Crash kills TV reporter Richard Threlkeld

AMAGANSETT, N.Y., Jan. 14 (UPI) -- Police say former television newsman Richard Threlkeld, 74, was killed Friday in a Long Island, N.Y., traffic accident.

Threlkeld, whose career took him to the CBS and ABC evening news teams, was behind the wheel of a 2008 Mini Cooper that struck a propane tanker in Amagansett, East Hampton police announced.

The driver of the truck was not injured and the crash was under investigation.

The Los Angeles Times said Threlkeld , who lived in the area, spent 25 of his 36 years in television with CBS. He was an anchor and field correspondent whose assignments included the fall of South Vietnam, the Gulf War and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. He also covered the White House and was based in Moscow in the 1990s.

"Richard Threlkeld had the kind of name and kind of looks that could have made him a reporter in the movies, but unlike a reporter in the movies, he could write his own scripts," Lesley Stahl, his co-anchor on the CBS Morning News from 1977-1979, said in a written statement. "He was one of our best writers and reporters, someone CBS sent to troubled spots to cover the big stories of the day."

Threlkeld retired in 1998 and lived in the Hamptons with his wife, former TV correspondent Betsy Aaron.