The banter across the tennis nets at the Pointe at Tapatio Cliffs was as warm as the February afternoon sunshine. This was a tournament, but a friendly one. The organizer, Jac Rothschild, personally had sent out the invitations to 30 buddies. With a twinkle in his eye, he referred to…
IF ROY ROGERS and Dale Evans had run Alfred Hitchcock’s Bates Motel, it might have looked pretty much like the east Mesa landmark known as the Buckhorn Baths. Only less so. “I like to think that we’re offering people `old world charm,'” says 84-year-old Alice Sliger, who, with her late…
To find out the real history of Tucson you have to go underground. Down into the two-street underpasses that connect the university neighborhoods with downtown. Dank, dark, spotted with puddles of urine, they are places where drug deals go down and drunks take siestas. With its twirled Moorish columns and…
1. Charlie Keating finally took the great fall. These days the headline writers use words like “fraud” and “bilked” in writing about him. Not too long ago, Keating was Senator John McCain’s biggest backer. He did everything for McCain. He held fund-raising events. He flew the senator around on private…
SHERIFF TOM AGNOS doesn’t look embattled. His August open-heart surgery, a wrongful arrest lawsuit and the occasional political obituary notwithstanding, the sheriff appears serene. Though the investigation of the murders of nine people at Wat Promkunaram, a Thai Buddhist temple in the west Valley, has been criticized by everyone from…
Last summer, Joan Shafer sat in her husband’s study, sifting through her “nostalgia file,” the letters of condolences she had received in the month since her husband died of lung cancer. She looked at the dozen framed certificates on the wall, marking the training programs her husband, Dick Shafer, had…
AT ABOUT 10:30 A.M. on October 10, Governor Fife Symington’s press secretary, Doug Cole, appeared in the Senate press room and began handing reporters a brief statement. The release contained some shocking news: At 10 p.m. the previous evening, Department of Public Safety Director Rick Ayars and his hand-picked deputy,…
Carbonated beverages may not constitute one of the four basic food groups, but you would have a hard time proving it by my 9-year-old niece, who, like many children her age, leads a very snack-oriented lifestyle. Little wonder, then, that she was pleased as Hawaiian Punch when she returned from…
The Christmas party of 1986 is still a bitter memory for Liz Thornton and her co-workers at Southwest Savings and Loan. It was at that party that the thrift’s executives announced that times were tough and there would be no Christmas bonuses. Each employee was given a cheap teddy bear…
A SICK JOKE has been making the rounds. What is the link between the Tucson suspects in the Buddhist Temple murders case and the Phoenix suspects? Answer: They’re all in Dick and Laurie Elliget’s sex diary. The sex diary has been the topic of conversation in cop shops, barrooms and…
ON THE MORNING of his release from jail, erstwhile murder suspect Mike McGraw blinks in the broad sunlight and lowers his thick body into the shotgun seat. He tosses a plastic bag full of personal effects into the back seat. He’s about to take a trip to Wat Promkunaram. He…
On the morning of September 4, building contractor Nick Klipa was repairing the shower tiles in one of his rental apartments near 20th Street and Indian School in east-central Phoenix when he heard what sounded like firecrackers. When he walked out to investigate, he saw two police cars parked on…
I sat in the church pew while others discussed the dead man. It was Saturday and cool, the noon air so crisp in the desert that it didn’t seem possible a fresh grave had been dug. At the news of Ted Mote’s passing, friends and relatives were so overcome with…
A few desert-rat residents of Tucson and its surrounding small towns–your typical Sonoran outposts of dirt-bag chic–say they’ve heard the news: The Biospherians, the story goes, are making like Hogan’s Heroes. They’ve been spotted, in the middle of the night, at the Circle K in Oracle, guzzling malt liquor and…
In April, when Muin M. Kalla left his job as planning director for the Town of Paradise Valley, town manager John Baudek praised him as a model employee. Kalla’s leaving was marked by a “resolution of appreciation” issued by the Paradise Valley Town Council for the dozen years in which…
BILLY CLARK SEEMED like the kind of all-American kid every mother secretly hopes for when she rocks her baby to sleep. Athletic, popular and handsome, Billy graduated in 1989 from a Lutheran high school in Phoenix, where he’d been a soccer star and student-body president. After high school, he joined…
THE AUTOM COMPANY occupies a simple storefront with large windows. Unassuming. Like the old-fashioned office supply store that adjoins it on North Seventh Street, it is a repository of equipment. In this case, religious equipment. “Can I help you find something?” A young woman dressed casually in slacks and shirt…
The long-running dispute about loud music is finally over at the dusty trailer park on Grand Avenue. Except for one detail: What exactly was the music that triggered 93-year-old Ed Mazy’s murderous rage? Glendale police say they aren’t sure what Francine Ritter and Al Centracchio were blasting through the trailer…
When police arrived at her east Phoenix apartment one night last March, Alice Wheeler was lying face down in a pool of blood. Her husband, Samuel Parker, answered the door and, according to police records, admitted he had beaten his wife. The police handcuffed him and placed him under arrest…
“I don’t remember radio,” Shane McCabe says matter-of-factly. “You have to remember I spent most of those years, from the time I was 4 ’til I was 11, locked up in a closet. I never learned to appreciate music, either. I had no radio, no phonograph, so I don’t remember…
Because of his conflicting emotions, Mesa police officer Tim Elliget isn’t sure if he’ll ttend the sentencing of his disgraced ex-cop brother, Dick, for sex crimes against children. But Tim’s wife, B.J., plans to be in the courtroom tomorrow morning (November 14). She’s the Mesa woman to whom Dick’s 16-year-old…
Herb Trammell heard the shotgun blasts just after dawn on August 1, 1989. He looked out his bedroom window in time to see an orange car with wood side panels speeding past. He ran half-dressed out of his home in a middle-class east Phoenix neighborhood and looked around. Trammell saw…
