Martin Gerard Connolly

Martin Gerard Connolly, age 69, of Anaconda passed away in the kind care of Community Hospital in Anaconda on July 31, 2025 after a short illness.

He was born on April 2, 1956 in Jersey City, New Jersey, graduated in 1974 from Bergen Catholic High School in Oradell, New Jersey and graduated from Colby College in Maine in 1978. After finding a taste of law school unsatisfying, he began a long and distinguished career as a reporter, beginning with the Lowell Sun in Lowell, Massachusetts. He moved to Colorado, where he was a reporter for the Associated Press and the Rocky Mountain News and then an investigative reporter at the Daily Camera in Boulder from 1981 to 1987.

Connolly’s reporting for the Camera revealed the existence of an illegal gift-making operation involving jewelry at a "model shop" at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado that cost taxpayers at least $1 million. His stories led to a congressional investigation and to Connolly winning in 1987 the Scripps-Howard National Award for Public Service and the Gold Medal for Investigative Reporting from IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc.). Connolly overcame numerous obstacles in publishing the stories, including eventually leaving the Boulder paper and briefly joining The Miami Herald to conclude his investigation.

After a brief stint with the Miami Herald, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri and joined the Kansas City Star, working alongside his former wife, Lynn Horsley. He continued his investigative reporting under the tutelage of well-known journalist, editor and author, Bill Dalton, until retiring from journalism in 1995. At the Star he won additional awards and was best known for a series of stories that led to the overturning of a conviction of a rural Missouri man serving time in prison after being falsely accused of rape.

Eventually he moved to Montana where he worked for several years at the Petroleum Club in Billings and did a variety of jobs in Helena, including as a jazz and blues piano player. In recent years, he  enjoyed fishing and other recreational activities. An amateur goalie, in April 2023, in the course of attempting to organize a youth hockey program in Anaconda, he was felled by a heart attack, from which he never fully recovered.

Warm, generous and genial, the hallmark of his life, and of his written work, was a fierce determination to do what he felt had to be done, whether to redress a wrong or vindicate a right and to see the matter through.

There was not a lost or stray cat or dog to escape Marty’s determination to recapture or rescue.

Marty leaves his brother, John and sister-in-law Kathleen of Hanover, Massachusetts; three nieces, Norah Connolly of Jay, Vermont; Claire Connolly of Buffalo, New York; and Margaret Connolly of Barcelona, Spain; a grand-niece Vivian of Buffalo, a grand-nephew Gael of Barcelona, and his supportive friend and neighbor, Cheryl Fayant of Anaconda.

Please visit the sidebar to offer condolences to the family or share a memory of Marty. Longfellow Finnegan Riddle Funeral Home and Crematory have been privileged to care for Marty and his family.