Tonight is the night, he told himself, inhaling the aroma of stale grease in her hair and feeling a little queasy. He closed his eyes as he hugged her. Tonight is the night, he thought. Tonight is the night Chelsea dies. (excerpt from First Date by R.L. Stine) Welcome, gentle…
They were young, they were in love and they’d just tied the knot in Las Vegas. Yet thanks to one of the ghastliest turns of events to ever occur in the glittering gambling capital, the honeymoon was over for this pair of Phoenix newlyweds almost before it began. Vows of…
Uh-uh.” Dance-hall owner Jack Smythe shakes his head while skimming an application from a well-groomed, middle-aged woman who’d just applied for a job as a hostess at his new establishment. Forty-five-year-old men don’t want to come in here and talk to a 45-year-old woman,” says the 49-year-old Smythe. If he…
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, 80-odd warm bodies gathered to determine what to do with a hundred cold ones. Although officially billed as the second annual “Mass Fatality Incident Management Conference,” the marquee in the lobby of the Fountain Suites Hotel in north Phoenix announced the event in verbiage that was at…
Look! Up on the wall. … It’s a bird! Near some planes! It’s supermural! And since last month, when officials at Sky Harbor International Airport announced the upcoming closure of Terminal 2, the future of the famed phoenix mural has been up in the air. Installed in the spring of…
Up on a platform, three go-go boys in jockstraps (one of whom hangs upside down from a pipe running across the ceiling) simulate a menage a quatre with an exotic girl in a rubber dress. And from their vantage point up on a scaffolding, two young women in cat suits…
WHEN AND IF Oliver Stone ever signs off the Kennedy assassination, the muckraking moviemaker needn’t look far for his next conspiracy epic. Buried right in Hollywood’s own backyard is a legendary mystery that, in its own way, is every bit as Byzantine as the 1963 Dallas rub-out. Who says the…
A few weeks back, Don and Bobbie Shepard were among the very few people in town actually looking forward to the arrival of April 15. And why not? As owners of a mom-and-pop iris farm in northwest Phoenix, their business was blooming and, furthermore, their stalk portfolio had never looked…
HOLD THE PHONE! Was Prince Albert about to get permanently canned? For a minute there, it looked like it. But several weeks ago, following unsatisfactory negotiations with the Arizona Corporation Commission, U S West Communications put the lid on plans to market Caller ID, a controversial gizmo that enables the…
After somehow obtaining a secret hot-line number reserved for top station personnel, one of the craftier Interceptors made a late-night call to the deejay manning the turntable at KBUZ, a now-defunct easy-listening station. Identifying himself as general manager of the station, the prankster informed the puzzled deejay that the station…
Probably the most famous prank in the history of phone-foolery is a series of calls made to one Louis Red” Deutsch, the pit-bull-like proprietor of the Tube Bar saloon in Jersey City, New Jersey. Over the course of a dozen-odd calls believed to have been recorded some 15 years ago…
Big Brother is watching as you leave the Sky Harbor International Airport parking lot. This is not fiction. It’s fact. But why? High-flying speculation over that question has been circling the airport parking lot for some time now, ever since Sky Harbor inaugurated a practice that smacked of something right…
IT IS 1975. Sixteen years after it first appeared in France, the legendary book Hollywood Babylon rolls off the presses in its first authorized U.S. edition. While the rest of the nation gasps over Kenneth Anger’s juicy compendium of Tinseltown tattle, Phoenix yawns. For starters, we’d seen it all in…
Poet, painter, actress, gangland den mother-perpetual publicity hound LIZ RENAY may well be the most colorful character ever to emerge from Mesa. In and out of the Valley since she won a 1949 beauty pageant sponsored by a national bra manufacturer, Renay began piling up headlines when she was grilled…
USING FLASHLIGHTS and kerosene lanterns to lance the darkness, incredulous lawmen warily make their way through the horrific clutter inside the Wisconsin farmhouse. It is the evening of November 16, 1957, and the men have good reason to be wary. They are prowling through Ed Gein’s ramshackle playground of death,…
Browse through the Christmas releases at your local video store and you’ll find all the usual chestnuts like It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and A Christmas Carol. You’ll also find fast-buck fruitcakes like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Ernest Saves Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night (Parts…
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…
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…
ON THE EVENING of October 26, Phoenix artist Rick Bertoni stood in front of a mirror and used makeup to transform his face into a facsimile of a ghoul from the movie Dawn of the Dead. Had he survived till dawn, the onetime godfather of the Phoenix punk scene might…
Feeling jittery about the recent rash of roller coaster mishaps at the Arizona State Fair? Uneasy riders may want to steer clear of the construction currently under way at the Golf N’ Stuff miniature golf course at Metrocenter. Now going up (so it can come down soon) is Phoenix’s first…
IT’S 3 A.M. Those damn sleeping pills just aren’t cutting it anymore. You stumble out of bed. Perhaps you light up a cigarette. Maybe you pop a brew or head for that pint of Haagen-Dazs. But no matter what else you do, you almost certainly turn on the tube. If…
Maryvale movie maven Jack Hardy has problems. Reel problems. Luckily, his family understands. “My wife is very supportive of this,” says Hardy as he gingerly picks his way through the maze of film cans, videocassettes, editing tables and movie-history books that have transformed his west Phoenix home into the equivalent…
