This alumna went from Lubbock to the Bay Area, where she covered some of the most memorable stories of the past 40 years and became a legend in the process.

For Rita Williams, career fulfillment was never about any perceived happiness coming from having Lubbock, Texas, in her rearview mirror, as fellow Lubbockite Mac Davis once sang.

It was more about exploring the wide world of opportunity that lay out there beyond those amazing West Texas sunsets. 

She never forgot the early lessons she learned and how they shaped her into the person she would become. It was on the South Plains where, in many ways, her character was forged.

Like the time 10-year-old Rita was sent to the store to buy her dad a pack of cigarettes (this was commonplace in those days before the surgeon general’s warnings). She made the required purchase, handed over the cash and, to her surprise, received too much change in return.

What a windfall.

“I thought, ‘This is pretty cool,’ so I put it in my pocket,” she remembered. “I went home and gave the cigarettes to my daddy. He saw the money in my hand and asked, ‘What’s that?’”

Rita explained the clerk had given her the excess money, and it was hers.

“I didn’t steal it or anything,” she said.

“Yes, you did,” her father replied. “You took that money out of her pocket because at the end of the day, that hard-working woman is going to have to make up that money. It’s just the same as if you had stolen it.”

He told Rita to get back on her bike, go back to the store, return the money and apologize. Rita burst into tears, but her dad, a civil servant who worked at Reese Air Force Base, was unmoved by the emotional outburst. 

He put her in their family car and drove to the store.

He then watched his daughter explain how the clerk had given her too much change, and that it didn’t belong to her, so she returned it, wrapping things up by saying how sorry she was that it had happened.

“The store clerk looked over at my daddy, like ‘What am I supposed to do here?’” Rita said. “And I’m sure my daddy gave her the same look he had given me, so she said, ‘That is so nice of you to do that. Most people wouldn’t. You are a very responsible young girl. Thank you.’”

Rita has never forgotten that afternoon exercise in integrity. It served her well throughout a highly decorated career in broadcast journalism. The little things mattered, and they would always matter to her.

What is the old saying? You can take the girl out of West Texas, but you can’t take West Texas out of the girl.

The Beginning of a Journey

Rita did put Lubbock in her rearview mirror, but not before earning a journalism degree from Texas Tech University. Then she launched out into the world, setting an amazing, trailblazing, sometimes even hair-raising, career into motion.

These days, Rita is retired and enjoying life in the San Francisco area, where she had a front-row seat to the Bay Area’s history for four decades as a respected television journalist whose trademarks became fairness, objectivity and credibility.

She not only learned about those qualities but also put them into practice every day on the job. 

“I remember when I was really young, it was confusing to see her on television and standing there in our home at the same time,” recalled her son, Brad Bowen, who eventually became accustomed to growing up with a well-known mom.

 “I didn’t understand how she could be in two places at once. Being with her when people would stop her at the grocery store just to talk to her, I came to realize she had sources all over the place.”

As a result, she became a trusted voice for stories large and small, including the infamous Zodiac serial killer case. 

“As I reflect on it now, it was a very heady experience,” she says, “and I cannot believe some of what I’ve done, but truly, it has been an incredible journey. It was an honor and a privilege to tell other people’s stories: sometimes in the worst times of people’s lives, sometimes in the best times of their lives, and to be trusted to do it in a fair and objective way.”

It also has been unconventional. Rita has done things her way, starting with her late-1960s decision to become a journalist, a profession that historically had been dominated by men.

Rita had several factors on her side that she expected would propel her over, around and through whatever obstacles might appear. First was a dogged determination to set goals and achieve them. Second was undeniable talent.  And third was having advocates in her corner throughout those early stages of her life, people who saw her potential and worked to help her maximize it.

Finding Her Place in Lubbock

The line of encouragement can be traced all the way back to teachers at Slaton Junior High and Monterey High School in Lubbock. These are where Rita began to flex her muscles of observation, inquiry and writing.

