1879
Casa Grande was founded in 1879 during a mining boom in Arizona, when the railroad came through.
about 0:05:37The story
Loretta Bowersock was born Loretta McGilton in Kansas on 2 March 1935, one of five sisters. Her father was an oil wildcatter who drilled dry holes for years, while her mother Gladys supported the family through a real estate company. Loretta grew up determined not to marry a dreamer. She was a fine tennis player, sociable and always carefully turned out. She married Dave Bowersock, an Air Force officer some years older than her, against her sisters' advice, and the couple moved around the country before settling in Tempe, Arizona, where they raised a son, Scott, and a daughter, Terry. The marriage ended in divorce in the early 1970s.
After the divorce Loretta took a degree at Arizona State University, taught dance and tennis and ran the tennis pro shop at the San Marco Golf Resort in Chandler for seven years. In 1979 Terry, then in her early twenties, borrowed 2,000 dollars from her grandmother and opened a consignment furniture store called Terry's Place, which grew into Terry's Consign and Design. Mother and daughter became business partners; by 1985 they had four stores and were filming their own television commercials. Terry later said she had hidden dyslexia for years, drawing crayon pictures to track the business, and the pair became locally famous in Phoenix.
Loretta had been divorced for more than a decade and wanted a man in her life. She had a seven-year affair with Rex Armistead, a US Justice Department organised crime investigator, but he never left his wife. In April 1987 she advertised a room to rent in her large Tempe house. He said he was a wealthy Scottish inventor and entrepreneur, a Wharton graduate and a classmate of Donald Trump, just back from Saudi Arabia where his employer had lost his pay cheque and his luggage had gone astray. He was handsome, charming and a superb cook, and Loretta was smitten. Her sisters, her daughter and her friends all doubted him, but she told them it was none of their business and let him move in.
Within a year he had access to her bank account, and he spent the next seventeen years living off Loretta and Terry. He claimed to be an inventor with fifteen patents, including solar panels, a solar car cover, serrated lawnmower blades and audio transducers, and he talked about building a solar plant on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. None of it ever produced money. In the late 1980s he persuaded Loretta to demand a buyout from Terry. In 1991 Loretta served her daughter with a lawsuit; Terry said she fell to her knees and cried, feeling she had lost her mother. The case rumbled on for years while Terry built the business into a national chain of 36 stores.
Loretta's money drained away. The mortgage on that house cost 1,209.80 dollars a month, leaving her 759.92 dollars for everything else. In fact he was intercepting the mortgage payments, washing the cheques and making them out to himself, and hiding the bank's warning letters. The house went into foreclosure, with a trustee sale set for 14 March 2005. He also ran up 40,000 dollars on eight credit cards in her name and borrowed 8,000 dollars from a neighbour.
On Saturday 11 December 2004 Loretta hosted a belated birthday dinner for her friend Lorraine Combs, serving a roast, and afterwards they drove around looking at Christmas lights. That afternoon, between 3.33 and 4.44, Loretta made seventeen consecutive calls to ten different Wells Fargo numbers, trying to sort out her finances. That evening he telephoned Scott in Hawaii twice.
He spent 17.48 dollars on his Visa card, withdrew 24,000 dollars in cash from Wells Fargo at Lakeshore Drive and Baseline Road, and bought two new mobile phones at a Sprint shop on Southern Avenue. He telephoned Terry at 10.15 to say he and Loretta were still at home and about to leave for Tucson. He drove to the outlet malls at Casa Grande, buying two baseball caps at 11.04, and stopped at Love's travel stop at 1.10 for two Arby's lunches and petrol. He checked into room 1613 at the Residence Inn in Tucson at about 12.30.
He described her grey outfit and silver hair. Police noticed fresh scratches on his hand, which he said came from moving exercise equipment. Mall and store security had no record of Loretta, and the red Dodge Caravan never appeared on the surveillance footage. A search by twenty officers, a helicopter and dogs found nothing, and by 4 a.m. it was scaled back.
A welfare check at the Tempe house produced a foreclosure notice and then a realtor asking to view the property. Inside, detectives found boxes of unopened mail, the foreclosure letters, and Loretta's cheque book showing two mortgage payments written faithfully every month that had never reached the lender. In the garage was a white van with its rear seat removed, a long grey hair in the back, and Loretta's purse rolled in a towel. In the red van they found a pickaxe, a dirty shovel, a passport, 24,000 dollars in cash and an Arizona map with a hand-drawn circle around the desert along Interstate 8 in Pinal County.
His account of the drive did not match credit card and phone records, and his phone showed seven calls made while stationary in the desert near the junction of Interstate 8 and Highway 84, two exits and five miles from the outlet mall, for two hours. His claimed education, his career as a Xerox vice president, his Scottish background and his claim never to have married were all false. Detectives concluded that Loretta had confronted him about the money after her bank calls and that he had killed her, probably by asphyxiation, then staged the mall disappearance.
On 16 December he moved to the Residence Inn at Phoenix airport, signing in as Bob Smith. On 18 December he left two copper paintings, a briefcase, the van keys and a notarised transfer of all his assets to Terry at the front desk, with a note saying that he and Loretta had vowed to spend eternity together. The next day Terry and police found him lethargic in his room; a tactical team and paramedics were called. Later that day he was found hanged in the garage of Loretta's home with a yellow extension cord around his neck.
Terry spent more than a year searching the desert with volunteers, cadaver dogs and, at the urging of psychics, an army of employees. On 10 January 2006 a rock collector found a half-buried body wrapped in a landscaping tarp in a river wash near the junction of Interstate 8 and Arizona 84, close to a blue abandoned motel that one psychic had described. The remains were Loretta's and the cause of death was asphyxiation. She was cremated and her ashes scattered over a beach in Hawaii. Her sister Shirley said she would never forgive him.