Episode 14 Transcript- The Perplexing Homicide of Don Bolles: Part Two

[Amanda] Hey everyone, I’m Amanda. In today’s episode, we dive deeper into the perplexing circumstances surrounding the homicide of Don Bolles, an Arizona Republic journalist who was grievously injured and would later die as a result of those injuries, when a car bomb under the seat of his Datsun exploded as he was leaving the parking lot of the Clarendon Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona. He had gone to the Clarendon to meet an informant who failed to show for their scheduled rendezvous. This case is wild, and even though this is the second part, I'm only getting to the tip of it. Buckle up and welcome to New York's dark side.

[Intro Music]

[Amanda] How's it going, everyone? I'm going to start out by addressing my prolonged absence, resulting in the delay of this episode. Things have been really just a whirlwind for me. I've been going through a lot of changes in my personal life and my professional life. I… I switched jobs. Literally everyone in my house switched jobs at the same time. My husband, me, my son. It's been crazy. School's been starting back up for my… my son and I had to just take a step back and completely reset. I just had to step away, I stopped listening to podcasts, which is completely out of character for me. I freaking love podcasts. There are several that I listen to on a regular basis, and I just got so overwhelmed I went into shut down mode and I… this case is crazy. Like I said, it's perplexing. It's terrifying. It's a huge rabbit hole. And you know me, I love a rabbit hole. I always go down them. But there is so much information that I didn't know where to go with this one, and I didn't realize it was going to be this chaotic when I found the first article and thought, oh well, this connected… New York, Arizona… Perfect for a road trip episode! I completely went into a writers block and had no idea what to do with that. So, then all of a sudden, I blinked and it's October and I didn't mean for there to be this long of a gap. But I'm back and I'm ready to conquer it. I am so sorry, but here I am and we're gonna… we're just gonna get started. 

[Amanda] I'm going to do a quick recap of part one before jumping into the new stuff. Just bear with me for a second or skip ahead for a few seconds if you'd prefer or if you listened to part one recently and don't need a refresher. On June 2nd, 1976, Don Bolles, an Arizona Republic journalist, had a meeting scheduled with an informant named John Harvey Adamson. Adamson had called him at the end of May claiming to have information regarding a land fraud deal with some high-profile names attached to it and Don Bolles, he just latched on to this, but he was also very skeptical. Don Bolles, he was one of Arizona’s big name investigative journalists and was well known for shedding light on corruption. That was his whole jam. He, from the day he started out into the journalism field wanted to be the one to shed light on these types of things. One of his most well-known pieces was one that discussed the mafias infiltration of Arizona. He had also been running articles about the Emprise Corporation, which is a multimillion-dollar sports conglomerate based out of Buffalo, NY. They are still around today under a different name and we'll kind of get into that later and attached to that is the Funk family of Phoenix, Arizona. They had a monopoly, the two organizations had a monopoly, on all of the horse and dog racetracks in the state of Arizona, so he was on that when the bombing occurred. The last four words that Don Bolles would say to the first responders who were trying to aid him were John Adamson, Emprise, and Mafia. Like I said, when I first found this case, I had no idea that it was going to be this complex. I really didn't get into much of the rabbit hole in the first episode. Be prepared everybody. We are going down deeper into that rabbit hole today and I'm not even going to get you out to the other side. The story is terrifying. It's perplexing. I had a hard time writing it. And yeah, I will refer you to a couple of different resources to kind of further deep dive into this. I don't think at this point I'm going to take this beyond two parts. I'm not going to take it beyond this episode unless you guys really want me to, because I feel like it's kind of getting away from what we wanted with the start of the show, which is all around New York. The only reason I picked this case to begin with was I was on the road trip in Arizona, New York, Arizona mesh in this episode.

