Guests - Betsy Smith, Dave Smith, Jeremy Duda, Elijah Norton
A Mother Executed at the Lake, a Journalist Assassinated in a Parking Lot, and $32 Billion That Cannot Go to a Democrat
Friday on Winn Tucson was a morning of consequential conversations threaded together by a single concern: institutions that are supposed to protect people either failing them or working actively against them. The show opened on political violence — against Sheridan Gorman, against investigative journalism, against the president — and closed on a question of institutional competence: who do you trust to manage the state's $32 billion?
Betsy Brantner Smith: Sheridan Gorman, the 12-Hour Detention Bill, and What Adelita Staged at Taco Tuesday
Betsy Brantner Smith — National Police Association spokeswoman, retired law enforcement officer — opened Smith and Wynn with two cases that, in her telling, belong in the same sentence: the execution of Sheridan Gorman on a Chicago lakefront, and the effort by three Arizona Democratic Congress members to limit ICE detention to 12 hours.
Sheridan Gorman: What Actually Happened
Sheridan Gorman was a college student at Loyola University in Chicago. She was walking with friends toward Lake Michigan when a man — masked, armed — approached them. She warned her friends. She ran. He chased her and shot her in the back when she was 40 feet ahead of him. This was not a robbery gone wrong. It was not self-defense. It was, as law enforcement charged it, first-degree murder.
The man who killed her had a prior deportation order. He had been in and out of the country. He was a gang member in his home country. He was allowed to remain in the United States because of Cook County's sanctuary policies and the political decisions of the Pritzker administration in Illinois.
An alderman in Chicago got on social media — before learning any facts of the case — and said Gorman was in the wrong place at the wrong time. An unnamed public official cast the woman running for her life as somehow complicit in her own murder.
"She was walking with her friends toward the lakefront and this vile piece of garbage approached her and her friends with a mask on and a handgun," Brantner Smith said. "She ran. She tried to run away. She warned her friends. She saved her friends' lives. He ran after her and he executed her. First-degree murder."
Her parents attended his arraignment. They watched his eyes when he stood in the courtroom. He followed all instructions precisely. He interrupted the translator — which told the parents that his claimed inability to understand the proceedings was not real. His eyes, they said, were dark and vacant. Their daughter had 40 feet of open ground between her and the man who killed her and he closed it to shoot her in the back.
The 12-Hour Bill and the Three Stooges
H.R. 8557 — the Short Term Holding Facility Standards Restoration Act — was introduced by three Arizona Democrats: Greg Stanton, Yasmin Ansari, and Adelita Grajales. The bill would require that anyone detained by ICE in a temporary holding facility be released or transferred within 12 hours.
Brantner Smith confirmed she gave an interview about the bill the day before and was unequivocal: there is no chance it passes the House. It was not designed to pass the House.
"This isn't going to go anywhere. This is just trying to pretend like they're doing something."
The reason people are held longer than 12 hours at ICE temporary facilities is record-checking. Due process — the same concept these members of Congress invoke constantly on behalf of detainees — requires verification before either release or transfer. The bill's actual effect, if enacted, would be to make due process impossible by making verification impossible.
"You know why they're being held longer than 12 hours, Kathleen? Checking records. They're trying to give these people their due process. Remember we're hearing all about that? So let's just rewrite this so that before the 12 hours is up, they're on a plane back to their home country."
Grajales staged a visit to a detention facility — which Brantner Smith noted, with deliberate care, coincided with what appeared to be lunch service. The visit was designed for cameras, not for oversight. Three Democratic Congress members issued a bill they know cannot pass, staged visits for the footage, and got their sound bites into local news with what Brantner Smith described as sympathetic coverage from Arizona media that gives the other side 30 seconds and the activist narrative two minutes.
Meanwhile, the Tucson City Council — which does not govern Marana — voted against a potential ICE holding facility in Marana. A city council voted on something that is not in their city.
"This is just like our city council. This is just like the county board. This is a joke and they have no business."
Nanos: 100 Days, a Fox Interview, and More to Come
The 100-day mark in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie is approaching, and Brantner Smith reported that national media crews are returning to Tucson. Fox News is already back. News Nation is coming. The anniversary is drawing renewed coverage.
