Galveston Daily News reporter Terry MacLeod walked into Ellis Lauhon’s cell at the Galveston County Jail on July 4, 1955, knowing she didn’t have much time to unearth a good story. Deadline loomed. But readers desperately wanted to know Lauhon—who he was, where he came from, and the answer to one question in particular: Why did he kill a 12-year-old boy, his mother, and his grandmother while they slept in their Texas City home?

MacLeod’s jailhouse interview covered the front page the next day and gave readers every detail they craved. A few days later, she returned to the jail to capture Lauhon’s first meeting with his estranged father after the murders. She recounted their stilted exchange in excruciating detail. The father’s desperation to save his son did a cannon ball into readers’ Corn Flakes.

Coverage of the Lauhon case won MacLeod first prize from the Headliners Club of Austin in 1956. Ten years later, a colleague called it the apex of MacLeod’s career, but it was hardly downhill from there. MacLeod spent the next two decades writing the island’s stories. She was one of the paper’s longest-serving reporters, a natural news hound at a time when women were more likely to stay home than pound the pavement in search of a good story.

“In her years of reporting, Terry has had broad experience in all phases of newspaper work,” wrote Lillian E. Herz in a 1967 column announcing MacLeod’s appointment as society editor and head of the paper’s Women’s Department. “Some have been exciting, some have touched the heart strings, others have been of scientific and research value. And throughout the years, she has helped to write the stories of thousands of Galvestonians.”

MacLeod was born in Mexico City in 1913. She grew up in Central America, where her father worked as a civil engineer. Her parents eventually sent her and her sister to Galveston’s Sacred Heart Convent, where she graduated high school. She went to college at Our Lady of the Lake in San Antonio and the University of Texas, returning to Galveston to get married. But several years later, both her infant son and her husband died, leaving her to raise her oldest son alone.

In 1943, she took a job as society editor at the Galveston Tribune. Five years later, she left to join the U.S. Army Intelligence and Public Information Department. She spent two years traveling through China, Japan, and the Philippines, her young son Butch in tow. In 1950, she returned to Galveston and joined the staff of The Daily News.

In addition to writing about the Lauhon case and other sensational murders (1955 was a particularly brutal year in Galveston), MacLeod took up the task of advocating for the island’s elderly. Her reporting, including a four-part series following the Wallace murder, helped spur the creation of homes for the elderly. She also advocated for better treatment for people with disabilities and mental illness.

Cleta Sireno remembers MacLeod taking pride in knowing her stories helped raise—and solve—important issues in the community she loved. In 1965, a 21-year-old Sireno worked in the paper’s business office but longed to be a reporter. MacLeod took her under her wing, mentoring her through her transition to the paper’s “morgue,” as the library was called, and eventually to her post as Lifestyle editor.

“She was like no one else I have ever met,” Sireno told me.

By the time Sireno joined the paper, MacLeod was working as Women’s News editor and had mostly set aside her hard news reporting. Instead, she wrote fun features and covered society parties, fundraisers, and weddings in her popular Passing Parade column, which ran on the front page.

“Most of the people by that time only knew her as the fun lady who brought out her red carpet on special occasions demanding all the news crew follow her around, marching or singing and dancing, with whistles and bells, according to what type of event we happened to be celebrating,” Sireno recalled. “She also hosted luncheons in her office, bringing things like tuna salad topped with pickled beets, her special black-eyed peas with melted cheese on top, a bucket of fried chicken with watermelons for everyone. I was the little ‘fetch-it’ girl that helped her set it all up, and washed the paper plates she wanted to use over and over until they went limp.”

MacLeod worked at the paper full-time until she retired in 1976. But she continued to write as a special correspondent until 1979, when she was mugged. The attacker pushed her to the ground, breaking her hip. In a testimony to her importance in the community, the paper published both her room number at the hospital and the phone number where readers could reach her with get-well wishes. The Passing Parade column included daily updates on her recovery.

Although she’d been out of the newsroom for seven years when she died in 1986, her former colleagues still felt her loss.

“She was a legend in the newsroom—the keeper of traditions and the flag-waver for all special occasions,” managing editor Richard Fogaley wrote. “She was the one who knew where the bodies were buried and the Christmas tree decorations were stored.”

Fogaley also recalled her early advocacy for nursing home reform and described MacLeod as a “top-notch reporter.” While her Passing Parade might have been dismissed as society fluff, MacLeod didn’t sugar-coat her fellow Islanders’ activities, sometimes publicly airing things they would have preferred to forget. Everyone was fair game—even her friends and colleagues.

“There were a few other times I could have killed, when I woke up to read my name, or my children’s, at the head of her Passing Parade column, with vivid descriptions of some unfortunate or embarrassing episode in our lives,” Sireno wrote in a 1986 tribute to MacLeod. “But like everyone else, I read it, because I knew I could find out what had been going on around the island by doing so.”

In another tribute column posted shortly after her death, publisher Les Daughtry recalled the longtime reporter’s devotion to the newspaper: “Terry had a way to pick me up when I was down, or bring me down to earth if I took some action she felt to be not in the best interest of HER Galveston Daily News.”

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