[Amanda] In June of 1976 while Don Bolles was still lying in critical condition at Saint Joseph's Hospital, a team of journalists would start The Arizona Project, which was in action from 1976 to 1977. The Arizona Project consisted of a group of 36 reporters assigned to cover the story of Don Bolle's murder and the subsequent investigation. The reporters came from all around the country under the leadership of a man named Robert Greene, who was the editor at Newsday and had the goal of continuing Bolles investigative work. He would say, quote- we wanted to send a message to the mob, kill one of our own, three dozen will take his place, end quote. Don Devereaux was one of those investigative reporters in the project. The team of journalists wrote about 23 articles that were published all around the country, and in the podcast the Patsy Don Devereaux would say that during the time he was working with The Arizona Project, he believed the Bolles case was being properly prosecuted, but in 1979, he would come to the realization that a miscarriage of justice had been done. Deveroux would discuss Emprise Corporation bringing their name back into this case. And I'm just going to point out that the Emprise Corporation was never found to have a connection to Don Bolles murder. There's not been any charges for them that I'm aware of in connection to this homicide, but their name comes up quite a bit and we're going to discuss why. And it's… it's a little bit crazy. So, Don Devereaux has spent decades investigating Don Bolles murder. There's a lot of information from him that I used in this episode. I'm going to link his website where all of his newsletters are in the show notes, and on my website, and I did do my best to try to validate some of the things that he proposes on there through other sources, so, all of those sources are going to be linked as well. Again, there's so much in there I could not cover it in this episode alone, so please do a deep dive because it's crazy.

[Amanda] Let's start out with Emprise because this is New York Stark side. We're all about New York's dark history and true crime. The Funk greyhound racing circuit was partnered with Emprise and together they owned all six of Arizona's dog tracks. Don Bolles had been doing some investigative work on this partnership because he believed that there was an organized crime component to this, and Emprise already had one organized crime related conviction. In fact, Don Bowles and US Congressman Sam Steiger had testified before Congressional committee regarding the concern that Emprise Corporation had ties to the mob and Emprise had been on the FBI 's radar as well due to the potential monopoly they had among other things. Emprise Corporation was started by three brothers, Marvin, Charles and Louis Jacobs, who were born of Polish immigrants. The beginnings of Emprise started in 1915, when the brothers had moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side to Buffalo, NY. The boys started out hawking food and services at public gatherings. Louis was selling peanuts at a local Buffalo ballpark and popcorn at burlesque houses. Marvin and Charles, they were providing all kinds of services at Delaware Park Lake- Canoe rentals, shoe shining, newspaper sales, whatever they could do to kind of earn money and they started to save that money to open additional concession booths. They opened their first ballpark concession booth in Jersey City, which rapidly grew after World War I. That's when baseball really kind of boomed. And they then started a concession operation at Buffalo Bisons baseball games and then became shareholders there and later owners of the team. So, they started to really grow at this time. The company went by the name Sports Service Co, and they continued to grow in baseball concessions in the 1930s, with Louis Jacobs at the head. One tactic that he likes to use was to loan money to franchises in sports that were struggling, and in return they would get guaranteed concession contracts. So, the company began to diversify its holdings and services into the night late 1930s and 40s, gaining traction in professional hockey and racing concessions, and even started to own some of the facilities in which they were operating. So, they started getting into real estate. They also started to offer concessions at drive in movie theaters and had gotten long term contract at Washington National Airport. So again, it's just continuing to grow. Marvin and Charles would end up selling their shares of sports service to Louis in the early 1950s. Sports Service Co would start the 1960s by operating the concessions for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. So, they went from hawking peanuts to doing concessions at the Olympic Games. Jacobs literally lived the American Dreams if you think about it, albeit as I mentioned, there is concern that in part this is due to ties to the mob. He at one point was dubbed by Sports Illustrated magazine as the godfather of sports. That's how politicized this concern was. And Louis Jacobs? He ended up forming Emprise Corporation as a holding company from the operations of Sports Service Co, and that was to keep the racetracks and the sports areas separated. Louis Jacobs would ultimately die at his desk in the Emprise Corporation office in Buffalo, NY, before the conviction came in the case, but Emprise was convicted of a federal felony in the early 1970s for conspiracy to hide mob interest in a Las Vegas Casino. From what I've researched, I'm not seeing any one specific person at Emprise Corporation named as a direct connection to Don Bolles, but they're connected to the Funk family through their partnership with the racetracks, and there's one specific character of note in that organization who does have a connection to Don Bolles. 

