1928–1976
The Arizona Republic | Phoenix, Arizona | June 2, 1976 (bombed); died June 13, 1976 | Age 47
His assassination by car bomb shocked the journalism community and sparked the first large-scale collaborative investigation by reporters nationwide, cementing the principle that killing a journalist would never silence the story.
The Journalist
Donald Fifield Bolles was practically born into the newspaper business. His father ran the Associated Press bureau in New Jersey, and his grandfather, Stephen Bolles, had worked as an editor at the Janesville Gazette in Wisconsin before being elected to the House of Representatives.
Born in Milwaukee in 1928, Bolles moved to New Jersey as a child and graduated from Teaneck High School in 1946. At Beloit College in Wisconsin, where he studied government, he served as the editor of the student newspaper. It seemed like his path was set from the start—journalism was the family trade, and Bolles embraced it.
Like many journalists of his time, Bolles served in combat before launching his career in earnest. After graduating from Beloit, he joined the Army and was deployed to Korea. When he returned stateside, he went to work for the Associated Press, spending nine years as a sports editor and rewrite man in New York, New Jersey, and Kentucky.
In 1962, Bolles joined the Arizona Republic. He would remain there for the rest of his career, quickly establishing himself on the investigative beat.
The Work
Just three years after joining the Republic, Bolles was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering bribery within Arizona’s state tax commission. It was the beginning of a body of work that would shape investigative journalism in Arizona for more than a decade.
Bolles specialized in untangling the connections between politicians, organized crime, and corrupt business practices. He exposed land fraud schemes that swindled buyers across the country, tracing how Arizona developers created fake subdivisions and sold worthless desert plots to out-of-state retirees. He documented the infiltration of Mafia figures into Arizona in a series called “The Menace Within,” naming names and tracking money through shell companies. He investigated Emprise Corporation, a Buffalo-based company that controlled Arizona’s dog tracks, revealing its ties to organized crime figures in multiple cities.
In 1974, he received the Arizona Press Club’s Newsman of the Year award for exposing a conflict-of-interest scandal in the state legislature. He had shown how lawmakers voted on bills that directly benefited their private businesses.
Colleagues described him as relentless—always working, always digging, maintaining a handmade database of index cards tracking every known organized crime figure in Arizona and their associates.
This work came at a price. Bolles faced repeated death threats, had his phone tapped, and his bank account monitored. Friends noticed he became more cautious and guarded. His wife, Rosalie, urged him to take their name off the Phoenix telephone directory. For years, he resisted, insisting, “No, people have to be able to get hold of me.” Only in late 1975 did he finally agree.
By then, Bolles had grown weary. He was moved off the investigative beat, moving first to cover Phoenix City Hall, then the state legislature. Friends noticed the change. He seemed tired of the constant battle and the endless labor that investigative work required. When asked if he would continue his investigations, he simply replied, “No, no more of that.”
The Final Story
But in early June 1976, Bolles caught wind of a potentially corrupt land deal involving Republican leaders and private businesses. Despite his exhaustion and his earlier promises to step back, he couldn’t resist.
On June 2, 1976, Bolles left a note in his office typewriter explaining that he was meeting an informant named John Adamson at the Hotel Clarendon. Adamson had promised to share information about a shady land deal, and Bolles planned to return to the newsroom by 1:30 p.m.
Bolles arrived at the Clarendon and waited in the lobby. After several minutes, he received a brief phone call—Adamson calling to postpone or move the meeting. Bolles walked back to his car parked in an adjacent lot.
As he backed his 1976 Datsun 710 out of the parking space, six sticks of dynamite taped beneath the driver’s seat exploded. The blast pulverized his lower body and hurled him half out of the vehicle onto the street. Though his right leg was blown off and his face was blackened by the explosion, he remained conscious.
A bystander rushed to help, using his belt as a tourniquet. Bolles, looking up through broken glasses, asked for his wife to be called. He identified himself as a reporter and then uttered his final words: “They finally got me—the Mafia, Emprise. Find John Adamson.”
Bolles was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where doctors amputated both legs and an arm in a desperate attempt to save him. He died eleven days later, on June 13, at the age of 47.
Just three days after the bombing, the Arizona Republic ran a lead editorial that captured the moment: “With the assassination of Don Bolles, the City of Phoenix realizes it has come of age. The slimy hand of the gangster and the pitiless atrocities of the terrorist are part of the current Phoenix scene.”
The following year, John Adamson pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for building and planting the bomb. Others were convicted in the conspiracy in coming years, but the exact motive for the attack remains unknown.
The Legacy
Bolles’s murder came just days before the first national conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), where he had been scheduled to speak. His death sent shockwaves through the journalism community. For years, there had been an unspoken rule—organized crime didn’t target cops or reporters. That code had been broken.
In response, IRE launched the Arizona Project. Led by Newsday’s Robert W. Greene, nearly 40 journalists from 23 newspapers across the country converged on Arizona for five months to complete Bolles’s work. It marked the first large-scale collaborative investigation in American journalism history.
The resulting 23-part series unveiled Arizona’s intricate web of corruption, organized crime, and land fraud—exactly what Bolles’s killers had tried to prevent him from exposing. The series ran in newspapers nationwide, including the Miami Herald, the Washington Star, the Kansas City Star, the Boston Globe, and the Denver Post, though notably not in the Arizona Republic itself.
The message was clear: killing a reporter would not silence the story. It would only amplify it.
In 2017, on the 40th anniversary of the Arizona Project, IRE established the Don Bolles Medal to recognize investigative journalists who exhibit extraordinary courage in standing up against intimidation. The first recipient was Mexican journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea, who was assassinated that same year for exposing organized crime and corruption. In 2023, the medal was awarded posthumously to Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, who was stabbed to death in apparent retaliation for his investigative reporting.
Today, investigative reporters study the Arizona Project as a model of journalistic solidarity and collaboration. Bolles showed that investigative journalism, when done right, can threaten powerful interests enough to provoke violence. The response to his murder demonstrated that the journalism community would not be silenced—that every assassination would only lead to more reporters, more investigations, and more truth-telling.
Content included in this publication was generously provided by Freedom Forum which hosted the Journalists Memorial for 18 years to commemorate journalists who died reporting the news.
Freedom Forum is a partner with the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation.