On Nov. 24, 1965, at the preliminary hearing for Charles Schmid in Justice Court, Richard Bruns testified for more than four hours and was expected to return to give more testimony the next day.
Another so-called "mystery witness" was Charles E. Fields, 25, of Phoenix. Fields had told police that he and Schmid were once business partners. His business card was found in Gretchen Fritz's purse when her family's abandoned car was discovered several days after she disappeared.
Other witnesses were expected to testify in subsequent days, many for the defense, and many of them teenagers.
Meanwhile, the court order barring law enforcement officials from speaking to the media about the case was causing quite a debate.
On Nov. 28, 1965, The Continuing Study Committee of the Associated Press passed a resolution condemning the Superior Court order. The committee issued a statement saying that it "feels that the public's right to know has been infringed upon by recent Superior Court actions in Tucson wherein the city police and sheriff's office were enjoined from discussing the Charled H. Schmid Jr. murder case with news media..."
The following day, a spokesman for the Pima County Bar Association released a statement supporting the order, and the president of the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Indianapolis, Ind., condemned the order.
The order was also condemned by the Sigma Delta Chi national journalism professional society chapters in Tucson and Tempe, and supported by the Arizona Bar Association.
The free press vs. fair trial debate continued. From the Arizona Daily Star, Dec. 2, 1965:
On 'Gag Rule'
Roylston Would Like Legal Test
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
The judge who enjoined police from telling reporters about three Tucson murder cases expressed puzzlement Wednesday that the press had not forced his ruling into a higher court.
Judge Richard N. Roylston told the Arizona Republic that by obtaining a writ of prohibition in an appellate court, the press of Arizona might clarify a national conflict over free press and the rights of defendants to a fair trial.
The case at hand, Roylston suggested, would give the press a favorable opportunity to argue some key questions.
Roylston said the view of pretrial publicity expressed in the injunction is not his personal view but a prediction of how higher courts will rule on the issue.
"It was my feeling that the higher courts would find the news coverage of this case in violation of the defendant's rights," he said.
"I think the sooner the high courts interpret it, the better it will be for trial judges," the judge said.
A trial for permanent injunction will be filed after mid-December, when defendants have filed their answers. By then the progress of the Schmid case through the courts may make this unnecessary, he added.
However, William Small Jr., assistant publisher of the Tucson Daily Citizen, said his newspaper was not planning to pursue the case further in the courts.
"We are not going to take on another test case of the benefit of the industry. We simply cannot afford it," he said.
The purchase of the Arizona Daily Star by the Citizen is now pending anti-trust decision on federal court.
The editor of the Wall Street Journal made the claim that the gag order prevented a fair trial. From the Star, Dec. 2, 1965:
Newspaper Society Head Condemns Roylston Gag
Royster Says Trial Might Be Unfair
"A fair trial, by definition, must be fair to both parties" and the gag placed on public officials in murder cases here may make a trial unfair to both the public and the defendant, the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors believes.
Vermont Royster, editor of the Wall Street Journal, condemned Pima County Superior Court Judge Richard N. Roylston's order that Sheriff Waldon V. Burr, Police Chief Bernard L. Garmire, County Atty. Norman E. Green and their staffs not discuss the case of Charles Howard Schmid Jr. Schmid is charged in the deaths of Wendy and Gretchen Fritz and Alleen Rowe, all teenaged Tucson girls.
"In enjoining silence on the police authorities in the trial of Charles Schmid," Royster said in a letter to a Tucson newspaperman, "Judge Ricahrd Roylston may have intended to safeguard the process of a fair trial.
"What he did, if upheld, might make a fair trial impossible."
Royster said the order prevents news media from obtaining and telling the truth about proceedings, and "opens the door to let the rumor mill run unchecked in a case about which the public is emotionally aroused."
He said aroused rumor "may do the defendant far more injury than would frank and honest information so that even if he is hereafter acquitted at the bar of the court, he may be irreparably damaged at the bar of public opinion."
"But this is not the only injury," he said. "A fair trial by definition must be fair to both parties and one of the parties in this case is the people of the State of Arizona."
He contended the order permits authorities to "proceed as they please and hide behind a cloak of silence" giving the people "no way of knowing whether the authorities are proceeding diligently with the investigation of the murder or proceeding properly in their treatment of the alleged defendant."
Royster said the gag rule opens the door "to all manner of abuses in the judicial sustem," and that freedom of information does not prevent a fair trial "but in fact the only assurance the people have that justice is administered fairly."
Roylston issued the order on the request of Schmid's attorney, William Tinney.
Schmid has been ordered to stand trial on two charges of murder in the deaths of the Fritz girls. Preliminary hearing for him on a murder charge in the alleged death of Miss Rowe is scheduled Dec. 13.
More newspaper associations and jurists weighed in, but of course, the matter was not to be decided in the newspapers and other media, merely debated in them.
Next: John Saunders and Mary French are sentenced.
