NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Jeanne Toomey, a pioneering reporter who dropped out of law school in 1943 to take a job covering the New York police beat, has died. She was 88.

Toomey was the first woman to cover the NYPD for the Brooklyn Eagle. Sheila Terranova Beasley of Falmouth, Maine, says her mother died Sept. 17 in Falmouth.

Toomey's career brought her to dozens of publications around the country, and she interviewed both Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a founding member of the New York Press Club.

After retiring from journalism in 1989, Toomey served as the director of the Last Post Animal Sanctuary in Falls Village, Conn., which she ran until 2007.

In 1998, she published a memoir: "Assignment Homicide: Behind the Headlines."

A memorial service will be scheduled at a later date.