Страница 30 из 79
Nonetheless, by the time Peasley was disbarred, Lougee despaired of finding conclusive proof that Soto-Fong was i
By now, Soto-Fong had been assigned new lawyers for a final appeal in federal court, so Lougee was ready to turn the files over to them. "I was so obsessed that my wife was getting ready to leave me," he told me. "I thought to myself, I don't need this anymore. I decided to take another murder case from the county, a woman named Carole Grijalva-Figueroa. Simple case. Shooting at a Circle K. And then one day Carole says to me, out of the blue,'Do you remember El Grande?' "
To Lougee, the government's theory of the El Grande mur-ders-that it was a botched robbery-never made much sense.The perpetrators allegedly stole just a few hundred dollars, and they left thousands more in cash lying around the store. Photographs from the night of the murders show several cigarette cartons full of cash that had been left in plain view. Peasley said that he thought the killers panicked and forgot to take the cash-or that they never saw the money in the first place-but the motivation for the murders had never been entirely clear.
The South Tucson neighborhood was full of drug dealing and, in the early nineties, a great deal of drug violence. In the days following the murders, Peasley and Godoy seem to have investigated the possibility that the murders had a drug co
"We can tell when somebody's lying.We can smell these things," Godoy told me. "King was clean." Once Keith Woods appeared on the scene, the investigation of a drug co
Carole Grijalva-Figueroa, who is thirty-four, was arrested in January, 2004, for her role in a fatal shooting outside a Circle K convenience store in Tucson. As part of a religious awakening, Lougee says, Grijalva-Figueroa has told him of her association with the city's drug underworld, and that included a co
"I sat and I waited. Heard a bunch of yelling.And I heard shots," she said, according to the transcript. She drove the three men from the scene, and heard one of them say, "Did you see I got that motherfucker point-blank?" As for Martin Soto-Fong, Chris McCrimmon, and Andre Mi
Grijalva-Figueroa's version of events raises many questions, as Lougee acknowledges. It is, for example, hard to square Grijalva-Figueroa's version with Soto-Fong's fingerprints on the plastic bags-if those bags were really the ones found by the register and those prints are really his. "I know it seems impossible that, out of all the cases in the world, I happen to get this woman out of the blue who solves the one case I've been obsessed with for years," Lougee said."I know there will be people who think that I fed it to her, or she didn't say it, or that it's just too pat. I can't help it. But I believe her story is true." Grijalva-Figueroa, who is in protective custody, fears for her safety, and, according to Lougee, has said that she may deny any knowledge of the El Grande case if she feels that testifying will jeopardize her further. "How do you present a case like this to a jury?" Lougee said. "You're better off as a defense attorney if you can just point to a single lie or a couple of them. No one will ever believe you if you say the whole thing is a lie."
Ke
In October, a prominent local doctor, Brad Schwartz, was charged with hiring a hit man to kill a former colleague, who was stabbed to death. Schwartz had been romantically involved with a onetime Pima County prosecutor, and had social ties with her former office; last month, LaWall fired a deputy county attorney and suspended three others who had apparently delayed sharing relevant information about the case with the police. In recent months, at least eight other prosecutors have retired or resigned-extraordinary turmoil in an office of only about sixty prosecutors. Still, in
LaWall's opinion nothing is amiss."I don't think any of the conduct of any of these men reflects on the office," she told me. "This is a good office."
The three men convicted in the El Grande case remain in prison. In 2004, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, ordered the United States to grant new hearings to several condemned Mexican nationals, including Martin Soto-Fong, but it's not clear how that ruling will be applied. Through his new attorney, Gregory Kuykendall, Soto-Fong is seeking a writ of habeas corpus in federal court in Tucson, a case that would appear to be his final hope of avoiding execution. McCrimmon and Mi
Joe Godoy and Ken Peasley, still close friends, have joined forces in the private sector, working out of the historic downtown house that serves as the law offices of Brick Storts, a prominent Tucson defense attorney. Godoy is now an investigator, and Peasley is a consultant and a paralegal. (They are collaborating on Schwartz's defense.) Godoy is characteristically effervescent about his new role. "I have to work nights sometimes, just to keep up with my work.And I have a couple of guys working for me, and, gosh, I just got too much work," he said. "The people that know me know that I'm not a bad cop and that I'm not a bad person."
The lawyers in Storts's building have spacious offices in the front, but Peasley is wedged into a small room in the back, next to the parking lot. The papers on his desk are still arranged in orderly piles, and his prosecutor-of-the-year plaques hang on the stucco walls.While we were talking, a secretary came in to say that one of the lawyers was heading back from court, and Peasley almost sprinted out to the parking lot, to make sure that my car wasn't blocking the lawyer's way. "He hates when someone gets in his space," Peasley said.