![]() ![]() “Where is Miss Miles?” the sergeant asked. You see, that was Miss Miles’s room he was in. The name was David Whiting, he told the sergeant. The sergeant asked the MGM person for the dead man’s name and position. ![]() “He’d been drinking, he swallowed a lot of pills, he took a bunch of pills and he was dead. “He’d been drinking,” the MGM man told the sergeant in a confidential tone. As he stepped out to his squad car Sergeant Hinderliter felt a hand on his arm. The sergeant wondered why the man on the floor had decided to collapse and die in what was clearly a woman’s bedroom: the vanity counter above the body teemed with vials of cosmetics, a woman’s wardrobe packed the hangers, a long brown hairpiece streamed across a nearby suitcase. (Burt Reynolds would later testify he saw pills lying on top of the dead man’s arm.) There were about a dozen, and most of them lay in two groups on the floor. His feet stuck out beyond the end of the partition. His nose touched the metal strip which divided the carpeted dressing-room floor from the tiled floor of the bathroom. The young man lay curled up on his left side on the floor of the partitioned-off “dressing-room” area of Travelodge room 127. Rigor mortis, in its early stages, had stiffened the arms which were wrapped in an embrace around an empty polyethylene wastebasket. Pale blotches on the hands, the neck and the forehead suggested to Sergeant Hinderliter that death had come to the body several hours before he had. Forty members of the cast and crew checked into the Travelodge Motel on the eastern edge of town. On January 28, 1973, an MGM production company shooting The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, a high-budget, middlebrow western starring Sarah Miles, Burt Reynolds and Lee J. Hollywood westerns occasionally use the railroad’s ancient steam locomotive and the cactus wastes surrounding the tracks for “location” work. The Phelps Dodge Corporation uses the railroad to run copper anodes from their foundries up to the Southern Pacific freight siding at Gila Bend. There’s an old narrow-gage railroad that runs south from the town to the open-pit copper mines near the Mexican border. Since then Gila Bend has been just another hot place. ![]() In 1965, the Weather Bureau did some checking and put a stop to the matter. Someone in Gila Bend had been doing some fooling around with the thermometer readings to make Gila Bend look a few degrees hotter than it was. It was hot in Gila Bend, but not that hot, the Mayor of Gila Bend confided to me one evening at the Elks Club bar. Occasionally Gila Bend was referred to as the hottest place in America. One hundred twenty in the shade was not unusual. Up until 1965 Gila Bend showed up frequently in National Weather Summaries as having registered the highest daily temperature in America. There was a dead body in room 127, it was reported, an overdose of something. She had just taken a call from a man at the Travelodge Motel. Seel, the station-house dispatcher, on the line. He was drinking black coffee at Birchfield’s Café at six minutes past noon when the phone rang. He took statements until six-thirty in the morning, then returned to the station house to check in for his regular Sunday tour of duty. Sergeant Hinderliter had the body tagged and carted off to Phoenix for an autopsy. An accident, the other man, the one who owned the. A shot went off, the first visitor died.Īn accident, the woman told Sergeant Hinderliter, the gun had gone off by accident. A minute later the other man came through the door. A car pulled up outside and flashed its lights. She told him to get off and get out she warned him she was expecting another man. She woke up after midnight to find a man on top of her, making love to her. He’d also found a woman there, and this was her story: He’d found the body-a black man with a bullet hole in his back-lying on the floor in Apartment 44 of the North Euclid Avenue project at the western edge of town. Locations and types of dining adventures, are listed further down.Sergeant Forrest Hinderliter of the Gila Bend (Arizona) Police had been up since two in the morning with a dead body and a shaky story. and all the discoveries and funny things I've learned along the way! I have continued blogging about memorable dining adventures of all kinds, near and far. Even though I met my goal, I learned too much to end my adventures in dining. I met some curious people, tried some scary foods and explored places and cultures I never would have otherwise. On July 4th 2011, I set a goal to try 50 culturally diverse restaurants in one year! (I knew that was possible, living in the Houston area) I spent the year pulling in friends and family to join me, on some unusual dining adventures. ![]()
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