Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (30 page)

Warren turned white when he heard that Ed was missing. They thought he was having a heart attack. He canceled a business meeting and walked out of the room and went home for the day, and perhaps he wasn’t faking. Three people witnessed it and they all tell the story the same way.

He had set up a kind of alibi for himself more than a month before, on the same day my father testified before the grand jury. That evening, Warren had asked Bill Nathan, one of the investors who had bought Consolidated Mortgage, to swear out a complaint against Ed Lazar with the attorney general’s office, charging Ed Lazar with fraud. He thought this might neutralize the testimony Ed Lazar had just given that morning. He asked Nathan to tell this to Lonzo McCracken. He also asked Nathan to tell McCracken that he was looking for a deal. He was ill, he had a heart problem, he was afraid he would be convicted and go to jail, he would be completely broke from the legal bills. Perhaps he believed in this version of himself in the moment he presented it to Bill Nathan. Within a year he would be making comments about how Ed Lazar was probably killed by a jealous husband, or because he was selling drugs.

Around nine o’clock that morning, a lawyer named Rad Vukichevich parked in the second underground level of the First Federal Savings Building, where he noticed a Pontiac Grand Ville with its front door open, a briefcase and a set of keys lying on the ground beside it. He informed the parking lot assistant manager, Ruben Lopez, who eventually brought the briefcase and keys to the office of the building manager. Lopez noted the parking permit number on the Pontiac, which could be used to trace its owner. About three hours later, around 1:15, after Ed had missed his eleven and one o’clock and lunch appointments, his office called Susie to ask if she knew where he was. She thought at first that he had just wandered off somewhere, which he did sometimes, often to her annoyance. Around two o’clock, she called the county attorney’s office to see if they might have called him in for any further questioning. Around 2:15, three Phoenix police officers were dispatched to the garage and a missing person file was opened. It was about 3:45 when the briefcase and keys finally made it to the office of Harold Toback, Ed’s boss, who called Susie again. About seven hours had passed since Lee DiFranco and Doug Hardin had driven off in their station wagon. Detective Wallace Sem discovered the body in the stairwell at 4:47. The Homicide Detail arrived almost two hours later, at 6:40.

It’s somewhere around this time that the current span of my memory really begins, in fits and starts, as if some clock in my mind had been reset to zero on that day.

21

O
n my last night in Phoenix, I met Chuck Kelly, a reporter for the
Arizona Republic,
at a restaurant in Scottsdale. A few weeks before, Kelly had done me a great favor by sending me more than a hundred pages of photocopied news clippings in which my father’s name appeared. Looking through that sheaf of papers, I’d had the sense of reading a baroquely plotted crime novel composed of found documents, a cacophony of names and faces, facts and suppositions, and in the silent gaps, as if in some occult code, the story of what had happened.

Joining us at the bar before we ate was Jon Sellers, a retired detective from the Phoenix Police Department. He had worked my father’s case for several months in 1975 and 1976. Kelly and Sellers had known each other for over thirty years, since at least June of 1976, when one of Kelly’s fellow reporters, Don Bolles, was murdered by a car bomb in the parking lot of the Clarendon Hotel in downtown Phoenix. The murderer turned out to be John Adamson—now always referred to as John Harvey Adamson. The most likely scenario is that he’d been hired to do this by a man named Max Dunlap at the behest of a wealthy Phoenix businessman named Kemper Marley. The story is byzantine and takes in dozens of names and in some ways it dovetails with the story of my father and Warren. Bolles had been lured to the Clarendon Hotel that afternoon with a tip from Adamson about land fraud, allegedly involving the usual suspects, Barry Goldwater, Congressman Sam Steiger, and Harry Rosenzweig.

Kelly had told me that Sellers was from Texas and a real cowboy, and he was not speaking metaphorically. Sellers stood near the bar in a black fringed jacket and a black wide-brimmed hat, nearing seventy but vigorous and fit. The hostess told him he would have to remove his hat if he wanted to have a seat with us in the dining room and Sellers said no, in that case we would have to talk in the bar.