[Amanda] Bradley was the son of one of the senior members of the Funk organization, and he was heavily into drinking in the 1960s. He was in the middle of an extremely messy divorce from his wife, Betty. Don Bolles became friends with Betty and was helping support her through the divorce process, but a few years later, that relationship actually changed in nature to becoming more intimate, and they began having an affair. Don Bolles would talk to Betty about the things that he was interested in learning about the Funk organization or her husband specifically, and Betty would turn around and help him in this investigative work by actually having her lawyer obtain that information as part of the divorce proceedings. And that was how Don Bolles learned a lot of information in his investigative work. And this really passed Bradley Funk off, which I'm… I'm not a fan of Bradley Funk at all. But it seems fair considering I'm not working with the mob or anything. But I would be fucking pissed  too if I was divorcing my husband and he started having an affair with somebody who started like writing shit about me and giving all my information to them to use against me and said whatever… So Jared don't get any fucking ideas. Anyway, Don Bulls would claim to have been personally threatened by Bradley Funk not long before he was killed. And when Don Bolles was in the hospital clinging to life, Betty would come to the hospital and be at his bedside and claim that Bradley Funk had something to do with this. He was behind this. There sounds like there might actually be some reasoning as to why she thought that. In fact, I believe her car was also checked for a bomb after this. But one of the factors that kind of leads to this idea that maybe Bradley Funk was behind the bombing was there was an off the book slush fund of $50,000 that Bradley Funk received in December of 1969, and he would end up using some of that money to hire a man named George Johnson. And George Johnson was an unlicensed private detective in the early 1970s and he started to investigate phone and bank records, as well as other private information relating to Don Bolles, US Congressman Sam Steiger, and a few members of the Arizona Racing Commission that Bradley Funk believed were putting the Emprise Funk racing empire in peril. And what he didn't expect was for George Johnson to then go to Congressman Sam Steiger with this information shortly after starting the investigation. So, Don Bolles, Congressman Sam Steiger, and the newspaper The Arizona Republic that Don was working for would actually start a civil litigation case against Emprise and the Funk organization, which ultimately ended up being settled out of court in 1973 when the Arizona Republic took a dive and they told Don Bolles to stop looking at the Funk organization, to stop looking at Emprise, and he was moved to start focusing his work on state government affairs. However, the Emprise Funk organization would come up again in that work because state legislature and the Attorney General were considering removing the Emprise Funk organization as dog track operators because of the Emprise federal felony conviction as according to Arizona State law, felons can't hold state licensure. So, because the Emprise organization had that federal conviction, they really, per Arizona State law couldn't hold licensure for the dog tracks anymore. We know about the slush fund because actually Don Bolles got a copy of the slush fund memo that was signed by Bradley Funk and three other members of the Funk organization shortly before the car bombing through Betty's attorney, because she had given Don Bolles permission to have access to all her divorce proceeding files. Don Bolles had also talked about a confidential informant that he had shortly before he died, regarding the potential of a separate set of books that the Funk family was keeping and a document that he had found regarding Bradley Funk that he would say was something he had been looking for all of these years. And while I don't know what that document is Don Devereaux does say in his newsletter that he has seen that particular document and he feels like it is significant. 

[Amanda] But wait, there's more... Bradley Funk had a friend named Neil Roberts and we talked about Neil Roberts in Part 1. Bradley Funk and Neil Roberts had known each other since their time at Phoenix North High School. And if you recall from episode one, Neil Roberts was the attorney who had a theory on the Don Bolles murder that initially implicated Max Dunlap and Kemper Marley, and then John Adamson's testimony would later seal that. Adamson and Roberts were drinking buddies as well, and they were closely associated. By the 1970s, John Adamson would allege that he didn't know Bradley Funk, but that was found to actually not really be the case. In fact, Don Devereaux the reporter that had been deep diving on this case alleges that someone in the Phoenix Police Department would actually attempt to hide the relationship between John Adamson and Bradley Funk by destroying a report about Adamson assisting a very drunk Bradley Funk into a… drunk Funk [laughs]… into a cab at the Phoenix dog track. Additionally, Eileen Roberts, the secretary of Neil Roberts, there's no relationship between the two, they just have the same last name would give sworn testimony in 1977 at a deposition that a few days before the bombing. There was a meeting at Neil Roberts’ law office between Neil Roberts, John Adamson and a man named Mr. Funk. She would report that when Mr. Funk would come to the office, she was asked to leave to run errands or just send out of the office in general. Like go away lady. And of interesting note, the Attorney General at the time, William Schaefer, who was the chief prosecutor in the early days of the Bulls investigation, was at that deposition and actually put a stop to her participating in a photo lineup to determine if the man that she had seen come to the office, because she saw him, was Bradley Funk. Like why wouldn't you want to know that you're the prosecutor? But again they… so they ended up clearing Bradley Funk very quickly for some reason. Eileen was interviewed in the in that podcast I listened to about this, The Patsy, and would state that Max Dunlap was wrongfully convicted and wrongfully accused. So, Neil Roberts actually had come to live in her apartment with her and her son in the late 1990s as he was dying of alcoholism and multiple sclerosis, and he told her before he died that he had been one of the leading men to arrange for Don Bolles’ murder and that Max Dunlap had been a Patsy and taken the fall for this murder. This same information was published in an interview with the reporter named Mark Flatten that was in the Mesa Tribune in February of 1999, she didn't say anything to anyone regarding his deathbed confession until after he died in January of 1999. However, Neil Roberts had also confessed to a New York Times reporter named Molly Ivins back in 1979. 1979! Like, let's hold on to that because I'm, I'm gonna come back to some similar stuff like that in a few minutes. Eileen would have more to share about a connection between Neil Roberts, Bradley Funk, and John Adamson. 