Sheriff Chris Nanos is still communicating sporadically with the media, relying on three public information officers to do much of the talking. Nothing of substance has been released about the investigation.
FBI Director Cash Patel appeared on Sean Hannity's podcast and confirmed federal awareness of the case. What he said precisely, and what the FBI's role is, is being monitored closely. Dave Smith noted in the following segment that he has spoken with active deputies in the Pima County Sheriff's Office. There is more to come.
"The longer he stays in office, there's going to be more to come," Smith said. "The bullying. What he did to Heather Lappin. What he's done to his own staff. How he got the job. None of that's been answered. Take a cue, retire, save your pension."
Dave Smith: Propaganda vs. Criticism, the Gerrymandering Ruling, and Why Gallego and Swalwell Were Topless on a Camel
Dave Smith — retired Lieutenant, Tucson Police Department, Republican Party chairman of Pima County — replaced his wife Betsy in the rotation and carried the conversation in a more analytical direction: the structural failures of the media, the Supreme Court's redistricting ruling, and the political implosion of two members of Congress whose relationship is apparently documented on video.
The First Amendment Is Not About Propagandizing
Smith drew a distinction that he says the press has inverted.
"The freedom of the press — the whole idea, if you read the Federalist Papers — was the ability to criticize government. Not to propagandize."
Criticism, in his framework, requires presenting facts, context, and evidence that allow readers to form their own analysis. Propaganda presents a curated emotional picture designed to change the reader's reality.
"If you're propagandizing, you're trying to change my attitude. You're trying to change my reality. You're trying to change the way I think. And so therefore you don't present balanced facts. You don't even present the whole story."
The example he reached for is the immigration issue. The media's consistent visual framing of illegal immigration — a mother of four, alone, desperate — bears no resemblance to what he and Winn observed at Tucson International Airport during the Biden administration's border surge: primarily military-aged men from countries across the world, processed through a dedicated expedited lane, given a court date for a hearing years away.
"It's sad that they have to constantly see an emotion. Whenever you see an illegal immigrant on TV, it's a mother of four desperately alone trying to get into the United States for her liberation. Not the fact that you and I saw at the airport mostly military-aged men from throughout the world. It was weird and creepy and nothing like the media presented."
The Supreme Court Gerrymandering Ruling: Why It Terrifies the Left
The Supreme Court's ruling against racial gerrymandering — the practice of drawing congressional district lines around racial demographics to produce predetermined electoral outcomes — is, in Smith's analysis, one of the most consequential and most underreported developments of the year.
The people in power because of racial gerrymandering are now facing the prospect of representing actual communities rather than manufactured demographic bubbles. The communities inside those bubbles now have the opportunity to elect representatives who serve them rather than the party that drew the lines.
"The people who are in power because of racial gerrymandering are hysterical because they're losing their 'community.' And now they're actually going to have to serve the community where they live."
Virginia provides the object lesson. The state's Democratic-controlled legislature attempted a mid-cycle redistricting in violation of the state's own rules and its own constitution. They ran billboards featuring President Trump implying his endorsement. The measure passed 51-49 along pure party lines. A state judge blocked it. The challenge is now heading to the Virginia Supreme Court.
Jen Allen and the Board of Supervisors Accountability Gap
Smith addressed the Pima County Board of Supervisors — where the new evening meeting schedule, starting in May, shifts regular sessions to the second and fourth Tuesdays at 5 p.m.
He made his standard observation about Steve Christie: the one member of the board who attempts to apply rational financial accountability is consistently 1 against 4.
Supervisor Jen Allen was named specifically. "She doesn't represent Marana or our ward or our district. She represents a narrow group of radicals and she's an activist, which means she doesn't even understand the nature of public service. She understands only power."
His broader point: the money spent during the Biden administration's border surge — on cab companies to transport illegal aliens, airlines to fly them around, special expedited lanes at Tucson International Airport — has never been publicly accounted for. Who got the contracts? What were the salaries? How much went back to politicians in the form of donations? "I want to see where did the money go. What were salaries? How much went back into the coffers of the politicians in terms of donations? None of that's been answered."
The Election Denier Non-Argument
On being called an election denier, Smith had a characteristically precise response. A detective who approaches a suspect fleeing an alarm is not denying that suspect's innocence. He is applying reasonable suspicion to initiate an investigation.
