LATE ONE NIGHT, after everyone else had gone to bed, Dick told Stacie to take off her clothes. “Let me massage your whole body,” he whispered. “Take off your shirt and bra and I’ll just give your whole body a little somethin’.” Dick squirted some baby lotion into his hands…
With his attorney’s license in jeopardy for lying to clients, Jim Feeley needed to pull something out of his hat. What he produced was way out in left field. This is the way Dr. Francis Enos of the Institute for Human Services tried to explain Feeley’s behavior to a State…
When Carol Hottell answered the telephone in her east Mesa home late on the evening of September 6, she heard a voice that made her shake. Her half-brother Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins was calling from death row in Columbia, South Carolina. She always felt confused about Pee Wee. This time…
For seven years, Beverly Lemieux donned her blue waitress uniform and slung hash at a Smitty’s restaurant in north Phoenix. Lemieux enjoyed the give and take with her customers at the popular supermarket eatery near Seventh Street and Cave Creek Road. She operated in the lovable-wise-guy manner of waitresses everywhere…
Someone ought to send 90-year-old Sarah Mandell the Savings and Loan trading-card set. Mandell is that little old lady from Hollywood who recently grabbed Charlie Keating by his lapels and shook him for all she used to be worth. The Savings and Loan trading- card set is the brain child…
Seven-year-old Tina Harris looked up at her mother and blurted out the truth. “You told me if I ever was afraid to do anything, if I didn’t want to, I didn’t have to,” Heidi Harris says her daughter told her on that early evening of April 14, 1987. Tina told…
When it was Yavapai County Sheriff Buck Buchanan’s turn to vote at the meeting of the Arizona Peace Officers’ Memorial Board, several Oro Valley cops shifted nervously in their seats. “Some of us have become so concerned with the letter of the law that we have forgotten our own humanity,”…
No one paid much attention when Bobby Janisse excused himself from the off-campus bash last March 9. “Be right back,” he told a young woman he had met earlier that Saturday. “Save my seat, okay?” Bobby stepped into the bathroom at an apartment near Arizona State University in Tempe. He…
ASU’s pioneering sport- psychology program was put to the acid test in the days after Bobby Janisse’s self-inflicted death. It passed with flying colors. Several ASU wrestlers and head coach Bobby Douglas credit sport psychologist Mark Andersen with counseling them on how to cope with the mind-numbing tragedy. “It was…
“This is going to be fun,” assistant Maricopa County attorney Jessica Funkhouser promises the bleary-eyed barristers. The occasion is a three-hour seminar titled “Ethics for Public Lawyers–The Higher Standard,” part of the State Bar of Arizona’s annual convention. “The `Higher Standard’?” one local lawyer says as the 9 a.m. session…
Kathy Gravell woke up last week in the Motel 6 on East Van Buren Street. She put on a pretty flowered dress and drove her red Toyota a few miles west to the Attorney General’s Office. Kathy admitted she was a nervous wreck. “I want to put this thing behind…
Three weeks ago, Kathy Gravell stood beneath the Washington Monument and prepared to place a flower in a large wreath. The occasion was the tenth annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Day service. Kathy’s late husband, Bill–a 49-year-old detective from a small town north of Tucson–was one of 153 cops being…
Sue Holmes eyed the newspaper ad like a hungry fish eyes a worm. “I remember exactly what it said,” she recalls. “`Free consultation with one of Arizona’s leading cosmetic surgeons! No visible scars!’ I’d been thinking about doing something like that for a long time. It sounded great.” Since the…
Why was this guy knocking on my door at nine o’clock on a Sunday night? I warily peeked out my living-room window. He looked like a jogger. I asked him what he wanted. “There’s a cat across the street,” he said, “and it’s drowning! I was jogging by and I…
Odd as it was, the caller’s request didn’t shock Leigh Wilson. “This woman on the other end said she had plenty of money and that she wanted a certain person killed,” says Wilson, a 48-year-old Scottsdale businessman. “This may sound crazy, but I’m one of the few people in the…
Annette Morris lines up an eight-footer on the third hole at the Arizona Acres golf course in east Mesa. “Just about the same one as that little guy had, Ian Woosnam,” the sixtyish native of Canada says, referring to the new Masters champ’s winning putt of a few days earlier…
In the unforgiving world of the Coffelt housing project, even the little victories are hard to come by. The 1,000 or so people who live in the public-housing project a mile due south of the Arizona State Capitol can’t just say no to poverty. Rudolph Valentino Buchanan, the coordinator of…
In the Big Scheme, a poetry reading by an ASU professor normally wouldn’t rank as a major event. But when the poet is Norman Dubie, and it’s his first public reading in a decade, and he plans to read from his newest book, well . . . “This reading is…
The prisoner’s dream starts with such promise. “They’re letting me out and I’m going to meet Christopher,” Debbie Milke says. “He’s alive! I’m free!” Suddenly, the dream becomes a nightmare. “The only way we’ll be together is if we get attached by handcuff. Forever. That’s the only way he’ll stay…
December 3, 1989, began as Armando Saldate’s day off, but proved to be one of the most momentous of his twenty-year career. “It was a very long Sunday,” the former Phoenix homicide detective says. “Two murder confessions and a poor little guy’s body out in the desert.” Saldate’s seven-page account…
The owners of a burning backyard in the White Mountains finally have moved out of the danger zone, after two years of battling one of Arizona’s most expensive and least-publicized toxic disasters. Art and Lynn Shupe and two of their neighbors recently reached an out- of-court settlement with paper giant…
Gary Callahan never had time to name his yacht. Too bad. He might have called it “Lady Luck.” First, the bad luck: The veteran U.S. Border Patrol agent was accused of ripping off a cocaine smuggler and sending the drugs to Phoenix, where they were peddled by a Paradise Valley…
