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Following the Thread: From Classroom Questions to Community Change

Kat Reichert, CLA Public Information Office
September 5, 2025
cla-pio@alaska.edu

This summer, Department of Science & Environmental Journalism emeritus professor Brian O’Donoghue sat down with veteran reporter Robert Hannon for the Fairbanks Tall Timbers Series, a program that highlights individuals whose work has shaped and strengthened the Fairbanks community. The discussion traces O’Donoghue’s path from early newsroom adventures to decades in ����ֱ�� and points listeners to his newest chapter: The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice and the Birth of a Movement, published this spring.

The book follows the long arc of a question O’Donoghue first asked as a working journalist and then pursued as a teacher: What really happened in the 1997 murder of John Hartman, and how did four young men—Marvin Roberts, Kevin Pease, George Frese, and Eugene Vent—come to be convicted? Their trials raised painful questions about how institutional and individual bias shaped both the investigation and the outcome for the Indigenous men.

As a professor at UAF, O’Donoghue discovered a powerful resource to take those questions further. “I had a whole newsroom,” he recalls of his investigative reporting course, where each semester’s cohort built on the last by pulling records, re-interviewing witnesses, and mapping contradictions.

The work was rigorous and often unconventional. Semester after semester, O’Donoghue’s students took on assignments that pushed them beyond the classroom: gathering records, probing inconsistencies, and testing the strength of the state’s case. They retraced key elements of the prosecution, testing whether crucial eyewitness accounts could hold up under real conditions. What they discovered often raised more questions than answers. Their reporting and persistence culminated in Decade of Doubt, a seven-part investigative series produced over six years with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. The series carefully laid out troubling gaps in the case, from recanted confessions to questionable eyewitness accounts, and raised pressing questions about how evidence was gathered, presented, and weighed in court. That body of work helped spark a five-week evidentiary hearing that ended in the eventual vacating of the four men’s convictions.

O’Donoghue’s Tall Timbers conversation offers glimpses of the person behind the pages: the kid from Washington, D.C., who learned to ask hard questions; the reporter who kept following a thread; the teacher who trusted students with real work that mattered. The book captures that ethos without grandstanding. It is, at heart, a chronicle of how learning by doing can move a case, a newsroom, and a community.

“Once you start identifying that people are innocent, you can’t really turn away,” O’Donoghue says. His students didn’t. Over the years, they collected small truths that added up to something larger: courage, craft, and a demonstrable public good. Their journey stands as proof that a classroom can be a launchpad toward professional purpose, civic responsibility, and change you can measure.

Watch the Tall Timbers interview to hear the story in his own words, then read the book to see how those lessons took root.

O’Donoghue’s new book stands as both a record of the Fairbanks Four case and a testament to what students and faculty can accomplish together when they engage real-world questions with rigor and persistence. For those who want to dive deeper, Aurora magazine recently featured O’Donoghue’s work, and the College of Liberal Arts has curated an online archive of supporting materials, including the Decade of Doubt series, on its Fairbanks Four project page.