"After 2020 and 2022, when we had all these anomalies — and an anomaly is something that creates reasonable suspicion — we asked to investigate it and we were told we don't have standing. The courts kick everybody out. The media mocks them."
The investigation he is asking for is not a conclusion. It is a process.
Gallego, Swalwell, and Whatever That Was on the Camel
Smith expressed that video documentation of Senator Ruben Gallego and Congressman Eric Swalwell's relationship is expected to surface. He noted that the two men had been photographed together, bare-chested, on a camel in some unspecified desert location.
"I tell you what, I know there's going to be video coming out. Whether they're both half naked on a camel someplace in the desert — the videos that are going to come out — what were they doing? And is that behavior befitting someone who is elected as you've now got a U.S. senator?"
Swalwell, once the front runner in California's governor race, withdrew so precipitously that the California Democratic Party effectively sacrificed its leading candidate before the primary. The question Smith is asking is what exactly is behind that calculation.
"I think he's hoping to circumvent some real legal issues and I don't think he will."
Jeremy Duda: The Murder That Made Arizona Journalism History, and the 10-Year Book That Finally Tells It
Jeremy Duda is a reporter for Axios Phoenix, a University of Arizona graduate, and the author of Murder in the Fourth Estate: The Assassination of Investigative Journalist Don Bowles. The book was released on April 16th — roughly six weeks before the 50th anniversary of the car bombing that killed Bowles on June 2nd, 1976.
Why This Case Needed a Book
Duda has been an Arizona political journalist for most of his adult career — Capitol Times, Arizona Mirror (which he helped found in 2018), and now Axios Phoenix. He first encountered the Bowles case while still in New Mexico, picked up a secondhand copy of The Arizona Project, and found himself unable to put the story down.
When he moved to Phoenix and began researching in earnest, he discovered the gap that defined the project: almost nothing comprehensive existed. There were Republic tributes. There were conspiracy-oriented books that disputed the official findings. There was no clear, authoritative account that laid out all the evidence and allowed readers to draw their own conclusions.
"I set out to write the book that I wanted to read."
The primary source material was at the Arizona State Archives: the attorney general's case file, approximately 150 bankers boxes of documents. Getting access required the personal approval of then-Attorney General Mark Bernovich. Once inside, Duda was not permitted to make copies of the fragile documents. He brought a digital camera and photographed thousands of pages, starting in 2015, often going before work or taking full weeks of vacation to do it. He did this for years before he felt he understood the case well enough to sit down with investigators, attorneys, and journalists who had worked it.
"I didn't want to start doing that until I had enough of a grasp of the case that I could sit down with people who actually investigated it and talk intelligently like I knew what I was talking about."
Who Don Bowles Was
Don Bowles spent 14 years at The Arizona Republic as one of its finest investigative reporters. He covered the mob, land fraud kingpins, and corrupt politicians. In a state that was, during the 1970s, genuinely entangled with organized crime — Joe Bonanno had "retired" to Tucson, Detroit mob boss Pete LeCavoli had done the same — Bowles's coverage made him real enemies.
The Marley building at the University of Arizona is named after Kemper Marley — a rancher and businessman whose appointment to the state racing commission Bowles had written negatively about. That name recognition turns out to be relevant.
The Bombing
On June 2nd, 1976, Bowles went to the Clarendon Hotel in Phoenix for a meeting. He was on the Capitol beat at the time, not the investigative mob beat. A pipe bomb hidden beneath his car exploded when he started it. He survived the initial blast — barely. A limb and both legs were amputated over the following 11 days. He was barely able to communicate, but told paramedics and bystanders: "They finally got me. M. Price, the mafia, John Adamson, find him."
He was still alive enough, the day after the bombing, for Phoenix homicide detective John Sellers to enter his hospital room and ask a few questions. Bowles couldn't speak — he had tubes in his throat — but he could nod or raise a limb. That was the last meaningful communication he gave to investigators before his death on June 13th, 1976.
"He held on for 11 days," Duda said. "It was just too extensive. Too many infections. Too much shrapnel."
