When Elizabeth Holmes pitched Theranos to Arizona legislators

Holmes had yet to become notorious in February 2015,  when she pulled up in a black SUV, and a team of security guards and lobbyists piled out. They guided her to a series of meetings with legislators.

It happened to be the day I was shadowing then-House Speaker David Gowan, because he was the first speaker from Southern Arizona since 1988.

So when a dozen legislators and lobbyists crowded a windowless meeting room to hear Holmes’ pitch for her company Theranos, I was in there too. Holmes wore a black turtleneck and, in a startlingly deep voice, essentially told Republican legislative leaders she was one of them.

In a room decorated with a life-size, cardboard cutout of Ronald Reagan, she noted that Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schulz, was on her board of directors, along with Henry Kissinger. Her request was to get a law passed allowing Theranos to draw blood from Arizona consumers without doctors’ orders.

She told the dozen or so legislators and aides present that her goal was to “create free-market competition to drive prices down and increase transparency.”

At that, Gowan perked up and said, “You’re talking to free-market-minded people here, so you’re talking in the right tone.”

She also reeled out a personal story that she must have told thousands of times. Her uncle, whom she grew up adoring, had gotten skin cancer, which quickly turned to brain cancer, and then he died. Even then it struck me that the catch in her voice as she told the story might have been deliberate, though I dismissed my doubts as too cynical.

“We want to build operations here that can serve as a national model,” she said.

At the time, Holmes and Theranos were still saying that their machine, called Edison, was able to test for hundreds of disorders with just a pin-prick of blood.

It wasn’t true, and Holmes is serving a 10-year prison sentence for fraud and other crimes.

Here are three columns that resulted in part from that day’s reporting and further revelations on Theranos in Arizona.

— Arizona fell hard for Theranos’ bluff, published Sept. 10, 2016

— Southern Arizonan, for once, a statewide power player, published Feb. 21, 2015

— Arizonans are unwitting subjects of state’s tech experiment, published March 31, 2018