[Amanda] So, during the July 4th weekend of 1976, Neil Roberts told Eileen that he was going to a dog show in Seattle, Washington. However, he would then place calls to her at the law office from a phone number with an area code of 714, which was the area code for San Diego, California. California… Washington… very different places. Bradley Funk at that time was staying at an alcohol rehabilitation facility in Orange, California and he would tell his roommate at the rehab that he was leaving the rehab for a temporary period on the weekend of July 4th to go attend a celebration at the San Diego Harbor for the bicentennial July 4th holiday. This roommate would come forward with this information to both California and Phoenix law enforcement. John Adamson’s girlfriend Gail Owens, we had talked about her in part one would also come forward to Phoenix Police, regarding a meeting that she had witnessed in San Diego, at a bar called the Iron Maiden that she had described as sinister before the bombing between Adamson and a bearded Caucasian man. What's interesting is that the police never questioned Owens further about the details of this meeting. They didn't want to know about the conversation, didn't want to know about the bearded man. In fact, the prosecutor of the case, William Schaefer, would claim that there's no point in having Gail Owens do a photo lineup to see if this man was Bradley Funk, even though there were reports that he was in that area and that he had a beard at this time, like, why don't you want to know that? Anyway, Don Devereaux in one of his deep dive newsletters on this case would discuss that he had also offered to have Gail Owens do a photo lineup, but she declined. I kind of found that interesting, like, why? Was she threatened? Was she paid off? I have my own theories, but I'm… I'm not going to get into that because... 

[Amanda] So, Neil Roberts would end up arranging for himself a limited immunity deal with Maricopa County Attorney Moise Burger. If you recall, Roberts had arranged for John Adamson to leave town right after the car bombing, and he went to Lake Havasu. In exchange for this limited immunity deal, all Neil Roberts contributed to the case was a vague theory that maybe Max Dunlap was involved in the murder of Don Bolles as payback for a critical article that he had written regarding Kemper Marley, who was Dunlap’s business partner and mentor, and had helped raise him since he was twelve as like some form of cowboy justice. What's interesting to note is that Neil Roberts had known Moise Berger previously, Neil Roberts had actually represented a man named Ned Warren who was prosecuted for slipping bribes to various public officials, including Moise Berger, in land deals. There was at least one member of the Phoenix police who was upset about Neil Roberts getting this immunity deal, and that was an intelligence detective named Lonzo McKraken, who was eventually able to get Moise Berger chatting over drinks and got a confession from him about him accepting illegal gratuities from Ned Warren, which like ultimately ruined his career. But this isn't the craziest thing about Neil Roberts because Phoenix police received a statement from a man named Hank Landry who knew both John Adamson and Neil Roberts, and Landry would tell police that he had attended a Memorial Day party in the days before the Don Polls bombing. Neil Roberts was in attendance at this party. He'd been drinking, he had a really bad drinking problem, and he was just casually telling people at this party about this upcoming murder and even went so far as to tell them that a bomb was the needed method of killing him because a bomb would make the message behind the murder loud and clear, which was necessary. What the fuck? So, you may be wondering, why? Why did the method of Don Bolles murder have to be loud and clear? This was potentially far, far, far more than just Don Bolles having an affair with the ex-wife of Bradley Funk. It was potentially far, far more than the potential of the mob skimming money off the dog track operation of the Funk Emprise Corporation. There is the potential for corruption of high-level politicians and investigators, and this is just my opinion… there is definitely the potential for the wrongful conviction of Max Dunlap because someone needed to take the fall to help cover up all of the other activity that was going on. Gold diversion, land fraud deals, mysterious deaths labeled as suicide. It goes on and on and on, and I'm not going to get into all of it because I just don't think that I can do it justice. I think that it's going to take us far away from the point of this show and because as crazy as the story is, if these things are true, there's been no justice for any of them, so I'm going stick with what we know. 

