PRESSED TO KILL-Tom Marquardt

of sexually harassing a former high school classmate. For years, the man sued the editor, the reporter, and the newspaper for defamation, then took to Twitter now x to lash out against the editor and the reporter. Representing himself in court, His lawsuit rambled and failed to persuade a judge who easily dismissed it. He spent the next three years silently plotting his attack on June twenty eighth, twenty and eighteen, he blasted his way through the locked doors of Capital

Gazette offices and killed five employees. He called nine to one one to confess, then hid under a desk while waiting to surrender to approaching police. Marcourt spent two years reviewing police and court files, eyewitness accounts, the killer's interview with a state psychiatrist, and video footage to chronicle in stunning detail what led up to the crime and how

the killer escaped detection. Press to Kill is a chilling account of the worst mass murder at an American newspaper, but more so, it is about the lives of those who died their heroism that day and the remarkable response from a community who rushed to its side. The book we're featuring this evening is Pressed to Kill, Inside Newspaper's worst mass murder, with my special guest, journalist and author Tom Marquard. Welcome to the program, and thank you very

much for this interview. Tom markquart Thanks, thanks Dad, good to be here. Thank you very much, and congratulations on this book, Press to Kill.

But part of that history is the Maryland Gazette, which is a forerunner to the newspaper we know today as the Capitol Gazette. The Maryland Gazette was in existence in the late seventeen hundreds was one of the first newspapers in the United States. It protested the Stamp Act. It was run by a fearless publisher who often ran a foul of the local residents. Is certainly the British, so it goes way back as far as history goes from a newspaper standpoint.

aggressive reporter, good understanding the news, a good writer. He knew how to ferret out a story, and we assigned him to the court beat originally, and then he impressed us with his writing and we felt we need a little bit more dimension to the paper, so we gave him a column that allowed him to roam freely around the city and address almost any kind of subject. That was really the start for Eric Cartley.

you know, just being nice. She started up a conversation that was really more by email and a little bit of Facebook, but never a phone call or never a face to face meeting, but just being friendly talking sharing stories. They both had some mental struggles and so they shared that information with each other. But at some point he was getting a little too aggressive because she wasn't responding to his conversations quickly enough. She started backing off of

that relationship. Feeling a little bit worried that he was getting a little too aggressive. He in the meantime, was hoping to strike up a conversation which they would meet. He became very up set when she wasn't responding fast enough and at some point just lit up and called her all sorts of names. Ceased communication and he became more aggressive. So what he did even called is per bank and said that she had some mentalism mental issues. She ended up getting fired or laid off on the bank.

She suspected this was the reason called. Her parents kept pressuring her to keep the communication going and it didn't, so finally her only step was find a lawyer and press charges against him for stalking. He went before the judge. This was in twenty eleven. Judge heard the case and reduced the sentence to sexual harassment, which is very important

because that reduction allowed him to buy a weapon. He wouldn't be able to buy a weapon if he was convicted of stalking because it would have been a felony. You know what, that was the case that went before judge.

their domestic quarrels. There are people suing people for different reasons, but it's a great source for newsteps, and he came across this case, so he thought, you know, it's really your worst, your worst scenario of running across an old friend from the former school and sudden being chased by this guy and becoming scared. So he thought, well, this is something that people could resonate with. So he wrote the story, and it was really a story based on

what had happened in the courthouse. Everything I just explained was laid out in detail with testimony from Laurie Sondervan. So the story just filed along the same courses with little elaboration. Really, we had tried to reach out or had he tried to reach out to Jared Ramis through the attorney because that was the only phone number he had, but his attorney said, I'm not going to talk to

about my client about this. So Tory ran in twenty eleven with the headline that Sared said, Jared Ramis wants to be your friend.

also upset that he wasn't called. But as I said, we tried reaching him. We just were unsuccessful. He launches a protest that appears on Twitter largely, and he starts calling us names, the reporter. Eric. He looked at those tweets and he showed them to me, But we were confident that there really wasn't any audience for them. They were just really to himself and to Eric. He knew Eric was looking at them, but I didn't stop. He just it was his podium to get back at us for writing the story.

