The man charged with the brutal murder last spring of a twenty-year-old woman was mistakenly released from jail only three days before the murder because of a flagrant error by Maricopa County prosecutors, New Times has learned. No one in the County Attorney’s Office is contesting that “The Screw-up,” as…
The white-haired old man the kids call O.M. stands next to a slide projector, flipping through the day’s lesson. From clothes-dropping preliminaries through beatific postcoital grins, the subject of this day’s class is the heterosexual sex act (acts, actually) as practiced by two young lovers. O.M. describes the action, pausing…
A few rare films stun the senses. They send you reeling from the theatre. They set you brooding about them for days. This is how it is with Casualties of War, Brian DePalma’s tale of an atrocity in the Vietnam War. All at once it is stunning, frightening, depressing–and a…
Momentarily oblivious to the sound man who’s cramming a battery pack down the back of her dress (a skintight creation that could pass for a sequined sausage casing), former Channel 10 newscaster Shelly Jamison ponders her new position in the show-biz firmament. “What would my reaction have been if someone…
Pat’s baby was, like the child of Hester Prynne, a pearl of great price. Pat chose to bring life out of an unwanted pregnancy, and for it suffered serious illness, destitution and fear. Unable to call on her parents or the baby’s father for help, with neither education nor a…
No one bothers Socorro Bernasconi anymore as she stands with her protest sign near the Pointe at South Mountain. On most afternoons, the long-time Guadalupe activist and mother of eight stands near Pointe entrances holding a hand-painted sign that says, “Dead Spirits in Live Bodies Build the Pointergeist. A Development…
Many a fried Phoenician has stood under Payson’s Ponderosa pines and marveled at their majesty. There still are thousands of pines to gape at in the town of 8,000 about an hour and a half northeast of Phoenix. But these days, “progress”–most recently in the shape of a sprawling Wal-Mart…
Opponents of the for-profit adoption industry invariably single out Southwest Adoption Center, Inc., the largest for-profit agency in the state, for criticism. But the less-visible Birth Hope Adoption Agency, Inc., which last year sent 28 babies out of state for adoption, has the worst history of legal and regulatory problems…
In nine days, 51 creepy phone calls and death threats were made to Leon and Jeanette Woodward. U S West Communications determined that 43 of those calls originated within state police headquarters or from the home of Department of Public Safety Officer Van Jackson. Subsequent events raise the possibility that…
John Kromko, a Democrat always willing to take up a populist cause, is being snookered by, of all people, his own party. Three months ago Democratic bigwigs were pushing their maverick colleague from Tucson to start an initiative drive to roll back auto-insurance premiums. The state representative wasn’t even a…
Sometime next week a couple of extremely colorful City of Phoenix staff members will haul a big pile of sketches, overhead-projector transparencies and documents into the council chambers at City Hall. Then the councilmembers will assess their options. Then they will vote, and the Valley’s baseball future will be decided…
My wife is psychic. She can always tell when I’ve dressed my son. All she has to do is look at the lad in his green dress shirt, blue swimming trunks, red-and-white gym socks and black patent-leather shoes, and somehow, she just knows that I coordinated his outfit. It’s incredible…
here’s a mad rush on for the Phoenix City Council to approve a $200 million downtown stadium. Between now and Tuesday, councilmembers will be subject to a last-minute razzle-dazzle to try to convince them that the deal–which has yet to be finalized–is really the best the city can expect to…
Earn “big bucks” . . . work in “a nice air-conditioned office” . . . “have fun” selling photocopier supplies over the phone. Little wonder that a certain central Phoenix telemarketing firm promised new employees that they were about to embark on “THE GREATEST JOB IN THE WORLD!” “It was…
It’s a million and ten degrees in the shade and you’ve warned your kids that if they don’t behave, you’re sending them outside until they’re medium to well-done. So they mill around the house, expecting you to entertain them. Here’s what you do. Stick a tray of ice cubes down…
There’s no question that Phoenix sewage plants are dumping toxic materials into the Salt River, at least on occasion. But city officials don’t want to spend the money to install the equipment for a problem they contend occurs only rarely. Instead, they’d rather spend tax dollars in court to fight…
Phoenix is in the clutches of the worst epidemic of backyard drownings since recordkeeping began, but even that’s not enough, apparently, to overcome City Hall’s reluctance to adopt mandatory safety regulations. In fact, anti-regulatory sentiment is adamant inside City Hall, judging from the bureaucrats’ reaction to proposals to require pool…
Last winter, a handful of Arizona State University engineering undergrads and a couple of professors slaved for weeks on a proposal for a solar-powered dream machine they named the “Sundevil Suncruiser.” When the ASU team beat out dozens of other schools from across the country, you’d think state legislators would…
We sat on the stone steps outside the Durango women’s jail. It was late afternoon. Mike Black, the attorney, kept looking through his briefcase. Lawyers always make themselves look busy. The sun was coming at us from an angle and the shadows were deepening. But it was hotter now than…
We were driving Route 101 south along the Oregon coast. A light rain was falling on the windshield of the rented car. It is an area where the only radio station you can get is National Public Radio. We’d spent the first night in a Portland hotel of fading grandeur…
Here are thirty reasons Charles Keating deserves to be drawn and quartered at a public ceremony in Patriots Square. 1) Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan failure will be the largest bailout in history. 2) In order to clear up the mess Keating’s greed caused at Lincoln, taxpayers will ultimately pay…
Lawman Ralph Andrew Lawrence was primed to kill on that spring evening in 1986. In his mind, his enemies had conspired to ruin him–starting with waitress Sharma Bethel, an ex-girlfriend from the southeastern Arizona town of Willcox. Lawrence had figured his troubles with Bethel were ancient history. That stuff had…
