* Ed Montgomery; Award-Winning Journalist

Ed Montgomery, 82, the San Francisco Examiner crime reporter who led an ill-fated crusade to prevent Barbara Graham from dying in California’s gas chamber. The 1953 execution was the basis for a 1958 film that won an Academy Award for actress Susan Hayward, who played Graham. Montgomery’s newspaper and magazine stories also were used for a 1983 television movie starring Lindsay Wagner. Montgomery won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1950 series of articles about a tax scam run by Internal Revenue Service agents. He retired in 1975. On Monday in San Francisco of pneumonia.