Infamous Arizona

Considering the state’s relatively low number of electoral votes, Arizona should be little more than an afterthought in most things, but it isn’t. It’s usually right there, front and center, from the Civil War to World War II; from the Oklahoma City bombing to September 11; from the knee-whacking of Olympic figure-skater Nancy Kerrigan to the slicing of a gondola line in the Italian Alps; from Billy the Kid to Richard Nixon.

Whether it’s something in the water or something else, Arizona has plenty of infamous legacies. What follows are just a dozen. Stay tuned, though, more are bound to show up in the months and years ahead.

BILLY THE KID
Billy the Kid was, and always will be, the bad boy of the Old West – a New Mexican gunman who was said to have killed a man for each of his 21 years of life. That part isn’t actually true, but it sure feeds the legend that William Bonney was one mean dude.

History tells us – and New Mexico tourism touts it – that he’s buried in Fort Sumner, where anyone can go to the graveyard and see his marker. But history doesn’t always get it right. In fact, Billy the Kid just might be buried in the Arizona Pioneer Cemetery in Prescott, under the name John Miller.

As it turns out, two men claimed they were the real Billy the Kid, decades after Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett supposedly shot the Kid to death in 1881. To this day, the officers of Lincoln County wear a Garrett patch to commemorate their hero.

There was also a guy in Texas who said he was the real Billy, and then there’s John Miller, who was a cattle rancher and horse breeder in the Zuni mountains of New Mexico and a farm worker in Buckeye, Arizona. In the book Whatever Happened to Billy the Kid?, Helen Airy interviews family, friends and neighbors – Indian and Mormon – who say Miller was the real Billy and that they never disclosed that because they thought the guy deserved to live out his life in peace. As she writes, “Ask any of these people the question… and invariably they will reply: ‘Of course Miller was Billy the Kid. Didn’t you know that?’”

Nobody knows for sure, but in 2003, New Mexico decided to dig up all three graves. In addition, they intended to dig up Billy’s mother, who is reportedly buried in Silver City, New Mexico, and then compare their DNA. Even New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson endorsed the project, which created havoc in the world of Old West history, but was potentially a great tourism boost.

The project ran out of steam recently, although some are still on the track. And there’s more than just Billy’s history at stake here, because Pat Garrett had somebody buried as Billy the Kid, and finding out that it wasn’t the real guy could make the legendary lawman a murderer.

THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE
“The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands without a parallel amongst the crimes that stain the pages of American history.” Attorney William Bishop uttered those words in 1877 to defend his client, John D. Lee, who later faced a firing squad for the atrocity.

In the spring of 1857, a train of 40 wagons, 1,000 head of cattle and 142 Mormon pioneer men, women and children left Arkansas for California. By that fall, they were in the Utah Territory, and on the morning of September 8, they were attacked by “Indians” – it’s now known, however, that many of the attackers were Mormons disguised as Indians. The pioneers held out for four days, but ran out of water and nearly all of their ammunition.

History tells us that Bishop John D. Lee of the Mormon Militia approached the train under a white flag of truce and convinced the pioneers the Indians would leave them alone if they gave up their wagons and possessions. To save their lives, they did, but they were later murdered in cold blood. Even some children were killed, while others were taken back to Salt Lake City and given to Mormon families.

Although there were many investigations – and modern historians are still trying to solve the controversial question about whether Mormon leader Brigham Young ordered the massacre as a “blood atonement” – no one was punished until 20 years after the massacre. That’s when John D. Lee was tried and executed. Lee’s connection to Arizona?
He was the founder and operator of Lees Ferry, the only crossing point over the Colorado River in pioneer days. Located at the edge of the Grand Canyon, river runners still launch their boats from Lees Ferry for trips into the Canyon.

JOHN DILLINGER
He was America’s public enemy No. 1 – a notorious gangster, bank robber and prison escapee whose very name sent chills down the spines of law abiding folks. J. Edgar Hoover even had him on the FBI’s 10 Most-Wanted list.

Despite being in the FBI’s crosshairs, though, John Dillinger and his gang found their end in Tucson in 1934. Back then, Tucson was just seven square miles and had a police force of only 35, but the local cops embarrassed Hoover by nabbing the guy who had eluded federal officials for years.

The gang apparently thought Tucson was remote enough and “hick” enough to be a safe place to hang out after a robbery spree in Indiana. But their 10 days in Arizona would be the last free days of their lives.

Some of the gang had set up housekeeping in the Hotel Congress in downtown Tucson, and might have never been discovered if a grease fire hadn’t started in the hotel basement and roared up the elevator shaft. Instead of running for their lives, as the other guests had, the gang tried in vain to save their baggage, but in the end, the men had to be rescued through the window by Tucson firefighters.

