There wasn’t much left of Janet when Bob Hirschfeld got done with her. A tall, soft-spoken woman, she takes great pride in her rail-straight posture and unshakable composure. But after three hours of questioning, she seemed shrunken and lost–slumping against the courtroom table and weeping into her hands. Janet knew…
LAS VEGAS–Gazing out a second-story window of the intimate “boutique” hotel that bears her name, Debbie Reynolds, best known for her role in 1957’s Tammy and the Bachelor, surveys the once-familiar landscape that’s rapidly being transformed into some sort of whacked-out theme park for gamblers. “This town has really changed,”…
Latricia Brown murdered her boyfriend, Melvin Wilson, in 1989 and was sentenced to 13 years in prison in a case barely noticed by the press. Now, after spending more than three years behind bars, Brown, 47, has had her conviction overturned by an appellate court, saying a Maricopa County judge…
It was perfect softball weather last Friday morning, when Jerry Lee Wells took the mound for the last time. Hundreds of Arizonans who had idolized him were looking on at the house that Wells built, Ken Lindley Field on Gurley Street in Prescott. This time, however, they were there to…
When Deborah Stuart left the home of her elderly aunt last July–skipping out on her probation officer, stealing $300 and leaving behind an $875 phone bill–there was little doubt where she was headed. The 31-year-old mother of two, a repeat felon, was making a beeline for Oklahoma–specifically for 1-918-596-5601, the…
Don’t get shot after 10 p.m. That is the macabre advice being passed around South Phoenix, as word spreads that the only emergency medical center south of the Salt River will be scaling back operations on October 1. The Jesse Owens Memorial Medical Center on Baseline Road, a satellite of…
TELLURIDE, Colorado–It’s the fourth and final day. The 20th annual Telluride Film Festival is almost history. Everyone’s getting ready to blow town. Each Labor Day weekend, this film festival draws film buffs from all over the country. They watch four or five films per day, and grow punchy from being…
It’s tough to fight people with friends in high places. Just ask former Arizona State Lottery director J. Bruce Mayberry, who played hardball with GTECH, the biggest lottery computer vendor in the nation, and with Evans Group, which holds the state’s largest advertising contract. Governor J. Fife Symington III fired…
Bishop Thomas J. O’Brien ought to be on his knees, praying for forgiveness. On Friday, August 27, Father Wilputte Alanson “Lan” Sherwood was sentenced to ten years in prison. In diaries and home movies seized by the police, the priest had chronicled his own sexual liaisons with 22 underage boys…
Abuses by attorneys and private fiduciaries such as Wayne Legg, Webber Mackey and others have led to proposed changes in how the Maricopa County Probate Court operates. “This hasn’t been a matter of a little tweaking here and there to get things up to speed,” says the court’s presiding judge,…
The Kings of Probate Dorothy Richards hadn’t spoken to her Aunt Delores for years when she decided to look her relative up in early 1988. A few inquiries led the Newport Beach, California, resident to Delores Reichwein’s home in Mesa. But Richards’ visit to Arizona was short and sad. Her…
Kamala Stillwell opened her Sunday paper early in July to disquieting news. The Maricopa County Library District, she learned for the first time, was advertising for a new director. The job offering came as more than a slight shock to Stillwell. She has, after all, held the director’s post for…
Junior Standish met Milton Berle in 1947 at the Riviera nightclub in New York City, where she was a showgirl. Berle, headlining at the Roxy theatre, was on the verge of becoming a huge celebrity, the first television star. Standish was a beautiful dancer, “the toast of Broadway,” in Berle’s…
The feds have two questions for top officials of Arizona Public Service Company: What did you know? And when did you know it? New Times has learned that federal investigators plan to visit Phoenix this week to interview several high-level APS managers as part of a probe into whether the…
Q: Where does a 500-pound gorilla sit? A: Anywhere he wants. If, however, you happen to own a far more lightweight simian, your primate’s seating opportunities are considerably more limited. Or so Phoenix businessman Ric Adams discovered when he disguised his pet ape as a baby and smuggled the animal…
Leo Damore was in a state of high dudgeon. At this moment, his fury knew no bounds. Damore’s blood had been stirred by reading an excerpt from Joe McGinniss’ latest book, The Last Brother, in the September issue of Vanity Fair magazine. Damore did not bother to pull punches, as…
I drove to the Arizona State Prison at Florence last week to watch the Board of Pardons and Paroles in action. Anyone who spends much time as a reporter will visit quite a few prisons and hear many inmates’ tales. I have talked to killers, gang leaders, bank robbers, drug…
About noon on June 18, 1985, Josh Burner pulled his truck into a parking space in front of the Tempe Police Department. He had come to report a murder. He knew exactly what he wanted to say. As it turned out, Sergeant Mike Palmer, a detective, did the listening. “My…
In July, Details magazine lauded Tiffany’s Cabaret of Phoenix as one of the top topless joints anywhere. “Eight hundred ninety-three million women table-dance nightly in a labor-intensive mammathon,” the trendy, men’s style publication quipped in a feature on the top 300 nightspots in the U.S. “The most corporate and unsleazy,…
Phoenix Fire Department Chief Alan V. Brunacini likes to boast that getting into his department is as difficult as getting into medical school. The Phoenix Fire Department is, in many ways, an elite organization. So it was no surprise that of the 1,709 people who showed up at Phoenix Civic…
Ivan Kapetanovic says it happened “just like on TV.” As Kapetanovic and two friends–Marko Belinic and Zeljko Vusir, both Croatian citizens–strode across the parking lot of Scottsdale’s Los Arcos Mall on May 31, 1991, a horde of armed federal agents swung into action. “Down on the ground, now! You’re under…
Few human physical acts capture the imagination or wrench the emotions like branding, the “kiss of fire.” –Fakir Musafar in Body Play magazine Some like it hot–red-hot. Like, for instance, Jennifer Saunders, a 20-year-old “modern primitive” who doesn’t mind making contact with small pieces of metal heated to nearly 2,000…