[Amanda] Alright, so before the police tracked down John Adamson to question him after the bombing because they had his name from Don Bolles himself, an attorney representing Neil Roberts had called the Phoenix Police Department and brought up a lot of blah, blah, blah… We know this part. This is where the theory came about Max Dunlap and Kimber Marley. Don Devereaux would say that Neil Roberts and John Adamson went so far to kind of help plant the seed to investigators at this point about Max Dunlap by going to one of their regular bars, the Ivanhoe in Phoenix, and they had a very loud conversation at that bar a few days after the bombing. Now at this point, Adamson and Roberts were already under surveillance by investigators and they were surrounded by undercover police at the bar. And they began having this loud conversation about Adamson being owed money for his part in the bombing and Roberts told him that he should go, quote- talk to your fat friend on Bethany Road, that he pay you the money he owes you; and which further implicated Max Dunlap to the police. So, this in part would lead to Max Dunlap being surveilled by the police as well. Max Dunlap he was initially questioned and he was released by investigators. They didn't find anything. However, when they would end up going to question him again, Dunlap asked to be polygraphed. And he failed the polygraph. But you know, investigators, they believe that he failed the polygraph because he's lying. We know polygraphs, they are not accurate, there's a lot of reason why people can fail a polygraph. There are people that are lying and they pass a polygraph and that's why they're not permissible as evidence in court. But what otherwise implicated him was on June 10th, 1976, Max Dunlap delivered money to an attorney’s office named Tom Foster. He was the attorney for John Adamson, and Max would claim, when questioned about this later, that this money was delivered to him by a man that he had never met before when he was getting ready to get into his truck, the man stopped him. So he told this to investigators. But he also wrote this in his journals that his daughter found and talked about in the Patsy. And in his journal the man told him that he had come on behalf of Neil Roberts who needed his help because he was in trouble and the man had a brown paper bag Which he gave to Max Dunlap and instructed him to exchange the money inside from $100 bills to 20s and deliver it to Tom Foster, and the man gave him Tom Foster’s business card. Dunlap wrote in his journal that he contemplated not doing this, but he figured that it wouldn't be a big deal because he had never been in trouble before, and he put the money in a Manila envelope as instructed after he broke it down into smaller bills. He wrote JA on the corner as the man had instructed him to do so, and he drove to Tom Foster's office and when he got there, John Adamson was in the lobby. John gestured for him to come into an office off the lobby when he arrived and John took the money from him. But Max Dunlap wrote that John Adamson seemed off like he was in a stupor, and he asked him like, do I deliver the money to you? I don't know what's going on. And John just told him, I'll take it, and Max Dunlap left. And he never realized what would happen to him later because of this. So Matt Dunlap, he is arrested. There's another man that John Adamson implicates in this named James Robison and they're both arrested and they would go on trial together- Max Dunlap and James Robison. 

[Amanda] What's interesting to me that is discussed in the Patsy is that the Arizona State legislature ended up repealing the accomplice statute, which would allow the prosecution to call the accomplice of any crime to testify against their co-defendants without the corroboration of any other witness and would be able to seek the death penalty and they repealed this shortly before the trial of Max Dunlap and James Robison and repealing this allowed for the state to give John Adamson a plea deal so that he would avoid the death penalty. But he had to testify against Max Dunlap and James Robison and he took it, of course. He didn't want to die. The trial of Max Dunlap and James Robinson began on September 3rd, 1977 and Adamson would testify stating that Max Dunlap had hired him to kill three men, Don Boles, Al Lizantz, and Bruce Babbitt, who was the Attorney General at the time, and that he had been paid $6000 for his part in the plot. The reason Dunlap reportedly gave John Adamson for wanting these men killed was that the men were troublesome to Kemper Marley and Don Bolles was selected to be the first victim due to past articles that he had written.  We kind of talked about that in part one where Don Bolles had written articles about how Kemper Marley had been given a high-level position at the Racing Commission and ended up having to step down from that because of all the publicity about that. Adamson had testified that Robison had agreed to assist him with the murder and he that Robison had been the one to detonate the bomb with a remote control device after Adamson placed the bomb under Don Bolles car. One of the biggest concerns that I have with this case and a lot of people have had with this case was at the time it didn't appear to be a fair trial and we're going to talk a little bit about that now.