Gang member Charles Makley tipped firemen William Benedict and Kenneth Perider $12 to climb back in and retrieve his baggage, which invariably contained lots of cash. A few days later, the alert firefighters were thumbing through True Detective magazine and thought that at least one of the “wanted men” looked extremely familiar – just like the guy who so badly wanted his bags from the burning hotel. They alerted police, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Makley was eventually captured at the Grabe Electric Co., where he was shopping for a radio that monitored police calls. One of the gang members and his girlfriend drove to the police station after police had snookered him into believing that his out-of-state license plates needed an Arizona sticker. Dillinger and his girlfriend, Evelyn “Billie” Frechette, were arrested at a house they had rented at 327 N. Second Avenue. He was “dumbfounded” when the “hick-town cops” showed up and ended his freedom.

The entire capture was pulled off without a shot being fired, and the gang members were extradited to Indiana to serve their time.

To this day, Tucson celebrates Dillinger Days in January to commemorate the day it captured public enemy No. 1. Some of the gang’s guns, including a Thompson submachine gun worth more than $1 million, are on display in the city. And the Hotel Congress offers special “Dillinger” menu items, including Killer Apple Pie and Hit Man Omelets.

THE CIVIL WAR
The first time there was an “Arizona” was during the Civil War, but it didn’t belong to the United States of America – it belonged to the Confederate States of America.

The Yankees in Washington had no real interest in the Sonoran Desert’s dirt and cactus. In fact, they included what’s now Arizona in the New Mexico Territory – an oblong chunk of real estate that stretched from Texas to California. Arizona’s pleas to be a separate territory had fallen on deaf ears, and as the nation marched toward Civil War in 1861, no map of the country mentioned anything called Arizona.

But the South saw the area as a strategic passage to the West Coast. The Butterfield Overland Stagecoach had run through the area, carrying mail, freight and passengers from the East Coast to California. From the South’s perspective, the route could just as easily have been a conduit to carry gold from California to the Southern capital on the East Coast. As war loomed, Northern politicians spotted this threat and revoked the stage contract to deny the South their transportation corridor.

To add insult to injury, Washington also pulled Union troops out of forts in the area, leaving the population unprotected from Apaches and Mexican banditos.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis created the Confederate Territory of Arizona on February 14, 1862. It lasted only a year, as President Abraham Lincoln acknowledged the oversight and brought Arizona into the Union in 1863, and exactly 50 years to the day after Davis created the first Arizona, it was brought into the United States as the last of the contiguous 48 states.

WORLD WAR II
Arizona has two powerful connections to World War II – one representing the state’s agony, the other its triumph.

Few in Arizona would have thought that their sparsely populated state would forever play a central role in the events that unfolded in Hawaii on December 7, 1941 – one of the events that drew this nation into World War II.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began about 7:55 a.m. on that fateful Sunday. At about 8:10 a.m., the USS Arizona exploded after being hit by a 1,760-pound armor-piercing bomb. The ship sank with most of her crew in less than nine minutes.

In the end, about a dozen American battleships were sunk or beached, while 164 American aircraft were destroyed and another 159 planes were damaged. In all, on the “day that will live in infamy,” 2,388 Americans – Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Army Air Corps, and civilians working on base – were killed. Another 1,178 were wounded. Japanese causalities were light, although the Air Corps managed to destroy 29 Japanese planes and damage another 74, while sinking five midget submarines.

Today, the USS Arizona Memorial is the final resting place for many of those men and it’s a tribute to all who died that day. The anchor of the USS Arizona now adorns a park in front of the State Capitol in Phoenix.

The second powerful connection to the war took shape four years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Arizona’s Ira Hayes be-came an icon of America’s resilience and strength. That’s when he helped his fellow Marines raise an American flag on the small Pacific Island of Iwo Jima to claim victory over Japanese occupancy. A photographer captured the act as the flag was going up, and it became one of the most famous photographs in U.S. history.

Hayes was born in 1923 in Sacaton, on the Pima Indian Reservation. He was the son of a poor farming family, and joined the Marine Corps to help support his family by sending home his paycheck, and to ensure himself regular meals. According to history, his Tribal Chief told him to be an honorable warrior. Little did he know that the 23-year-old would be forever memorialized in the photo, and then again in the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington, D.C., a bronze cast replica of the famous photograph. Ira Hayes died in Arizona in 1955.

TONYA HARDING-NANCY KERRIGAN
They called it “Skategate” – the scandal that led up to the 1994 Olympics when American figure-skater Nancy Kerrigan was attacked in a plot to keep her out of the competition and open the door for her rival, Tonya Harding.

