A reporter whose crime stories nobody wants any more, with a sick wife he cannot afford, who takes one last story anyway.
Ben Urich is an investigative journalist for the New York Bulletin, struggling with the lack of interest in the crime pieces that made him successful when he was young, and with a sick wife he can barely afford to keep in hospital or move to a home. Vondie Curtis-Hall plays him in the first season of Daredevil. He agrees to work with Karen Page on her investigation into Wilson Fisk, which is the story of the season.
Minor spoiler
Fisk learns that Urich met his mother while investigating him, breaks into his apartment and strangles him. The reader who sent this list described him as the journalist who got killed by the man he was trying to expose, which is exactly it. Karen takes up the work he was doing.
Show detailsWhy he dies
Wikipedia records that the decision to kill Urich was Marvel’s, made before the showrunner Steven DeKnight joined. The point was to have Fisk do something truly terrible late in the season, when the audience had begun to sympathise with him, and to signal that being beloved in the comics kept nobody safe. In DeKnight’s account, Urich commits the one unforgivable sin in Fisk’s mind: he went to Fisk’s mother.