Shilling, Ariz. –
The detective leaned over and used a long mirror to catch some sunlight and illuminate the stubborn corners of the open grave. I wondered why he didn’t use a flashlight. A backhoe had removed the top portion of dirt and earth, but the detectives were afraid to keep going with the heavy equipment. If they damaged the fifty-year-old coffin they might damage the fifty-seven-year-old bones inside of it.
This was in 2018, and I was at the Flannery Hills Cemetery north of downtown Shilling. They were exhuming the remains of Little Miss Somebody. She’d been a resident of sorts for decades. My friend was a lieutenant with the Verde County Sheriff's Office and told me that the sheriff, along with a private company, Thatcher Scientific, secured federal grant funds to dig her up and ship her bones to Texas. There they would use the remains to create a DNA profile and hopefully find family members, and finally learn the girl’s real name. The entire case was a dead end from the start.
In 1968 a teenaged girl was out running in western Verde County, still a rugged and empty area today. She came across the burnt remains of a little girl, then thought to be between five and ten years old. The body had a torched dress, red sneakers, and a half-melted pendant of the Virgin of Guadalupe hanging around the victim’s neck. Verde County is slightly bigger than Rhode Island. The population today is about 300,000. Back then one-third of that lived there. And everyone seemed to know everyone, and everything that happened. The dead girl became the county’s story.
Sheriff’s detectives said they traveled to Phoenix, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles to seek information. Volunteers distributed flyers to people driving through the state highways, seeking any information or witnesses. After an initial rush of effort, the detectives really didn’t know anything – the girl’s identity, where she was killed, and certainly not who killed her.
The victim’s remains lay at the coroner’s office for three weeks. Then the local Catholic parish caught wind of the melted pendant of the Holy Mother and raised money to bury the little girl. One of the church women came up with the name Little Miss Somebody. I found a 1968 article from the Shilling Sentinel that quoted Marian Dolan, who led the fundraising. “We had to give her a name,” Dolan said. “Whoever did this just discarded her like she was nobody. Jesus made her and Jesus loved her. She was somebody.”
At Flannery Hills, it took them a while to finesse the coffin from the ground. A team of detectives, deputies, and one of the Thatcher Scientific employees lashed the coffin with rope to keep it from breaking apart while they removed it. A detective pried it open once they had it settled next to the backhoe. I couldn’t hear him, but he nodded and raised his right thumb as though he half expected the bones to be missing. I spoke to one of the Thatcher guys, but he was winded and tired, and didn’t seem interested in saying anything on the record that wasn’t rehearsed. I didn’t write any of it down.
Before they loaded the coffin into a sheriff’s van, a priest came by to say a blessing over the remains: a simple iteration of the Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be. The priest was the only one who crossed himself among the group. There were no other reporters there and there was no sign of Aggie Quinn.
That was five years ago. Last month the Verde County Sheriff and Federal Bureau of Investigation, based on the DNA profile provided by Thatcher Scientific, identified Little Miss Somebody. Her name was Isabel Estrada. She was seven years old and from Pueblo, Colorado. Three weeks before her body was found in western Arizona, two people, best identified as a man and a woman, kidnapped her outside her home. They grabbed Isabel and put her in a blue sedan. Her twelve-year-old brother was the only witness. The cops in Colorado, the sheriff in Verde County, and the FBI doubt they will ever identify the kidnappers. Just a man and a woman in a blue sedan who vanished into the fog of time.
I read a wire story quoting Isabel’s now adult niece. She thanked everyone for finding Isabel and giving her a decent grave all these years. The article said the Estrada family planned to bury the remains in Pueblo. The story didn’t say what ever happened to that pendant with the Virgin of Guadalupe. I wondered if it was a family heirloom.
Little Miss Somebody interested Verde County in waves over the years. There was the feverish searching for answers right away, then it ebbed for most of the 1970s. It resurfaced in the 1980s, and fell away again, this time for almost thirty years. It was a mystery and of course interested me. But I was more fascinated – and sometimes haunted – by the story of Aggie Quinn.