“I was a sportswriter, believe it or not,” she says with a smile. “I loved sports, but they wouldn’t let girls play competitive sports then, so I became the sports editor in junior high. That’s where I got the bug because I had always liked writing and was great in English and telling stories.”

She carried the interest to Monterey, where a teacher named Betty Stanley continued to kindle her interest in writing. Rita eventually became editor of the school paper and then set her sights on Texas Tech, where she pledged the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and made friends she still maintains contact with today.

“We got together through a lot of activities over the years, just keeping up with her remarkable career and supporting each other,” recalled Sandy Henry, a sorority sister of Rita’s. “She was extremely involved at Texas Tech, and she was always a high achiever and very capable. She also had a wonderful sensitivity as far as people and building relationships.”

Thanks to scholarship support from the local newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Rita was able to write the next chapter of her educational journey.

“My parents could not have afforded for me to attend college,” she said. “And one of my first paid jobs was while I was still at Monterey working as a high school columnist for the Avalanche-Journal, kind of giving them the scoop on the high schools every Friday.”

At Texas Tech, Rita crossed paths with two professors, Bob Rooker and Ralph Sellmeyer, who served as her mentors in what was then the Department of Mass Communication and helped prepare her for a career in journalism as a reporter.

“They saw promise in me and were wonderful,” she said. “I was usually the only woman in a lot of the classes, but they treated me as an equal, and it never occurred to me that I might not be treated that way when I got out of school.”

It was great training, and armed with this professional poise and confidence, Rita would be able to hold her own in any interview setting. At Texas Tech, she served as an editor with the University Daily (as the Daily Toreador was known from 1966-2005). Coupling this with her natural curiosity and knack for asking straightforward questions, she was ready to take on the world.

Rooker, who had worked for The Associated Press (AP) before joining Texas Tech as a faculty member, believed Rita would make a superb AP reporter and encouraged her to pursue a job with the wire service.

But it was not to be. She was about to be slapped by the cold realities of the late 1960s workplace, despite recently enacted laws meant to provide equal access to job opportunities.

“The guy who interviewed me told me I the most qualified candidate he’d interviewed in the state, but he wasn’t going to hire me,” she recalled. “He said it was because I was too attractive and I would get married soon and have babies, and all their training would be wasted. That crushed me. I had to regroup.”

Mr. Mahon and a New Path Forward

Another opportunity had come along during Rita’s junio year at Texas Tech when Lubbock Congressman George Mahon asked her to come to work for him. Mahon served 22 consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and became one of the most influential and powerful members of Congress.

Mahon also had people on the lookout for talent who might make a strategic addition to his staff. Word of Rita’s skills reached Mahon, but the job offer came at the wrong time of her life. She had just been elected secretary of the student body and wanted to finish her education at Texas Tech, becoming the first college graduate in her family.

“I was flattered, but there was no way I was leaving my senior year at Texas Tech, and I told him so,” she said.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. After Rita graduated in 1969, she moved to Austin. She was working for former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, writing speeches for senators, and her plan was to begin graduate school at the University of Texas-Austin in the fall.

One day she received a phone call from Jerry Hall, who was Gov. Preston Smith’s press secretary. Hall had heard Rita was a talented speech writer, so he inquired about her working for Mahon in Washington.

She was still mulling the possibilities days later, when Mahon himself called.

“We had not talked in a year,” she recalled. “He asked if I would come up there to Washington and work for him.”

Rita explained that she had never traveled much, came from a family without a lot of money and had never been to Washington.

Mahon would not be dissuaded. He suggested Rita try the job for a week. If she liked it, he would fly her home so she could pack and move back to Washington. If she didn’t like it, that was OK.

Mahon secured a one-week stay for her at a women’s boarding house, and suddenly, Rita found herself in the nation’s capital.

