Who Really

is Chaz Higgs?

State Sen. Sandra Tiffany remembers her reaction when State Controller and good friend Kathy Augustine broke the news: While on vacation in Hawaii, Augustine had married a handsome, younger man she barely knew - a critical care nurse at the hospital unit where her previous husband had died just three weeks earlier.

"When I heard that, I said, 'What, are you nuts? Are you crazy?' " Tiffany recalls telling Augustine of the whirlwind marriage to Chaz Higgs.

Tiffany, a Henderson Republican, says that she met Higgs only once, at a political function: "I don't think I heard him say two paragraphs."

And the senator's first impressions? "He was buff. The guy is self-centered and self-absorbed."

Tiffany is not the first person to describe Higgs that way.

One of his three previous wives paints a similar portrait of the man whose attempted suicide after the mysterious death of Augustine earlier this month has thrust Higgs from being a bit player as a political spouse onto center stage.

This article is good.