[Amanda] So I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that the FBI were looking into Emprise and they actually got involved in the investigation of Don Bolles murder because of the potential of that link, as well as being asked to assist by the Phoenix Police Department. And one of the concerns that Don Devereaux talks about in his newsletter was that the information provided by the FBI in the Don Bolles case was far from fair to the defense of Max Dunlap. Actually, Arizona's deputy Attorney General, William J Schaefer, had been on loan from Maricopa Counties Attorney's Office to serve as the special prosecutor in the Don Bolles case. And on August 10th, 1976, the Phoenix FBI office was instructed to make excised copies of informants reports available to the Phoenix FBI office for review by the local prosecutor. But no documents or records were to actually be given out so he basically he was given the secret reading file of information from a confidential informant of the FBI. Since the documents weren't physically given to him to take, the defense was not given the same opportunity to get that information because that's how the FBI practiced at the time, the FBI documented all over the place that this was approved at the highest level and by legal counsel. So, in the same newsletter by Don Devereaux, there's another Phoenix FBI memorandum on August 24th, 1976, that stated that William Schaeffer again visited Phoenix FBI offices on August 16th, 1976, to read the excised copies of the informant reports again, this memorandum goes on to warn that Schaefer speculated that it might prove to be unavoidable for him to have to identify this informant as a source along with his information to defense attorneys, but that Schaefer will take every precaution necessary to preclude questioning of source by defense attorneys on the matter of any prior association with the FBI. It should be noted that when John Harvey Adamson went to trial, his defense attorney had sent a subpoena to the FBI for information regarding the Bolles homicide and this subpoena went all the way to the US Attorney General's Office for approval and the response would set the standard for all subsequent defendants in the case. The only information that would be approved for release was what was already given to Phoenix Police Department, which was excised of all administrative markings, all identities of informants and sources and their names and identifying data of individuals who furnish information pursuant to all Pacific promise of confidentiality. And on October 1st, 1976, US Attorney General Levi would officially add his own support of this, agreeing that any release of FBI documents beyond those given to the local police would, quote- be detrimental to the interests of the United States- end quote. What the fuck is in this file that it's detrimental to the interests of the United States? Like literally what is in there? Maybe I don't want to know. Um…

[Amanda] Don Deveraux, he doesn't find out who this confidential informant is, but he does discuss a few clues in information that he was able to obtain. And one clue was a communication from the Phoenix FBI office to the FBI Director Kelly stating that Phoenix PD homicide detectives have actually briefly interviewed the confidential source in June of 1976, and they had gotten the sense in this process that this informant may have already been an informant to the FBI and this relationship was actually verified by the FBI, and the FBI instructed the Phoenix police to keep the connection confidential and to avoid any further contact with that source. The informant would be instructed to quote- continue contact with suspects, end quote and report to the FBI and the FBI would provide any information to the Phoenix police on a timely basis. The suspects are not identified in that information however, the names John Harvey Adamson and Neil Roberts do appear in the caption, and there's also communication that was marked priority from FBI Director Kelly in August of 1976, reminding the Bureau's Phoenix office that the confidential source in question had previously furnished US information concerning matters of organized crime. So clearly not at all sketchy, right? One has to wonder if Max Dunlap and James Robison would have initially been convicted had the defense had access to that information and what was the FBI planning to do with it? Like, were they hoping to keep it quiet and maybe go for a bigger organized crime takedown later on that potentially never happened. Or maybe it did, and it's never been publicized that it was related to Don Bolles and Max Dunlap is just left to sit in jail and take the fall for forever. Like, what the fuck? So unfortunately, both men were convicted of murder on November 6th, 1978 and they were both sentenced to death. However, we're still not done. Three years later, in February of 1980, the Arizona Supreme Court ended up overturning their conviction and the reason it was overturned was because the court initially did not deny a defense motion to strike John Adamson's testimony when he asserted his Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer certain questions posed to him on cross examination which violated his plea deal. And he's a fucking liar. We touched on that in episode one like he was found to lie about a bunch of things like the size of the bomb and a bunch of other stuff they just let it go forward. Max Dunlap went to jail. James Robison went to jail. Thankfully, you know, this got overturned and the charges against both Max Dunlap and James Robison were dismissed without prejudice because John Adamson, he decided he didn't want to testify against them again. 

