Longtime journalist Ward Lucas, who served as an investigative reporter and anchor at 9NEWS for more than 30 years until his retirement in 2009, died Sunday at the age of 75, Denver Gazette media partner 9News reported Tuesday evening.
Lucas was known among his colleagues as a quick-witted truth-seeker with a passion for words and was a mentor to many young journalists.
Born in Kyoto, Japan, Lucas began his career as a television anchor in 1974 at KIRO-TV in Seattle. Two years later, he moved to Denver to begin a decades-long career at 9NEWS. In his more than 40 years as an investigative journalist, his work has included covering the DB Cooper kidnapping and the Ted Bundy murders.
In 1977, he tried to persuade the news director of 9NEWS to fly him to Aspen after Bundy’s escape from the Pitkin County Courthouse. At the time, the news director felt the story was not nationally known enough, so Lucas hired a pilot to fly him and a photographer to Aspen to cover the story.
Ward Lucas with Mark Koebrich.
“The news director didn’t know about the breakout from the jail there, the Pitkin County Courthouse, until I started broadcasting from Aspen,” Lucas said in a 2019 interview with Tom Green when Netflix released a documentary about the case. Lucas appeared in the documentary.
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