Associated Press, by J. Ross Baughman
Winning Work
While interrogating prisoners at gunpoint, a white soldier makes suspected guerrillas hold a stress position for over an hour in the midday heat of the Kalahari desert on Rhodesia's western border with Botswana, 21 September 1977.
A guerrilla prisoner waits with a rope noose around his neck shortly before white cavalry troopers in the Grey's Scouts drag him behind their cantering horses near the town of Kikidoo in western Rhodesia, 23 September 1977.
Lt. Graham Baillie raps a small wooden bat against his leg after using it to beat Moffat Ncube, a local teacher, political leader and now a bound, unconscious prisoner slumped against the wall of school house, 20 September 1977. Ncube reportedly later died after three days of brutal, non-stop torture.
Biography
J. Ross Baughman graduated in 1975 from Kent State University after working as an editor, writer and photographer for the daily student newspaper and yearbook. While there he honed skills as an investigative journalist by slipping inside Ohio's state mental hospitals for a year-long study of the de-institutionalization movement. He also became a rodeo clown, and then jumped inside the world of demolition derbys. Baughman then joined the staff of the Lorain Journal, and won the Associated Press Managing Editors' award for Ohio by infiltrating the American Nazi movement in Cleveland and Chicago and exposing their plans to bomb embassies, synagogues and assassinate Henry Kissinger and 11 other prominent Jewish-American leaders. At the age of 23, Baughman became the youngest professional to win the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the guerrilla war in Rhodesia.