She was the girl who found the body in 1968. She was the town beauty queen who gave up a chance to become a Hollywood actress so she could remain in a remote and dusty corner of Arizona – to find Little Miss Somebody’s real name and who killed her. Aggie Quinn was the young widow-turned-newspaper reporter who broke stories on the case in the 1980s, re-ignited the county’s obsession, and almost got a Pulitzer. She was the tough reporter who in 1990 got punched in the face by the lead sheriff’s detective at a press conference. To me, she was the soul of the fifty-year saga. She was also the woman who skipped the graveyard in 2018 and refused to speak to me when I called her back then.
Reporters don’t like answering questions, and Aggie was known for being highly guarded. Old friends said she’d been that way all along. Others said it started in the 1990s, after the press conference incident, when she retreated from journalism to teach at the local college and write novels. That was when she came home to the Church, attending daily Mass at St. Rita’s, a small parish that sits on the northern edge of the county, just before the land rises toward the Mogollon Rim.
My knowledge of Agnes Rose Quinn comes from interviews with her old friends and newspaper colleagues, mostly done between 2019 and 2022. And from the twenty-minute conversation I had with her over coffee a few weeks ago. The silences in that conversation probably told me more about her than any piece of research. Some friends and colleagues spoke on background because they didn’t want to upset Quinn. Most of the information on Aggie’s youth and her marriage comes from Elizabeth Call. They grew up together. Elizabeth told me that I could use anything she said once she died. In 2022, her cancer returned, metastasized, and killed her.
There is also the public record on Aggie – newspaper items, journalism review articles about her career. The well-known profile in Copper State Magazine in 1990, when she was close to that Pulitzer.
Now and then I would attend St. Rita’s so I could get a look at Aggie. I always sat in the back. She was there all right, and she was still beautiful, even at seventy. Word was she still ran an hour each day. Her yellow hair was trending gray, but it created even more gravity to her appearance. I would find myself gazing at her during Mass. She sat on the Mary side of the pews, up close, always alone.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1950. Her father John worked for the telephone company. Her mother Brenda worked as a store clerk. John, the son of immigrants, served in World War II, fighting in Guadalcanal and other campaigns in the South Pacific. Back in Brooklyn, the noise and the closeness of other people bothered him. A few months after her brother Jackie was born in 1956, their father moved everyone to the town of Bayley on the western outskirts of Verde County. A state highway ran next to the town. Back then it was how people traveled among Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. There was the copper mine, a café, general store and gas station, and small church and school.
John took work at the mine and the family lived in a small house attached to a larger ranch property. There was a barn and after a while John did his drinking in there so he could be alone.
Aggie Rose, as she was known as a kid, loved the high desert. She’d always wanted a dog but couldn’t have one in the Brooklyn. In Bayley, John found a blue heeler puppy and Aggie Rose named him Buddy. The dog taught her to love running. She would break out of the house with Buddy and return two hours later. Then she and the heeler would fall asleep next to each other on the floor of the living room.
In 1962, Jackie suffered acute appendicitis. He spent a day in the hospital in Shilling and then died before they could transfer him to Phoenix. Elizabeth Call said that Brenda was shattered, and she blamed her husband. If they’d still been in New York, the boy could have gotten better medical care. Some nights John Quinn would sleep in the barn to avoid his wife.
Brenda really took out her rage on Aggie, though. Elizabeth remembered days when Aggie would come to school with bruises on her arm. One day she arrived with a black eye and some scratches on her throat. She told the school she’d fallen down a hill while running with Buddy.
In 1964 Aggie found her father dead inside the barn. The coroner said it was a heart attack brought on by chronic myocarditis. After that, there were no more bruises or black eyes.
“Brenda really doted on her – finally – after John died,” Elizabeth said. “She hovered a lot, which drove Aggie nuts. But she became this cheerleader. I thought it was good. Aggie didn’t. Like she felt something sinister beneath all the attention. Years later when Brenda died, Aggie said she wished she’d punched her mother in the face just once in her life.”
John Quinn had a small life insurance policy through the mine, but it wasn’t much. When she was 15, Aggie went to work at the local café. She would occasionally attend high school but never graduated.
“She’d run at least an hour a day,” Elizabeth recalled. “Sometimes twice a day. It was compulsive. Brenda told her she’d ruin her chances of having a baby. That was the belief back then. Aggie probably ran marathons by herself some weekends. She’d just disappear for hours. Running.”
The café sat along Highway 31 which connected Phoenix to the northwest part of the state. One day in 1968 a Hollywood talent scout stopped in for lunch on his way back to Los Angeles.
