Episode 13 Transcript- The Perplexing Homicide of Don Bolles: Part One
[Amanda] Hey everyone, I’m Amanda the host of New York’s Dark Side. I’m still out on the road and today I have another road trip edition episode for you. Today’s episode is another true crime episode- it’s one of Arizona’s most high-profile homicides that potentially has connections to a Buffalo, New York corporation. This is the story of the 1976 homicide of Arizona Republic journalist Don Bolles.
[Intro Music]
[Amanda] I’m getting to the tail end of this road trip. It’s been fun, but I am ready to be home. Before diving into the episode, I promised to give an update on any spooky activity from my stay at the Clown Motel. First, I’m going to apologize, I realized a day or two after the Bina Verrault episode published that I uploaded the original cut and not the edited copy I had meant to. So that’s all corrected now. But to the real question- did we experience any paranormal activity? I don’t know to be honest. We did bring an EMF recorder with us, and when we got there, we had done some readings of the room without much activity. During the night however, the EMF recorder was going a bit crazy in the room. There also was randomly a blue crayon on the floor of my room that was not there when I recorded the episode that showed up later in the evening, I have no idea where it came from, but I know it wasn’t there because it was right in front of the outlet where I had plugged in all the sound equipment to record the episode. I also noticed some knocking sounds in the audio recording that my mic picked up but my phone which I recorded the video version didn’t. I couldn’t edit those out so I’m sure if you listened to the audio version you heard them too. It could have been just noises from another room being picked up, but the rooms on either side of me were not occupied, so who knows. I didn’t have any occurrences of the lights turning on or off on their own as others had reported occurring in the room. I did have a crazy dream that I was part of a tour group and a ghost child everyone referred to as “baby Joseph” grabbed my pant leg and held me back from continuing with the group which in turn caused me to wake up in the middle of the night but that was about it. So, anyone who has more insight on this, let me know, was this potentially anything paranormal?
[Amanda] Anyway, the case we’re discussing today is another one I had not heard about, and this was very intriguing to research. Honestly, this case is far bigger than I expected when I started looking into it. While it sounds like there were arrests and convictions in this murder, there are still a lot of questions surrounding it that I don’t know if there will ever be an answer to… I’ll listed all source material in the show notes, and they will be available on the webpage for this episode. Let’s get started!
[Amanda] Donald Fifield Bolles was raised in Teaneck New Jersey, where he graduated from Teaneck High school in 1946. His had the dream of following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. His grandfather was Stephen Bolles, a politician, newspaper editor, and congressman from Wisconsin who was reportedly with President William McKinley when McKinley was shot twice in the abdomen by anarchist Leon Czolgosz (Chol-goes) at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 5, 1901. McKinley would succumb to his injuries on September 14. Don Bolles’ father was the chief of the Associated Press bureau in New Jersey. Don would study at Beloit College where he would graduate with a degree in government in 1950. While at Beloit he was the editor of the college newspaper and won the President’s Award for personal achievement. After college, he served in the Army where he was stationed in Korea and assigned to an anti-aircraft unit. In 1953, he started working at the Associated Press, where he worked as a sports editor and rewrite man in New York, New Jersey, and Kentucky. He wanted to expose corruption, and would travel all around the United States, at times undercover to track down “wrong-doers” including the mafia, state water commissioners, and state tax commissioners, his brother Richard would state in a 2016 interview with Tatiana Hensley in Arizona Central.
[Amanda] Don started working for the Arizona Republic newspaper in 1962, where he continued his investigative journalism. He gained a reputation for his reports on influence peddling, bribery, and land fraud. Don had married twice, at the time of his murder he was living with his second wife Rosalie and had a total of seven children with her, four from his previous marriage, two from hers, and one they shared together. He was very much the family man, he devoted himself to his family and in his off time would run daily and occasionally play tennis. He was also involved in work for his church. At work, Bolles took great pride in the accuracy of his reporting, he placed that as his highest value in his work. In 1965, Don was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his investigations on briberies and other corruptions in the state tax and corporate commissions. He wrote a series of articles in the Arizona Republic which was the first major effort to expose land fraud in Arizona. He also wrote extensive articles from the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s on Emprise Corporation. Emprise Corporation was an organization out of Buffalo, New York. They had partnered with the Funk Family in Arizona and together they controlled Arizona’s horse and dog tracks, we’ll talk more about them later. Don Bolles was best known for his articles that revealed the infiltration of the Mafia in Arizona, the series was called “The Menace Within”. Due to the nature of his work in exposing criminal activity, his life had been threatened multiple times. His wife, Rosalie pleaded with him to take their names out of the Phoenix phone directory for safety, which he had refused until about a year before his death because he felt that people needed to be able to get ahold of him. After working in investigative reporting for about 14 years, Don Bolles had started to tire of the game and had started work on legislative reporting.
