Former Enquirer crime reporter and columnist Frank Weikel, who died March 28 at age 95, knew how to make headlines.
He had terrific reporter instincts and often broke news stories in his column, which he wrote for The Enquirer from 1965 to 1987.
In a front-page piece on April 29, 1974, Weikel was the first to report that a “Cincinnati politico,” who went unnamed, was under investigation from a vice probe. Later that day, Jerry Springer resigned from City Council because he paid a sex worker with a personal check.
Sometimes Weikel was in the news himself.
While working as a crime reporter in August 1964, he discovered the body of missing 4-year-old girl Deborah Dappen in Fairfax.
He had squeezed under the crawl space of a porch where he found the dead girl. Then he accompanied the Fairfax police chief when they got a confession from a 13-year-old neighbor.
“I still get goosebumps when I think of it,” Weikel told The Enquirer in 1987. “I crawled under the porch, turned over a piece of plywood and there was the baby.”
Weikel spent 40 years at The Enquirer. He was hired as a copy boy in 1947 when he was still a sophomore at Purcell High School. A week after he graduated, he was made a full-time reporter.
On the police beat for 13 years, he wasn’t afraid to get down in the trenches.
In November 1960, a riverman had barricaded himself in his English Woods home and threatened to kill himself and his 2-year-old daughter.
Weikel phoned the man from a house across the street and persuaded him to surrender before the police swarmed in with tear gas and riot guns.
He was promoted to columnist in 1965. Alongside the news items, Weikel sent out “darts” to people and actions he disliked, and “flowers” to praise those who did something nice.
In 1967, he spent 10 days in Vietnam to honor war correspondents for the Cincinnati Cuvier Press Club and speak with local servicemen.
“I saw the column as a public service,” Weikel told The Enquirer in 1987, when he retired from the newspaper to work as community relations officer for Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis Jr.
While with The Enquirer, Weikel also served as a member of the Springfield Township Board of Trustees from 1969 to 1992.
In the 1990s, Weikel moved to Florida where he served as a Charlotte County commissioner.
He returned to Cincinnati a few years ago and was living in Montgomery.
His first wife, Joyce A. Weikel, died in 1993.
He is survived by his wife Joan Weikel; his son, Dale, of Dayton, Ohio; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