“I could not believe where I was,” she said. “I was working for one of the most important and powerful men in Washington, who was kind of like a grandfather to me, and I was learning so much.”

After a week, both Rita and Mahon were happy.

“He told me, ‘Rita, you’re a really good writer when it’s something you know about,’” she remembered. “’The only problem is you’re so young, you don’t know much about anything yet.’ He always kind of kept you humble.”

Mahon offered her a full-time job, making more money than her father was as a civil servant at Reese Air Force Base. 

Rita canceled her plans to attend graduate school and flew back to Lubbock, ready to collect her belongings and write a new chapter of her life. Her father took her to the Scoggin-Dickey dealership, where she picked out a Buick Skylark with 10,000 miles on the odometer.

The next lesson was just as practical. She spent time learning how to back up her new vehicle with a trailer full of possessions without it jack-knifing. 

“I had never backed a trailer up in my life, and my dad made me practice backing out of the driveway of our house,” she said. “When I was able to do that, my mom and dad told me, ‘Goodbye and good luck.’”

Moving from Politics to Journalism

Rita wanted to put her journalism training to work, and it wasn’t long before she was kicking the tires on possible jobs. She was even hoping she might break into broadcast news, but women as on-air personalities were a rarity in those days.

“There were only a handful of women on television anywhere at that time, nationally or any other place,” she said. “I never really aspired to be a television reporter. That just sort of happened, and we were able to break those barriers and prove that not only could women do the job, they could do it better.”

She started her career in television as a management trainee for Westinghouse broadcasting in Baltimore (one of a dozen from among 1,000 applicants). Her first on-air television reporting job was in 1974 with a San Antonio station. She worked there for four years before taking a job with the PBS station in San Francisco in 1978.

Two years later she went to work at KTVU and finished her career there, becoming one of the Bay Area’s most respected and well-known journalists during her 30-plus years with the station, interviewing everyone from President George H.W. Bush to Mother Teresa.

“I never worried about her safety, although maybe I should have, looking back, especially at the (1989) earthquake,” her son Brad said. “She stood up to bad guys and exposed their BS, and she’s handled herself well.”

Her trajectory of success has not been a surprise to those who knew her during the early days at Texas Tech.

“She has earned every bit of it,” Henry said. “It’s been great to see all of these things happen for her. There are some you’d look at back then and wonder if they would make good, but not Rita. She was one you knew was going places.”

Along the way, she never saw herself as a pioneer. She was just trying to do an important job one day at a time.

“When you’re doing it, you don’t think about legacy or anything like that,” she said. “But you know, when you’re a ‘first,’ it’s damn hard when you are not allowed to be in a press conference at the police department because you weren’t one of the guys from the newspaper.

“You’re not only a TV person, but you’re a TV broad, and you know that every day you have to fight for your place, and you gain respect by doing the job. I knew at the time that I was doing something a lot of women weren’t allowed to do, but I didn’t consider myself a trailblazer. I was just trying to survive and prove I could do the job.”

For Rita, the secret was treating people the way she wanted to be treated. She believed her responsibility was to care for people’s stories, but not to take what anyone said at face value. 

She asked challenging questions, didn’t mind waiting for answers, and did it all with respect for others.

“Someone had a story to tell, and it was my job to poke holes in it, but also to report it as I saw it,” she said. “Women changed television news back then, when a lot of times it was which man could holler his question the loudest and get a yes or no.”

Rather than obvious questions, Rita’s queries were often more layered and nuanced, and they were regularly focused on the other person’s humanity, leading to stories that were contextualized with meaningful perspectives about individual impact and singular significance.

“I think that’s part of the reason I got so many exclusives,” she said. “People trusted me, and that was the difference in my stories. They were not just statistics or information. I always tried to look at the bigger picture.”

Rita also prided herself in outworking her competition. Because her stories were most often featured in the 10 p.m. newscast, she was running down leads and talking to sources practically right up until the last minute, trying to give viewers the most current story possible.

