Joline Gutierrez Krueger began writing as a kid in Albuquerque. After winning a blue ribbon in first grade for an essay at St. Mary’s School, she was hooked. She lived on both coasts and a couple of mountain ranges before returning home, where she began an award-winning newspaper career in 1987. She worked as a journalist, columnist, cop reporter, assistant city editor, features editor, and food critic at the Albuquerque Tribune for approximately 27 years. When the Tribune closed, she became a journalist and columnist for the Albuquerque Journal for the next 15 years. Joline says, "I write the stories behind the stories" and “I write about real people who rarely make headlines, and the real stories behind the people who do.” After raising six children, she is recently retired and enjoying a peaceful life at home with her six dogs.
In the video clip above, Joline was interviewed on June 10, 2022, shortly after she announced her retirement. View this videotaped interview to learn more about Ms. Gutierrez Krueger, particularly the approach to journalism that she took throughout her career, which added a human element that gave her stories a real depth to them. The link below leads to an article that Joline Gutierrez Krueger wrote as she reflected upon her career and bid her readers farewell.
https://news.yahoo.com/joline-gutierrez-krueger-retirement-begins-141000785.html
In 2001, when the state of New Mexico prepared to execute Terry Clark, the first man to be executed in this state during the modern era of the death penalty (with it having been 41 years since someone had been executed in 1960, via gassing), Joline began to write to Terry Clark and developed a relationship with him through letters over the months, nearly two years, prior to his eventual execution. Her aim was to try and understand why Terry Clark committed such horrible crimes against children. She states in the video provided above, "If you don't understand why people are the way they are, we are going to be in our little silos and never gonna get what the problem is out there!" The two links below are only a sample of the many articles that she wrote about Terry Clark that have been buried in the archives (the first one about Clark's final moments during his execution; and the second one about the law that was created in the name of his victim Dena Gore, which is designed to eliminate the possibility of releasing on bond those who have been accused of victimizing children.)
On February 25, 2023, I traveled up the beautiful mountains of Tijeras, New Mexico to meet with Joline Gutierrez Krueger to talk with her about her experiences with Terry Clark over the couple of years she knew him while he was on death row, prior to his execution, leading up to his last moments right before his execution. Terry Clark became the only man to be executed in New Mexico in the modern death penalty era because no one was executed after him and in 2009 New Mexico abolished the death penalty.
Voices Against the Death Penalty