After three months working on an investigative story, the air date was finally just a week away. It was to air the Monday after Thanksgiving. I came into the station the night before to do some last minute tweaking to find 75% of my content erased! All the emotion and fantastic sound-bites from the first couple of visits gone. I was mortified. 

I'd always heard of others backing up their work on external hard drives, but never having reason to need one myself (until now), I always put off buying one. 

What should have been my most intricate story yet was now composed of a few pieces here and there of the last few months and a make-up day's worth of sound-bites, with far less emotion. It came together, I'll always question whether it came together as well as I'd wanted it to. If only I'd used a back up.

As live reporters, we're always hoping to cover spot news- something worth while, dramatic and truly LIVE. It's not until you're experiencing the after effects of the story that you begin to to realize it's not always what you hoped for.I've covered my share...murders, missing children and family sex rings. But none of them seemed to affect me the way I thought they would. Not yet anyway. 

We had just ended our Saturday six o'clock newscast. I'd spent some of the day getting a story out of a train exhibit that had come to town for a children's charity. I had no idea that this slow news day would soon become the break down of the past four weeks of the entire opposite. 

Just before walking on set to anchor the newscast with my co-anchor Alyssa, we'd received word of a Williamsburg house explosion over the police scanner. Listening intently for the rest of the information, we began making calls. When time came, I took to the anchor desk as I aired a brief statement about the house explosion with one of those "Stay with KOMU as we continue to investigate the situation," a.k.a we have no information to give you. I didn't think much about it until the newscast ended. 

Walking back into the newsroom, I overheard our assignment desk telling our producer the address of the home, or what was left of it. All eyes fell on me. I grabbed my gear and left. 

Twenty-five minutes later, I was searching along a long, dark and windy road for the flattened property. While parked on a side street, a car pulled up to me. The driver got out of the car and told me he was the neighbor and that two people had...died. Somehow, I wasn't expecting that at all. It was no longer a house explosion, but a tragic accident that left two dead, and I was on my way to cover it. After a point in the right direction, I pulled up to a line of squad cars and a fire truck shining a large spotlight on the smoking pile of wood, washing machines and cars among other things. 

The sheriff walked up to me to introduce himself. He then pointed toward a group of people standing in the street just looking at the wreckage. It was the family. I was told the victims were a 20-year-old mother and her 4-month-old baby boy. New feelings began to take over: deep sadness, panic and fear of what this grieving family might do or say to me, a stranger getting ready to shoot video of the place where their loved ones were just killed. I felt so insensitive. But I had a job to do. I kept my distance, did my interviews down the street and left silently, all the while making phone calls to the station with new information to tweet about. The minute the car door shut, tears began to fall.

The worst part was watching the father and a police officer walk over the debris looking for family possessions left behind. They looked for hours trying to find a laptop with all the family's photos. Watching him...his eyes...his face...That just about killed me. 

A call from my mom on the ride back to the station was all it took to create a waterfall effect: both in sobs and emotions. I'm sure it hit hardest out of any of the stories I've covered in the last weeks because I was THERE, standing on the rubble, focusing in on baby blankets that lay under a cloud of dust, a baby toy hanging in a smashed car window. Just hours before, this family was a family of three. Now only the dad remained, having been away from the house at the time of the explosion. I just couldn't stop picturing what the scene looked like before I'd pulled up. I don't think I would have been able to watch. I hope I never have to. 

To make matters worse, I was scheduled for an onset that night. With red puffy eyes, I called my producers and asked that it become a reader, that I wasn't in the right state to go on-air. I received the okay and ten minutes later arrived in the newsroom still trying to gain composure. Surprise-They'd decided an onset would be the best format for the story after all and scheduled me to go on-air in 25 minutes! (Great.)

Quick. Download memory card. Convert clips. Import into Avid. Write story in the midst of oncoming tears. Edit VoSot. Apply eye-drops. Reapply Makeup. Give producer the look of death while walking on set. And 5...4...3...2...1...

I held it together for Mid-Missouri. That was the job. That was spot news after an already long day. That was not what I'd hoped it would be, but that's life, and I'm sure I'll experience nights like these all throughout my career. You just have to pray that every now and then you get a really good, uplifting story that comes along, something to balance out the bad.