is fact, you have nothing to worry about. So there really wasn't anything that was alarming in that story, you know. So I mean from a libel standpoint. I've been sued for libel before, so I understood libel, and I don't think there was anything that was alarming at all about the story.

were no walls. You could just see five or six departments just by walking into the lobby, so it was a very open office building. Eventually, we had a security system at the back door their employee entrance as well as the front door, because we did have an incident in which a convicted felon came back and talked to one of our people in the community news department, so we started we had guards at actually one time walking down the hallways, which we had to eliminate with budget cuts,

but it was pretty secure. So that office building I thought was pretty secure. People just didn't walk around without being escorted or have an appointment. Fortunately they moved to a different office during the budget cuts. And this was at a time, you know, when our circulation was starting to decline. When I moved up to the publisher's position, we saw circulation plummeting. Advertising was dropping as a result. So he had the competition from Craigslist. He had a

competition from the internet. It was not a good time for newspapers in general, and we were no exception. So at that point I was laying people off and trying to drop expenses. We closed our press mood to another facility, outsourced it, and there's some pretty dramatic cuts department by department, including the newsroom.

There wasn't anything initially that was alarming to a point where we felt threatened in any way. It was just a guy who was unhinged and just we didn't understand what his message was. So Eric and I would talk about it. Actually we probably laughed about it and said let's keep an eye on it because we didn't know where he was going. I mean, like you said, Twitter was new at that time. The reports were just starting to use it, and I was not on Twitter, not

using it, so I was unaware. So I just said to Eric, I said, let's just keep an eye on this guy and let me know if there's anything more alarming, if it gets progressively worse, and it did.

So she talked to the police. She had some friends and the police, and she said, I'm going to get a weapon, and they cautioned her that there are a lot of laws that would restrict her from using it. You know, she would have to make sure there was no other place that she could escape to before she shot. He said, you know this is crazy. I'm gonna move to a state that has a loser protection lass. She decided to move. She had lost her job. She had family in Maryland, but she decided it was safer if

she left the state. So she packed up. She got in her car and as she pulled out the driveway, she got a message from Jared Rayma say you can run, but you can't hide. She still has no idea how he knew that she was leading at that point, let alone where she was going. So she fled the state,

changed her name. It's still changed her name. She moved twice actually, just to make sure that he could not follow her, but lo and behold, one day she appeared in a newspaper photo attending an event and was identified and he found it. I mean, he must have been searching the internet every day trying to find out where she went. All he knew is that she was in this area of South Carolina. You know, that was the end of that, but he continued to harass her as much as he could where she was.

to do all his research. And that's what he was doing mostly on the job, was looking up his enemies. He was looking up Lorie Sondervan, He's looking up me, He's looking up Eric Hartley. He's looking up anybody who crossed his path, Brendan McCarthy, the judges, any reporter who worked at the newspapers. So all he did was just relentlessly dig up background about all of us.

you know, you have really no case here. This is all a story that was taken out of a court trial. There's nothing here to sue for defamation or for libel. The lawyer said to him, if you're so persistent about it, why don't you just go ahead and represent yourself, And he said, you know, I think I could do that. So he studied law in his free time and researched

as much as he could. He went down to the courthouse, took all the proper paperwork, filed it correctly, and then one day just sued us for defamation and libel.

than anything else. He basically abandoned that after he could because he felt he no longer needed it. But you know, he showed the signs of narcissism. You know, he had other signs of just anger management. But you know, he was still living a life and going to his job and not showing any outward signs. He had no other legal issues than sexual harassment.

