Paul Wagner - DC Breaking Local News Weather Sports FOX 5 WTTG

Paul Wagner has been a reporter in Washington, D.C. since 1981 when he began his career as a traffic reporter monitoring the bridges over the Potomac River with a pair of binoculars from the top of the Washington Monument.

Over the next thirty two years Paul made stops at KIKK Radio in Houston, Texas, WTOP Radio, the Associated Press, as well as the old FM radio stations WCXR, KIX-106 and XTRA-104.

Since 1999 when Paul first joined Fox 5 has focused heavily on enterprise reporting. In recent months Paul has broken several high profile stories about the D.C. Fire Department to include a hundred firefighters calling in sick on New Years Eve, false information on fleet numbers given to the DC City Council and unsafe ladder trucks left uninspected.

Paul also broke new ground on the murders of Joyce Chiang and Vanessa Pham, reporting detectives had solved the troubling cases in the District and Fairfax County.

In 2012 Paul first told the stories of Kirk Odom and Santae Tribble. Two men sent to prison for a rape and a murder they did not commit. Both of them convicted in part on deeply flawed hair analysis conducted by the FBI.  

Paul's enterprise reporting also revealed DC Police and prosecutors were making great strides in taking stranger rapists off the street with DNA evidence that had been left untested for years.

In 2011 Paul discovered a witness to a murder was a DC Police officer who took no police action and let the killer get away. The officer initially lied to investigators about what she saw and later pled guilty to a charge of Obstruction of Justice

In 2004 City Council member Kathy Patterson singled Paul out for praise in exposing missteps at the D.C. Police property warehouse. A FOX 5 investigation revealed police had lost evidence in dozens of unsolved murder cases. Paul's reports lead directly to a new law requiring D.C. police to retain evidence in murder cases for sixty years. Patterson called Paul's reporting "the very best in public service journalism".

During his career, Paul has broken dozens of local and national stories including a confession in the Starbucks triple murder case, the FBI's espionage investigation of a State Department employee missing in Shenandoah National Park, and Mystery Author Patricia Cornwell's relationship with a former FBI agent and how it played a role in a bizarre attempted murder plot in Manassas, Virginia.

Paul has won two Emmy awards, three "Outstanding Enterprise Reporting" awards from the Associated Press along with the National RTNDA Edward R. Murrow award for his coverage of the 1991 Mount Pleasant Riots.

Paul graduated from Mount Saint Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Maryland with a degree in Political Science. He lives in Maryland.