[Amanda] On Thursday May 27, 1976 Don Bolles would receive a phone call from a man claiming to have information involving a land-fraud deal that had involvement from high profile politicians including Senator Barry Goldwater, Congressman Sam Steiger, and former GOP state chairman Harry Rosenzweig. He set up a meeting with the informant and would tell a colleague Bernie Wynn after the first meeting with the informant that this informant had told him he was from San Diego, but Don hadn’t gathered any information from the meeting because the informant had nothing concrete. Don and the informant had set up a second meeting and this time the informant said he would be coming with not only additional information but documentation to support it. On June 1st, the informant would call Don Bolles again and they set up a meeting for June 2nd. June 2nd happened to be Don’s eighth wedding anniversary. He and Rosalie had plans for dinner and a movie that night, he didn’t share his plans to meet with the informant with Rosalie, instead he prepared for work as usual and left the home with no incident in his new white four door 1976 Datsun that he had bought a month prior. He was working out of the state capital building that day, and he attended their morning meeting. The meeting ended just before 11 AM. He took a few calls and then left a note on Bernie Wynn’s typewriter that said “I’ve gone to meet with that guy with the information on Stieger at the Clarendon House. Then to Sigma Delta Chi. Back around 1:30 p.m. Bolles”. Don then left the Senate building and drove the Clarendon House Hotel in downtown Phoenix just prior to 11:15 a.m. which was when he was due to meet with his informant. Don would park his car in the rear lot of the hotel and enter the lobby. He looked around the lobby but didn’t see his informant. The woman working at the counter would later recall seeing him and asking him if she could help him. He responded that he was meeting with someone and was going to wait on the sofa in the lobby.
[Amanda] A few minutes after Don had sat down, the front desk phone would ring. The male caller asked for Don Bolles, and the woman at the front desk asked Don if that was him. She would switch the phone call over so he could speak with the caller. The receptionist didn’t hear the entire conversation but would later recall that Don had said something about the capitol and told the person on the line to go to the State Office Building. Don thanked the receptionist and then left the lobby. He returned to his car, started it up, reversed out of his parking space and as he was turning the wheel and pulling forward the car exploded.
[Amanda] The blast shook multiple buildings in the area. All four hubcaps would blow off, the windshield blew out, and a two-foot hole was blasted through the floor of the car beneath the driver’s seat. The driver’s side door ripped open, and Don would fall out of the car to the pavement beneath. Both of his legs and his right arm were complete mangled, but he was still alive. One of the first people to respond to the scene was a refrigeration technician who was working on installing an air conditioner nearby, he would take off his belt and apply it as a tourniquet to Don’s right leg. Others responded shortly after that and would attempt to help as best they could. Don Bolles would tell them that he wasn’t going to make it, requested for his wife to be called, and would utter four other things to the people around him- “John Adamson” “Mafia” and “Emprise”. He was taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital where the health care team would work hard over the next eleven days to try to save him despite his mortal wounds. One of the first things done was an amputation of Don’s right leg above the knee as it was too far gone to attempt to save. At this point Don was still conscious but he was not able to speak to anyone.
[Amanda] News quickly reached the Arizona Republic regarding the bombing and that it had been a member of the press that was hit as there was a press ticket on the car’s windshield. Many of the journalists working with Don Bolles had also had their lives threatened so this was a terrifying time for them. When news came that it was Don, they were all in shock. Bernie Wynn after hearing the news would later go to Don’s office, where he found a note on Don’s desk that read “John Adamson. Lobby at 11:15. Clarendon House. 4th and Clarendon”. This note would be given over to the police. At the hospital, two policemen were standing guard outside Don’s room as there was concern that the people who were trying to kill him would come to try to finish the job. There was significant concern that this was indeed a mob hit due to the nature of the attack on Don’s life. Investigators believe that the bomber did not account for Don Bolles height when placing the bomb, Don had pushed his seat back to accommodate his height, which likely led to him not dying immediately. This is just extremely tragic…
[Amanda] On June 3rd, the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette partnered together and offered a $25,000 reward for information that would lead to identification of the bombing suspect. Don Bolles was awake, but still unable to speak. He was in still in very critical condition. The police were concerned that he would succumb to his injuries without being able to give any more potentially important information, so they questioned him from his hospital bed. He was able to confirm to them that a man named John Adamson was the informant that he was going to meet the prior day, they showed him a copy of Adamson’s license photo.
J[Amanda] ohn Adamson was a member of Phoenix’s underworld, but only a minor figure in the hierarchy. Growing up he had lived in Phoenix, had been one of the top students at Phoenix’s North High School. He had served as president of the Latin club and played trombone in the school’s band. He would be arrested on June 4th for an old warrant involving a charge of defrauding an innkeeper. He would give no information, but would be photographed, fingerprinted, and released on $100 bail. Don in the meantime would receive a total of 32 pints of blood on June 4th. On June 8th, as his condition continued to deteriorate, they would take him back to the operating room and amputate his right arm between the elbow and the shoulder to stave off further infection. He was now unconscious, and his condition was extremely grave.
