Theo Wilson; Celebrated Courtroom Reporter

Theo Wilson, the storied consummate news reporter who thought nothing of hiring a taxi to take her 250 miles to a crime scene or of telling mass murderer Charles Manson to “shut up,” died early Friday. She was 78.

Wilson, who covered the trials of the century for the New York Daily News when it was the largest circulation paper in the country, died in the midst of a promotion tour for her book about those courtroom epics. The anthology, “Headline Justice: Inside the Courtroom--The Country’s Most Controversial Trials,” was published Wednesday.

Linda Deutsch, a well-known national trial reporter for Associated Press who was Wilson’s neighbor and best friend, said Wilson was ready to step into a limousine to go to an appearance on Tom Snyder’s late-night television program when she was stricken. Paramedics rushed Wilson to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

“This was to be the weekend of her life,” Deutsch said. “The book was out after more than 10 years of working on it. She had scheduled book signings and television and radio appearances, and the publisher had just told her the book was going into a second printing. It is just so doubly unfair because this was such a happy time.”

A world-class raconteur as well as reporter, Wilson enjoyed telling the story of her $200 taxi ride to Chowchilla to cover the kidnapping of a school bus full of children in 1976. A native New Yorker, she did not drive, so she thought nothing of calling a cab to take her to the small town north of Fresno, about 250 miles from her Hollywood Hills home.

During a recess at the Manson trial, Wilson barely blinked when the cult figure made a remark to reporters that many interpreted as a threat.

“I looked at him,” she once told The Times, “and said, ‘Oh, shut up, Charlie.’ ”

When her editor phoned from New York, the diminutive reporter dismissed any fear by telling him: “Why Charlie’s smaller than I am!”

For 30 years--the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s before television cameras began setting up shop in courtrooms--Wilson served as a “talking camera” for her readers. She practiced the two rules she preached to lesser trial reporters: Stay in the courtroom, and take your reader in with you by describing everything, explaining everything.

From Dr. Sam Sheppard to Daniel Ellsberg and John DeLorean, she colorfully chronicled the complex layers of historic trial defendants. Meticulously taking notes by hand and then dictating stories by phone when there was no time to type, she related the unfolding epics of Jack Ruby, Sirhan Sirhan, Manson, Patricia Hearst, the Boston Strangler, the Son of Sam, Jean Harris and Claus von Bulow.

Wilson covered other major stories--Princess Anne’s wedding in London, early Mercury space shots and the first walk on the moon, national political conventions, Ted Kennedy’s incident at Chappaquiddick, and former First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s travels to India and Pakistan. But none, she wrote in the introduction to her book, “has been as challenging, as difficult, as demanding as covering a big trial.”

What set Wilson above her colleagues, Deutsch said, was that “she had such a feeling for people. Others came and observed a story, but she felt for all the people involved and conveyed that to her readers.”

The Brooklyn-born Theodora Nadelstein Wilson, who often likened trials to theater, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in English from the University of Kentucky. She honed her reporting skills at the Evansville Press and the Indianapolis Times in Indiana, the Richmond News Leader in Virginia, Associated Press and the Philadelphia Bulletin before going home to New York and the Daily News.

She earned myriad news awards and was invited to join discussions on crime and free press versus fair trial issues from television newsrooms and law school auditoriums to the White House.

Wilson is survived by her son, Los Angeles attorney Delph Robert Wilson; a brother, Ernest Nadelstein; and five sisters, Marion Rose, Rosalind Donziger, Betty Moss, Isabella Fine and Matty Kaplan.

Services are scheduled for 10 a.m. Sunday at Mt. Sinai Memorial Park, 5954 Forest Lawn Drive. Friends suggested that memorial donations be made to charities benefiting cats or other animals.