He remembers watching a movie with his mom and crying, and his mother chastised him for crying in the middle of a theater. He remembers hitting a kid with a croquet mallet and having to apologize to the kid. So there were some instances, including that one, that were a little bit more dramatic his mother and father split, so

the divorce was probably pretty traumatic for him. He lived with his mother for a short period of time and then she decided to move and cut off all the utilities when she was ready to leave the house, and he saw that as a personal slight that she did that so he wouldn't be able to use his computer, So he basically separated himself from his mother. He was close to his grandparents, who took him to them all

to play or bottom a bicycle. He's real close to them, but eventually they died and he didn't have really anybody but his sister to talk to, and so he kept him pretty good contact with his sister. His sister actually is reaching out to him more than the other way around, but eventually he felt that she didn't understand him and he separated from her. It's probably four years before the murders.

talking to our attorney because it was just bizarre. Here you have a case who has litigation against us, who wants to argue it in the newspaper, and we didn't know how it affected the case, and so I didn't really want to jeopardize that, so I refused to run the letter to the editor, which angered him a lot.

But yeah, at that point, you know, I think Derek and I were only too another editor who were concerned, and we're just saying we got to monitor this, but not doing anything more than that because we really did not want to make it inflamed.

too late, but the judge allowed it anyways. And so at that point he was ratcheting up his threats on his Twitter account, basically saying he was going to own us, and I'm going to be fired and I'm going to journalism hell is what he was saying. Call me evil, Tom, I'm going to journalism hell. More worse things as to progressed. So he files a lawsuit against us. At this point, I'm about to retire. This is in twenty twelve, and so he students for fourteen million dollars. He asked for apologies.

His lawsuit rambled so badly. You know, we didn't understand half of it. And even though it's cited all the right cases, and our attorney looked at it and said, it's properly filed, so we have to treat it as a real lawsuit. We didn't have any concern that we were going to lose that case because is pretty obviously, you know, a lawsuit that wasn't going to go anywhere, a frivolous lawsuit. So we were confident that we were going to win the case. So we didn't really even

take that seriously. But we had to go through the emotions, which meant we had to put up a defense, had to make appearances in court, and we have to spend a considerable money. In the end, it cost us one hundred and fifty thousand dollars just to defend this nuisance suit. So yeah, that was our approach. We just had to let the slow wheels of the judicial system take its course.

So he thinks about his next step, and at some point he says, you know that, says to himself, the only thing I can do now is to get reaction at the end of a weapon. So he cases out the office. He goes there one cold day in February in which he can dress up with hoods and face masks so he won't be spotted, and he looks through

the windows at night just to get the layout. He also at one point walks into the building through an unlocked employee entrance, takes film the only time he used a cell phone was to take film of the layout as he walked through this building. So he gathers all the evidence he's the security system and then goes back to his apartment where he downloads all his video onto his computer and.

He pulls out his Duffel bag. In the Duffel bag's a twelve gage pump action Mossberg shotgun amimal pouches in a tube. He has placed two Barracuda blocking devices, and he grabs the duffel bag with what's also smoker inades, and he walks into the employee entrance that is unlocked, and I should point out that was a complaint of the reporters was that that door didn't work. The lock didn't work right.

So he proceeds into the office. There is a stairwell that is rarely used because most people use the elevator of this four story building. So he proceeds to take off his tie and his shirt. He puts on his ear protection, his eye protection, and he has a light that he puts on the scope, so he is now armed. Walks down the hallway. Now he sets off a smoke grenade, thinking that this is going to be a diversion for the police when they get there, that they won't be

able to see through the smoke. But the smoke grenade doesn't have the effect that he wants, and so he decides not to set off any more smoke grenades. So he walks down the hallway, which is really only about maybe twenty feet and he gets to the front door, expecting it to be open, but it's locked. So he stands back and he pumps two rounds into the door,

with shatters on the floor. He walks in and he turns right and he sees Rebecca Smith, who is the first one in the office, sort of the receptionist, and he misses her with those two shots. He proceeds to go to an empty boardroom, which he expected to find a group of people who usually meet on that day for a editorial board meeting which includes people from the public, and this being after the election day, he surmised that there would be people who won the election also in

