The 69-year-old writer was found dead Monday at his Adel Apartment. Cook County Coroner Ron Lipsey declined to reveal the cause of death but said that Postell died of natural causes.
An investigative reporter for The Miami Herald and later The Albany Herald, Postell gained a reputation throughout the Southeast for his no-holds-barred approach to journalism, according to his daughter, Robin, who inherited her father’s writing prowess.
“He did something that no one has really done before in this state and probably never will do again, thanks to the state of the modern media,” Robin Postell, who currently globetrots as a freelance writer for adventure magazines, said. “Daddy had a dogged sense about a story, and he wasn’t afraid to go to any lengths to get it.”
While Postell had a knack for turning the most ordinary and mundane assignments into captivating reads, his brush with convicted murderer Carl Isaacs in 1973 garnered him the most fame, prompting him to pen three books, including “Dead Man Coming” and “Escape of My Dead Man,” which was later adapted into the 1993 film “Midnight Edition.”
Isaacs was executed by lethal injection in 2003 for the murder of the Alday family in Donalsonville.
In 1980, Postell and his wife Judi became the targets of an investigation themselves when FBI agents raided their home after four death-row inmates escaped from prison, according to the New York Times. Postell had been corresponding with the inmates, which prompted scrutiny from investigators. Later that year, Walter Cronkite heralded a judge’s decision to dismiss criminal charges against Postell on the CBS Evening News.
During his tenure as the state editor for The Albany Herald, Postell covered a number of high-profile cases, including the trial of the “Dawson 5,” who were implicated in the shooting of a grocery store owner, and the investigation of Mitchell County Sheriff Bud Williford, who was the target of a GBI and NAACP inquiry after he shot and killed a murder suspect he said was trying to escape.
Camilla Police Chief Ray Folsom, who was roaming the streets as a young Albany Police Detective when he first met Postell, called the writer a “relentless” reporter who did his best to get the story.
“He was relentless when he wanted information,” Folsom said. “But he also had an integrity about his job too that made him a good man in my eyes.”
Folsom said that Postell would often come asking questions about an investigation that police weren’t ready to release information about.
“If I asked him not to print something because it would jeopardize a case, he wouldn’t print it, even if he got it from somewhere else,” Folsom said. “Now that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have to do something for him later on down the road,” he said laughing, “but that’s just the way it worked back then.”
Jim Hendricks, who began his career at the Albany Herald when Postell was nearing the end of his and is now the executive editor of the newspaper, said Postell was a unique newsman who brought a lot to journalism’s table.
“Our thoughts and sympathies go out to Charlie’s family. I read his stories in The Herald as a kid and had a chance to work with him for a couple of years late in his newspaper career. He was as old-fashioned a newspaperman as you could find, a throwback to the Ben Hecht era,” Hendricks said.
“Early on, I covered some of the counties for The Herald that Charlie had covered, and I discovered pretty quickly that folks either loved him or hated him and there was little middle ground. Charlie, like everyone else, had his faults, but he also was a determined, aggressive reporter with an unbelievable list of sources. I don’t think we’ll see anyone quite like him again.”