When the bomb went off, the city editor of The Republic heard the explosion over the police scanner. He assumed mob hit, called a reporter, told him to get down there. The reporter on the scene found a press parking sticker in the windshield of the demolished car. He called back — who's the car registered to? MVD came back: Donald Bowles. The newsroom erupted, because everyone had assumed it was Al Sitter — another investigative reporter who covered the same beat and was unaccounted for. Sitter then walked through the door, blissfully unaware. The city editor looked at him and said: Al, you're alive.
John Adamson and the Prosecution's Tortured Path
John Harvey Adamson — a local barfly and petty criminal — was the man who lured Bowles to the Clarendon Hotel. He left a trail that investigators followed almost immediately. He cut a deal: he would name his co-conspirators in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
He named Max Dunlap, a Phoenix contractor, as the man who hired him, citing Dunlap's connection to Kemper Marley. He named Jimmy Robeson, a Chandler plumber, as the man who built and detonated the bomb. Dunlap and Robeson were convicted in 1977 and sentenced to death.
The Arizona Supreme Court overturned both convictions in 1980 on a technicality. Adamson began negotiating — he wanted new terms before testifying again. The attorney general's office lost patience and charged him with murder. He was convicted and sentenced to death. That conviction worked its way through the courts for years. Finally, a new deal was struck with Adamson to testify again. New trials followed. In 1993, Dunlap was convicted again. Robeson was acquitted.
"The question of was someone ever charged or convicted is more complicated than one might think," Duda said. "This was all over the course of 17 years."
What Bowles Actually Said — and Whether He Was Right
The dying declaration — "M. Price, the mafia" — is the case's most enduring mystery. M. Price was a massive sports concessions company with operations across the globe and mob-connected ties, which co-owned Arizona's dog racing tracks. Bowles had spent years investigating them.
But investigators never found a plot that led back to either M. Price or the mob. The official conclusion is that Kemper Marley — angered by coverage — commissioned Dunlap, who hired Adamson.
"Did he say that because he was writing something about them? Or was he just in shock, in pain, struggling to figure out who might have done this?" Duda asked. "He'd been dealing with M. Price-related issues that very morning at the legislature. So they may have just been fresh on his mind. A bomb blows up under your car, and the first thing you might think is: the mafia, this is the stuff the mafia does."
Duda acknowledged that there are still people today who believe investigators got it wrong, that M. Price or the mob were the true architects. The police and the AG's office never found the evidence to support that theory, but the questions haven't gone away.
The Distinction That Defines the Case
Duda's assessment of why this is the most infamous journalist assassination in American history is worth unpacking. Car bombings are rare in the United States. A car bombing in a hotel parking lot, on a summer afternoon, in a major American city — that is the kind of act that sends a message, whether or not a message was intended.
"I think it became the most infamous because this was done in a way that seems like almost to attract maximum attention. They wanted to send a message. At least, that's what some people feel."
Duda's personal view is that it may have simply been an amateurish operation that underestimated the consequences of choosing such a public and dramatic method.
Murder in the Fourth Estate is available now from any online bookseller, including Amazon. A book signing is scheduled for Saturday, May 16th at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale. Duda is attempting to schedule an event in Tucson as well.
Elijah Norton: $32 Billion, a DOGE-Style Audit, and Why This Is Not a Job for On-the-Job Training
Elijah Norton is a candidate for Arizona State Treasurer — a Republican primary race with one serious opponent on his side and a well-funded Democrat waiting in the general. He arrived on Winn Tucson's Friday to make the case that managing the state's investment portfolio is not an appropriate place to learn finance.
What the Treasurer Actually Does
Norton walked through the constitutional reality of the office — something, he noted, that gets lost in campaigns that treat the treasurer as a general conservative platform position.
The Arizona Treasurer is constitutionally the chief banking and investment officer of the state. The treasurer does not set the budget — that's the legislature and the governor. The treasurer does not implement the budget — that's the governor's agencies. What the treasurer does is manage all cash once it arrives: the state agency investment pool, the local government investment pool, operating reserves, the 529 plan, the state land trust.
"The treasurer's job is to determine how we can protect those assets — invest them in stable, safe securities that prioritize safety over liquidity and liquidity over yield."
Those assets total more than $32 billion.