Aggie, Elizabeth, and two other girls were talking by the counter when the man came in. He approached the girls and handed each one his business card. Aggie got the first one. “Aggie was exquisite,” Elizabeth said. “Her bright blonde hair and slender figure. All the boys were in love with her. She never paid them any attention.”
The Hollywood man said he was getting ready to cast a surfing movie and that they should come to Los Angeles. He could guarantee them roles.
“I think he really just wanted Aggie,” Elizabeth said. “He only asked the rest of us to get her to do it. We were cute. She was something else entirely.”
The girls got excited, and they decided to do it. They were all eighteen, except Aggie who had another month till legal adulthood. “For some reason, she thought Brenda would handle it better if Aggie waited till she was eighteen,” Elizabeth told me. “Aggie was enmeshed in being her mom’s therapist. Brenda would make Aggie listen to it all – her grief about Jackie, her rage at John. All the misery from her life back in Brooklyn. Sometimes Aggie felt guilty just for leaving the house to go to the café.”
A month later, they were ready. One of the girl’s older brothers was going to drive them. The morning before the departure – the day after Aggie Quinn’s birthday – she went for her usual run. She would always start at the café, where she stowed her work clothes and where the owner had an employee bathroom with a shower. She’d run along Highway 31 and then cut eastward into the desert brush. About two miles up the highway, and maybe 200 yards into the brush, she found the body.
“I got a call around breakfast. She was so calm about it all,” Elizabeth said. “She told me she found a dead body, a little girl. That the sheriff deputy interviewed her already. I could tell by her voice she wasn’t coming.”
Elizabeth and the other girls urged Aggie to come to California. She told them she would come out soon, once they solved the mystery of the little girl’s identity. All the friends ate pie together at the café before saying goodbye.
Aggie kept working at the café. She helped pass out flyers to travelers coming through the restaurant. She asked people a lot of questions. She most likely worked with the local parish on the fundraising for the burial, but no one is still around who could confirm that.
A year later Elizabeth and the other girls retreated from their failed movie careers in California. “We got rejected for that surfing movie and worked odd jobs and auditioned for what we could. The talent scout was so disappointed we showed up without her. He told me that Aggie would have been a star.”
Aggie was still working at the café, and no one had solved the Little Miss Somebody case. She did her usual morning run in the same area she’d found the body. “I think she was trying to conjure something up,” Elizabeth said. “Like a spell, some way to get the earth and universe to provide some answers. I told her that once and she laughed. Said she just loved running.”
In 1971, Aggie married Jed Carver. He worked for the railroad. He was thirty-four and handsome. Brenda thought he was a good match for her daughter and bragged about his looks. A year later Brenda remarried and moved to Phoenix. Aggie and Jed moved to Shilling.
There are no sheriff records or court documents to substantiate this because Aggie never reported anything, but Jed often beat her. She had melancholy and could go quiet for days; she could also get very sarcastic. “Jed took himself so seriously,” Elizabeth said. “Anytime she went through a quiet spell or poked him with that attitude of hers, he’d hurt her. And he hated that she wouldn’t take his last name. She told me she kept Quinn to honor her father.”
One night Elizabeth came to visit her old friend and found Aggie unconscious on the porch hammock. Jed had knocked her out and placed her there while he and some railroad buddies played cards and drank inside the house. Jed also had a series of affairs. His railroad work took him to Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Amarillo, and into Oklahoma. He had women in each town. He impregnated the one in Albuquerque. Aggie didn’t seem to mind. She asked him to move there and be with his new family and Jed smashed her head against the dining room table.
Jed would disappear for months sometimes, laying up in New Mexico with his other family or he would stay in the Texas Panhandle. “Aggie never told Brenda about it,” Elizabeth recalled. “She acted like everything was normal. Her mother kept asking her about grandchildren.”
In 1973, Aggie got her GED. In 1975 she earned an associate degree from Verde Community College and took a job as a secretary with the county treasurer’s office. With her husband barely around, she began a friendship with a sheriff’s sergeant named Patrick Bride. He was in his early forties, a widower and childless. People could tell it was romantic between them after a while. Everyone in town had a distaste for Jed Carver, so no one bothered Aggie about it. She and Bride spent time hiking and dining together and Aggie’s melancholy seemed to ebb.