[Amanda] On the afternoon of June 8th, a new figure would come forward claiming to be an alibi for John Adamson. This was a well-known attorney in the Phoenix area named Neal Roberts. Roberts would claim that Adamson was at his office fifteen minutes before the explosion and couldn’t have had anything to do with it, and he remembered the time well because his secretary had to call the operator for the time since her watch had stopped and the time she called the operator was 11:18 a.m... Which… I’m completely lost without my watch but like really. The office didn’t have any clocks and no one else had a watch? Roberts would then claim that he and another man named Henry Landry would then go to the airport to send one of their greyhounds to a track out of state. The police of course checked into this, and the receipt that they recovered from the airport to send the dog had the time logged as 11:10 when the dog was dropped off which would have meant that they would have had to have left from the office at 10:45. This completely ruins the alibi, Roberts however isn’t done and claims that the airport made a clerical error.
[Amanda] On June 5th, authorities would obtain a search warrant and search John Adamson’s apartment. At this time, they found magnets, firecrackers, electrical wire, tape, and a booklet entitled The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
[Amanda] On June 10th, Don Bolles would be taken to the operating room again and his left leg would be amputated. He was spiking fevers at this time and had developed pneumonia. He would lose his fight on June 13th. Two hours after Don Bolles died, Adamson was arrested and charged with murder.
[Amanda] On June 21st, the preliminary hearing for Adamson was held in Marcicopa County’s Superior court to determine whether Adamson should be brought to trial. There would be two big witnesses that would help seal this decision. One was Robert Lettiere who owned greyhounds with Adamson. Lettiere had a criminal background, having been convicted in the past of grand larceny and burglary in Minnesota previously. He would testify on the witness stand that on Friday May 28th, he had been in the car with Adamson when they drove to the Arizona Republic parking lot to look for Don Bolles car. Adamson had even spoken with the security guard to get access, telling him that he was dropping off something for “Don So-and-so” and that Don was expecting this delivery. Adamson would tell Lettiere that he had a job to do and that he was going to blow up the car because “some people don’t like this guy”. They couldn’t find the car in the Arizona Republic parking lot so instead they drove to a Datsun dealership where Adamson would look beneath the hood and inspect the undercarriage of the same model of car that Don Bolles had bought. Lettiere claimed that Adamson had asked him if he was interested in helping by tailing Bolles for a while so that he could get an insight to Don Bolles habits, offering him 10 percent of the take, but Lettiere declined. Lettiere told him that he had been offered 10 grand and had another job lined up for another 25 grand if things went well with this one.
[Amanda] The other big witness in Adamson’s case with Gail Owens, Adamson’s “common-law wife”. She would say that she had spent time with Adamson between April 20th and April 29th at the King’s Inn motel in San Diego. While there they had gone to a hobby shop, Adamson told her that he “wanted to buy a gift for a friend”. She didn’t see what he bought while at the shop, but she opened the box when they got back to the motel. In the box was a remote-control device. At some point during this trip, Adamson told Owens that he had a job where he was going to make a lot of money and if the job went well, he had two more jobs lined up. On June 2nd, Adamson would contact Owens and told her that something had happened, and he would not be able to see her for a while, but she didn’t ask him to elaborate on that. The grand jury determined that there was enough to send Adamson to trial and that trial was set for October of 1976.
[Amanda] There was still a lot of speculation on the motive behind Don Bolles murder. I mentioned earlier that Bolles had written at length regarding the Emprise Corporation. The Emprise Corporation was a multi-million conglomerate run by the Jacobs family of Buffalo, NY. The Emprise Organization was started by Louis M Jacobs and his brothers, the sons of a Polish immigrant tailor. When Louis Jacobs died in 1968, his son Jeremy Jacobs took over as president of the company. It was believed that the Emprise corporation had long and intricate ties with the mafia including Moe Dalitz of Los Vegas, Anthony Zerilli of Detroit, and Raymond Patriarca of Providence. Emprise, along with the Phoenix-based Funk’s family Greyhound Racing Circuit owned all six Arizona greyhound tracks at the time of Bolles’ death. Bolles had been investigating a possible Mafia “silent” partnership in operation of the dog tracks in Arizona. During this period, the FBI was investigating the Emprise corporation as well. In 1972, the Emprise Corporation would be convicted of conspiring to conceal ownership of a Las Vegas Hotel- the Frontier Hotel and Casino. A jury in Los Angeles would connect the Emprise Corporation when mobsters used $712,489 of Emprise’s funds to buy the property, Don Bolles had been asked to testify in that case. After this conviction Jerry Jacobs would completely restructure the company. It’s important to note that investigators would not find any connection to Emprise Corporation relating to Don Bolles murder. The reason that they came up was because Don had stated the organizations name to the people that first responded to the bombing. The year following Don Bolles’ death, Jerry Jacobs would seek a federal pardon for the conviction, claiming that through the restructuring it no longer had any ties with organized crime.
