The Press: The Constant Companion

Theodore C. Link, a husky, gentle-voiced man of 55, has spent much of his life in companionship with violence. As a combat marine during World War II, he fought through the landings on Guadalcanal, Guam and Bougainville. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s tough, tireless crime reporter for 20 years, Ted Link has coolly padded through the back alleys of the underworld, has probably written more about crime than any other U.S. newsman. Last week, as usual, violence was Reporter Ted Link’s companion. This time, it was his own doing.

Summoned home from an assignment in New York by word that his summer cottage 50 miles west of St. Louis had burned to the ground, Link picked up his eleven-year-old son Ted Jr. and set out by car for the scene. Before he left, he slipped a loaded .38-caliber revolver into his pocket; on the way, he stopped in the little town of Grover, Mo. and made a purchase: a 12-gauge shotgun and two magnum shells.

When the Links arrived at the ruins, they found a man poking through the ashes with a hoe. Link knew him well. He was Clarence W. Calvin, 35, an odd-job man with a local police record for disturbing the peace—and until a few hours before, part-time caretaker at the Link cottage. Suspecting that Calvin had something to do with a recent rash of cottage burglaries, as well as with the fire, Link had reached Calvin by phone, had discharged him before leaving St. Louis.

The two men exchanged angry words.

A shotgun roared, then again, then three pistol reports. Calvin fell dead, riddled by two shotgun charges and bullet wounds in the head and chest.

Before a coroner’s jury, convened after the killing, Link was a cooperative witness. He said that Calvin had rushed him, brandishing the three-pronged hoe, with “a terrible expression on his face.” Link told how he had run to a tree against which he had leaned the shotgun, fired twice. Calvin kept coming. Link went for his .38 and slammed out three more shots.

“It was either him or me,” he said.

But Ted Link Jr. had another story to tell. “The man was sitting at the picnic table, and the shotgun went off,” said the son. “I turned and heard the second shot.

My dad was standing over the man and fired the pistol three times.” The jury returned a verdict of “homi cide by gunshot wounds,” which left it up to Franklin County Prosecutor Charles Hansen. He said that he was dissatisfied with the discrepancy between the accounts of father and son. The case would go be fore a grand jury, where Crime Reporter Ted Link could be indicted for murder.