In 1976, Bride hit his twenty years with the sheriff and retired. Five months later he abruptly moved to western Colorado.
“He adored her. He was in love,” Elizabeth said. “She wouldn’t divorce Jed. It was insane.” Other friends told me the same thing.
Not much longer after that, a man in Amarillo stabbed Jed Carver outside a saloon, and Aggie’s husband died in a Texas emergency room. Jed was sleeping with the man’s wife. I found one newspaper item about it. It said Carver left behind a wife in Arizona. No mention of the other woman and baby in New Mexico. Jed was cremated in Amarillo and his ashes shipped back to Arizona. One friend from those days told me Aggie dropped the urn down an old mine shaft out near Bayley, some place she and her father used to explore.
She kept working for the treasurer and spent her free time reading books and running. As the 1970s neared its end, and Aggie approached her thirtieth birthday, she began writing letters to the Shilling Sentinel newspaper, where Marvin Kaplan was the editor. He was also a New York transplant, coming to Verde County for his health, although everyone says he drank and smoked too much for that to be the case. I imagine he liked Aggie’s Brooklyn grit. In 1979, he invited her to the newsroom. After a brief conversation he offered her a job as a reporter.
Her first beat was education. She also wrote Sunday features and book reviews. It seems inevitable now, looking back, that she would write about Little Miss Somebody.
“I think she had some good information on the case long before she arrived. I always assumed that was one reason Marvin hired her.” This is Fred Oatman. He worked at the Sentinel from 1977 until his retirement in 2009, when newspapering went to hell. “She was quiet and reserved and wrote banal school board stories. Then suddenly – this explosion of top-level reporting.”
The first story came in 1983. Aggie obtained several sheriff’s reports on the case from 1968. None of them mentioned investigators traveling to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or Albuquerque to chase leads. Police agencies in those cities confirmed they had no investigative requests from the Verde County Sheriff.
“Chris Bowman was the sheriff back in ’68. He was a drunk and full of shit. He and I didn’t get along,” Marvin Kaplan told a journalism class at Arizona State University in 1997. The video tape I found at the ASU library shows a slumped and ashen Kaplan, but still fiery. This was eighteen months before he died. “He claimed his detectives had fanned out all over the Southwest. They lied to make it look like they did their job. Bowman used Little Miss Somebody to win re-election, again and again. Our stories sank him in 1984. That moron Otis Adams became sheriff. Another drunk. He hated the paper more than Bowman.” The students laughed at this one, and Kaplan doubled over in an emphysema-lit cough.
The first Sentinel story also cited a 1971 internal memorandum from the sheriff’s office. It gave a list of failures by case detectives. The biggest one: investigators did not interview a man who worked at the mine, a convicted child molester. He assaulted a teenaged girl in 1963 in Deming, New Mexico, did two years, then moved to Bayley. The memo stated the man, whose name was blacked out, had also been known to loiter near school yards in town. Several deputy reports during 1966-1968 named him as a suspect in peeping tom incidents. He disappeared a few weeks after Little Miss Somebody showed up. The memo is laconic and brutal about the sheriff’s failures. It was written by patrol Sergeant Patrick Bride.
“Clearly, he gave Quinn all this stuff before he left. Or he was still attached to her all the way from Colorado. Somehow, she had her hooks in him,” Oatman said. “I know he remarried in the mid-eighties. Finally gave up on her. Must’ve realized Aggie didn’t give a shit about anyone. Just her story. As a reporter I admire that. As a man, I feel for Bride. Maybe the only humble and sober cop in Verde County.”
The next story came three months later. It reported that the two original detectives on the case fabricated witness interviews, claiming they’d canvassed most of the western county. Aggie found and interviewed one of the retired detectives. He confirmed that Sheriff Bowman ordered them to do it.
In July 1995, Patrick Bride took his car up Wolf Creek Pass near Pagosa Springs, Colorado. On his way down, he lost control of the vehicle and launched it off one of the sharp switchbacks. He left behind his second wife and young son.
During his ASU lecture, Kaplan confirmed Bride was the source of the initial Sentinel stories.
“Patrick was soft in some ways,” Kaplan said. “His first wife’s death changed him. Here is a decorated cop who killed three guys once. In ’66, this group of wannabe hoods rolled into Shilling from California and tried robbing the local gold exchange. Bride responded to the call and shot all three dead before they could get into their car. But when it came to Aggie, he was soft. He never even blamed her for pushing him away.”
