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Key points:
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Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was killed in a car bombing 50 years ago
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Rep. Selina Bliss is pushing for a memorial to Bolles to be placed at Wesley Bolin Plaza
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Don Bolles’ assassination sparked a unique investigation into Arizona’s organized crime
It will be 50 years this coming June since Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was killed in a car bombing linked to an investigation he was doing.
And Rep. Selina Bliss says she thinks the timing may finally be right to line up the votes – and overcome some opposition from a few within her own Republican Party – to allow a memorial to him to be placed across the street from the Capitol in Wesley Bolin Plaza.
It isn’t a question of money.
HB2079, sponsored by the Prescott lawmaker, says any funds for its construction must be privately raised. And that’s been the financial case now for the entire time since the idea was first proposed in 2023 by Phoenix Democratic Rep. Jennifer Longdon and Republican Sen. T.J. Shope from Coolidge.
What prior efforts have run up against is Sen. Jake Hoffman who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Queen Creek Republican, who has never explained his opposition, has used his position to block any such plans.
And Senate President Warren Petersen has, in the past, chosen not to exercise his ability to have the proposal sidestep Hoffman’s committee.
Bliss, a Prescott Republican, picked up the cause after Longdon left the Legislature. She said she thinks this might be the year, particularly since prior efforts by her and others have generated more than enough bipartisan support to secure the necessary votes.
“I spoke with his daughter,” she told Capitol Media Services, referring to Diane. “She is stepping up to support the effort,” with an eye on the 50th anniversary.
“This is it,” Bliss said.
Her original bill, which earlier cleared the House on a 45-15 bipartisan margin, was assigned by Petersen to Hoffman’s committee, where it died.
So she cooked up a plan: Bliss got permission from Sen. Janae Shamp, R-Surprise, to tack the exact same language onto an unrelated bill that had already passed the Senate when it went to the House. Again, a 45-11 approval.
That sent the now-amended bill back to the Senate where Petersen could simply have brought the new version up for a final vote of the full chamber, without further committee action. He did not. And the bill died.
“Senate leadership failed to move it forward,” Bliss said.
And this year?
“I wonder if Senate President Petersen can assign it to a different committee to give it a chance?” Bliss asked.
Petersen did not respond to multiple inquiries asking whether he would again assign any House-passed bill to Hoffman’s committee where it would again meet the same fate. Nor would he say whether he would use his power to get around Hoffman.
Still, some things are different this year.
Petersen, now running for state attorney general, is looking at a larger constituency than just his home community.
And there’s something else.
The Senate president is pushing his own plan to create an honor for someone else who was struck down. He wants to rename a 78-mile of freeway that loops in and around Phoenix for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed in a shooting earlier this year in Utah, as a memorial.
“It is right that Arizonans are regularly reminded of the tremendous legacy of this champion for free speech who was assassinated for his stand, which is why I introduced this bill,” Petersen explained earlier this month.
Bliss took note.
“When I saw the Charlie Kirk proposal, I thought, ‘Well, this is perfect,’ because the precedent will be set that Sen. Warren Petersen is going to run an individual out there that’s part of our history,” she said. “So this makes the Don Bolles bill even more applicable to this movement to acknowledge these individuals and their important part of history.”
That history, Bliss said, is what drives her on this issue.
“I think I was 13 when this happened,” she said. “It very much affected me to think that this could happen in the United States of America, someone being assassinated with a car bomb for discovering the truth.”
Bolles had gone to the Clarendon Hotel in midtown Phoenix in 1976 to meet with a source. That person, later identified as John Harvey Adamson, never showed up.
As he was backing out, six sticks of dynamite which had been attached to his 1976 Datsun 210, were detonated by remote control. He died 11 days later.
Adamson, seeking to avoid the death penalty, agreed to testify against Max Dunlap, saying he had ordered Bolles to be killed, with police saying that was because of a story the reporter had written about a friend, liquor magnate Kemper Marley.
Dunlap eventually was sentenced to life behind bars after a first conviction was overturned. He died in prison after a clemency plea was rejected.
Adamson and James Robison, who was accused of actually planting and detonating the bomb, also have since died.
Bliss said it’s important for people to be told that story.
“We have so many people that come to Arizona and they do not understand our important, rich history,” Bliss said. “And this is very much a part of it.”
Now the question for lawmakers is whether Bolles deserves to be honored in Wesley Bolin Plaza, alongside Arizona’s various veterans, pioneer women, the Ten Commandments, and Jesuit missionary Father Kino. The plaza already is home to more than two dozen plaques, statues, and other memorabilia, including large guns from the USS Arizona and USS Missouri.
State law requires that any memorial, regardless of whether, as in this case, the tab is to be picked up through private donations, must receive legislative approval and the governor’s signature.
The idea has had its detractors.
One was Rep. Jacqueline Parker, a Mesa Republican in 2023.
“So, the only thing this guy accomplished is that he was a reporter?” she asked in voting against the measure.
It also initially drew opposition from Rep. Alexander Kolodin.
But the Scottsdale Republican, now running for secretary of state, later changed his mind after saying he had developed a new appreciation for Bolles – even if it came with a slap at other reporters.
“Don Bolles, as opposed to the current hacks that we have in the liberal media, was actually a newsman,” Kolodin said.
Bolles’ assassination, unusual in a country like the United States, provoked an immediate and unique response within the journalism community. Nearly 40 reporters from newspapers around the country, sponsored by Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., launched an extensive probe that resulted in a series of stories about organized crime in Arizona.
The series was printed in the Arizona Daily Star and in many newspapers around the country, though not in The Arizona Republic, where Bolles had worked.
Memorials at Wesley Bolin Plaza have not been without their controversy.
In 2011, the Senate voted to tear down part of a memorial to the victims of the 2001 terrorist attack at the World Trade Center after some lawmakers said they were upset by some of the phrases carved into the ring. Then-Sen. Al Melvin, R-Tucson, said the memorial should have only “patriotic, pro-American words” and not phrases that represented attitudes at the time, like “fear of foreigners.”
And in 2020, a monument to Confederate troops was removed from the park at the request of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This group placed it there in 1961 during increased activity in the civil rights movement.
The group stated that the monument needed repair. But there was something else, with demonstrations and it being vandalized since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The organization said it would be “unwise” to repair it where it is located, due to the current political climate.”
It has never been replaced.
Among others memorials and monuments still in place are those honoring Purple Heart recipients, crime victims, canines that worked with law enforcement, former Gov. Ernest McFarland, and the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshot Crew killed during a 2013 fire.
