“It’s awful, Coop. Worst I’ve ever seen.” He pushed his visored hat back on his head and rubbed his forehead with his wrist.
   “How many dead?”
   “Six, I think. Maybe more. And a dog.”
   “A dog?”
   “Stabbed. The others were shot.”
   “Pistol?”
   “Shotgun. Blown to shit.”
   Delaney moved aside as a detective carefully descended the steps. He was followed by a paunchy, bald-headed man of medium height in his late fifties or early sixties, dressed in a red polo shirt, khaki pants and running shoes. His face, forehead and neck were covered with black paint. Only his eyes had been spared and they appeared as two round white goggles behind thick glasses giving him the look of Al Jolson or Eddie Cantor in vaudeville blackface. While descending the steps, he slipped in the blood and would have taken a pratfall had Delaney and the detective not caught him by the elbows and helped him to the sidewalk. Moments later, the little man, surrounded by a phalanx of uniformed officers, tottered unsteadily toward Fifth Street. I lost sight of them in the crowd.
   That was my first glimpse of Donn Kilgore, perpetrator of what became known as Philadelphia’s notorious Mowbray Street Massacre. It had occurred far too late at night to make the Sunday edition of The Observer. But I stayed around interviewing anyone and everyone who would talk to me and taking copious notes. At two, the mayor and police commissioner showed up and went inside the house. From two to three-thirty, bright flashes came from the windows as police photographers recorded the grisly scene inside. At two-thirty, the mayor came outside and made a statement, calling this a great tragedy and urging everyone to stay calm. These victims were not Greeks, he said, and this tragedy had to be considered entirely separate from Greek Weekend; the victims appeared far too young to be members of any kind of college Greek-letter organization, although two of them were so badly mutilated that only an autopsy would determine who they were. Neither the mayor nor the police commissioner would take questions. At four, the first victim, in a gray body bag, was removed from the house on a gurney and slid into the back of a waiting ambulance. Five more corpses followed—all heading for the morgue and autopsies. The last body to be removed was that of a dog wrapped in a bloody blanket. It was put in the trunk of a squad car. At first light I grabbed a cab to my office on Spring Garden Street where I typed up my notes and hit the Internet for everything I could find about Donn Kilgore. The luxury of an additional 18 hours of research meant I was able to turn out a far more in-depth story than if I were working under the usual crazed deadlines.
   Since I was the first reporter on the scene, this became my story. For ten days, the Mowbray Street Massacre consumed me as Watergate had consumed Woodward and Bernstein. While alive, Kilgore and the media played each other with the symbiotic sexuality of vintage Strads in the Largo movement of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. His one-hour interview with Matt Drudge on the Fox network delivered knockout ratings, even beating out Regis Philbin’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Any discussion of Kilgore and the massacre—especially on MSNBC and CNN—sold a ton of product for advertisers. For a fleeting few days, Donn Kilgore became the most talked about man in America. In the firestorm of his celebrity, he polarized the country. Yet, because of the explosive nature and controversy surrounding the event, not a single joke or reference was ever made on Leno, Letterman or Politically Incorrect.
   For me, it was a hell of a ride, albeit a brief one. Just ten days. Do I miss Donn Kilgore? Absolutely. Even the people most offended by him agreed that if nothing else, he had been great copy.
   This is Donn Kilgore’s story—and mine.