With the momentum of those first stories, Kaplan and Aggie convinced the publisher of the Sentinel to sue the sheriff’s office for the release of the Little Miss Somebody file. “It was never going to happen, not while the case was open,” Kaplan recalled. “But I wanted the sheriff and his minions to know we weren’t going away.”
In 1985, Otis Adams became sheriff and announced he was “reinvigorating” the investigation. He assigned it to Detective Ken Duffy, a brash Vietnam Vet who joined the sheriff’s office in 1974. Duffy was a patrol deputy on the eastern side of the county for the first six years of his career.
Mari DeSoto worked at the Sentinel from 1982 until 1991. She began as the paper’s librarian. Her job was to catalog and pull old clips for reporters. In 1984, Kaplan moved her to the news desk and assigned her to help Quinn.
“Aggie and I liked each other. Neither of us had real friends in the newsroom. I was the Mexican librarian to everyone. The men just stared at my ass and told me what clips to get,” DeSoto said during a 2022 interview. “And Aggie was so cold and guarded. The men had stopped hitting on her by the time I showed up.”
DeSoto was 28 years-old. She was divorced with no children. She and Aggie worked hard and stayed in the newsroom long after deadline. “We drank margaritas together, laughed. Talked about the next story. I had no idea what I was doing but I had the best time of my life with her.”
DeSoto said Ken Duffy was the worst choice to lead the investigation. “To me, he symbolized the new culture in Verde County. It was like most places in the Eighties – everyone was selfish, obsessed with money. We had our share of cocaine, too. Duffy dated one of my girlfriends for a little while. They used to do coke together, then go out to the Whiskey Barrel.”
But Duffy was hunting and drinking buddies with Sheriff Adams, so he got the big case. He died in 2007, after retiring to Page, Arizona, the small town along Lake Powell. I found some old clippings about him. In the photographs Duffy looked like an Eighties cop – mustache, slick backed hair, a 1911 .45 pistol on his right hip. His detective work had mainly encompassed narcotics investigations.
“He worked two killings,” Marvin Kaplan barked to the ASU audience in 1997. “Bar fights. Plenty of witnesses. Easy to clear. Little Miss Somebody was a total whodunnit. What the hell is he doing leading that case?”
Duffy convinced himself the late Sixties “drug element” was responsible for Little Miss Somebody. His theory was that a group of local hippies murdered the girl in a narcotic-crazed fit.
“He convinced himself she was a local girl killed by local people,” DeSoto recalled. “Never mind that there were no missing children reported in the county two years prior to her murder. She was not from Verde.”
Duffy and his detectives re-canvassed anyone who lived in west county during 1966-1968. He dispatched a series of drug informants to skulk around the county’s darker cultural edge and see what they could find out.
A year into it, Duffy had nothing. DeSoto recalled that the buzz on the case died down, probably because the Sentinel had been quiet on the matter. Aggie mainly wrote Sunday features that year. Pieces about the rodeo, new businesses opening in Shilling, the closing of the mine out by Bayley.
“Maybe she did it to make the sheriff think she was done hounding them,” DeSoto said.
But Aggie did it for another reason, DeSoto believed. “She and Duffy got involved. She tried to hide it, but he had a big mouth. I think she left Little Miss Somebody alone for him. Aggie was tough but also a big people pleaser. Duffy was drowning in the investigation, totally out of his league. I think she laid off to keep the pressure from him.”
The affair lasted until late 1987. Then Duffy moved on. Aggie stopped writing Sunday features.
DeSoto likened what happened next to a tsunami – for the sheriff, the newspaper, and even people outside of Verde County, Arizona. “Like how a tsunami is real quiet right before all the water recedes and then now, you’re drowning.”
It began, really, years earlier. Arthur French was a journalist in Nevada who wrote for weeklies in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. He was a product of the alternative news scene in the San Francisco Bay Area and was known as a brilliant researcher.
French wrote about the environment, especially western water issues. This led him to investigate commercial real estate development. And this brought him close to the elements of organized crime that loomed in the desert Southwest. French’s reporting exposed land fraud schemes in Nevada and Arizona, and how outfit guys were wining, dining, and sometimes extorting state and federal land use officials. During 1981-1983 he published 15 stories. They got minimal play in the mainstream press and mostly remained part of the alt-news scene and AM radio.