[Amanda] So I really wish I could say this is where it ended and that Max Dunlap and James Robison went on to live the rest of their lives as free men. But it's not fucking over. John Adamson was taken back to trial for murder, and he was sentenced to death in November of 1980, his death sentence would be overturned in 1988. And in 1990, Max Dunlap and James Robison were again charged with murder because John Adamson decided- I will testify against them again. So, they went back to trial and this time Max Dunlap and James Robison, they were tried separately and on April 20th, 1993 Max Dunlap was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without possibility of parole for 25 years at the age of 64 and James Robison, however on December 17th of 1993 was acquitted. The testimony against him by John Adamson wasn't enough to convict him, but it was for Max Dunlap. Anyway, James Robinson… its not really over for him either, because he was immediately charged by the FBI for soliciting a prison inmate who killed John Adamson while he was waiting for the second trial, and he ended up pleading guilty to that. He served five years, and he would die in 2013. At the age of 90, but we're still not done here, guys. 

[Amanda] Don Devereaux would discuss in one of the newsletters he released on his investigations that he had a lengthy quote- off the record interview with prison inmate in 2004. And this prison inmate would tell him that John Adamson had confessed to him that Bradley Funk and Neil Roberts were responsible for the murder of Don Bolles, and they had also arranged for a beating of a man named Fred Porter. Fred Porter, we talked a little bit about him in the first episode, but he was connected to the dog tracks and had met with Don Bolles a few days before the bombing, and he ended up getting the shit beat out of him with a bat a couple days after the bombing. The inmate was hesitant to let this information public unless it was actually going to result in a new trial for Max Dunlap. However, Max Dunlap was not at this point in any financial or physical condition to make that happen and so a copy of this inmates sworn affidavit with all of his information was prepared, and a copy of it went to the Arizona Attorney General at that time, Terry Goddard, in 2009. But the attorney general never did anything with it. He never went in and questioned this previous inmate. It just sat there and Max Dunlap unfortunately died in prison in 2009. So basically, that that's where we're at with this case. Bradley Funk died of a heart attack in 1989. Neil Roberts died of alcoholism and multiple sclerosis in 1999. John Adamson is dead. Max Dunlap is dead. James Robison is dead. We'll never uncover the truth of the matter in this case, I don't think, unless it's said that Neil Roberts had wrote a book about all of this stuff and had given it to an attorney and nobody's ever found it. So, I don't know maybe if that comes up, I mean, it literally just happened with some guy who is now being potentially convicted of Tupac murder. So, I mean, that could resurface and part of what's getting that guy in trouble is what he had written in his memoir. So, I mean, it could happen, but I'm not feeling very confident and I… I can tell you I have a lot of questions, way more questions than when I started looking into this. I mentioned earlier in this that this case potentially has the cover up from high level government officials, diversion of gold, the land fraud deals, mysterious deaths that were likely murders that were covered up as suicides and I could potentially do another couple episodes on this case but don't want it to take away from the focus of the show being on true crime and history and stories from New York. The only reason I started covering this case was as a road trip episode and I got really distracted and went into shutdown mode. But again, if you're interested in doing more digging on your own, listen to the podcast The Patsy. It's linked in the show notes… It's on a couple different podcast platforms. It's got a lot of information in there. Don Devereaux, the journalist that I got a lot of this information from this, he helped work on that podcast, but he has a ton of information from his investigations on his website, again linked in the show notes. 

[Amanda] I'd love to hear your thoughts on this case, so feel free to reach out to me on social media. We're on Facebook at the New York Stark side Facebook page. We're on X Twitter, whatever the. Hell, that is an Instagram at NY Darkside pod. I'm swearing a lot in this episode for some reason. You can e-mail me at nydarksidepodcast@gmail.com and check out my website www.nydarksidepodcast.com and all of our resources are there. There's tons more information all of our past episodes. There is a form there if you have an idea for an upcoming episode, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening and again, for all your patience while I have gotten myself back in order. Mental health is important, people take care of yourselves. I love you. I am looking forward to bringing you more content. Next week, happy spooky season and stay curious.