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has told him of her association with the city’s drug underworld, and that included a connection to the El Grande murders. According to a transcript of a statement that Grijalva-Figueroa made to a private investigator, which she acknowledges in a brief telephone interview, the murders were a revenge killing over drugs. Grijalva-Figueroa said that, in June, 1992, a friend learned that about sixty-five pounds of cocaine that he partly owned had been stolen—and that “the El Grande guy” had tipped off the people who took it. As a result, her friend and two other men went to the store on the night of June 24th to exact retribution. “I was supposed to be the lookout,” she said, adding that she waited in a gold Cadillac while three men went inside.

“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 Minnitt, Grijalva-Figueroa said that she didn’t know them.

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.”

KENNETH PEASLEY ISN’T THE only prosecutor who has got into trouble in Pima County lately. David White, who preceded Peasley as the head of the criminal division, failed to disclose more than eight hundred pages of potentially exculpatory documents to defense lawyers in a first-degree-murder case; the county was compelled to dismiss the charges. (White died in 2003.) In July, the Arizona Supreme Court suspended the law license of a third veteran prosecutor, Thomas Zawada, for six months and a day, because he made false accusations against defense lawyers in yet another first-degree-murder case.

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 Minnitt, incarcerated on Keith Woods’s testimony in the Mariano’s Pizza case, will not be eligible