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       Lucy Morgan, a Florida journalist who began as a novice reporter paid by the inch and built a bloodhound reputation for exposing corruption and high-level abuses across the state, including an investigation into police coverups that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, died Sept. 20 at a nursing home in Tallahassee. She was 82.

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       The cause was health complications after a fall, her family said.

       Ms. Morgan’s investigative work — once arranging to get insider tips slipped to her in a dressing room of a department store — brought accolades from readers and struck fear in officials during more than four decades at the St. Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times. A former political science professor at the University of South Florida, Darryl Paulson, once described the worst moment for anyone in Florida affairs: “Getting a message that Lucy Morgan is on the line.”

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       Her reporting brought down corrupt cops, uncovered political dirty dealing, revealed the full scope of a drug ring and rewrote Florida laws on protections for journalists after she refused in 1973 to disclose an anonymous source to a county grand jury. She was sentenced to eight months in jail, but the case was overturned in 1976 by the Florida Supreme Court.

       In 1985, Ms. Morgan and a St. Petersburg Times colleague, Jack Reed, shared the Pulitzer for investigative reporting for a series on deep-rooted failings inside the Pasco County sheriff’s department north of Tampa. The stories detailed, among other revelations, how some Pasco officers lied about their criminal records before being hired.

       During their research, Ms. Morgan developed a key source: a whistleblower inside the department. To avoid the risk of being seen together, the officer’s wife slipped confidential documents to Ms. Morgan under the door of a department store dressing room.

       When Ms. Morgan retired in 2013 — after stepping down as Tallahassee bureau chief in 2005 — she wrote about her passion of peering into the “dark corners” of “this crazy state we covered.”

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       “Where else can you find public officials who behave so badly, write about them and force them to do the right thing?” she wrote, the Tampa Bay Times recounted. “I almost feel guilty for collecting a paycheck all these years. Almost.”

       Ms. Morgan’s byline first appeared in the era of the typewriter and robust newspaper competition. She always maintained something of a throwback aura as the news industry moved into a 24-hour churn, and the internet and other economic pressures forced many regional papers to close or trim their staff and investigative ambitions.

       She invited politicos, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, over for meals to cultivate rapport and maybe get a scoop in the process. “It was almost seen as, you had made it in Tallahassee if Lucy invited you out to her house and cooked dinner for you,” one of her former editors, Richard Bockman, told the Tampa Bay Times.

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       Ms. Morgan relished playing up her Mississippi drawl as a disarming calling card in the capital, Tallahassee. Instead of regular greetings to politicians and others, Ms. Morgan often deployed her signature phrase that was part performance art and part warning: “You doin’ somethin’ bad?”

       “I have always liked to be underestimated,” Morgan said in 2005. “To be a Southern woman in a Capitol full of good old boys is an advantage. When they find out I’m serious, it’s too late.”

       Her watchdog stature became such a part of the political landscape that, in a rare act, the Florida House of Representatives was the venue for a memorial service on Sept. 29. The media gallery of the Florida State Senate is named in her honor.

       Investigative journalism often brings pushback from those under scrutiny. Ms. Morgan faced open hostility at times. During the Pasco County probes with her colleague Reed, the sheriff’s department sent officers to search through her trash and distributed bumper stickers with a crude message: a screw next to her name. In the end, the Pasco sheriff, John Short, was dismissed and indicted on corruption charges but was not convicted.

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       Her investigations often left a trail of disgraced officials and calls for reforms. In 1982, she examined widespread corruption linked to drug smuggling in Dixie County on Florida’s Gulf Coast. (The series was a Pulitzer finalist.)

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       “Before I was able to finish there, a whole bunch of deputies, a school board member, a county commission chairman and 250 other souls went to jail because the Feds took an interest in my stories,” Ms. Morgan said in a 2000 oral history for the University of Florida.

       A Gulf County sheriff, Al Harrison, was convicted by a federal jury of violating the civil rights of five former female prisoners — accusations detailed in stories by Ms. Morgan. In 2010, she broke a story involving efforts to conceal funding for a $50 million courthouse in a transportation bill. The disclosure led to new rules about courthouse projects.

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       “I went from looking at drug smugglers and public corruption and organized crime into state government and politics,” she said in the oral history. “Somehow, it seems like a natural transition. The drug smugglers were more candid than the state officials.”

       Journalism came calling

       Lucile Bedford Keen was born on Oct. 11, 1940, in Memphis and grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss. Her parents split up shortly after her birth and she was raised by her mother, who ran a pharmacy.

       At 17, Ms. Morgan married Al Ware, a high school football coach, and became a homemaker as the family grew to three children in Crystal City, Fla. Then in 1965, Ms. Morgan was baffled when an editor from the Ocala Star-Banner reached out with an inquiry. Would she be interested in being the Citrus County correspondent?

       “I’ve never written anything,” Ms. Morgan told Florida Trend in 2014, recalling her reply to the editor. “Why would you come to me?”

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       Turned out, a librarian told the editor that Ms. Morgan checked out more books than anybody else. The editor assumed if Ms. Morgan liked literature, she could manage a news story. The pay was 20 cents per column inch. Ms. Morgan, who was soon divorced, sometimes had to bring her children along to cover a late-night fire or crime scene.

       “It wasn’t like it is today,” Ms. Morgan said in 2005. “I’d be at the scene of an arrest and a cop would yell, ‘Lucy, grab the handcuffs and get ‘em to me.’”

       She joined the St. Petersburg Times in 1967 and, a year later, married Richard Morgan, an editor at the newspaper. She served as the newspaper’s Tallahassee bureau chief from 1985 to 2005.

       Survivors include her husband; two children from her first marriage; a stepdaughter; nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. A son from her first marriage, Al Ware, was killed in a car accident in 1979.

       As the new industry changed, Ms. Morgan remained a staunch advocate of giving journalists the time and resources to dig deep.

       “You don’t want to shoot rubber bands,” she said. “When the time comes, you want a loaded gun.”

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