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| Bruce and Chris Willingham: What Happened to the McCurtain Gazette-News Journalists? |
Bruce and Chris Willingham became nationally known after their reporting for the McCurtain Gazette-News was followed by a recording that allegedly captured local officials discussing plans to harm the journalists. But the story did not end with the publication of that recording. Chris eventually left McCurtain County with his family, while Bruce remained behind and continued running the newspaper with his wife, Gwen. Their very different paths are now part of Peacock’s documentary Kill. Bury. Print., which revisits the reporting, the fallout and the extraordinary chain of events that followed.
Bruce Willingham had already spent decades in local journalism before his name became attached to the controversy. After moving from North Carolina to Oklahoma in the late 1970s, he began covering courthouse business and criminal cases in 1980. Over the years, he reported on roughly 100 murder trials in McCurtain County, building a career around the sort of local reporting that rarely makes national headlines but tends to make people in the courthouse pay attention.
His connection with the McCurtain newspaper deepened in the 1980s. Bruce became executive editor of The McCurtain Daily Gazette in 1985 and, three years later, he and his wife Gwen bought the Gazette and the Broken Bow News. Journalism eventually became something of a family trade. Their son Chris joined the Gazette around 2005 as a police beat reporter, while Chris’s wife, Angie, also worked for the paper as a copy editor. For the Willinghams, covering local government and law enforcement was hardly a side project; it was the family business.
By 2021, Chris had moved increasingly towards investigative reporting. His eight-part series on the county jail, published across 2021 and 2022, examined allegations surrounding the handling of homicide investigations, claims involving Sheriff Kevin Clardy and investigator Alicia Manning, and other accusations of wrongdoing. The reporting brought considerably more attention to the newspaper and, according to Chris, changed the atmosphere around him.
Chris later said he became the target of false accusations, including claims that he had been connected to a paedophilic ring. In March 2023, he filed a federal lawsuit alleging retaliation by Clardy and people associated with him because of his journalism. Then came the incident that transformed a fiercely local dispute into a national story.
On 6 March 2023, Bruce left a voice-activated recorder in a room used for a county commissioners' meeting after the official meeting had ended. He said he believed county business might still be taking place in breach of Oklahoma's Open Meeting Act. What the recorder allegedly captured was far more serious than a disagreement over public meetings.
According to the Willinghams and the documentary, the recording contained Clardy, Manning, Commissioner Mark Jennings and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix discussing alleged plans to kill Bruce and Chris. The conversation allegedly also included discussion about harming Angie, along with racist and violent remarks. The Gazette published excerpts in April 2023 before releasing the alleged recording itself several days later.
The publication immediately escalated the dispute. Bruce reported the alleged conversation to Idabel police and sent a written complaint to the Oklahoma Attorney General's Office. The sheriff's office disputed the Willinghams' account, arguing that the recording had been obtained illegally and claiming it was fabricated. Investigations followed involving the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI.
The legal outcome, however, was considerably less dramatic than the recording itself. No one was charged, and the Oklahoma Attorney General's Office concluded that Clardy had not committed a crime or conduct that provided a legal basis for removing him from office. That distinction is important because the documentary presents the Willinghams' allegations and experiences, while the official investigations did not result in criminal charges.
For Chris, the consequences were personal as well as professional. He said in the documentary that rumours surrounding him intensified after the newspaper's reports. One particularly serious allegation came from a man named Farley Grisworld, who accused Chris of sexually inappropriate behaviour towards him when he was a child. Chris denied the claims, and no charges were filed.
Eventually, Chris decided that continuing to raise his family in McCurtain County was no longer something he felt comfortable doing. In 2023, he and Angie moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, with their children.
He also left the McCurtain Gazette-News. His public comments about the period have focused on the effect the events had on his family and his mental health, rather than simply treating the episode as another chapter in a newspaper's history.
Bruce chose a very different route. He stayed in the community with Gwen and continued publishing the McCurtain Gazette-News three times a week. The family also operates several holiday cabins in Hochatown, a resort area roughly three hours away. By this point, the cabin business had reportedly become the family's main source of income, giving Bruce another way to keep the family operation going while the newspaper continued its local role.
There was also a political after-effect. In the 2024 Republican primary, Kevin Clardy received around 18% of the vote. Bruce interpreted the result as a sign that the reporting he and Chris had produced had contributed to some change in the community. That is his interpretation rather than a measurable finding, but it illustrates how the newspaper's investigation continued to shape the way the Willinghams viewed what had happened.
The Willinghams' story is unusual because it does not have the neat ending that documentaries sometimes prefer. There was no sweeping courtroom finale, no string of convictions and no simple moment when everything suddenly returned to normal. Instead, one journalist left town, another stayed, a family business carried on and a small local newspaper found itself at the centre of an international conversation about journalism, local power and press freedom. Sometimes real life is considerably messier than the final episode credits.
There is also something oddly old-fashioned about the whole saga. The story began with local reporters doing the painstaking work of covering court cases, jail operations and county politics, then somehow ended up involving hidden recording equipment, federal litigation, national headlines and a documentary. The Willinghams were not operating from some giant newsroom with endless resources; they were running a local paper in Oklahoma, which makes the scale of the fallout even more striking.
My view is that the most interesting part of the Willingham story is not simply the sensational allegation surrounding the recording. It is what happened afterwards. Chris leaving McCurtain County while Bruce stayed behind shows how differently the same experience can reshape members of one family. The newspaper survived, but the lives around it changed considerably.
There is also an uncomfortable reminder here that local journalism can carry enormous personal consequences because reporters often have to keep living among the people they investigate. The Willinghams' story feels less like a tidy tale of heroes and villains and more like a portrait of a community dealing with an extraordinary dispute. And, frankly, that messiness is what makes Kill. Bury. Print. worth watching.
The story of Bruce and Chris Willingham is still likely to prompt questions about what happened inside that meeting room, what the investigations established and how the controversy changed McCurtain County. What do you make of the Willinghams' very different decisions after the events? Share your thoughts on the documentary and the story in the comments.