Kerrigan and Harding were competing in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships and Olympic trials in Detroit on January 6, 1994, when an assailant clubbed Kerrigan on the knee with a retractable metal baton.

As the plot unfolded, authorities learned that Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, had hired three thugs to attack Kerrigan to ensure that Harding got a chance at Olympic Gold.

Two of the thugs were from Chandler, and the weapon of choice was bought in Mesa. It didn’t take long for officials to start piecing things together, especially when hoodlum Shawn Eckhardt decided to brag about his crime – in a paralegal class, no less – at Pioneer Pacific College in Oregon.

He had recruited two Arizona friends to carry out the attack, 20-year-old Shane Stant and his uncle Derrick Smith, both of whom were from the East Valley. Stant wielded the baton, which he had purchased at Mesa Spy Headquarters, and Smith drove the getaway car. As the story unfolded, they looked less like dangerous hit men and more like bumbling idiots.

By the time the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Nor-way, had begun, the attackers had already been arrested. Harding admitted she knew of the plot afterward, but did not come forward initially. The Olympic committee ruled she couldn’t compete, but she filed a $25 million lawsuit demanding her right to skate, and the committee relented.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter – Tonya Harding failed miserably in the Olympics. She needed a “do over” when she aborted her first jump and complained that her skate laces had snapped during warm-ups. She finished eighth.

Nancy Kerrigan, however, brought home the silver medal, finishing just behind gold medalist Oksana Baiul of the Ukraine.

The men who plotted the attack were eventually tried, and all were sentenced to short prison terms – Gillooly to two years and the others to four years. But they didn’t serve even that. Gillooly spent just six months in prison, while the other men spent about a year each.

Tonya Harding entered a plea deal on charges that she hindered the investigation of the attack. In exchange for not going to prison, she was stripped of her national title and banned for life from competitive figure skating.

The most recent news from this cast of characters came in December, when an Oregon judge denied a petition by Stant to have his conviction expunged so he could apply to become a Navy SEAL. Kerrigan opposed his petition, telling the court a crime like his could not be “swept under the rug.”

THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING
Most adults in America can remember what they were doing on the morning of April 19, 1995, as the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring more than 800.

It was, at the time, the most horrific terrorist attack on American soil, and remains to this day the worst example of domestic terrorism. The images of death and destruction created by American-born militants will forever be hardwired into the nation’s psyche.

Arizona felt a particular devastation when it learned that the plot had been hatched in the small town of Kingman and that a native son had known about the plan for months, but did nothing to stop it. Bomber Timothy McVeigh had moved to Kingman in early 1993, staying for a time with his Army buddy, Michael Fortier, who had grown up in the town. In July 1994, McVeigh was the best man at Fortier’s wedding in Las Vegas, and the next month, he told Fortier of his plan to attack a federal building and asked for his help. Fortier refused, although in December 1994, he stood guard as McVeigh took guns out of storage in Kansas, and he later helped his friend sell the stolen weapons.

In early March of 1995, McVeigh became angry that Fortier continually refused to join the attack plan, so he left Kingman, hooking up with another Army buddy, Terry Nichols, in Michigan.

They carried out the plan, filling a Ryder truck with explosives and fertilizers and parking it outside the federal building, timing it to go off at 9:02 a.m.

McVeigh was arrested within an hour of the blast, when a highway patrolman pulled him over for not having a license plate on his car. Inside, police found a white supremacist novel they think was the model for McVeigh’s plot. Officials said McVeigh carried out the plan to avenge the deaths of Branch Davidian cult members near Waco, Texas, and tax protestors at Ruby Ridge, who he believed had been murdered by federal agents. The attack date was the second anniversary of the Waco tragedy.

McVeigh, who remained callous until his execution, called the deaths in Oklahoma City “collateral damage” in his war against the government.

Fortier pleaded guilty to failing to notify authorities of the plot, for helping McVeigh sell stolen weapons and for lying to the FBI. But he also became the star prosecution witness against his buddy. McVeigh was executed in 2001 and Nichols is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but was released in January after 10 years for good behavior. He and his wife and two children are thought to be in the Witness Protection Program. They have vowed to never return to Kingman.

ITALIAN SKI TRAGEDY
It was a tragedy that is both devastating and embarrassing. On February 3, 1998, an American Marine pilot, accused of recklessly flying his jet through the Italian Alps – at times upside down – sliced a ski gondola cable, plunging 20 people some 350 feet to their deaths.

The Marine pilot was a 32-year-old California captain named Richard Ashby. It took Arizona just a few days to realize its connection – Ashby had attended ASU.

