What Ray Bernal saw west of Casa Grande on June 30, 1975, troubled him so much he wrote a memo to his boss. An inspector for the Arizona Corporation Commission, Bernal wasn’t strictly responsible for the public’s safety at Arizona’s railroad crossings. His job was to check on the condition…
THE GOVERNMENT MAN recalls the first time he laid eyes on a Klump. “One of the brothers was riding horseback over the south side of the Dos Cabezas Mountains,” says Larry Humphrey of the federal Bureau of Land Management. “I noticed that his horse wasn’t wearing any shoes and I…
Jack and Penny Laetch may end up telling a judge they deserve a break-but it won’t be at McDonald’s. The elderly Scottsdale couple turned from McCustomers into McBlackmailers last month, police say, after scheming to extort money from a man who owns several of the fast-food joints. The alleged shakedown…
IF MARIA TORREGROSSA knows anything, she says, she knows this: That man saw me standing right in front of him, and he came at me with his car like I was a piece of nothing. I jumped out of the way, but he got me good.” Torregrossa narrowly escaped death…
A few months ago, a Shar-Pei escaped from his north Phoenix backyard and wandered to a nearby apartment complex on Shangri-La Road. The friendly dog trotted up to a woman named Vickie Back, and she fed him a snack and a bowl of water. No dummy, he stuck around Back’s…
MAURICIO RODRIQUEZ celebrated his 20th birthday a few days after Christmas 1990 by hot-wiring a late-model Chevy pickup. He and two friends then careened through the streets of west Phoenix in the stolen vehicle. ²Along the way, the Phoenix man slowed long enough for his pals to hop out, then…
A Phoenix cop since 1983, Hardin had been a sergeant for only three months when Rodriquez stole the Chevy and presented him with one of his first major tests as a supervisor. Hardin interviewed Rodriquez a few hours after the clash. He focused on the guy who smashed into the…
Phoenix fire captain Gary Pykare underwent his latest cancer surgery several weeks ago, just as a commission that studied the incidence of cancer in Arizona firefighters was finishing its unprecedented study. Now Pykare says he feels much better. Results from the commission’s work, on the other hand, are inconclusive. After…
Onetime real estate broker John Stetler Jack” Brown seemed to have played his legal cards like a champ. His winning run started, oddly enough, soon after he admitted to a friend and former Paradise Valley neighbor in 1987 that he was molesting her 7-year-old daughter. Brown not only wasn’t arrested…
EVEN IF THE Paradise Valley police had done their job, a jury may never have convicted pro football player Marcus Cotton of raping an ASU co-ed. As in almost all acquaintance” or date” rape cases, this one may have come down to a courtroom match between two people: The woman…
Gordon Fischler once planned to be buried “forever and a day” between his wife and his uncle in a Tombstone cemetery. (After all, Fischler was the Tombstone marshal for a decade.) But someone beat him to it. “They’re telling us to forget that `eternity together’ stuff, unless we dig up…
Governor Fife Symington’s chief henchmen went to the Mesa Tribune last week for a long-awaited powwow. By the time it was over, John Dougherty-the Trib reporter whose scoops about the savings-and-loan scandal consistently have embarrassed the governor and other politicians-was off the big story, possibly for keeps. Several sources present…
VALENTINE’S DAY 1987 hadn’t been overly romantic for Roberta and David Korzep, but they seemed to be having a decent enough time. The Yuma couple liked to play the dogs, and they decided to make a night of it at the local greyhound park. They went to the track early…
Roberta had seen a lawyer about a divorce before this, but had never followed through on it. “I loved David,” Roberta said later. “He was basically a nice man.” ROBERTA KORZEP has remained steadfast on a central issue of David’s violent death: “That’s the maddest I had ever seen him…
Agnes Lang sums up her first head-on collision with the legal system in her 79 years like this: “It was as much of a lemon as that car those people sold me.” The Tempe resident sued East Valley Jeep Eagle in 1989, claiming salesmen had hoodwinked her on the value…
Remembered for his still-murky link to the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, Phoenix attorney Neal Roberts has long negotiated around legal-system land mines with stunning success. But now he’s in a pickle that should keep him behind bars for at least a short time. Phoenix police arrested…
MARTY GIFFIN SMILES over at her 11-year-old daughter Samantha, who is working on her homework at the kitchen counter. “I’m responsible for her, just me,” Marty says. “I haven’t gotten much help. The judge told my ex-husband when we got divorced in ’84 that he had to pay child support…
®MD120¯ Ä CTEXTSETTER Ä 222 Lines Ä Depth 95.4 Picas Ä 15.89 In. Ä 33.94 Col In. ÄÄ ®MDNM¯ ®MDUL¯Agnes Lang says of the car salesmen: ÔWe figured they were honest people.” In July 1989, 77-year-old Agnes Lang bought a car from East Valley Jeep Eagle. After a day of…
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…
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…
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…
Stacie Elliget hid from all but a few girlfriends that her father, Mesa Police Department patrol cop Dick Elliget, had been sexually molesting her for years. When she finally tried to get her mother to help her, she got an icy response. “I gave my mom a chance before I…
