Fourteen years before, she'd rejected a plea agreement, believing that when she stabbed a Somerset County man who abducted her outside a tavern, she had acted in self-defense.

The police and prosecutor didn't buy her story. Neither did the jury. And now this reporter named Pete Shellem from the Patriot-News in Harrisburg wanted to visit her at SCI Muncy because, as he wrote, her case seemed like "an outrage" to him, and he thought some attention might help.

She didn't like reporters much - all the articles about the stabbing made her look horrible, she says. But this Shellem guy seemed so righteous. And intense.

He spent three or four hours talking to her one visiting day in 1998 and seemed to already know the answer to every question he asked.

He'd read every court document in her case, had approached everyone involved in the investigation, and gone way beyond that, interviewing an off-duty policewoman whose testimony hadn't been allowed at trial.

Had she been called, he discovered, the officer would have said that the stabbing victim, portrayed by the prosecution as a religious family man, had grabbed her, too, in a Johnstown bar, then gone after her again in the parking lot.

Not an empty suit

"I've met with some people over the course of the years dressed up in the finest suits, their shoes were spit-shined, every hair was in place. But underneath, they were empty. Pete was thorough, compassionate. He gave his word, he didn't go back on it. That's who he was."

Shellem's article ran on Aug. 2, 1998, under the headline, "Why is this woman still in prison?"

Two months later she wasn't. After pleading to a lesser charge, she was released for time served. His article had that much impact.

"He was the avenger," she said Wednesday. "He was the knight in shining armor."

Two days earlier, she had traveled to Mechanicsburg for a memorial service for Shellem, 49. He had taken his own life, and she was too shocked at the funeral home to introduce herself to the others there.

The others included David Gladden, wrongly convicted of killing an elderly woman in 1995. Until Shellem wrote about the case in 2007, police had missed the fact that the victim had lived in the same building as a serial killer who preyed on elderly women.

A briefcase in the trash

"I've never seen anyone at any paper do the kind of stuff that Pete's done," said Crawford's attorney, Joshua Lock. "He was just tireless in his effort, indefatigable."

In all, Shellem's digging freed four people from jail, where together they had already spent 66 years.

Spero T. Lappas, a defense attorney, says of his late friend's reporting: "He did what he did without regard to who he was hurting or who he was helping. It really pissed him off to see the law roll over innocent people."

Lappas says he hasn't a clue why such a tenacious fighter would kill himself. "I would say everybody in this community gasped when we heard about Pete's death. Some of us are still gasping."

For more than a decade after Shellem wrote about Carbone, the two stayed in touch. A couple of weeks ago she e-mailed him about her religious faith.

I told her the line I heard from his old reporting partner at the paper, Pete Shelly, about how Shellem could save the world but not himself.

"He was the champion of so many," Carbone said. "It breaks my heart that he was so sad and lost in his understanding of himself that he couldn't find a way out."

Shellem, who grew up in Delaware County and studied journalism at Temple, left behind a wife and two grown sons. The tragedy reaches far beyond his shaken family.

A reporter frees someone who has been wrongly accused, and the mail from other prisoners starts arriving in the newsroom. Free four people and the thick yellow envelopes never stop.

Those packages are now delivered to Mike Feeley, who was Shellem's editor at the Patriot-News. But there's no one left with the sources, the skills, and the conviction to find the injustice in all the entreaties.

"Who will do Pete's work? That's a good question," Feeley said. "He always took the time to do that, even though it took a terrible toll."