FEW SEATTLE NEWS stories have had more direct -- or quicker -- impact than the revelations about Superior Court Judge Gary Little that ran on the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Friday, August 19, 1988.
Inspired by rumors that had recently led Little to announce his retirement, the stories detailed Judge Little's sexual relations with five teenage boys during the early 1970s when he was a prominent Seattle attorney and part-time teacher at Lakeside, the city's most prestigious private prep school.
As the first edition of that Friday's P-I was rolling off the presses, Little shot himself outside his chambers on the eighth floor of the King County Courthouse in downtown Seattle. A janitor found his body in the hallway beside a handgun and a suicide note.
Remaking the front page of the main metro edition of Friday's paper, the P-I inserted a story on Little's suicide above the lengthy investigative pieces by Duff Wilson that prompted it. That morning, people all over Seattle were awakened early, as if by a thunderclap.
In the aftermath, some expressed the view that the press had unfairly hounded Little to his death. As the judge himself said in his suicide note, "I had hoped that my decision to withdraw from the election and leave public life would have closed the matter. Apparently these steps are not satisfactory to those who feel that more is required, so be it."