that room, and that's why he picked this day. But the editor had canceled that meeting because it was shortly after the election and so many people were going to be gone, so there is nobody there. So he proceeds down the hallway down the aisle, which is really in the middle of this office. It's an open office with some offices on the left, and now he sees Rebecca Smith who's trying to climb over the partition to get

out the broken front door. He shoots her twice. He proceeds down the hallway the aisle and he encounters Wendy Winters, who had three days prior to that at taking a course invasive tactics. When confronted with the mass murder, well her last. He's supposed to hide. If you can't hide,

you're supposed to defend yourself. Can't defend yourself, then you attack, and she knew that was her only step, so she grabs a waste paper basket and charges Jared Bramis, throwing the basket at him, but he fires twice to her and drops her kills her. At this point, walks farther down into the aisle, but Janet Cooley in the advertising department is hiding underneath the desk and sees him walk by, and besides, she's got to get out of there, so

she escapes. She runs past him and jumps over Winnie Winter's body, gets to the front door, and Rebecca Smith, who's barely conch, is at the front door, and she slips but eventually gets out. She cuts her hand, but she eventually escapes. Jared Ramis walks farther down the aisle and come across Rob Hyson, whose desk was open to the newsroom and he had no place to hide, so he is underneath his desk. Jared Ramis shoots him twice. He goes further down and right next to Jared, right

next to Rob Hyason was Gerald Fishman. He had a troll writer who watched and listened to all that, but was undetected by Jared Ramis. So Jared Ramis walks farther down the aisle. At this point, several of the reporters had a duck for cover to decide they got to get out of there, and they rushed to the employee entrance in the back of the office. Unfortunately, Jared Ramis had barricaded that door with his Barracuda device, which has

slipped underneath. You can't get out right, So they bounce off that door and then go hide underneath the desk. So they go farther down. They're in the back of the office now, So Jared Ramis is walking down the hallway and sees John McNamara, who also had tried to get out that door and couldn't, but he was the last one to try and so he was more visible

to him, So he shoots John McNamara. One other reporter at that point had also tried the door and was hiding, so they were at that point three reporters hiding him back when the photographer who was also hiding underneath the desk, heard him go by. He too, decided that his only opportunity was to run. He runs out the front door. He gets to the front door and Jared had hurt him, turned around and fired around a round of a volley throm.

This weapon has six thirty three caliber bullets. Those bullets liz by Paul Gilespie's head. He hears them go by right his head, but he gets out to the front door and escapes. Ramus had set his clock his wristwots to five minutes, and that's the time he figured as he researched, this is all he had before the police start arriving. So he thinks he's really gotten everybody who's

in that newsroom. Unbeknownst to him, Sell reporters were still hiding, so he drops his weapon and he goes to a photographer's desk to send out a last couple of tweaks, but unfortunately he didn't like the keyboard on that particular computer, so he goes over to another computer which is right next to Rob Hyacinth, and he sees Gerald Fisherman hiding, so he takes great comfort that he has found Gerald Fisherman. He recognizes Gerald Fisherman because he studied the photos of

all the editors. He knew who's who. So Ramus goes through his weapon, captures it, goes back and shoots Gerald Fisherman point playing. So he decides that he's done everything he can. Now he takes great joy of shooting Gerald Fishman. There was a clock on the back that said Fisherman time, and he thought, oh, that's really bogus. This guy gets his own time, and so you know, it was an inside joke, but he ended up killing Gerald Fisherman for that. So he calls nine to one one from the phone

and said, I'm your killer. I surrender, I give up. I did it. What he didn't know is that the phone system was connected to a Baltimore network because the newspaper's owned by the Baltimore Sun, so they shared the same phone system. So the nine one one call goes

to the Baltimore office. The Baltimore office can't figure out what he's talking about, and he gives the address, but the address doesn't coincide with anything in their system, and Ramis is now trying to explain this to the nine one one operators, saying I'm in Annapolis, and she doesn't understand why he's calling Baltimore nine one one Minnapolis. So frustrated and now hearing the police sirens coming up, he decides to hang up. So he hangs up and goes hide, hides underneath the desk.