In late 1984, he drove to Winslow, Arizona, to meet a source. The next morning the operator of the Winslow airport found French’s car parked on the main access road. His body was slumped over the center console. He’d been shot six times. Months later, the sheriff and FBI arrested two men for the killing. Neither of whom were connected to the Las Vegas outfit guys or any of the people shamed in French’s reporting. Conspiracy theories abounded that the men were patsies, but it never went beyond that.
Sometime in 1986, French’s widow, Pauline, reached out to Aggie Quinn. The details of their meeting are unknown (Pauline died in 2009 and Aggie wouldn’t comment on the meeting for this article). Pauline gave Aggie a trove of documents, audio recordings, and photographs. Items French had accrued during his investigation into the land and water fraud, and organized crime.
The first Sentinel story in February 1988 was headlined – “SUSPECTED MOB ANGLE IN LITTLE MISS SOMEBODY SLAYING.” The meat of the story was this: Martino Tillio was a noted mafiosi in Las Vegas during the late 1950s until his assassination in 1980. He had three children. Frankie was the eldest and took over the family racket after his father died. Carlo was in federal prison in California on an extortion conviction. The daughter’s name was Noelle. She was kidnapped in 1968, when she was 10 years-old. Her school had been visiting the Grand Canyon and the bus stopped in Kingman, Arizona. Noelle disappeared somewhere between the bus and the bathroom. Six days later Tillio got a ransom demand. He bucked and the kidnappers went dark. Two weeks later Aggie Quinn stumbled onto Little Miss Somebody. And Noelle Tillio was never found. Kingman was about 100 miles north of Bayley.
“The sheriff was caught with his pants down,” Kaplan howled at ASU. “He and Duffy were a million miles from this information. To be fair, it’s not like this mobster called 911 to report his daughter missing. He used other means.”
As subsequent stories detailed, Tillio went on the warpath. FBI reports from French’s archive summarized how numerous Tillio rivals were murdered during 1968 through 1977. There was also a letter from Tillio’s attorney stating his client had issued a $5 million reward to the underworld seeking information on his daughter.
The biggest story was about Las Vegas FBI Agent Barry Parker. Aggie wrote that from 1969 until 1976, Tillio’s front company executed twelve bank wire transfers to Parker, totaling $450,000. In return Parker used his FBI badge and authority to conduct an off-the-books investigation into Noelle’s disappearance and Little Miss Somebody. Several Verde County residents were quoted in the story. Each one recalled the aggressive FBI agent who asked them questions. Barry convinced himself one local man participated in the kidnapping and repeatedly threatened him for information. The man said he reported it to the sheriff’s office in 1973 but nothing happened.
Aggie also traveled to Tucson and interviewed Marlene Noonan, a widow who last saw her husband getting into a car with Agent Parker in 1976. Desmond Noonan had been a low-level gangster for a time in Las Vegas, working for a rival of Tillio’s. He moved to Tucson around the time Noelle was kidnapped. He did it to marry his high school sweetheart, leave the crime world, and work as a plumber. The Noonans had three children.
A week after Parker took Desmond away, Marlene received a parcel. It contained $75,000 in cash and a note that read, “Keep your mouth shut or your kids will be orphans.” She remained silent and kept the money and card in her safe.
Once those stories came out, it didn’t take long for the FBI and Tucson Police to go after Parker. He was retired by then, living in Bullhead City, Arizona. He worked security for one of the casinos across the Colorado River in Laughlin, Nevada. Investigators got lucky when they found his fingerprints on the note and some of the $100 bills sent to Marlene. In 1989 he confessed to killing Desmond Noonan somewhere east of Tucson in the open desert. He dumped the body down by the Mexican border. He couldn’t remember where.
During 1988-1989, The Sentinel’s circulation exploded. “It was the first time newsstands in Phoenix wanted our paper,” Kaplan said. The news networks and big daily papers from California and Denver descended onto Verde County. Kaplan again: “They tried but they never broke any stories. But it put a tremendous amount of pressure on the sheriff.”
DeSoto remembered that Aggie was driven and excited about the Tillio stories. “She secretly hoped it would shake something loose. That some stubborn fact would finally emerge and answer all the questions.”
