Entangled for decades in web of Bolles' murder

It's an unwritten but unbroken rule: We commemorate our best and worst days every five years. The fifth anniversary. The tenth. The fifteenth. And so on.

Because of that, the second day of June will mean a lot more next year. Much more than it means this year, except to people like Richard Wolfe. June 2, 2016, will be the fortieth anniversary of the day a bomb exploded under the car of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.

Bolles would die 11 days later, after losing one leg, then an arm, then the other leg. There were investigations, arrests, convictions, overturned convictions, new trials, new convictions, questions, mysteries, suspicions and more questions. The shock waves from the explosion that killed Bolles have reverberated through all the decades since, with memories of the murder and its aftermath lodged like shrapnel in the souls of those who lived with the crime and sought the criminals.

Like Richard Wolfe. He is 81, now, and not well. In 1976 he was an investigator with the Arizona Attorney General's office, which launched its own investigation of the case.

"Poor Don," Wolfe says. "We went to the same church together. He was a fine man. I lived that investigation 24 hours a day for more than a year. It never really went away, I guess."

Wolfe read a column I wrote last month about finding Bolles's shredded car in a police impound lot in the 1990s. The memories of the murder welled up in him, though Wolfe says they're never far from the surface.

"We did the best we could," he told me. "Our office. Phoenix police. We worked with (Det.) Jon Sellers and many others. We figured we knew all the players and what happened. But we couldn't get all of them convicted."

The way investigators saw it, a man named Max Dunlap paid a small time crook named John Harvey Adamson to plant the bomb. Adamson later said an accomplice, James Robison, triggered the explosion. Adamson served 20 years for the murder. Dunlap and Robison were convicted, but those convictions were overturned. Each was retried, with Dunlap again convicted and Robison acquitted, though he later pleaded guilty to a charge of trying to hire someone to kill Adamson.

Adamson testified that Dunlap wanted to kill Bolles because the reporter had wronged Dunlap's mentor, millionaire businessman Kemper Marley Sr., who was never charged in the case. Others who've studied the crime disagree. The argument goes on.

"There was so much corruption in Phoenix and Arizona at the time," Wolfe told me. "As we started looking at all the different characters in the case, and who they associated with, it became like a spider web. It went off in so many different directions it became difficult to stay on Don Bolles's case. It was as if we could have worked on different aspects of it for years with all of those different directions. We got most of those responsible for killing Don, I believe. But maybe not all of them. Like I said, it was a spider web."

With some of those involved in the case still caught in the web.