So you know, the mayor, for instance, had a parade plan for July fourth, which is only a few days away, so he turned the parade into a parade for the First Amendment and had and asked the journalists to march in them. They were not willing to do that. They really didn't want to do that, but they realized that the community need to see that they were okay and that they were going to exist. So they did march in that parade and everybody stood alongside the sidewalk and

just applauded and cried. I mean, there were flowers or memorials, there were speeches. You know. The coverage was intense, not just in Annapolis, but intense everywhere. They didn't expect the newspaper to come out the next day because they would understand that in the office the staff was decimated. They had lost by people and one was in the hospital with injuries, and most the other reporters were grieving. But they managed to get out of paper the next day,

which was a miracle. But the newspaper wanted to do that to assure the public that they will move on from something like this. But it became intense. They moved to another office because they couldn't go back to that office, so they had temporary quarters and people volunteered office space

that they could move to. They had guards inside that office, and every day people would bring by trays of food, trays of food, cards, so many cards that they put them up on the wall, and the tributes were just from across the nation were coming in at an incredible rate. This was the worst mass shooting in the newspaper and so it it reverberated throughout the journalism community, but also throughout the community as a whole.

not certainly at this point. And then my mind started wandering back to Jared Ramis, which was now three years, three to four years after we had left last heard from him. So you know, I kept thinking, well, I can't be can't be that old. I mean, he would react, took him that long to react. So I was sort of in disbelief until I got a phone call throm a reporter from me the Ely Times, who gave me his name, and that was the first time I had

heard the name and just reacted. I just really broke down because I just couldn't imagine that this guy had done it, and this this was a guy that was after me. And I wasn't in that newsroom, and neither was Eric Cartley, but that's who he was. Truly after there were other people who knew exactly who it was. Eric Hartley by six o'clock that night had called the County Police Department and said, I know who it is. Brenda McCarthy, the lawyer for Laurie Sondervan had call police

and said I know who it is. Lauris Sondervan had called and said I know who it is. So those people instantly came to his name when they heard of the incident. But the information was leaking out so slowly that it was taken forever for me to find out that the names of those who had died, and people were calling me with inside information. So I finally learned of it, but it was traumatic to say the least.

uncomfortable saying anything, so she was just getting suspicious. But she says, well, maybe he's in the hospital. So like she gathered a bunch of clothes and some magazines and was prepared to go to a hospital to find out where he was because he wasn't answering his phone and she was yet not ready to admit that he had died. So I mean, yeah, the information is leaking out slowly.

In case of winning Winters, her youngest daughter was the first to find out, and that was six hours after the murder, and she had to call all her siblings to let them know what had happened. So yeah, unfortunately, that's how it works.

newspaper every day. Now, fortunately the Baltimore Sun, its parent company, was able to bring in some people who were to design the paper as well as reported. But a couple of reporters that we're going to report this. This is our store. We're not letting some other newspaper do that.

So without an office, without any kind of research material down the office phones, they huddled around the back of a pickup truck by one of the reporters and they worked the phones, and they had a photographer there who was starting to pull out photos from the file of the victims, shooting photos at the scene, you know, not

knowing who died, and the buyers were still there. So these three reporters in particular were traumatized, but they were working off the back of a pickup truck to get the stories out, interviewing the reporters who had survived, interviewing the spouses, and the next day was the most comprehensive coverage of the event that any newspaper had.

at the city dock. They contacted their state legislators asking for stronger legislation, red flag laws among them, and so they worked at for a couple of years, but they were on national media talking to something has to be done. There's been way too many mass murders, and begged legislators and people not just to move on to the next mass That's what happened in a few days, That's what

everybody did. They moved on to the next mass murder, one hundred and ninety of them, by the way, after this mass murder.

to go to. But in this twenty hours, he starts from his childhood and walks us through what happened to him and presents his case on why he was justified to do what he did. He makes these arguments that anybody in their right mind would look at and feel this is just idiotic, it's unreasonable, but in his mind, what he did was reasonable, and he walks you through

every step of the way. You know, when he decided to kill, he knew what you know, what steps he took, he knew his motive, he knew when he enjoyed what he did, he knew you know, his regrets, principally that he didn't kill me. So there there has never been a mind exposed like this for everybody to see. And I think that's what's incredible here is that along the way you see the markings of the next mass killer.