Yet after almost two years of work, nothing changed. “Sure, the stories led to the downfall of a corrupt FBI agent, the unsolved disappearance of Desmond Noonan. Big results. This is when they said Aggie would get a Pulitzer,” DeSoto said. “But the needle never moved on Little Miss Somebody. It sent Aggie someplace deep inside herself, someplace dark.”
Despite Tillio’s suspicions, authorities found no evidence to show his daughter was Little Miss Somebody. The sheriff made a point of announcing this in a rambling releases. He criticized Aggie’s reporting. He called her the “hysterical Mrs. Carver.”
“She was very upset when she read that,” DeSoto recalled. “She yanked the door off one of the newsroom supply closets. Then she decided to fire one more torpedo at Sheriff Adams.”
Aggie had identified another suspect: Sam Kent. He worked at the Bayley copper mine from 1958 until 1973, when he got a disability retirement. In early 1987, Kent’s ex-wife, Deborah, sat down with Aggie and told her the unsettling story: how after Little Miss Somebody became public, she’d found a trove of young girls’ underwear in a hiding place in the backyard shed. How in 1966, Kent showed up at the house late one night. His feet were bleeding, and he wasn’t wearing any shoes.
“It took her a while, but Deborah learned that a deputy sheriff came upon Kent’s van at the far end of Lopez Lake Road,” DeSoto said. “The van was rocking, if you know what I mean. The deputy thought it was some teenagers. He yelled at them to open the door. It took a minute or two. Then the door slid open and there was Kent. Behind him, a 13 year-old girl was pulling up her pants.”
The deputy grabbed Kent and knocked him around a bit. He put the girl in his patrol car, then took Kent’s shoes and keys and told him he could walk home from there. There was no official report filed. Deborah also said Kent became viciously paranoid after Aggie found Little Miss Somebody. He burned a bunch of his clothing and disappeared to Yuma for a week.
“He was a true suspect,” DeSoto said. “But in ’87, Aggie was with Duffy. So, she passed him the info. I think it hurt his ego. Because he never followed up.”
Around Christmastime 1989, Aggie telephoned Sheriff Adams at home. DeSoto was in the newsroom with her. “She was screaming. Told him that she was going to go confront Kent and write a story about it. Adams panicked.”
As soon as the call ended, the sheriff dispatched Duffy and his team to find Kent. Word got out they were hunting him, and Kent fled to a small house in Pahrump, Nevada. When Nye County deputies tried to contact him there, Kent barricaded himself inside. An hour later he stormed from the house with a rifle. Deputies shot him 17 times and he died at the scene.
The Nye County sheriff was furious with Adams for sending the mess his way. And the networks and big city dailies that were still hanging around Shilling got wind of it and blew it up.
The Sentinel went for Adams’s throat and published a story about Kent’s encounter with a Verde County deputy and pre-teen girl in 1966. Kaplan made sure the sub-headline explained that his reporter had provided “copious information” to VCSO detectives long before Kent’s death.
The public and law enforcement consensus quickly became that Kent was the killer. It was 1989 and cable news was growing. Vans camped out front of Adams’s office, the satellite antennas lurching over the sidewalk. Adams had to do something. So came the infamous press conference in January 1990.
“He seemed drunker than normal,” DeSoto told me. In the video, Adams stands at a lectern and fumbles through an explanation of how Sam Kent slipped away. Then he unleashes a five-minute tirade about the press and how The Sentinel obstructed justice and he muses about arresting the entire newsroom. At this point his eyes freeze on something behind the camera. DeSoto was there that day and told me he was staring at Aggie Quinn.
“She just grinned back at him,” DeSoto said.
The television and print reporters launched question after question. Adams ignored them and then the reporters got louder. Adams waived his hand in disgust and announced the press conference was over. I couldn’t find archival video anywhere of the next part. But DeSoto was there, and I have one more source who told me what happened.
Adams and Duffy retreated to a corner by the exit door. Aggie Quinn, holding her reporter’s notebook and pen, marched to them. DeSoto couldn’t hear what was said. “Whatever Aggie told him had him reeling. Then Adams just ran out of the room.”
Duffy half-followed his boss into the hallway. Then he stepped back into the room. He grabbed the notebook from Aggie’s hand and threw it to the floor. Then reared back and threw a punch right at her face. She flew backward into a table and rolled onto the floor. A uniform deputy rushed to Duffy and held him against the wall. DeSoto ran to her friend.
