Photo by Lucas Gilman

Mark Truby tells reporting students in Old Main about the problems he encountered in his long-distance coverage of events on the tiny nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Truby credited much of his success to being the first journalist to follow the story.

From a small West Virginia daily, reporter Mark Truby logged thousands of miles tracking Caribbean intrigue and corruption. At stake were the lives of a well-known, wealthy local couple prone to violence.

Mark Truby, a reporter for The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, W. Va., and winner of the 1998 Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting, gave students a real-life look at the life of a young crime reporter in a campus visit in October.

Truby, 27, won the award with a series of stories on a millionaire West Virginia couple who were held on murder charges in dungeon-like prisons for nine months on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. He is on temporary assignment at USA Today and in early spring will join the Detroit News as an investigative reporter.

As a result of Truby’s stories, the couple — who faced death by hanging if convicted — was released. They were accused in the murder of a local water taxi driver.

Truby’s year-long series for the 38,000-circulation newspaper helped establish the rights of free press in the developing law of the recently independent St. Vincent, exposed a U.S. government policy as ignoring corruption in St. Vincent and brought about the resignation of St. Vincent’s top law enforcement and most corrupt public official. Truby made four trips to the island and was at personal risk while reporting the story the Nakkula judges said could have just as easily been ignored in the first place.

He told the students that the imprisoned couple acted like “ugly Americans” while on the islands. They were known to have drunken barroom scenes, but they also donated money to local schools. In the end, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them of the murder, and they were freed.

Truby wrote the first stories about the couple, and his work was followed by several major U.S. newspapers and television news magazine shows.

The nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines is off the northeast coast of South America. St. Vincent is the largest of the nation’s more than 30 islands. Once a British colony, St. Vincent and the Grenadines became independent in 1979. The total population is 110,000.

Truby is the eighth daily newspaper reporter to win the award honoring Nakkula, a 46-year veteran of the Denver Rocky Mountain News. Nakkula died in April 1990.

Truby graduated from Marshall University in Huntington and began working at the paper while still a student. He was editor of the University’s student newspaper, The Parthenon.

The $1,000 Nakkula award is sponsored by the News, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado and the Denver Press Club.

Contest judges said Truby overcame significant hurdles to write the compelling story that captured the environment of the island and gave the reader a strong sense of character of the people involved. Judges were Melvin Claxton of the Chicago Tribune, Christine Shenot, a reporter for The Orlando Sentinel, and Jay Ambrose, chief editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C.