By the late 1980s, those complaints began to be tinged with genuine concern. Family members would later say that it was around this time that Roye began to exhibit signs of mental illness, a psychological instability that would haunt him to this day. This instability, in their view, led him to take a series of otherwise inexplicably bizarre steps, steps that would later land him in a Thai prison where he would study mysticism and sink deeper into his own angst.
Colleagues at work noticed that Roye was becoming more erratic in his speech and actions. At first, they chalked it up to the unremitting stress of the job few professions are routinely more stressful than the daily struggle with complex stories and intractable deadlines that is the news business. The pressure of producing the signature tabloidy stories that WWOR was gaining a reputation for was severe, to be sure. But there was added pressure at the Secaucus, New Jersey studios of Channel 9 in those days as well. Media giant MCA was negotiating to buy the station from RKO, and Roye, like others in the newsroom, was concerned about the security of his job. Increasingly, Roye became more antic. And that, family members said, only increased tension at home. Finally, in 1987, Roye reached the breaking point.
The way coworkers later described the incident, Roye suddenly melted down in the newsroom. Even by newsroom standards, it was a chilling emotional outburst. According to Leone's account in the Record, Roye, in a fit of hysteria, stormed into his boss's office, grabbed an old and, according to Leone, inoperable shotgun that Leone had been storing, and began waving it around, screaming almost incoherently. The only words Leone remembered were Roye's bizarre third-person declaration: "He has a gun! He has a gun! He's going to shoot somebody with it!"
Roye's outburst cost both men deeply. Roye, of course, lost his job, though Roye and RKO did reach an agreement under which Roye received a lump-sum payment, Stephanie Roye later said. The precise details of that settlement remained confidential.
Leone, the man who had first spotted Roye's obvious talent and who gave him his start at WWOR, also lost his job.
"He ruined my life," Leone later told the Record.
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