Was deemed useless by her teacher,
never attended college, and went from dead-end job to dead-end job until a
writing course and spell on a tiny Florida paper set her on her way to
become the greatest crime reporter in history. She covered the festival of
mayhem that was the city of Miami, a place so lawless in the 1980s that at
one point, as Buchanan reported, the Dade County morgue was so stuffed
full of corpses that officials had to hire a refrigeration truck from
Burger King to cope with the overflow.
Buchanan was a relentless collector of
detail (“Ask one more question, knock on one more door, make one last
phone call, and then another …”), and a relentless questioner of those
in authority. One officer said he’d sooner be interrogated by Internal
Affairs than by Edna. The result was an extraordinary portfolio, ranging
from the rape victim who, running in distress down the street, came across
another rape victim running in the other direction; the 72-year-old man
who ran away from home because his 103-year-old mother wouldn’t buy him
a car; the mother who framed her own two-year-old for the murder of his
playmate; and Jacinto Roas, who murdered a man only to find that an iron
security door had slammed shut and trapped him with the corpse.
Her stories were typified by crackling
one-liner intros: “They called it Operation Snow White because the drug
was cocaine and the suspects included seven Miami police officers”
(1982); from 1985: “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin”;
and, most famously in March 1985, on the ex-con shot by a security guard
before he could order at a fast food joint: “Gary Robinson died hungry”.
She was famous too for her three rules
of reporting: “Never trust an editor, never trust an editor, never trust
an editor.”