Houston crime reporter S.K. Bardwell, who was called the "Queen of the Scene" by colleagues and remembered for her tireless work on behalf of the disenfranchised, died Friday after a six-month battle with lung cancer. She was 57.
"She treated people on the street the way you would treat people at a corporate office," former Chronicle reporter Peggy O'Hare remembered. "Susan was the real deal. She was a crime reporter to the core of her soul - someone who would walk into tough neighborhoods without fear, knock on doors and get the real story."
Bardwell was revered for compiling a database of possible Houston serial killers and was consulted frequently by law enforcement. She was honored as an advocate for crime victims and their families.
At the now-defunct Houston Post, Bardwell regularly competed against the rival Chronicle on crime stories. For a year, then-Chronicle reporter Lisa Teachey battled her.
"She always won," recalled Teachey, now a Harris County District Court staff attorney. Bardwell later became her mentor at the Chronicle. "She was tough and gritty, but she was compassionate … because she knew these were real people caught in awful circumstances."
Susan Kathleen Bardwell was born on July 9, 1954, in Tulsa, Okla., to Pat and Billie Miller and grew up in the nearby Turley community.
She adopted the byline S.K. Bardwell in honor of her mother - using the family matriarch's maiden name after she died - and to gain an advantage with readers, said Micheal Boddy, her husband of 36 years.
"In a strange way it gave her a little more credibility with her audience, sad to say," he said. "It really unhinged people to realize they were getting their butts kicked by a woman."
After working as a bartender and in the fiberglass business with Boddy, she became a journalist upon graduation from Brazosport College. She cut her teeth at the Angleton Times and The Facts before becoming a Houston Post reporter in 1988. She joined the Chronicle in 1993.
Boddy recalled that his wife once responded to a deadly house explosion and saw a man a few blocks away carrying a gasoline can.
"She drove into the alley and confronted him and he pulled a knife on her," he said. "She did manage to calm the guy down and kept him talking. He wouldn't admit that he had actually done it himself, but he did tell her how the arson was done and how it killed the people."
Bardwell left the Chronicle in 2005 to help her husband start a short-lived community newspaper. She also was an accomplished gardener, self-taught knitter and amateur painter.
"Susan … never stopped learning," Boddy said. "She went from being a junior high school dropout to becoming one of the premier police reporters in the United States."
Bardwell is survived by Boddy, sons Sean and Eric, two grandsons, a sister and a brother.
A private service is scheduled next month for relatives and friends.
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?We know Henry K. Lee best as the veteran Chronicle reporter who has been chasing crime stories across the Bay Area since 1994. And while we'd expect him to have a strong following at this point in his career, it seems a complete stranger has taken an unusual liking (or disliking) to Lee's dark and bleak prose about the "grit and grime" of San Francisco streets.