While he spends lavishly on new offices, a bulletproof car and new employees to fight cat mutilations, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has so understaffed the county’s jails that inmates are threatened by disease outbreaks, and taxpayers could face new lawsuits. Documents, including duty rosters, sick-call rosters and jail-shift records, show that…
For more than two years, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office withheld a videotape that contains key evidence in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought by a paraplegic, Richard Post, whose single night strapped to a restraint chair in Madison Street Jail in 1996 caused him permanent neck damage. When the sheriff’s office…
When The Pistoleros singer Lawrence Zubia decided to kill himself after years of depression and drug abuse, for some reason the familiar buttes of Monument Valley came to him in a cocaine-addled haze. Zubia had no gun. And he’d already ingested enough drugs to kill a normal person. Instead, he…
For six months, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has ordered one of his employees to spy on a key member in the election campaign of Tom Bearup, the only announced candidate seeking to unseat Arpaio in 2000. The wife of a deputy who has performed that surveillance has come forward, and her…
There’s no longer any question that a book published by the University of Arizona Press has earned a reputation it did not deserve. For more than 20 years, I Married Wyatt Earp has influenced Western history and the popular imagination. Supposedly the memoirs of Earp’s third wife, Josephine, the book…
In Deep Impact and Armageddon, last year’s two Hollywood fantasies about asteroid-caused extinction, it’s Americans who take the lead to save the rest of the planet from catastrophe. In real life, the people who’ve embraced the greatest responsibility for saving Earth hail from a more specific location. Arizona. Arizona scientists…
Residents of a quiet south Scottsdale neighborhood received an unusual present the day after Christmas. In their mailboxes, homeowners found a flier with a picture of one of their neighbors. THE FACE OF RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY “Your neighbor Jeff Jacobsen is not all that he seems. When he’s not stirring up…
Joe Arpaio became Maricopa County sheriff in 1992 by taking advantage of dissatisfaction over Tom Agnos. The former sheriff had botched a murder investigation, and paid out $4 million in settlements to wrongly arrested suspects. Last week, it was Arpaio who found himself paying big bucks to settle a botched…
Glenn G. Boyer–scholar, novelist, rancher, entrepreneur, horseman, humorist and icon–hefts Wyatt Earp’s rifle to pose with it for a photograph. This morning, he says, he’s accepted an offer of $200,000 for the rifle from a collector. “You better not put that in the paper or the guys who I owe…
About 3 o’clock on the afternoon of October 26, 1881, the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday faced off against four members of Tombstone’s cowboy contingent in the most famous gun battle of the Old West, which occurred not in the OK Corral but in an empty lot nearby. Witnesses say…
Researchers suspect that Glenn Boyer made up much of what appears in Josephine Earp’s memoir I Married Wyatt Earp. Boyer contends he lost a controversial manuscript he says he drew from to recount Josephine’s years in Tombstone. For Josephine’s life after she left Tombstone, Boyer relied on a manuscript he…
Glenn Boyer put a photo on the cover of I Married Wyatt Earp that he said was Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, the famed lawman’s third wife. But is it really her? Boyer admits that the origin of the photo isn’t clear. But, he says in a recent pamphlet, “If it…
For more than two years, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has kept secret a toxicologist’s report concluding inmate Scott Norberg–who died when detention officers stuffed him into a restraint chair on June 1, 1996–was not high on methamphetamines at the time of his death, and that the drug had no…
The U.S. Department of Justice is conducting criminal investigations into the deaths of county jail inmates Scott Norberg and Robert Butler. Christine DiBartolo, spokeswoman for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, confirms that both cases are being handled with help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Criminal civil rights investigations…
Last week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said it will look into allegations that some of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies faced gestapolike tactics in Arpaio’s desire to root out dime-droppers. Those allegations surfaced in an affidavit by former lieutenant Robert Wetherell, who left the sheriff’s office in October and…
New revelations in the case of a fired deputy are rippling through the ranks of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and could spark a closer look at the way Joe Arpaio runs his agency. An affidavit by former Lieutenant Robert Wetherell accuses high-ranking sheriff’s officials of gestapolike tactics in the…
The morning’s newspapers have nuked him, and Paul Johnson is dealing with the fallout. On a warm morning in early October, Johnson’s tall, lanky body is folded into the passenger seat of a speeding red Honda Passport. He juggles two different cellular phones and a pager with his driver, who…
“No turning around, ladies,” says a beefy detention officer to the seven women slumped in plastic chairs. Behind them, 30 disheveled, sleepy men file into a bleak chamber hidden in the bowels of Madison Street Jail. They fall into rows of more plastic chairs, then all stand briefly as Commissioner…
While several reporters listened in on a news conference call, Lisa Allen, spokeswoman for Sheriff Joe Arpaio, broke the law: “Good afternoon, this is Lisa Allen with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday, the third of September at about 12:45. . . . Today, charges were filed against Sean…
Almost two years after Sheriff Joe Arpaio cleared his detention officers of wrongdoing in the death of inmate Scott Norberg, the prospect of county employees facing criminal prosecution has been revived. Norberg family attorney Mike Manning filed a motion on Friday charging that Maricopa County and the sheriff’s office deliberately…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio continues to grab airtime whenever he can, whether it’s to announce that inmates will help stuff county elections envelopes or to call in his posse to investigate pet abuse. But what the sheriff hasn’t been talking about is how much money county taxpayers have had to shell…
The townsfolk of Christopher Creek, a hamlet in the Mogollon Rim country, first spotted the young elk last year. Residents of the Gila County village say they’re used to seeing wildlife in the forests surrounding their homes, but never had an animal so captivated them. Nicknamed “Spike” by a local…
