From 'Street Reporter' to Bomber Defender

Meet the public defender for surviving Boston Bomber.  Intereting:  Was well regarded Miami reporter.  Now will be "most reviled." 

I met Conrad in the early 1980s when we were both rookie reporters in the Miami Herald’s Ft. Lauderdale newsroom. I recall a tiny, funny and fiercely intelligent woman — the sort that patronizing male colleagues might call spunky before they became acquainted with Conrad’s startlingly powerful rabbit punch.

“She was a real street journalist, and smarter than the rest of us,” recalls Ernie Torriero, a Voice of America editor who worked with Conrad at the Herald and later at the Kansas City Times. Christine Spolar, an editor for London’s Financial Times who attended Northwestern University with Conrad and has remained a close friend for 35 years, remembers an analytical journalist who “loved to explore the whys and what-ifs” and worried perpetually that she had overlooked some critical witness to the story she was trying to tell.