“Talk plain!” 99-year-old Edward Beeler Gamble demands of a visitor to his Sun City home. The subject is Viagra. “Is that for a man who has trouble performing sexually, trouble getting an erection?” the retired Naval commander asks, leaning forward in his wheelchair. Told that it is, Gamble says he…
It’s small consolation to Debbie Knight that Pietr Hitzig, the self-proclaimed “father of Fen-Phen,” surrendered his license to practice medicine in Maryland last week. The Phoenix native is convinced that, had Maryland authorities acted sooner, her brother, Alvin Chernov, might still be alive. Chernov committed suicide at his father’s Glendale…
A few years ago, a pal of mine pointed out a tall, pale man leaning on his walker in front of the Luhrs Building in downtown Phoenix. That’s Neal Roberts, he told me, the guy from the Bolles case. I knew very well who Roberts was, though I hadn’t recognized…
When you are young, you need your father. When you are old, you need your sons. –Vietnamese proverb This much about Loi Nguyen’s last hours may be recounted with reasonable certainty: The 17-year-old awoke on September 24 at his parents’ home near 19th Avenue and Dunlap in Phoenix. It was…
After church services on a steamy Sunday afternoon last May, Najib Savaya tried through an interpreter to put his plight into perspective. “I am not a dishonest liar guy,” said the soft-spoken Iraqi-born man, leaning up against a wall at northeast Phoenix’s Chaldean Catholic Church. “I never have trouble. I…
In the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart’s character is given the opportunity to see what would have happened to his community if he had never been born. Without him, the quiet tree-lined downtown of family-oriented Bedford Falls becomes the garish, loud and decadent main street of Pottersville,…
1. Tricky at the Cajun House: A mesmerizing performer and innovator who kicked butt in front of a few hundred people. By contract, only had to play for 45 minutes. Played hard for two hours. 2. Mose Allison at Timothy’s: Mose Allison at age 70. Great pianist. Great vocals. Great…
The two men face each other in an interview room at the Phoenix Police Department. It is 1:53 a.m. on January 17, 1997. Veteran detective John Norman introduces himself to Scott Louis Falater, who is seated in a corner of the little room, his back literally against a wall. Norman…
Jerry Solomon went to court last Friday hoping to get out of prison in a year or two. He went back to his cell with a good possibility of dying behind bars. That’s because the 58-year-old Scottsdale man, already in jail for conspiring to kill his girlfriend’s husband, tried last…
Arizona Veterans Service Commission executive director Norman Gallion retired last week–hours after a New Times story reported on continuing problems in the troubled state agency. AVSC board chairman Carroll Fyffe says Gallion announced his surprise retirement–which is effective November 1–in a faxed letter sent to Fyffe’s home in Sierra Vista…
The longtime attorney for the Arizona Veterans Service Commission is calling it quits, saying serious mismanagement and shoddy leadership have destroyed the agency’s credibility and its ability to serve veterans. Harold Merkow is attaching a scathing letter of resignation to court papers involving dozens of veterans to support his claims…
Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley stood at a podium Monday afternoon and assumed his most determined prosecutor’s face. The television cameras caught the moment for the 5 p.m. newscast, as Romley announced the arrest of Elizabeth “Shannon” Whittle, 24-year-old mother of the battered Avondale quadruplets. On a hot local news…
Just before dawn on April 6, a Phoenix woman we’ll call Susan Johnson told a nurse about a conversation she’d just overheard at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. According to a sealed Avondale Police Department report–a copy of which New Times obtained–Johnson said she’d heard another woman tell a man, “I think…
“So, buddy,” the guy sitting next to me at a Phoenix bar asked me one night in mid-1994, “you really think I could have done something like they say I did? You think I murdered the bastard?” I looked at him and rolled my eyes, as if to say, you…
1956–Gene Keidel and DiAnne Kidder marry in Peoria, Illinois. September 17, 1966–The last time DiAnne Keidel is seen alive. January 9, 1967–Fire at the Citrus Way home kills two of the Keidel children and seriously injures a third. January 10, 1967–Police investigator concludes that the fire had started accidentally on…
Lori Romaneck says she felt sure of something when she stepped into the Phoenix Police Department on June 9, 1993. “I thought they’d make sure I wasn’t totally nuts,” she recalls, “then they’d go dig up Mother. Simple.” The Phoenix woman, then 32, had kept an enormous secret for more…
1956–Gene Keidel and DiAnne Kidder married in Peoria, Illinois. September 17, 1966–The last time DiAnne Keidel is seen alive. January 9, 1967–Fire at the Citrus Way home kills two of the Keidel children and seriously injures a third. January 10, 1967–Police investigator concludes that the fire had started accidentally on…
In May 1995, Lori Romaneck asked a clerk at the state’s Office of Vital Records for copies of two death certificates. “I wanted to bury my two sisters with my mother, and I needed the right paperwork,” she says. “That was it.” But at that moment, Romaneck saw something that…
The showdown started in high June. Facing off are the top guns of Maricopa County’s two crime-fighting agencies. But instead of six-shooters, County Attorney Rick Romley and Sheriff Joe Arpaio loaded their word processors and fired off nasty memos about the other to the county Board of Supervisors. The latest…
Dr. Kay Rauth-Farley is checking on a toddler named Alex in the pediatric ward of St. Joseph’s Hospital. The 1-year-old has a fractured skull, and he’s whimpering in his bed. “Oh, baby,” she says soothingly. The pediatrician feels for the large mushy spot on top of the baby’s head. Alex…
Only in America could an immigrant shopkeeper send a letter of desperation to a stranger in Washington, D.C., and get such a response. About a month ago, Phoenix resident Amir Alyas wrote to Dr. James Zogby about serious criminal charges he, his wife Fay and many others then faced. He…
A juror in the Jeanne Tovrea case took off work May 27 to attend the sentencing of the man convicted of killing the heiress. He said he wanted to see if the judge would order James “Butch” Harrod to death row in the storied 1988 murder of the Phoenix woman…
