Patty Perkins has been on a roll with her reporting all year but rose higher in the public eye in November when she traveled to San Antonio to cover the Smoke Bird Murders, so named for the doodle chalked on the ground beside each victim. Perkins’s work in Texas surpassed journalism and entered a realm that was best summarized by James Relicson as “psychological portraiture of such an intensity and specificity that the killer, upon hearing her account and analysis, would feel fully seen, terrible as that may sound.” Relicson’s words were prophetic. David Freck, a drifter and former train mechanic, turned himself in after only a week of Perkins’s on-air reports, telling police that he “wanted to meet the woman who has already met me.” Perkins is now taking a much-deserved break from the grueling world of journalism to return to her first love, music; her debut album, Secret Argent, on which she not only plays flute and guitar and also manipulates sound with cut-and-paste tape effects, will be out next summer. Her husband, Mal, who has never held a job but calls himself her manager, has been phoning critics personally to promote the record. “Her title refers to the way she uses sound as a heraldic tincture,” he says. “Metal is never placed on metal, nor color on color.”
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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