Losing Something in the Translation

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…

Who Shot First?

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…

Letters

Greene Giant Congratulations on the investigation of the Baptist Foundation of Arizona (“Poring a Foundation,” Terry Greene Sterling, December 10). It’s detailed, thorough, helpful and timely. New Times was added to my “must see every week” list as the result of your “first with the story” reporting of the Fife…

Legacy or Sham?

I’ve been through legislation creating a dozen national parks, and there’s always the same pattern. When you first propose a park, and you visit the area and present the case to the local people, they threaten to hang you. You go back in five years and they think it’s the…

All Revved Up, Surrounded by Suits

Friday night downtown, between the decades-old warehouses and America West Arena, where old trolley tracks remain visible under streets paved over years ago, the dust and car exhaust blended with pithy scents of perfume and floated on a warm December breeze. Like carnival barkers, the lanky parking-space hawkers with chutzpah…

Losing Patients

The Arizona Board of Medical Examiners (BOMEX) plans to ask legislators for more power and more secrecy, despite harsh criticism at a joint legislative hearing last week. BOMEX’s proposed legislation would enable the director, at the board’s discretion, to dismiss complaints, resolve cases in mediation and deny licenses. BOMEX also…

How the West Was Spun

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…

Tell the Teacher We’re Cruisin’

Teacher, teacher, I declare–I see Monica Lewinsky’s underwear! Actually, the panties in question don’t belong to Lewinsky; they’re owned by drag queen Celia Putty, a performer at Wink’s, a Valley gay bar. But that doesn’t stop 30 Glendale Community College students and their instructor from roaring as the “semen”-caked intern…

The Inmate Who Cried Wolf?

What follows are excerpts from a May phone conversation between wolf advocate Pat Wolff and a man she says is Jody Lee “Chance” Cooper, who at the time was serving a sentence for firearms violations at a federal prison in Tucson. Cooper denies talking to Wolff, but comments the man…

Wildlife Disservice

Paul Morey had been waiting, hoping, to see something like this. “As we’re driving down a dirt road, we saw this elk calf bedded down,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife technician says. “It suddenly jumped up when it saw two wolves coming.” The calf got up and ran across a…

Tweaking the Truth

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…

Flashes

Pennant Fever You say you’re a baseball fan anticipating an intriguing 1999? Forget about it! There’s no need to play the games. The Arizona Diamondbanks have won the National League West. Might as well go ahead and hoist the banner. And fret not, diamond junkies can always speculate about who…

Red Hot Chile Paperwork

Former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet stands charged of murder, torture and kidnapping, but even he has access to the British court system as he fights his extradition to Spain. That’s better treatment than another Chilean, Oscar Fuchslocher, is getting in the United States. Fuchslocher, who has been ordered deported by…

Jailer’s Jihad

Ex-corrections officer Bill Haro thinks he knows exactly why his former employer, the Arizona Department of Corrections, suffers from a severe shortage of prison guards these days. It’s a lousy place to work, says the 16-year veteran of the Florence gulag, and it’s not because of the low pay or…

Letters

Clouds Over Sunnyslope This is the second time I ever had the dubious pleasure of reading anything you publish, and it happened this time only because a friend drew our attention to that portion of Brian Smith’s article (“Night in the City,” December 3) relating to Sunnyslope. I generally have…

How Dare They?

Arizonans have been joking about their cultural desert for years now. But recently Dr. Robert Knight, director of the soon-to-open Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMOCA), has been putting a slightly different spin on the phrase. Ticking off the list of new or enlarged museums, theaters, sports halls and public-art…

Poring a Foundation

The Baptist Foundation of Arizona recently proclaimed a banner financial year despite the fact that investigators from three different state agencies are scrutinizing the foundation’s multimillion-dollar real estate and stock transactions with insiders, New Times has learned. The Organized Crime and Fraud Section of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, with…

Flashes

Sheriff Raff The remarkable affidavit of former sheriff’s lieutenant Robert Wetherell continues to have repercussions after shaking up Sheriff Joke Arpaio and his favorite heavy, Dave Hendershott, director of the sheriff’s office. Wetherell blew the whistle on the dynamic duo, claiming that Hendershott in particular had rigged an internal investigation…

Balancing Act

Rob Smith, head of the Sierra Club in these parts, is a mild-mannered, middle-aged man. He doesn’t look like a bomb thrower. So he was taken aback when the Phoenix police detective approached him in a courtyard at the Pointe Hilton Resort at Tapatio Cliffs, where he was awaiting the…

Letters

Out of Bounds I have been heavily involved in the issues regarding the Washington Elementary School District’s proposed new school at Seventh Avenue and Peoria, which also proposes to use city park land by joint agreement between the school district and the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department. My…

Trunk Murder?

Ruby, the Phoenix Zoo’s Asian elephant, died last month when her pregnancy went awry, and the city got the blues. Ruby had lived here almost 25 years–longer than most of us–and she’d become famous as one of the world’s most unlikely painters. Her works raised hundreds of thousands of dollars…

Fed Up

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…