The news business is an addiction. Ask any drug addict or boozer the morning after a particularly vicious toot and they're likely to swear, right then and there, that they're done with it, that they'll never touch the stuff again. It hurts too much; it's destroying them, eating them alive. They're finished, they'll pledge. Never again. But once the hangover fades, once the guilt and pain recede, once the craving starts again, and all that's left is the sweet memory of the magnificent high, they forget about those vows, at least until the sun comes up on another tortured morning after.

The daily grind of print and television news is much the same. There's a high that comes from getting the story, getting it rich in detail and full of color. It's almost like a narcotic, catching that perfect quote. Part of it is the feeling that the journalist is at the center of the events, that he or she is part of something bigger and more powerful than they are. Journalists often see themselves as more than as just witnesses; it's more like being a witness with credentials and tickets to the ranks of the powerful, influential, and sometimes to alluringly dangerous people. When a story breaks right, a journalist, any real journalist, feels a rush pulse through them, and it erases everything. They forget the mind-numbing tedium that infects most of the job: the long hours, the brain-baking stress. Once the story is over, a journalist, any real journalist, starts searching for the next high.

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With his small business failure behind him, and his marriage on the rocks on the other coast, Stephen Roye started to look back nostalgically on his successes at WWOR and elsewhere. It had been three years since his dramatic newsroom meltdown, and perhaps the pain of that memory had faded a bit. His ex-wife would later say that Roye was beginning to think at this time of reclaiming his former glory and trying to find a way to work his way back into television news.

But there were obstacles. It would have been hard enough if he had been at the top of his game. Journalism is, in many ways, an incestuous business where everybody knows everybody, and if they don't, they know somebody who does. What's more, journalists who are trained to be scrupulous about sticking to facts that they can personally vouch for in their professional lives tend, as a whole, to be almost irredeemable gossips on their own time. In all probability, anyone who had not heard of Steve Roye's newsroom meltdown in Secaucus either wasn't listening or wasn't sufficiently well-connected to do Roye any good in the first place.

And even though some news directors might have been willing to ignore or overlook the circumstances surrounding Roye's sudden departure from WWOR, by the early 1990s, Roye was no longer at the top of his game.

In the three years since he had left Channel 9, there had been serious technological advances, as well as significant stylistic changes, in the television news business, and Roye, who had spent those years trying to prop up a failing baseball-card kiosk, had been left behind, his ex-wife told the Record.

Roye realized, family members said at the time, that if he was going to make it back, he was going to have to make it on his own. He was going to have to find that one great story, the one that put him back on top, Moorman said at the time.

In 1994, Roye told family members that he thought he had found the story that would pave the way for his comeback. He met "some educated middle class people" whom he claimed had been sucked into the sordid and desperate world of suburban drug abuse.

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