Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [57]
“Fong had worked there, so he knew they would recognize him,” Peasley went on. “So if he was going to allow somebody to recognize him, they were going in there with the idea of taking the money and killing the people who were there. To this day, that’s what I believe happened.” Fingerprints identified as Soto-Fong’s were found on plastic bags (which had contained the lemons and cucumbers), as well as on a food stamp, and that helped to convict him.
Lougee has tried mightily to discredit the fingerprint evidence. At the murder scene, he says, Godoy collected and processed the plastic bags in a haphazard way, and delayed forwarding them to the crime lab. It isn’t clear whether the food stamp with Soto-Fong’s fingerprints is the one that appears in photographs of the scene, and there was conflicting testimony about whether it came from the cash register or had been found on the floor near Gee’s body. (Since Soto-Fong had worked at the El Grande a few months earlier, it would be possible for his prints to turn up there.) At the time of the investigation, the fingerprint examiner, Timothy O’Sullivan, who had made significant errors in earlier cases, was suffering from terminal cancer and was heavily medicated, raising questions about his focus and attention. It is peculiar that O’Sullivan, who died before the trial in 1993, identified only Soto-Fong’s prints on the evidence, and not those of anyone else who worked at the store. It is also odd that other produce bags at the store had a red line across the top but the one with Soto-Fong’s prints, did not.
Nonetheless, by the time Peasley was disbarred, Lougee despaired of finding conclusive proof that Soto-Fong was innocent. Lougee could not look to Keith Woods, the dubious informant, for help. After testifying against the El Grande defendants, Woods moved to Nevada, where he was convicted on federal cocaine charges and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. In 2001, Woods pleaded guilty to possessing marijuana and heroin in prison and received a sentence of an additional twenty-seven months. (In response to a letter from me, Woods asked that he not be mentioned in this article.)
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 murders—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 connection. Godoy received a tip that a man named Ernest King, who had ties to the Tucson drug world, might have been involved in the murders at the El Grande. Godoy interviewed King, checked his prints, and gave him a lie-detector test, which he passed.
“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 connection was dropped.
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