Lesson Learned: When covering stories like these, make sure to talk to someone about it. I'd allowed all of these horrific stories to build up inside for weeks until I couldn't keep it in any longer. It's good to talk. Always make time to do something for yourself after these stories. In my case, I went home and watched a really good movie with friends I knew would cheer me up. It's better than going through it alone.

Click here for the online version of this story.

Disgusted is the only word that comes to mind at the moment. I'm sure by the end of this I'll have a few more. 

I came into this story the day after it debuted. I was reporting on the Mohler Family Sex Abuse Ring investigation. A fellow colleague of mine, Christy, covered this the day before. She immediately warned me of the consequences she experienced after covering it: the feeling of wanting to vomit, wanting to bury your head in a pillow and scream. Reading into the investigation and the explicit and gruesome details had me wishing I was the prosecutor in this case so I could look at these men in the face and see them meet their justice. They've been living the last 20 years of their lives as free men! Unbelievable! It stops here.

After weeks into reporting the this case, here's what we know: Six men (all related: Father, brother and his 4 sons) were charged with sexual assault crimes with children under the age of 12, rape/sodomy, bestiality and using children in sexual performances. The crimes occurred between 1988 and the mid-1990's. (Unclench fists and breath.) All of the victims were minors at the time and were children of one of the suspected men, and are now in their late twenties to mid-thirties. As if that's not bad enough, one of the daughters had to have an abortion at the age of 11! The stories are still coming out as these horrendous memories make their way back into the minds of those that probably tried so hard to forget them. The number of victims is still unknown. 

Now, as if the story couldn't get any more twisted, authorities are now looking into murder accusations. Documents show that the father, Darrel Mohler forced his young daughters to kill a man he'd held captive. He told his daughters if they did not do as asked, he would kill them. Mohler gave the girls knives to do the job. 

While this was not a story that we, at KOMU, were on the scene for, it was just as gut wrenching reading the statements and documented history of these unimaginable crimes. These men had their victims, their own children, write out the abuse that was happening to them, place the notes in glass bottles and then burry them as if to burry their troubles away just in time for round two. (Flinch.) Horrible.

What's worse is that the mother told officials she knew of the abuse going on at the time but did not tell the police, just church leaders (who deny these claims!) 

It's not just a story you don't want to report on-It's one you just plain and simple don't want to happen! What happened to all the nice and uplifting stories! This still creeps up every now and then in the back of my mind and I just have to think of how blessed I am to have such a loving family. It's what gets me through seeing all of this inhumanity.

I walked into the large courtroom on the third floor of the Boone County Courthouse. I was covering a murder trail, my first. I had no idea what to expect, the number in attendance, the mood and drama of it all. The only image in my head at the time was the ending scene from "A Few Good Men." The reality wasn't nearly as dramatic, at least not during the many hours I spent there.  To give you some background, 24-year old Damon Williams faced first degree murder and burglary charges as well as armed criminal action.  Back in June 2008, Williams and four others in their late teens and early twenties decided to get high at a Motel 6 in Columbia and then commit a robbery for even more drugs. After driving without a target in mind, one of the five picked an apartment complex supposedly with a supply of drugs inside. The break-in went from bad to worse when the suspected Damon Williams pulled the trigger on Nathaniel Bentley, one of the people living in the apartment. The bullet to the head killed Bentley instantly.Since then, the gunman's identity remained a mystery, until recently. The other four accomplices all took lesser charges of burglary with a plea bargain. They'd all have to testify or give depositions in Williams' trial. That was a weird experience to watch. I got to witness one of the four testify against Williams. He described who had the gun and where everyone was located throughout the apartment at the time of the murder. It felt strange watching what used to be two friends now blaming one another on a murder. I don't know how I could do that when the defendant sat only twenty feet from me. It was like Williams eyes were burning a hole through his friends. That's when the mood began to change. Pictures of the victim's wounds were shown, a witness who lived in the apartment gave his graphic testimony, two guns from the evidence table were examined from the witness stand and the tape of Williams' first interview with the police detectives played on a screen. Meanwhile, Williams' sat very calmly the entire time. Matter of fact, he even smiled here and there. Why would anyone SMILE in this situation? Coincidentally, I sat right in front of his mother, with the victim's family to the left of me two rows up. Throughout the day, I tweeted 15 times regarding any new evidence or testimony that was heard. It was my first time really going live from a story without being in front of a camera. Technology is such an amazing tool!