Elaine Green, a former reporter at WCPO who won a Peabody Award for an interview she conducted while being held hostage inside the Cincinnati ABC affiliate’s building, died Monday, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.
Green and several other WCPO employees were held at gunpoint in the WCPO newsroom for more than an hour by James Hoskins in 1980. While she was captive, Green interview Hoskins, who admitted he had just killed his girlfriend. The Enquirer’s John Kiesewetter recalls talking with Green about the incident:
I interviewed Green several times about that night. She called it “bone-chilling.” She was a very classy, old-school journalist who didn’t seek fame or fortune from her brush with death.
AdvertisementOn the 25th anniversary in 2005 she told me: “I still get chills. It’s a terrifying thing. You don’t know what you’re going to say or do that might set him off. … We all survived because nobody did anything stupid. Everybody stayed calm and nobody panicked.”
Watch video of the interview, via WCPO, after the jump.