This longtime journalist wrote a comprehensive book about 1976 murder of reporter Don Bolles

The murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in 1976 is still one of the most notable events in Phoenix history. But despite that, nobody’s written a comprehensive historical book about the case — until now.

Jeremy Duda, a reporter with Axios Phoenix and an Arizona native, had always wished such a book existed. Since it didn’t, he wrote it himself.

"Murder in the Fourth Estate: The Assassination of Investigative Journalist Don Bolles" comes out Thursday. Duda spoke earlier with The Show about the case and his book and they started with what Duda’s research process for this project was like.

Full conversation

JEREMY DUDA: Extraordinarily intensive, a lot more so than I probably realized when I started out. Because you have to remember, this case spanned nearly 20 years, from the day of the bombing in 1976 until the last round of trials in 1993. Almost two decades. There were many kind of associated cases. It branched off, the investigations branched off in a lot of different directions.

And so the Attorney General’s Office, which led the investigation, their case file, which is at the state archives now, it makes up something like 150 banker’s boxes full of documents. And that’s not including some, I think, a couple dozen that are still under court-ordered seal.

And so this was a many yearslong process of going to the state archives, making copies of these documents, trying to figure out which ones you’ve seen, which you haven’t, because there’s a lot of doubles, lots of 300-page court transcripts, police reports, investigative reports, all kinds of stuff. Copying these, taking them home, making notes, figuring out kind of a cohesive narrative out of all that.

And then on top of that, there’s ongoing coverage, was interviews with some of the folks who were involved in the case who are still around, folks who knew Bolles, folks who were involved in the investigation into the trials. So this was an extremely intensive research process, and start to finish, this took me about a decade.

MARK BRODIE: Wow. So during the course of the research, did you change your opinion about the case? Did you start to see it differently based on what you had known before you started doing all the research?

DUDA: In some ways. I think a lot of folks probably don’t realize, it was extremely controversial in terms of there are people who still today feel like the Phoenix Police Department and the Attorney General’s Office got it wrong.

I’m not in that camp. I started off with an open mind. I didn’t want to say, “Well, these are the people who definitely did it, and I’m not going to budge from that.” Started off with an open mind, and there are areas where you can see why people have questions, why people take issue with, you know, different aspects of investigation.

Ultimately, I feel like they probably got the right people. I don’t know if they necessarily got all of them. I am very skeptical that Kemper Marley was involved, which is kind of what most people assume today, which was the theory that was presented in court for many years. But ultimately I still feel like they probably, they most likely charged and convicted the right people.

Jean Clare Sarmiento

/

KJZZ

BRODIE: Well, so what do you think it says that even to this day there is debate and some questions about who is actually behind this, who did it?

DUDA: So a lot of the motivations and a lot of the details are a little bit unclear. And you have to kind of start with the lead suspect in the case, John Harvey Adamson, who is not the most reliable person in really any walk of life.

And so much of the investigation, so much of the official theory of the case kind of relies on him and what he told investigators when he took his plea deal. And so there’s a lot of things where you kind of have to take him at his word. Some things can be corroborated, some things can’t. There are other sources of information, people who provide very critical leads in that case besides him.

But you have to remember that Don Bolles, he was an investigative reporter out here for many years. You make a lot of enemies doing the kind of reporting that he did.

By the time he died, he was at the Legislature. He was doing more traditional political reporting. But for many years before that, he was investigating the mob. He was investigating the local dog racing circuit. He was digging into the business of a lot of people who don’t like people knowing their business. And you make a lot of enemies.

For years, he would put a piece of scotch tape on the hood of his car so he could see if someone tampered with it. Wasn’t uncommon to get threatening phone calls or letters at his house. Took a lot of precautions to kind of make sure.

And a lot of that had kind of fallen by the wayside by the time he died, because again, he was at the state Capitol, wasn’t digging into mobsters and whatnot. So he wasn’t dealing with the same kind of level of danger he’d been used to. And obviously he was dealing with a lot more danger than he probably realized at the time.

BRODIE: Yeah. What surprised you during the course of doing this research and writing the book, like, surprised you either about the case or about the people with whom you spoke or stuff you found?

DUDA: I think probably the most surprising is how little, for as famous as this case is in the Phoenix area, for as well known such a landmark event in Phoenix history, how little most people actually know about the case.

What most people know is Don Bolles went to the Clarendon Hotel in June 1976 to meet a source. His car got blown up in the parking lot. John Harvey Adamson said Max Dunlap hired me to kill Bolles at the behest of Kemper Marley because he was mad about a racing commission appointment.

And that’s pretty much what most folks know. And they don’t realize that competing theories about who might have been involved, about how many other cases were involved. There was trials about the beating of a talent agent, about the attempted bombing of an Indian Health Services building.

So many different kind of winding paths this case went down. The original murder convictions were overturned. Adamson initially refused to testify. So the Attorney General’s Office said, “Fine, we’re just going to put you on trial and sentence you to death.”

And the case was in limbo for years. People turned over rocks and sticking their noses into as many corners as they can. But there’s so much information out there, so many details, so many kind of different kind of random points, and most people just have no idea. All almost people know is just those most kind of basic details of the bombing and like the nutshell version of the law enforcement theory of what happened.

Jean Clare Sarmiento

/

KJZZ

BRODIE: So especially given that, that so many people don’t know too much about the case other than sort of the basic details of it, what about this case and about what you learned about still resonates all these years later?

DUDA: Now, in large part, I think it’s that the press, reporters are generally not folks who you would expect to be, in this country, are not generally subject to that type of violence. You know, Bruce Babbitt, who was attorney general at the time, said there’s an unwritten rule with the mob that reporters and judges and cops are off limits. And that rule was violated.

And so I think in large part it resonates because that’s such an unusual event to happen in this country. Other countries, unfortunately, you see that type of violence. Here, a reporter shows up for a meeting with the source, gets into his car in a hotel parking lot, turns the key and a bomb explodes under him — that just does not happen in this country. It didn’t happen back then, doesn’t really happen now. And I think it still kind of grabs folks’ attention.

BRODIE: So do you feel more confident in your feeling about what happened now than you did before you started this?

DUDA: Not necessarily. I think I’ve spent enough time looking at some of the alternate theories and alternate suspects to say here’s why I feel like I can rule them out. Here’s why I don’t believe this person was involved or that person was involved.

At the same time, I’ve learned enough to understand kind of why people have questions about, “Well, did the police look into, you know, these suspects well enough? We still don’t know what happened in this aspect.” There’s still a lot of questions about this.

Like, for example, I think one of the most fascinating things that I’ve learned in the case that I think that very few people know is that in the early- to mid-1980s, there was a Mafia hitman from Chicago who became a federal witness, who told investigators that he and his partner had been offered the contract to kill Bolles and ultimately turned it down.

One of the reasons the guy said they turned it down was that the people who were giving him the job insisted that it had to be done with a bomb. And they’re like, “We don’t do bombs. That’s not how we do our business.” And plus, they felt like whoever does this job, they’re going to be kind of set up to take the fall, and we don’t want to be in that position.

So they just went back to Chicago, and apparently the job went to someone else, but we don’t know who offered that to them. We don’t really know why. And that’s fascinating. That probably never got completely run down.