[Amanda] In July of 1976, the Phoenix Police would release a deposition from attorney Neal Roberts that had taken place in June. In this deposition, Roberts would present a theory that Max Dunlap, a wealthy contractor who at that time was 47 and another man named Kemper Marley, a seventy-year-old extremely wealthy landowner and Arizona’s largest wholesale liquor distributor who had raised Max Dunlap since he was 12 as the masterminds behind Don Bolles’ murder. Neal Roberts knew Max Dunlap well; Dunlap was president of Roberts graduating class at North Phoenix High School. He was also close friends with John Adamson and had admitted to declining an offer from Adamson to help him defraud Bank Americard of half a million dollars. So how do these two fit into the picture and how are they connected to Don Bolles? Well, Don Bolles had been writing articles on Kemper Marley as well. Marley had been a large contributer to the Democratic candidate for Governor- Raul Castro. Marley had been appointed by the governor to a select position on the State Racing Commission, however Bolles’ articles are credited with forcing him to resign from that position seven days after he took it, he had reminded everyone that while Kemper Marley was serving as Arizona Highway Commissioner he was charged with grand theft in the 1940s, a charge he was later acquitted of but not a good look, especially when he had a brother on the payroll at Memorial Stadium. It should be noted though those investigators had offered Neal Roberts limited immunity for information on what he knew, and he was offered that because he had arranged for John Adamson to go hide out a friend’s motel in Lake Havasu and had him flown out there immediately after the bombing. Adamson had been called back to Phoenix very quickly however by his business associates. Adamson would later exclude Neal Roberts from being involved in his testimony at trial. What we do know from testimony is this- On June 3rd, the day after the bombing Roberts and Dunlap met at Durante Restaurant and discussed their mutual friend John Adamson’s legal trouble, they also discussed how they could raise $25,000 for his defense. Their testimony would differ. Roberts would say that Dunlap offered to raise the money. Dunlap would say that Roberts asked him if he would conceal the source of the money. We do know that on June 10th Max Dunlap would deliver money to the attorney for John Adamson. Max Dunlap would claim that this money was delivered to his house by a stranger who would ask that Dunlap exchange the $100 notes for smaller bills and deliver it as a favor to Neal Roberts. The total was approximately $6,000. John Adamson was offered a plea deal for his testimony against Max Dunlap and another man named James Albert Robison. Adamson would testify against both Dunlap and Robison at trial, stating that Dunlap had hired him to kill three men- Don Bolles, Al Lizanetz, and Bruce Babbitt who was the Attorney General at the time. The reason Dunlap reportedly gave John Adamson was that the men were troublesome to Kemper Marley. Don Bolles was selected to be the first victim. Adamson would testify that Robison had agreed to assist him with the murder and had been the one to detonate the bomb with a remote-control device after Adamson had placed the bomb under Bolles car.
[Amanda] Both Dunlap and Robison were convicted and sentenced to 29–30-year prison terms on the conspiracy to commit murder and to death in the gas chamber on the murder count. Both Dunlap and Robison would appeal their convictions and their convictions would be overturned in 1980 due to a ruling that Adamson had violated his plea deal and not provided accurate testimony and that the men had not been afforded the right to confront their accuser because Adamson would not fully respond to cross examination. Dunlap would file a civil suit against the state of Arizona and the Phoenix Police, claiming that case files that would have shown his innocence were destroyed by the Phoenix Police. Documents from the civil trial show that multiple Phoenix police officers would testify that they were told to get rid of pages in the Emprise file with any information that pertained to Emprise, the Funk Organizations, and the Don Bolles investigation and then refile them so that it looked as though there were no missing pages. The civil trial would end in a mistrial but when Max Dunlap tried to refile, the statute of limitations had passed a month prior, so he was unable to do so. In 1993, 13 years after his conviction had been overturned, he was again taken to trial and was convicted of murder a second time. He would end up dying in prison in 2009.
[Amanda] But the story doesn’t end there my friends… This case is crazy, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get the truth behind it. A lot of the major players in this case are deceased now, but as I was researching. I found a whole load of information that makes me scratch my head that I want to share with you, but I’m going to save that for a part two because otherwise this episode might end up 2-3 hours long but I also can’t not talk about what I found. You can keep the conversation going by following us on social media- we are on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can also send me an email at nydarksidepodcast@gmail.com. You can also check out our website at www.nydarksidepodcast.com. I hope you keep listening, and most of all I hope you stay curious.