Paul Henderson

Who is Paul Henderson?

Paul Henderson III is an American journalist and private investigator who won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1982 as a reporter for The Seattle Times.

Henderson was born in Washington D.C., but moved to Beatrice, Nebraska as a young child. For high school and junior college, he went to Wentworth Military Academy and Junior College in Lexington, Missouri, graduating in 1959. After three years in the U.S. Army, he continued his education at Creighton University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Henderson began his career as a journalist at the Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil, before moving on to the Omaha World-Herald, and The Seattle Times. While working in the newsroom as an investigative reporter at The Seattle Times in 1981, Henderson took a call from a man named Steve Titus. Titus explained to Henderson that he was about to be sentenced for a sexual assault he did not commit. Henderson looked into the case and wrote a series of three stories entitled "One Man's Battle to Clear His Name, a story of rape, wrongful conviction and vindication", challenging the circumstantial evidence against Titus. When officials followed up on Henderson's leads, they found a man who resembled Titus and who eventually confessed to the crime. The report convinced a judge to reverse Titus' conviction. Henderson won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for his series. However, Titus, who had been an up-and-coming executive with a fast-food franchise with no more than a parking ticket on his record, had his career destroyed, and he died of a heart attack at age 36, just as he was on the verge of winning a major wrongful-conviction settlement.