On the evening of December 6, Wendy Cracchiolo-Sheedy gave birth to a six-pound, 15-ounce baby girl, “who looks like an angel, teensy-tiny and perfect.” She named the child Antoinette Catherine Sheedy. It was a miracle of sorts, because just a year earlier, after a double miscarriage, several surgeries and expensive…

A smoky voice rings up to the rafters of the pink chapel at the Cathedral of the Valley in Glendale. With an otherworldly echo, it calls out to the 20 or so faithful gathered for the Sunday-afternoon service: “We lift up our hands toward Heaven and say, ‘Jesus, I reach…

Dr. Robert McClarin has the patient and mellow air of someone who has been an elementary-school principal for 27 years. Silently, he walks the empty halls of his domain–Desert Cove Elementary School on 28th Street, just north of Shea Boulevard–tugging on doors to see if they are locked, peering into…

Just before dawn, with coyotes yipping from the trees across a narrow forest road just south of the Mogollon Rim, Arizona Game and Fish Department law enforcement specialist Ron Day pulls a tom turkey from the back of his truck. It’s a mounted gobbler, a bagpipe-size bird that the Game…

It was just another Friday night at Stinger Cocktail Lounge at 19th Avenue and Camelback: September 24, and the serious drinkers were balanced precariously on their stools. Colleen Speed was tending bar when a regular named Russell, who everyone knew as “the Mexican guy with one arm,” took a seat…

Peggy Rogers noticed the smoke when she was driving home from the supermarket with her daughter. It was just after lunch on June 10, a hot and dry Thursday in Fountain Hills. The smoke was coming from the west along Shea Boulevard, and so she turned the car in that…

Until the 1960s, the banks of the canals that flow from the Salt River and fan across Phoenix were oases, de facto promenades bordered by shady cottonwoods. Phoenicians walked there and swam there, and, according to many an old wag, even water-skied. But in the 60s, swimming in the canals…

On December 16, the day he would be killed, Fred Schrader got up before dawn, made a pot of coffee, turned on the TV, and sat down to watch the morning news. His wife, Elaine, was still asleep when she first heard the creaking of the approaching bulldozer. In her…

Last January, when Joel Coplin read the letter stating that the ramshackle art colony he manages near Apache Junction had been valued at $10,492,058 by the Maricopa County Assessor’s Office, he felt sure someone had confused his address with the Wal-Mart farther down Apache Trail. Apache Art Studios is, after…

Wendy Sheedy wanted a baby, not in that achingly desperate way of some childless women, but it was never far from her mind. Her friends all had children. She had a solid marriage, a successful business, a nice house in Paradise Valley. She was 31 years old and the time…

At midday on a recent Thursday, with temperatures in the high 90s, there was nobody on the Squaw Peak summit trail but chuckwallas and the hard-core regular hikers, two species that are barely distinguishable in color and skin texture. Linda Van Tilborg and a friend were burning their way uphill…

Unpaid traffic fines? In the event you can lay low for five years, the Phoenix Municipal Court will clear them from your record. Didn’t pay your water bill? Stay out of sight of the water department for 150 days and you’re scot-free. The City of Phoenix regularly removes delinquent accounts…

When we last heard from Wilda Heil, she had been unceremoniously dropped by her health insurance company for having the misfortune to develop cancer and actually using the benefits she had paid premiums for (Those ‘Unprofitable’ Cancer Victims,” February 5, 1992). Heil was a victim of a common insurance-industry practice…

You can smell the pheromones, palpably sense the rut vibes, feel the radioactive burn of eye contact. One thousand single people, male and female, circle the fountains at Concord Place for Lynda Johncock’s Singles Networking Party, a pre-Valentine’s Day bash. Lynda is president of Arizona’s Most Eligible Singles Directory, a…

Last summer, Don Engler of Schuff Steel took a proposal to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community for a machine that reduces the volume of garbage by 90 percent. The process, “destructive distillation,” can transform even medical waste and discarded tires into a sterile charcoal and a volatile gas that…

While Scottsdale Mayor Herb Drinkwater boldly led the fight to keep Tiffany’s Cabaret from opening its second “gentlemen’s club” in the former Windmill Theater, a partnership that includes the mayor’s son, Mark Drinkwater, may have been negotiating to buy the same property to open its own topless club. The latest…

The first appearance is startling: George A. Hormel II, whom everyone calls Geordie, has a shocking cascade of gray hair that fans across his shoulders, and a full, white beard that frames a bemused expression. Though he’s heir to millions of dollars, he favors slouchy suits that he buys at…

“This is how the other half lives,” Billy Rivera says as he wheels his garbage truck through a neighborhood nestled between Tatum Boulevard and the mountain preserves. The houses are big and pretentious, Taj Mahals in stucco and red tile with lawns like putting greens and shrubbery like a Philippine…

When monkeywrencher Mark Davis pleaded guilty to malicious destruction of property in last year’s nationally publicized Earth First! trial, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Broomfield gave him a sentence that allowed for early parole. Davis, a Prescott cabinetmaker who called his business The First Noble Truth Woodwork, went proudly off…

Sunday, November 15, at 9 a.m., a damsel in distress sat on a trail-side rock three-quarters of the way up Camelback Mountain. She was 29, but looked younger, and dressed as if she were going to the health club. She had hyperextended her knee, then grown nervous over the climb…

Tom Paniccia came into the New Times Building dressed in a black suit, his shoes still buffed to a military sheen–the habit of 11 years in the Air Force–and grinning from ear to ear with the thought that he would not be out of uniform much longer. Paniccia, 28, was…