“A lot of times, after they saw the piece, and saw both sides of the story, they would come to me and say, ‘You treated me fairly, and that’s all that matters,’” she said. “To me, that is the biggest compliment a journalist can receive.”

The Zodiac Case and Netflix

One of Rita’s biggest stories was an exclusive 1991 interview with Arthur Leigh Allen, the only person named as a suspect in the Zodiac case. The Zodiac killer terrorized the Bay Area in the late 1960s, killing at least five people and sending coded messages to media outlets, taunting authorities.

The case has never been solved. As a result, it has developed an almost cult-like following through the years with an array of armchair sleuths, would-be detectives and internet codebreakers devoting extensive time to it.

Because of her interview with Allen, Rita was included in the 2024 Netflix documentary “This Is the Zodiac Speaking,” a three-part documentary that explored the history of the case.

“There is a fascination with the Zodiac case that will always continue,” Rita said. “There are a lot of people who follow the case and would sometimes reach out to me because they claimed they knew who the Zodiac was or the Zodiac was their grandfather, and if you didn’t believe them or didn’t do the story, they could be threatening or a little wacky.”

When Rita retired, she stepped away from doing stories, including follow-up pieces on the case. Then, one of the people producing the Netflix documentary contacted her, going through a few hoops and providing legitimate referrals to demonstrate his seriousness.

Rita then checked with a media colleague who was also extremely knowledgeable about the case and had historically declined overtures to be involved in documentaries.

But this time, the colleague indicated he was going to take part.

“It seemed like the right time because a lot of the principals are aging,” she said. “And it looked like it might be the one place where everyone had a part in it, so I saw it as the definitive documentary on the Zodiac. I agreed to be interviewed and to be as truthful as possible and to have it as the historical record of what I could recall from that interview.”

Now, Rita’s part almost didn’t happen. There was the matter of signing a contract with Netflix. Rita looked it over and found that it was quite lengthy, so she asked her son, an attorney, to review it for her.

Rita recalled one aspect of the contract required that she not say anything about the documentary, which was a non-starter for her.

“I will not be gagged,” she said. “Over the years I have been threatened with jail for not giving up sources, and I did not want to give up the right to speak about things that I wanted to speak about.”

After more than a dozen rewrites, Rita said the contract was acceptable.

“It just seemed restrictive compared to what I would have expected,” Brad said of the original document. “She couldn’t share this or talk about that, but she is so experienced and wise, she knew how to handle those things as far as where she could and couldn’t push back on.”

Rita received no compensation for being part of the documentary, which was in keeping with her journalistic instincts. She said the series was supposed to debut sooner than it did, and that originally, it was going to be one episode. Then, one day, she received a text message from the producer, telling her it was going to air that day.

Funny thing, though, at the time Rita was one of the few people in the country who did not have a Netflix account, so she was going to have to sign up to watch a documentary in which she had a part.

“That was when I realized I didn’t have Netflix,” she said. “I couldn’t watch it until I paid something like $19 a month to be able to sit down and watch it. I watched the first part and thought that I wasn’t in there very much and thought the documentary was kind of interesting in that it left me hanging.”

Then Rita discovered there were still two more episodes to watch, and she is featured more in the second part than the others.

“So, I went back and watched the whole thing, and I haven’t seen it since,” she recalled.

Of course, as is the case with practically anything featuring Zodiac, the series was watched by a lot of other people, and Rita has received a number of emails from people she has known through the years who noticed her appearance. She laughs that the comment she heard the most was, “You were a badass.”

The documentary had the range and credibility she wanted it to have.

“I am not saying the Zodiac story was my legacy,” she said, “but I want to be remembered for having done that and for putting into perspective a story that will continue on long past my lifetime.”

Life Out of the Media Spotlight

Rita doesn’t make it back to Lubbock much these days. She was here for a class reunion in the summer of 2024, but her life, her people and her heart now remain in the Bay Area. 