So anybody who takes a look at this will say, yeah, he has he he has all the right traits for somebody who's getting ready to kill. So it's it's words wisdom, unfortunately for people to recognize and prevent this from happening somewhere else. But it's also an open mind to someone who's very evil.

weapon do you use? What's the best weapon? Yeah, the copycat killers are definitely out there today, and they're reading the material. And the advice that we get from journalism schools and from criminal investigators and mental health professionals is not to use the name. So in my book, his name doesn't appear for that reason, because it just glorifies

the killer rather than those who had died. But the traits other psychiatrists had looked at and said, all the traits were there for us to identify.

and planning. It's not the sign of an insane person. So while Ramis thought he was presenting a case for insanity, he was actually presenting a case for sanity because he was able to show that he was very competent and able to make the decisions that he did that led to the death of five people. So he lost his case very easily.

so he was winning. Along the way. He had me feeling guilty about what had happened and that I was not the one who was killed. So in many ways he got his justice. What he didn't get was an easy way out. He's serving five life terms without parole.

the office that day. But yeah, I mean he took me down that path. You know. I thought at the end of the day that this was history for the city, This was history for journalism, and people need to know exactly how these crimes are perpetrated and maybe we can learn from that to prevent the next one.

can you do anything about this guy? Is he a threat? And the police walked away saying he is All these are rants. We don't see him as a threat, and so you know, that was incredulous when that happened. I said that to the police, I said that to my fellow employees. But the BOTMB line is that the police, who we thought were the professionals who could examine this,

said there was no threat. What we learned later was that there are professional threat assessors who can examine all this and determine whll or not he's following the path with somebody who's ready to kill. We didn't know that kind of person existed, but we found out after that a threat assessor who was a friend of Brenda McCarthy had examined the case and informally said brandan get away from this guy. When that assessment was made well, prior

to the murders, they didn't tell us. So you know, there were a lot of people who could have done something to prevent us. There is the state's attorney who looked at the case, who said, I don't see anything we can do to stop this guy. He's just ranting, he's not making any threats. There are the police who decided there wasn't anything to do here. There are mental health professionals who he was seeing who didn't report him

as dangered anybody. So did we make a mistake? You know, we thought at the time we had done everything we could. We got a photo of the guy, we took around to all the employees and we said, beware a case this guy comes in the office. So we had done what we thought was good preventative measures to safeguard our employees. But and when he went silent for three years, we

thought he went away. So I can't blame ourselves. Again, I was away from the newspaper at that point, but I can't blame anybody who was still there in charge for not doing more. Had we known there was a professional threat assessor, yeah, you know, we would have easily have contact to someone like that and maybe had presented it, but we didn't know anything like that existed.

And even though it's not that long ago, it seems that in that ensuing five years, six years, I think police would be wise to take a look at the angry tweets that someone or social media posts that people would endeavor to do like Ramos did.

tweets and they did not. I mean, I followed up on that, and they did not, so the guy just went dormant for that period time. But if people really watch individuals around them, if they're a loner, you know, if they have a grudge, if they're collecting grievances and they're on social media complaining. I mean, those are the te leaves that we all need to identify, not just a place but everybody.

five years old. So I think there's quite a bit to be learned from you say that, twenty hours of psychological evaluation and this mass murderer being very forthright and cooperating and weirdly enough, thinking that he was that this would be a proper defense for him in a court trial rather than a very good tool for the prosecution.

and so they want to be remembered for life. You know, those are things out there that that's the motive. What's driving these people is the legacy.

They've identified land for it. They're still trying to raise money through private donations to build it. But it's that foundation that all profits from my book will go to.