What Norton's Insurance Business Proves
Norton owns an insurance organization that is not, he clarified, a small business. It carries over $100 million in claims reserves. Those reserves must be invested under NAIC guidelines — National Association of Insurance Commissioners — which are actually stricter than the guidelines governing the state treasurer's investment pools. 70 percent must be in bonds. 30 percent can be in equities.
Under those constraints, Norton's organization is currently earning better returns than the Arizona Treasurer is getting on two of the state's main investment pools — the local government investment pool and the state agency investment pool — which are averaging under 4 percent.
"Texas is getting half a percent to a percent more on their investments than we are," he said. "They're not doing anything riskier. They're just being smarter. And the reason they're smarter is they have someone who understands investments looking at those assets."
His diagnosis of Arizona's current situation: not enough experience in the office to analyze the investment portfolios properly. The money is not being lost, but it is being underworked. The state is leaving meaningful yield on the table by not having qualified investment professionals evaluating the options within the existing safe parameters.
The DOGE-Style Audit
Norton made the DOGE-style audit — a comprehensive, one-time review of state spending to identify waste, fraud, and abuse — a central platform commitment.
A recent internal poll found that 84% of Republican primary voters agreed the state needs such an audit.
His primary Republican opponent has gone on radio and appeared at events explicitly opposing a DOGE-style audit, arguing it would grow the size of government. Norton's response: "I say a once-in-a-generation DOGE-style audit because it's not a permanent thing. It'll identify the waste, fraud, and abuse. It'll tell the legislature how to fix it going forward. And it will save us billions of dollars."
He has heard from multiple people in the education sector — school board members, superintendents — that there is significant waste, fraud, and abuse in the budget. The scale of money flowing through the state's accounts has, in his assessment, allowed systemic problems to persist unseen.
"The budget is so big and there's so much money going through that there's just never been anyone that's dug in and figured it out."
The Qualifications Argument
The case Norton makes against his Republican primary opponent is not personal. He said explicitly and repeatedly that he considers her a nice person. The argument is functional: she has publicly acknowledged, on camera and at forums, that she has no investment experience.
"The voters of Arizona need to understand — do you want someone that doesn't know anything about investments or finance managing $32 billion? That is one of the riskiest decisions we could make. She's applying for the wrong job."
He extended the analogy to the job market: you apply for positions where your qualifications match the requirement. An education background does not prepare someone to manage a state investment portfolio. His does. The distinction shows up every time they have appeared together — at debates and forums across the state, the gap in financial fluency between them is, in his telling, visible.
The General Election: Nick Mansour
The Democratic nominee — essentially already anointed, as he ran unopposed — is Nick Mansour. He has a net worth Norton estimates at $10 to $20 million, contributed $350,000 of his own money, and has raised over $1 million total. With a million dollars-plus available, he is the most serious Democratic candidate for state treasurer since 1967 — the last time a Democrat held the office.
The math Norton presented was stark. Current cash on hand: Norton, approximately $1.4 million. Mansour, approximately $700,000. The Republican primary opponent, approximately $70,000. Norton's explicit argument: a candidate with $70,000 on hand cannot beat a self-funding Democrat in a statewide race where none of the three candidates have significant name recognition.
"There's no way that someone who is not currently in elected office, who has $70,000 in the bank, is somehow going to beat Nick Mansour, who is going to be able to put potentially millions of his own dollars into the race."
His commitment if nominated: "I'm going to put as much money as I have to make sure that we never have a Democrat touching $32 billion. Because I can just tell you, nothing is scarier than that. You might as well give a blank check to California as you go out the door."
Arizona has not had a Democratic state treasurer since 1967. Norton's case is that this is not an accident — voters trust Republicans with money — and that this record cannot be broken in 2026.
Campaign website: NortonForAZ.com | Primary: July 21, 2026. Early ballots begin arriving approximately June 23rd.
Winn Tucson airs Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., on KVOI 1030 The Voice. Happy Mother's Day.
Jeremy Duda's book Murder in the Fourth Estate is available on Amazon. Book signing: May 16th, Poisoned Pen Bookstore, Scottsdale. Tucson event TBD.
Elijah Norton for Arizona State Treasurer: NortonForAZ.com
Pima County Board of Supervisors new meeting schedule: 2nd and 4th Tuesdays at 5 p.m.