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February 13, 2004
Living in Pahrump's Dyer straits
I drove into town with a sedan packed full of my belongings and checked into what was then called the Days Inn. I picked up the Pahrump Valley Times and began searching for an apartment. I began work Jan. 31. I already inquired at Century 21, and near the end of the day, stopped at the other real estate office I knew handled rentals, Provenza Realty. There on the bottom of the board listing the rentals was a place for $375 per month, furnished, with utilities included. Ideal, I thought. The woman at the office, Liz Neth, cautioned it was a ways on the northwest side of the valley. I didn't mind, since I discovered how spread out Pahrump Valley was while checking out some earlier rentals that day. When I stopped to check out the apartment, above a garage at 2131 Simkins Road, I noticed the property was nicely landscaped with rows of pine trees, pampas grass and fruit trees. The older woman I met seemed friendly. So I signed a year's lease and paid over $500 in deposits. The next day when I moved in, a tall man with black hair met me at the gate. He said, "If you believe what they say in the papers you'll think I'm the biggest crook in the county." His name was Robert "Red" Dyer. He had just been recalled as public administrator. His wife was Genie Dyer. So began an almost three-year residency above their garage, next to the doublewide manufactured home where they lived. Red proceeded to quickly and tirelessly fill me in on his entire case and all the conspiracies he saw by the "good old boy network" in Pahrump. Being new to Pahrump, I didn't recognize any of the names, but he didn't seem to care. I bought a desk and dresser from Speedy Salvage, a place that sold secondhand furniture. As Red helped me carry it up the stairs, he was wheezing, he blamed it on his emphysema. Red also said he used to work for the Associated Press in New York because he was such a fast typist. I was a little upset over moving onto a property with people who were at the center of the biggest scandal in the county. A few nights I stayed awake wondering whether the sheriff's office would raid the place, whether some angry descendant of an estate would toss a firebomb, or whether I would arrive home to find my apartment ransacked. I quickly found out about the wacky nature of Pahrump politics. I moved in right after a petition to recall former Nye County Sheriff Wade Lieseke had been tossed out after the man who organized it submitted more than 1,100 John Doe signatures. Red Dyer told me he'd initiate another recall petition after that failed. I mentioned that tip to my new editor at View newspapers, who said if we wrote stories like that, we'd have to balance it with positive profiles on people in the community. I learned the Pahrump Valley View would be concentrating on good news in the community, not court cases and backstabbing politicians. I was glad I didn't write up that story anyway, it was one of a few things Red said he would do that never happened. Gradually, the Dyers found out I wouldn't be able to advocate their cause in the newspapers. But they still filled my head with their case, like the time Red had to drive me to Highway 160 and Bell Vista Avenue after my car ran out of gas, taking advantage of every minute to tell me his version of the case. Genie Dyer at one point wrote a column under a pen name in the Las Vegas Tribune. When I first moved in, Genie Dyer offered to line me up with dates through friends in the Mormon Church. Genie said she could introduce me to sister so-and-so, or sister so-and-so. I appreciated the thought, but I didn't want to be converted. And the only people I remembered calling sister were the nuns in Catholic grade school, especially Sister Bead, my fourth grade teacher who would punch us in the face with a closed fist if we misbehaved. Luckily, none of the bad things I envisioned happened. In fact, the first summer the door wouldn't lock to my apartment, and I never found anything missing. However, I suspect Red might have cut off the power on some of my weekend trips out of town, as the clock was blinking 12:00 when I returned. In fact it was sometimes a little amusing telling people where I lived. Once the power was cut off in the middle of summer. I contacted Provenza Realty, where I paid my rent, they sent a repairman out who eventually realized the power meter wasn't moving; they had been cutoff for nonpayment. A sympathetic neighbor was stringing an extension cord to my apartment when the Dyers came home. Red was upset. He said alerting the neighbors would soon spread the word all over town they were planning to split, which a number of people had suspected. One time I watched as the district attorney's office seized four vehicles from the back lot. "This is a travesty of justice," Red Dyer exclaimed as he came to my door to tell me about it. The Dyers had almost a Noah's Ark of animals, including three dogs. There was Honey, a temperamental, deaf, longhaired dachshund; Mikey, a more friendly, blind, longhaired mutt; and Tico, a precocious terrier who eventually climbed the stairs to my apartment, until I made the unpleasant discovery one morning he wasn't potty-trained. Red showed me how to attract the geese by bobbing his head and honking like one. There was the parrot that once belonged to Barbara Streisand, I was told. I sat through the whole soap opera: the televised preliminary hearing, Red Dyer's incarceration in Tonopah for contempt of court, the attempt to pick a jury in the old 99-Cent store and finally, their long-awaited trial in Las Vegas in December 2001, which ended in a mistrial. By the time of the trial, the Dyers had been living somewhere else, Las Vegas apparently. Then one night in February 2002, I had a knock on my apartment door. A deputy informed me they were taking Red into custody, and the dogs had been fed. He was arrested for bribery and perjury. A couple with a van came by to take care of the birds at first. I had never been inside the Dyer's birdhouse before. The man said he was an ex-Marine, who lived by the Corp's motto "semper fi", always faithful. Red Dyer's first wife came to move a bunch of their belongings out of the house. She was an attractive woman from Southern California. I wondered why Red didn't stick with her. I had been told they discovered some voodoo dolls Genie left inside the house; ordinary dolls with newspaper mug shots cut out and taped on the heads. There was one of Kirk Vitto, the prosecutor in the case, Doug McMurdo from the Pahrump Valley Times who wrote extensively of the case, and Red's daughter. Eventually I was given an eviction notice, posted in red on the door. I managed to stay a short time after that, until the mortgage company filed for a notice of unlawful detainer. I decided the Pahrump Justice Court was busy enough to be bothered with my case, the finance company was right, I was wrong. By this time it was October 2002 and it wouldn't be such a hot time of year to move. It had been an interesting three years. I had never been ripped off by the Dyers, but then friends joked I never died there. Write to Mark Waite at mwaite@pvtimes.com. |