He asked me, “Where do you want to go?” and I asked him to start with Lonzo McCracken. He said he hadn’t trusted McCracken, had always thought McCracken was on a crusade. He was angry that McCracken had not protected my father. I asked if McCracken had offered protection and he said that McCracken claimed he had, but he didn’t press hard enough, he should have insisted—a safe house, even overnight stays in jail. What Sellers remembered most about the case had more to do with the physical evidence: my father’s briefcase, the ballistics report, what kind of silencer might have been used. He said they’d had a good witness at one point, a woman who said she’d been there in the garage and had heard and seen some things, but that she was scared off by the FBI, who started asking her questions about land fraud.

I told him it seemed obvious to me that Ned Warren had been involved in the murder and Sellers agreed that that was everyone’s suspicion. I asked him why Ned Warren had never been so much as interviewed by the police, and Sellers said that was a good question, he had never gotten an answer to it himself.

Warren died in 1980, having spent the last few years of his life in prison, though mostly out of it on appeal. He had been convicted in federal court along with Gale Nace for the extortion of Dennis Kelly. The Arizona courts had finally convicted him of bribing public officials and of twenty counts of fraud in the sale of Jack Ross’s Chino Grande Ranchettes to U.S. servicemen overseas. I spoke to James Cornwall on the telephone just as I was finishing this book. I said I was surprised that he was in Phoenix after all he’d been through, and he told me that his wife’s family lived there, it was home, he’d gotten past the point of being intimidated. He had spent three years in Florence Prison looking over his shoulder—three years incarcerated with the very people he had put there with his testimony. They had tried to kill him, as they did kill Tony Serra one day in the prison sign shop. Cornwall said he had had to stop being afraid. He’s a retired minister now—in 1984 he founded the Scottsdale Worship Center, an evangelical church. He didn’t speak as an evangelist when we talked. I had felt some trepidation about calling him, because I’d already written him into this book—I had never been able to find him before and didn’t know he was still alive. I had read about the Rolls-Royce he once owned, the liveried driver, the house in Paradise Valley. I had seen and heard video footage of him from the time period. I had the transcript of a 60
Minutes
segment in which Cornwall says at one point: “I very kindly throw the responsibility back to the public for falling for such a lousy pitch of nothing more than five hundred free green stamps and a free cowboy lunch, which consisted of a hamburger and some beans.” I was cynically unsurprised to find out that Cornwall had become an evangelical preacher. But hearing him talk on the phone, I knew he had earned the authority to believe whatever he believed.

Don Bolles is the reason I know so much of this story: my father’s yogurt spoons, his dental appointments, his contracts and memos and the restaurants he frequented. When the bomb went off under Don Bolles’s car, the windows on one side of the Clarendon Hotel were shattered and guests came out onto their balconies to see a coil of smoke rising into the sky. Bolles himself survived for eleven days of physical agony. They amputated one leg, then the other, then his right arm, in an effort to stop the infection that eventually killed him. His murder led a group of journalists from around the country to join together and descend on Phoenix for six months to investigate what had happened and why. Their effort was called The Arizona Project. The group, the Investigative Reporters and Editors, looked into every dark corner they could find. They published a series of twenty-three articles in several newspapers across the country and accumulated a vast trove of documents and interviews now housed at the University of Missouri in Columbia. I spent days there looking over some of their files and listening to some of their cassettes, and I could have spent several more weeks researching further. In a way, because of those files, I learned more about my father than I might know if he were still alive.

As of 2008, they were still sorting out the tangled finances of Cochise College Park, one of Warren’s earliest and most compromised projects. Lots had been sold two or three times, mortgages had gone unrecorded, back taxes had accumulated, there were hundreds of owners with contracts and even satisfied mortgages but no titles or deeds. Whole sections of the subdivision were “abandoned to acreage” and sold off at a land auction. One report estimates a total of $40 million in fraud.

I asked around Camp Verde for any information about fraud at Verde Lakes but didn’t find anything. The most definitive comment I got there was from a title insurer who told me that by and large Consolidated had a better reputation than Warren’s other firms. Later, I found A. A. McCollum, the man who bought Consolidated in 1973 and was tried in federal court for whatever crimes may have been committed before he took over. He and the other three company officers were found innocent.