“She was motionless. For a moment I thought she was dead.”
Duffy pushed the deputy away and leapt down the hallway. The deputy came over to Quinn and picked her up. DeSoto walked with him as he took Aggie to a room with a couch. She lay there for several minutes before coming out of it. Her face was already bruising. The deputy ran back to the conference room and grabbed Aggie’s notebook from the floor.
Adams didn’t run for re-election in 1990. The county attorney considered charges against Duffy, but Aggie refused to cooperate. Kaplan made her take a month off to recover. When she returned, he forbade her from covering the story for a while. She was back on Sunday features. The truth was, there wasn’t much story left. It seemed Sam Kent had taken most of it with him.
Aggie retreated even further into herself during 1990 and 1991. She and DeSoto stopped hanging around the newsroom after deadline. As far as DeSoto knew, all Aggie did was spend time alone at home. And she would run.
In 1992, DeSoto accepted a marriage proposal from her boyfriend. They decided to move to Sierra Vista. “Aggie was mad at me,” she said. “Told me I was too baby crazy. She spoke about motherhood like it was a curse. We didn’t keep in touch after I left.”
Aggie stayed on the feature beat. In 1994, she sold her first book. It would be the first in a series of young adult fiction. In 1995, Verde College offered her a job and Aggie left The Sentinel to teach and focus on her books. The novels center on two brothers from New York – Jackie and Buddy – who come to Arizona in search of their father after their mother abandons them and moves to Europe.
The patrol deputy who came to Aggie’s aid at that press conference was named Charlie Atkinson. He was twenty-four and had been with the sheriff for three years. In 1995 he was promoted to detective and spent nine years in that bureau. One of his responsibilities was managing the Little Miss Somebody case file. “That entailed opening the chronology each year and writing ‘no new information,’” Atkinson told me. “Some nights if I was there alone, I’d pull the old file out and look at it. It was like a religious relic.”
In 2016 he was elected sheriff of Verde County. His first major decision was finding a way, given new DNA technologies, to name Little Miss Somebody.
“My predecessors just didn’t care that much about it. Can’t blame them. Life moves on, the county keeps growing,” Atkinson said. “More people and more crime. But I saw Aggie Quinn at that press conference. She worked so hard to keep that case alive. What did we do? Failed over and over again. And then what Duffy did to her.”
I asked him why VCSO always seemed at odds with Quinn.
“That’s easy. They hated her. For finding that little girl in 1968 and dumping a whodunnit in their incompetent laps. They hated that she never went away, all the stories she wrote. She gave them Sam Kent on a platter and Duffy still blew it. She reminded them how much they’d failed. But she’s the reason I stayed on as a deputy and went for the detective bureau. And I can tell you Aggie Quinn is the reason we pushed so hard for that grant money.”
Atkinson noted he telephoned Aggie in 2018 and last month when they made the identification. She never responded. “She’s why that little girl found her name again. You can tell her I said that.”
And so finally three weeks ago, I sat down with her. We met at a coffee shop in downtown Shilling. She wore her hair in a ponytail. The skin around her eyes was lined but her eyes still looked very young. She left it to me to start the conversation. I told her everything I’d reported, laid it out for her, read her some quotes. I hoped she’d tell me if she thought I got something wrong. She didn’t.
She told me she was happy Isabel Estrada made it home, but that she barely thought about the case anymore. That she had enjoyed writing novels, teaching, and leaving the dead with the dead. Aggie mentioned she might run the Shilling half marathon in two months. That life only existed right in front of her, and she didn’t care about old stories.
It was a good story, though. Didn’t she see the value in her legacy, in all she’d done for Verde County and Isabel Estrada? As Sheriff Atkinson said, Aggie’s tenacity and obsession led to all this. A lost little girl found her name. And the name Aggie Quinn meant something to people.
She was a Catholic, I said. Didn’t she think there was transcendence and salvation in all of that?
It was a flash of a moment: she widened her eyes and breathed in. Like she was going to break the whole thing open for me. Then she said, “You’re trying too hard.”
Aggie looked out the window to the hills west of town. I waited for her to look back at me. She kept her gaze out the window and placed her coffee mug on the table. She twisted it clockwise. “Being somebody – it didn’t save her.”
Can’t wait to talk about this piece!! ❣️