Ultimately, Ashby was acquitted of 20 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the tragedy, but faced up to 10 years in prison for destroying a videotape of the flight. His navigator, Captain Joseph Schweitzer, testified that he told Ashby they had to get rid of the tape because he worried the footage of his reckless flying antics would make them look bad. “I said, ‘The Italians will eat you alive,’” Captain Schweitzer testified in a military court. He admitted that he had burned the tape.

Ashby was convicted of obstruction of justice and conspiracy for helping to destroy the videotape and was sentenced to six months in prison and dismissed from the Corps.

None of this set well with European observers or the families of the victims. Italians were outraged when Ashby was cleared of manslaughter, complaining that 20 “innocent people… remain definitely without justice.”

“He’s convicted for destroying a videotape but not convicted for killing 20 people,” was the scornful reply of Sindy Rekewitz of Burgstadt, Germany, whose father and sister died in the tragedy.

RICHARD NIXON
The word “Watergate” still stands for government corruption and abuse of power. It was the riveting scandal that forced Richard M. Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974.

Two Arizona Congressmen were pivotal in the high drama of Watergate, because it was on their word that Richard Nixon finally conceded that his career as president was over – that he had to resign or be impeached by the Congress.

Representative John Rhodes, R-Arizona, was the minority leader of the House and the president’s “point man” on Capitol Hill. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was a seasoned and respected leader of the Republican conservative movement, and had previously been the party’s candidate for president.

These two elected leaders, both thought of as honorable, decent men of integrity, were anguished by the emerging evidence that the president had misused his powers and obstructed justice.

The saga started with a late-night burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. While Nixon was seeking re-election, the Democrats were in the midst of a brutal primary season. They had a month to go until their nominating convention, which would tap South Dakota Senator George McGovern as the standard bearer. (Nixon would later trounce him.)

The “burglars” turned out to be operatives from the CIA, and two snoopy reporters from The Washington Post – Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward – smelled a rat.

Their reporting, which ushered in an era of investigative journalism in America, would eventually show a widespread cover-up that led all the way to the Oval Office. “What did the president know and when did he know it” became national questions.

As Rhodes would later write: “My president had strong support for a long time, even as the House Judiciary Committee was passing articles of impeachment.”

For Rhodes, there was no “smoking gun,” no lethal, irrefutable proof that Nixon knew of the burglary beforehand or was involved in the cover-up. So, he scheduled a press conference in early August 1974 to announce he was standing behind the president, but he held off after getting a call from White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, who had warned Rhodes that something was coming the next day – something he needed to know about.

It was the smoking gun – a previously unreleased transcript of an Oval Office conversation of Richard Nixon instructing his assistant, H.R. Haldeman, to order the CIA to invoke “national security” to stop the FBI from investigating the Watergate burglary. “This was obstruction of justice – the ‘smoking gun’ I had been dreading,” Rhodes would write.

Rhodes’ press secretary, Jay Smith, remembers that after reading the transcript, the Congressman said, “This means that there’s just no chance in the world that he’s not going to be impeached. In fact, there’s no chance in the world that I won’t vote to impeach him.”

Rhodes rescheduled his press conference for August 6, 1974. Interest was so high that the three major networks at the time all interrupted their 4 p.m. programming to broadcast Rhodes’ words live – the first and last time a minority leader of the House was so heeded.

“This is a sad day for me,” Rhodes told the media, explaining that new evidence had led him to the decision to vote for Nixon’s impeachment.

The next morning’s Washington Post featured the banner headline: “Nixon Says He Won’t Resign.” Underneath was a picture of John Rhodes and a story on his press conference.

That same morning, Nixon summoned Rhodes, Barry Gold-water and Senator Hugh Scott, R-Pennsylvania, to the White House. They met in his “working office.”

Rhodes would later recall that their trip reminded him of a “disturbing dream” he’d had months earlier, where “I rode down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House with Barry Goldwater and told President Nixon he had to resign.”

Here is how Rhodes remembered the meeting, according to an essay he wrote: “Nixon asked me if it were true that all but about 25 members of the House would vote for impeachment, and I answered, ‘Yes, that’s my assessment of the situation.’ Then [Nixon] turned to Barry Goldwater and said, ‘And I understand that if the matter came before the Senate, there would be an overwhelming vote for conviction.’ Barry replied, ‘That is true.’(I got the very strong impression that he had already decided to resign when he talked to us).”

Smith later said that as they left the president’s office, Goldwater and Rhodes told each other they had no doubt Nixon was going to resign. Then he quotes Goldwater as musing: “It’s sort of amazing. Here’s the first time this has ever happened, and who was sitting there with the president? Two guys from one of the smallest states.”

Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, announced his resignation on August 8, 1974. He died April 22, 1994, at age 81. John Rhodes and Barry Goldwater later retired from Congress and came home to Arizona, where they were treated as honored elder statesmen. Senator Goldwater died May 29, 1998, at age 89. Representative Rhodes died August 24, 2003, at the age of 86.

THE CRUISE BOAT MYSTERY
You’ve seen the story on all of the news magazine shows, you’ve read about it in Time and Newsweek, and it’s become a cable-news frenzy: A beautiful couple goes on their honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean and the husband disappears somewhere at sea. That’s the sad story of George and Jennifer Smith, both 26, who booked the trip on a Royal Caribbean cruise line last summer.

Since then, the Smith family has been battling with Royal Caribbean over how it responded to the incident, and a wrongful-death lawsuit is lurking. The FBI is investigating the bloodstains that were found running from the balcony of Smith’s cabin to lifeboats, and Congress is considering hearings on cruise safety. Nonetheless, no one seems any closer to answering the question about what happened to this young man on July 5, somewhere between Turkey and Greece.

So, how is Arizona connected to this story? One of the fellow passengers on that ship, who happened to be partying with the Smiths that night, is a 29-year-old Phoenix teacher named Margarita Chaves.

She and other witnesses say the newlyweds were arguing in the ship’s bar when Jennifer kicked her new husband in the groin. “I was very surprised by their behavior… that a honeymoon couple would act that way,” Chaves told the Associated Press.

Jennifer Smith has strongly rejected those charges, calling them “ridiculous” and “outlandish.”

But as Chaves tells the story, she was with friends when another group introduced them to the Smiths. She says the couple was heavily intoxicated, and that Jennifer was leaning on another male passenger. “We were afraid a fight was going to start,” Chaves told the AP. “She was flirting with him.”

Dominick Mazza says he was the one Jennifer was leaning on, but he didn’t believe she was flirting, she was just drunk. Witnesses agreed that Smith called his wife names. “She kind of pushed him away lightly and suddenly stood up and kicked him in the privates and stumbled out of the bar,” Mazza told investigators. He goes on to say that Smith doubled over and stayed that way for a while. “You could tell he was in pain.”
Jennifer was later found passed out in a corridor on the other side of the ship.

SEPTEMBER 11
It will forever be remembered as the “Phoenix Memo.” If only someone in the FBI had actually read this warning document from its field office in Arizona, who knows? Instead, it’s one of the millions of “ifs” that will always surround the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

On July 10, 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to headquarters in Washington and to two agents on international terrorism squads in the New York field office. The memo advised of the “possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama Bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools,” according to the 9-11 Commission Report in a chapter titled “The System was Blinking Red.”

“The agent based his theory on the ‘inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest’ attending such schools in Arizona,” the report continues.

The memo was not acted upon, mainly because it wasn’t even read by most officials until after the September 11 attacks. The commission concluded that the memo probably wouldn’t have uncovered the plot that was already in full swing by that time, but it did determine that the memo might have “sensitized the FBI” to messages it was reading that should have set off warning bells.

Meanwhile, one of the terrorist pilots had been learning to fly in Arizona’s sky. The “fourth pilot,” as Hani Hanjour is characterized by the 9-11 Commission, trained twice in Arizona. He originally came to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia in 1991 to study at the Center for English as a Second Language at the University of Arizona.

He went back and forth from Arizona to Saudi Arabia, looking for someone to train him as a pilot. He couldn’t get into a program in Saudi Arabia, so he returned to Arizona in 1997 and enrolled in a training course. He obtained his private pilot’s license, and in 1999, a commercial pilot certification issued by the Federal Aviation Administration.

He went back home and sought work at a civil aviation school, but again, was rejected. He told his family he was going to the United Arab Emirates to work for an airline, but he never did. For several years, his whereabouts were unknown, but he showed up again in 2000 in Afghanistan. The commission has concluded that Bin Laden personally tapped Hanjour for the 9-11 plot because of his pilot training.

In late 2000, Hanjour returned to Arizona, settling in Mesa, apparently with Al Qaeda money from a Dubai bank account. He took refresher training at his old school, Arizona Aviation. He wasn’t a good student and the instructor tried to dissuade him from continuing.

“Hanjour said he could not go home without completing the training,” the 9-11 Commission notes. In early 2001, he trained on a Boeing 737 simulator at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Mesa. Again, an instructor found his work substandard and urged him to quit, but Hanjour persevered.

He finished the program in March 2001. Soon after, he left Mesa and drove east to meet up with the rest of the hijackers who would die attacking America.