The courthouse crowd in Tucson flees from downtown at every chance, and at lunchtime judges, cops, and politicians line up for Mexican food at Rigo's, in South Tucson, about fifteen minutes away. Godoy doesn't so much patronize Rigo's as preside there, in both English and Spanish. "I tried to think about El Grande the way a bad guy would," he explained, as we sat in a booth at Rigo's. "You had all these people killed, so maybe it was a stranger or maybe it was someone who knew them. So I decided to find all the people who had worked at the El Grande. It took weeks, but I found everyone except this one guy, this guy named Martin. I knew he was just a kid, and I kept just missing him. He was moving apartments, staying in different places. At first, I thought it was two different people, one named Soto and the other named Fong.Then I realized it was only one guy, Martin Soto-Fong, and he had never been prosecuted, never even photographed or fingerprinted. I was looking for him, but I was always one step behind him. I needed to make him or clear him."
The situation became even more pressing for Godoy and Peasley when a similar crime took place on August 26th: in the course of a robbery, masked gunmen shot the owner of Mariano's Pizza, though he survived. "Mariano's Pizza was something similar to El Grande because they shot someone when they didn't have to," Godoy said. "I learned from these other detectives that they were going to arrest these two guys, Chris McCrimmon and Andre Minnitt, and I wanted to be part of the arrest teams. I said, 'After you're finished with them about the robberies, I want to talk to them about the homicides at the El Grande.' " McCrimmon and Minnitt, both in their early twenties, were arrested, with Godoy's help, on September 2, 1992.
By that point, Godoy and Peasley regarded Soto-Fong, McCrimmon, and Minnitt as suspects in the El Grande murders, although there was little evidence against them. Then they discovered Keith Woods, who became the key witness in the case.
Woods, who was friends with Christopher McCrimmon, had been in prison on a drug charge. Although Woods was only twenty-one years old, he was already a three-time felon.When he was released, on August 21, 1992, McCrimmon picked him up to drive him home.A few days later,Woods was arrested for possessing cocaine, a parole violation that subjected him to a sentence of twenty-five years to life. Faced with this prospect,Woods told the detective who arrested him that he knew something about several recent crimes in Tucson, and detectives eventually steered him to Joe Godoy.
On September 8, 1992, Godoy sat down with Woods at Tucson police headquarters for an interview, which was tape-recorded. According to the transcript, Woods said that after McCrimmon picked him up from prison they met with their mutual friend Minnitt, and the two men revealed that they, along with a third man, committed the El Grande murders. In that interview,Woods said he knew the third person only as "Cha-chi," but he later said that it was Martin Soto-Fong. Woods also said that McCrimmon and Minnitt played a role in the Mariano's Pizza case. Peasley and Godoy decided not to pursue the parole-violation charges against Woods.
The use of criminal informants poses difficulties for prosecutors, because such witnesses can be extremely manipulative. Some informants lie, telling prosecutors what they want to hear, because they think they can get themselves a better deal. "You have to be tremendously careful that you don't give them ideas," says Stephen Trott, a federal appeals-court judge and former prosecutor, who lectures widely on the ethics of using informants."They know that the best way to stay out of jail is not to hire Johnnie Cochran but, rather, to turn on someone else. At a moment's notice, they will make stuff up and give it to you.With an interested witness, you do not lay information on the table and let him snatch it and say he knew it already."
As far as Peasley was concerned,Woods solved two high-profile crimes: the El Grande murders and the Mariano's Pizza shooting. Peasley told me that he understood the risks of dealing with Woods."He had priors. He was a drug user at the time. He had one ofjust about everything a witness could be impeached with," he said. "So he wouldn't have been my first choice. But he was who I had. And I was satisfied from the information he was giving that it was accurate."
Armed with Woods as a witness, Peasley brought charges against McCrimmon, Minnitt, and Soto-Fong.The first El Grande trial, in 1993, was against Soto-Fong, who had worked at the store a few months before the murders. After the tip from Woods, Tucson police investigators determined that Soto-Fong's prints matched those that had been found on plastic bags and a food stamp found at the scene. In light of this, Peasley said, "probably a third-year law student could have convicted Fong." The court appointed James Stuehringer, a respected Tucson lawyer and a friend of Peasley's, to defend Soto-Fong.
During the Soto-Fong trial, Stuehringer criticized the way Godoy had handled the evidence, especially the items with the fingerprints. Peasley defended Godoy with characteristic zeal, and, in the end, won a conviction and a death sentence against Soto-Fong. The trial deepened the bond between Peasley and Godoy. "I thought that Ken did a really good job putting everything back together and saying I'm not a bad cop," Godoy told me. Godoy was so moved by Peasley's defense of him that when he married for the third time he asked Peasley to perform the civil ceremony. (Tucson law enforcement is a small world, and Godoy's wife is also a Pima County prosecutor.)
In 1993, Peasley also won convictions in joint trials against McCrimmon and Minnitt-first in the Mariano's Pizza case and then in the El Grande murders, with Keith Woods as the key witness. Apart from Woods's testimony, there wasn't much evidence against McCrimmon and Minnitt in the El Grande case. Eyewitnesses described a gold Cadillac as the getaway car, and McCrimmon's fingerprints were found on a car that was parked a few blocks away from the El Grande; but that car was neither gold nor a Cadillac.
It was in these trials, in 1993, that Peasley started bending the truth about the evidence. He knew that a jury would have suspicions about a dubious character like Keith Woods, so he tried to enhance Woods's credibility, urging jurors to believe Woods because what he'd told Godoy was "something that Woods could get only from those people who were directly involved in causing the deaths" of the three victims. Peasley said that investigators knew nothing about the three defendants until Woods volunteered the information during his interview, on September 8, 1992. McCrimmon and Minnitt were sentenced to thirty-six years in the Mariano's Pizza case and to death in the El Grande murders.With the convictions of the three men now complete, the case vanished from the front pages of the Tucson papers and the defendants began their wait on death row.
Only a moment's hesitation by a single juror kept the case alive. Immediately after the verdicts were announced in the 1993 murder trial of McCrimmon and Minnitt, the judge did the customary polling of the jury. In answering whether he agreed with the verdict, one juror wavered, saying,"God, I can't say 'yes' and I can't say 'no.' " After further questioning by the judge, the juror went along with the verdict, but three years later, in 1996, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the juror had been coerced, and ordered a new trial for the two defendants. (The appeals court, however, separately upheld Soto-Fong's conviction and death sentence.) For their second trial, which did not take place until 1997, McCrimmon and Minnitt were assigned new lawyers. McCrimmon drew Richard Lougee.