EVANSVILLE — As a judge told a silent courtroom on May 14 that jurors had found Elizabeth Fox-Doerr guilty of murder for her husband’s 2019 killing, the first murder trial to be broadcast live from Vanderburgh County came to a halting conclusion.
In footage aired on all three of Evansville’s television stations, Fox-Doerr, 52, could be seen wavering as she struggled to bear the weight of what had just transpired. Despite a spirited defense from her attorneys, 12 jurors concluded that Fox-Doerr had, beyond all reasonable doubt, tasked a lover with carrying out the fatal shooting of her husband, longtime city firefighter Robert F. Doerr II.
“I could tell that her chin was trembling,” said Brian Cissell, who operated the television camera at Fox-Doerr’s trial on behalf of his station, WFIE-NBC14, and Evansville’s CBS and ABC stations. “She wasn’t crying in the sense that, you know, she had tears coming from her eyes, but I can tell by her chin trembling that she was emotional about it.”
Five years after Fox-Doerr dialed 911 to report that she had found Doerr, 51, bleeding from gunshot wounds in their driveway, she was now convicted of his killing. For the crimes of aiding, inducing or causing murder and conspiracy to commit murder, both Level 1 felonies, Fox-Doerr could serve between 45 and 65 years in a state prison.
A judge is scheduled to sentence Fox-Doerr at a hearing on June 17, according to court records.
After capturing Fox-Doerr’s reaction to the verdict, Cissell said he panned his JVC camera toward the crowded courtroom gallery, where Doerr’s family appeared to be crying tears of relief. The footage streamed back to local newsrooms, and then to television sets, in near-real time before making its way to several national media outlets that had taken an interest in the case.
Besides a few technical glitches, the consensus in Evansville seemed to be that the broadcasts were an across-the-board success — an outcome that Southern Indiana judges may look to when deciding whether to allow cameras inside their own courtrooms moving forward.
Last year, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that reporters could record, photograph or otherwise broadcast criminal trials, civil hearings and most other non-confidential court sessions so long as the presiding judge permitted them to do so.
That ruling has been in effect since May 1, but some judges have been reluctant to approve requests from news outlets to broadcast trials, citing the sensitive nature of certain cases, concerns over courtroom distractions, risks to witnesses and opposition from attorneys and prosecutors.
“Last year, I called just about every judge in our area and said, ‘Hey, are you going to allow cameras in your courtroom?’” Warren Korff, the news director for WEHT-ABC25, said. “And almost every one of them said, ‘No, I’m going to let somebody else go first and we’ll see how it goes … They just weren’t really willing to be the first one to pull the trigger on it.”
Vanderburgh County Superior Court Judge Robert Pigman presided over Fox-Doerr’s trial, which began May 6, and he worked with television producers, camera operators and reporters to lay out a set of rules governing how the trial could be covered.
Leslie Shively, chief judge of Vanderburgh County Superior Court and a longtime advocate for increased transparency across the criminal-legal system, said Pigman was the right judge for the job.
“He knows how things should work,” Shively said of Pigman during an interview with WFIE before Fox-Doerr’s trial. “And he is also very strong on the rules.”
Pigman carefully controlled when, how and where Fox-Doerr’s trial could be broadcast: Only the opening and closing arguments, along with the reading of a verdict, could be shown to viewers live. Witness testimony had to be recorded on a 30-minute delay and could only be broadcast during television stations’ regularly scheduled mid-day newscasts.
And perhaps most importantly, Pigman ordered that only one camera would be allowed in the courtroom at a time. Media outlets had to pool their resources.
Cissell operated the sole camera for the entirety of Fox-Doerr’s week-long trial. He told the Courier & Press that the presence of his camera and a few wireless microphones appeared to go largely unnoticed by jurors.
“I don’t think they really focused on me,” Cissell said. “My biggest goal was to be a fly on the wall in there, and to not be a distraction.”
John Simpson, the chief photographer at WEHT, told the Courier & Press that the hundreds of gigabytes of footage Cissell captured allowed reporters to tell better stories with greater depth and accuracy.
“People got a better understanding than they could have if we did the interviews out in the hallway afterward,” Simpson said of the coverage.
And that coverage could extend beyond Evansville’s television market. Each of the local station’s parent networks requested access to the footage, as did Court TV.
CBS, NBC and ABC all expressed an interest in potentially covering Doerr’s murder on their respective news magazine shows 48 Hours, Dateline and 20/20, according to legal filings.
Doerr’s killing on Feb. 26, 2019, devastated Evansville’s tight-knight fire department, where Doerr had worked for nearly three decades. According to prosecutors, Fox-Doerr conspired with her alleged lover, Larry Richmond Sr., 46, to have Doerr killed just as he returned home from an extra shift at a firehouse.
Fox-Doerr has maintained her innocence since she was first charged with murder in 2022, and her lead defense attorney, Mark Phillips, told reporters that Fox-Doerr may appeal her conviction.
Richmond Sr., who stands accused of fatally shooting Fox-Doerr’s husband at her request, is currently scheduled to stand trial in August. According to legal filings, local and national media outlets have sought the court’s permission to broadcast his trial, too.
“It was a high-profile who-done-it,” Korff said of the case. “It was like, ‘What happened here?’ A firefighter comes home and somebody shoots him in his driveway and takes off?”
Korff said the national news magazine shows scour the country’s courts for trials like Fox-Doerr’s.
“That’s kind of their M.O. these days, is taking a good who-done-it and presenting the evidence,” Korff said. “And then at the end of their shows, they say, ‘Oh, she was found guilty, or she was found not guilty, or something like that.”
If the state’s lead prosecutor and Fox-Doerr’s legal counsel could agree on one thing, it may have been that the addition of a camera inside the courtroom was, overall, a positive.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate maybe for every case, but this case was very discreet, and we really didn’t notice that the cameras were there,” Vanderburgh County Prosecutor Diana Moers told reporters after the trial. “And I think it’s a good way for folks to get to watch what goes on in the courtroom.”
Fox-Doerr’s lead attorney echoed that sentiment.
“I don’t think there was any disruption,” Phillips said. “We never talked about the camera being in the courtroom, but I will tell you the one thing we struggled with were all the microphones … It caused me to pause my mouth, frankly.”
Houston Harwood can be contacted at houston.harwood@courierpress.com
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Here's how the media covered Elizabeth Fox-Doerr's murder trial
