Legendary New York Post journalist Steve Dunleavy, known for his ingenuity in getting scoops, died Monday in Long Island at age 81, the New York Post reported.
Post owner Rupert Murdoch called Dunleavy one of the greatest reporters of all time, whose “passing is the end of a great era.”
His countless exclusives included interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and confessed “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo, as well as convincing three members of Elvis Presley’s “Memphis Mafia” bodyguards to reveal his drug addiction.
Dunleavy’s career began when he quit school at 14 and began working as a copy boy in his native Australia before leaving for a job in Hong Kong and then making his way across Asia and Europe. He arrived in New York in December 1966, with, he claimed, seven dollars in his pocket.
He eventually met fellow Aussie and News Corp founder Murdoch, who helped him launch his career in the U.S. He became the Post’s top crime reporter when Murdoch purchased the paper in 1976.
In 1986, Murdoch made Dunleavy one of the first reporters for “A Current Affair,” a program produced for his then-fledgling Fox broadcast TV network.
In one classic moment during nearly a decade with the show, Dunleavy beat ABC’s “Nightline” out of an exclusive interview with televangelist Jim Bakker’s mistress Jessica Hahn by going to her house and telling an ABC driver that she had been taken to a hospital.
In 2017, he was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame, which praised his “rambunctious, swashbuckling and hard-drinking career” and said he “earned the term ‘legendary reporter’ through his whatever-it-takes, larger-than-life approach to journalism.”
Dunleavy is survived by his wife and two sons.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.