tony kiritsis press conference
As you’ll see in the film, Tony Kiritsis held court before local media and law enforcement for an incredibly intense amount of time while he read off his demands and shoved his hostage Dick Hall around in front of the cameras. We didn’t have enough space to include the whole spectacle, but the footage in its entirety is significant for many reasons, not the least of which is that you will never see anything like it on TV today. So here are the first 8 consecutive minutes of the news conference like you’ve never seen them before. That’s because we had to create this video from scratch using multiple audio and video sources that had never been mixed together before. For an excellent account of what it felt like to be in the room that night on February 10, 1977, please check out a piece written by our good friend Tom Cochrun. In later years, he would become an anchor on WTHR’s evening news here in Indianapolis, but back in ’77, Cochrun covered the story as a reporter for local radio giant WIBC and has eloquently captured the experience of the whole thing, and in particular the Thursday Night News Conference, in his Trace article “A Time of Hostages: A Reporter’s Notebook.” http://www.deadmansline.com/tom-cochrun