It’s three days before Christmas, and tired shoppers–including Jennifer, a preppy young woman–are resting against a marble fountain at Fashion Square. A graduate of Saguaro High School in Scottsdale, Jennifer’s home on break. She’s a junior in college. With her are two boys, both high school freshmen, both wearing baseball…
Johnny is a seventh grader at a public school somewhere in the Valley. His teachers believe he has normal intelligence, but it’s hard to tell because he’s autistic, a condition one special education teacher describes in this way: “A racecar whose engine is not hooked up.” Johnny attends classes designed…
“Toddler X, you can’t attend this preschool. We’re learning numbers and colors and getting ready to go to school. But your mommy and daddy came to this country illegally, so you’ll have to wait until you’re old enough for kindergarten and then do the best you can . . .”…
When we last checked on Dean Mark Brewer, he was sitting in Maricopa County Jail on $314,000 bail, charged with 132 counts of theft in the looting of $8.17 million from the now-closed Charter Title Agency. But Brewer didn’t gain access to the world of high finance by being a…
As the centerpiece of a high-profile investigative series, the Arizona Republic published a story suggesting Arizona Boys Ranch employees had mistreated and later murdered a troubled black teenager. The story was wrong. In compiling the story, two Republic reporters doctored quotes, failed to interview key witnesses and ignored contradictory information…
Although William Kenneth “Taz” Stoner told the Los Angeles Times that he dynamited the Salt River’s Quartzite Falls to save lives, U.S. Forest Service documents suggest that Stoner had more self-serving motives, as well: Quartzite Falls was an obstruction in the flow of Stoner’s weekend job as a river guide…
The Roadrunner Truck Stop is history. Earlier this month, more than three years after changing traffic patterns forced the gas station-cum-hash house out of business, bulldozers and steam shovels descended on the onetime truckers’ paradise located west of I-17, just north of McDowell Road. When the dust had settled over…
The two men walked into the Subway sandwich shop with their weapons hidden. Both carried large, serious knives and they demanded all the money in the drawer. One guy went into the back of the store and grabbed the woman who managed the place. Out front, the second thief held…
The memory of the uniquely Mexican way of practicing his religion. After a short time in Tombstone, Francisco settled in the area around 24th Street and Baseline Road, a part of the Valley that was then devoted to citrus orchards and cotton fields, and to a great extent still is…
“Here’s how I felt about it,” Steve Bisbee, the lawyer, was saying. He was talking about his role in the biggest trial of his career. He was also talking about a period of more than a month during which some who wanted him to lose kept threatening every day to…
Hey, you Democrats, Bob Grossfeld has a message for you: Things aren’t as bad as they seem. Unless you’re a “liberal” Democrat. In that case, you’d best start calling yourself “progressive.” Grossfeld, a Tempe-based Democratic political consultant, suggests that his party’s malaise is, to some extent, a matter of semantics…
Sodium azide, the chemical that inflates auto safety air bags, is nasty stuff. It is highly flammable, often explosive and extremely toxic. It is so sensitive, in fact, that large explosions have been set off by workers performing such innocuous tasks as placing a wrench on a bolt or using…
“!@#%&*!+?!” Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we return you to the Tourette’s syndrome support-group meeting currently in progress. “Yeah, you’re in the right,” says the meeting’s good-natured host as she welcomes a couple of newcomers into a recent monthly gathering of the group. “The AA meeting’s…
Cindy Monkman opened a Gideons Bible in her La Jolla motel room. She read the verse she had turned to randomly–Psalm 39, Verse 4–then scribbled it in her journal: “Lord, make me know mine end, and what is the measure of my days; That I may know how frail I…
The first time we saw Brian Kingman in uniform, he was wearing the green and gold of the Oakland A’s. In the late Seventies, Kingman had a blistering fastball, a baffling curve and the worst luck in baseball: Kingman stands in the record books as the last major league pitcher…
Who killed Carmen? Almost 30 years after the attractive young legal secretary’s bludgeoned body was discovered northeast of Phoenix, Rose Weite still doesn’t have a clue who murdered her friend–and that explains why the fledgling true-crime author has just written a book using that question as its title. But at…
The other day, quite by accident, I received a fascinating notice in the mail about Keith Turley. It was an alumni bulletin from Arizona State University, and it reported that Turley, the retired head of Arizona Public Service Company, had been granted an honorary doctor’s degree by the school. Dr…
These hectic days, all bargain-conscious holiday shoppers must, as a matter of faith, make their pilgrimage to I. Magnin. I. Magnin, the luxury department store that helps anchor Sam Grossman’s Biltmore Fashion Park, is going out of business. Everything in the store, remodeled only recently at a cost of millions,…
Dr. Brian Finkel is an outgoing bear of a man given to bursts of enthusiasm and outrage. Even though he has a long history of working with the press, on first meeting, he seems overeager to impress, to demonstrate that he is one of the good guys. After a while,…
Can You Spell “Sellout”? By Tom Fitzpatrick Jerry Rubin died last week. He was 56. Once a famous Vietnam War protester, Rubin was struck by a car near his affluent Los Angeles home and never regained consciousness. They said he was jaywalking. I remember him as a young man. With…
L.S. Shoen is a lonely, 78-year-old man who now lives in a small tract house outside Las Vegas. He is regarded by some as a business genius, responsible for building the billion-dollar U-Haul empire. He has fathered 12 children. Some hate him enough to have run him off from the…
Don’t go breaking my heart. Carla was singing along to the radio as she slid out of her jeans. It was April 16, 1991, and Carla, who was 14, was spending the night with her brother and sister at the apartment of their Sunday-school teacher, Douglas Gates. Gates was a…