“I still have friends in Lubbock and Texas,” she said. “One dear friend, John Walker, and I met at Texas Tech. When I was working in Washington, Johnny wanted me to meet a fellow Navy officer and good friend he served with on a destroyer in Vietnam. That man, Lindsay Bowen, who retired a captain, is now my husband and we will soon celebrate 50 years of marriage. Those Lubbock and Texas Tech connections run deep.”

Walker, who lives in Houston, served as a Texas Tech University System regent from 2012-15 and 2017-23. The Texas Tech soccer facility bears his name following a generous gift from his family. 

“Rita is unbelievably talented,” Walker said. “She is extremely articulate and very smart. My understanding is she was highly regarded as a journalist there, hard-nosed, fair and someone who worked to report all sides. I just felt like she and Lindsay would be a good match. He was a good guy, a smart guy, so I introduced them. I didn’t know then if it would work out or not, but it has worked out great.”

Rita was named an outstanding alumna of the College of Media & Communication in 2011. 

The recognition represented one more in a string of professional accolades, which includes a 2010 George Peabody Award for her coverage of the killing of an unarmed Black man by a white Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer and its aftermath (events depicted in the 2013 film “Fruitvale Station.”)

“Rita is someone who everything she has tried, she has done well,” Walker said. “She is smart, confident and ambitious. She and Lindsay have both been extremely successful throughout life.”

She was selected for the Silver Circle of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for journalists who distinguish themselves during more than 25 years in broadcast journalism and was given the coveted Governor’s Award when she retired. She has also won two Emmy Awards as well as the 2010 AP Mark Twain Award for being the best television reporter in the 12 western states.

“As I got older and understood how the industry was changing, I could see how much she was not willing to bend,” Brad said. “She believed every story deserved to be told a certain way, and she wanted to honor people who opened up to her and shared their story. I think she was the last person at the station to have a true camera person with her every day for something like five years. She would not give in on how to do the stories she covered.”

Like Lubbock long ago, her broadcast journalism career is now in the rearview mirror. Rita retired in 2013. The business of journalism was already changing, so the time was right for her to step aside.

“I was taught that journalists are not looking for admiration or attention,” she said. “You were there to tell the story as truthfully as you could, and if you did get it right, you probably made enemies on both sides. Back then, you were a truth-teller serving as the eyes and ears of the public. It was a revered occupation.”

She covered her share of big stories, but today, even the earth-shaking stories fail to lure her back to the business.

“You would have to cover it the way they do it today,” she said. “For me, that would be more frustrating than beneficial. I don’t want to have to tweet about a story, and I don’t want to give my opinion about a story. That’s not journalism to me.”

Initially after retiring, Rita did a lot of community work, serving on boards and working on issues that were important to her, but after 10 years, she just moved off her last board. She said it is time for younger people to step up and engage.

Now, she dabbles in watercolor painting, but her two grandchildren deservedly get the bulk of her time and attention.

“I am thrilled to be in their lives,” she said. “We tried for 10 years before we had a son, and being a mother turned out to be the best profession I’ve ever had – next to being a grandmother.”

Brad remembers the TV job occupied a lot of his mom’s time, but it never took her away from him.

“There might have been times when she’d only get four hours of sleep, but she was there making breakfast and talking to me the next morning,” Brad said. “She was always there for me in every way.”

From West Texas to Washington, D.C., to Baltimore to San Francisco, Rita is the first to acknowledge it’s been an amazing journey filled with magnificent memories and milestones all along the way.

When she tries to sum it all up, she defaults to a journalist of a different stripe: Hunter S. Thompson.

It was Thompson who once wrote one of Rita’s favorite quotes, “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a ride!”

“That’s what I am trying to do,” she said with a smile. “I’m going kicking and screaming. I am working every day on something, and I will keep doing that as long as I can keep on going.”