Content area
Full text
Using anonymous sources, `The Plain Dealer' ran a Page One story naming the local TV and radio celebrity as a suspect in a sexual stalking case. Rose committed suicide the morning the article appeared. Was the paper too quick to name the widely known broadcasting personality? Many in Cleveland think so.
BRECKSVILLE, OHIO
IT WAS 9 A.M., WEDNESDAY, AUG. 2. THE FOUR police vehicles wound down a narrow, private roadway, armed with a warrant to search the home of Joel Rose, a slight, balding, bespectacled, 64-year-old icon of Cleveland radio and TV.
The prosecutors who wrote the warrant believed they had tracked down the man who had sent packages of slinky dresses, lingerie, and underwear with sexually suggestive, typewritten notes to more than a dozen stillunidentified women in the greater Cleveland area.
The deputy sheriffs confiscated Rose's computer and his typewriter, and rifled his home for adult magazines containing nudity, as well as holiday greeting cards, envelopes with red hearts and arrows, wrapping paper, purple with mauve roses, and other items mentioned in the warrant. They expected their search to get the evidence they needed to charge Rose with "pandering obscenity" and "menacing by stalking."
Then the agents of the Cuyahoga County prosecutors drove Rose to a hospital to test his DNA, convinced it would match the genetic fingerprint on the stamps pasted on the packages sent to many of the terrified women.
Shaken and scared, Rose was in desperate need of legal advice. But before he could get to a criminal-defense attorney, his blood had been taken and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland was readying a brief story on the house search for its Aug. 3 issue and was tapping sources for a longer article.
Rose understood that a misspoken word to the press could be his undoing. He had told his family he was framed. So he obeyed orders when Gerald C. Gold, his attorney, said he would speak to The Plain Dealer on his behalf.
"Joel was taking it very hard," says Gold. "He seemed to feel it was more important that I talk to The Plain Dealer than he get an acquittal. He wanted to see his side of the story quoted in the paper.
I think he realized what...