Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [50]
THE BURDEN OF THE EL GRANDE investigation fell to Peasley and Joe Godoy. Peasley and Godoy made an odd pair. Godoy is genial and outgoing, where Peasley is taciturn and severe. Godoy is thickly built, with a big thatch of black hair and a drooping mustache that curls down to his chin. When he talked about the El Grande murders, the case that led to his departure from the force, he never appeared defensive or unsure. “Joe is just totally likable, and juries loved him,” Judge Hantman said. “He was very soft-spoken, very credible, very sympathetic.” First thrown together at crime scenes, Peasley and Godoy started working cases as a team, and then became friends.
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