12:26 PM MST on Monday, September 8, 2003

By Rhonda Bodfield
© 2003 ARIZONA DAILY STAR

It is still too early to gauge the effect of last week's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, since it is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But that court found that when death is meted out by judge, not a jury, it violates a defendant's constitutional right to be tried by his peers.

If the ruling is not reversed, it is likely that all of Pima County's 33 death row inmates will have some grounds to seek a reversal of their death sentences, although their convictions would stand.

There is a catch: The state Supreme Court has indicated it could review each case to look for "harmless error." That means the jury, in determining guilt, already weighed aggravating factors. A jury that finds a man guilty of killing three people for money, for example, has already considered the aggravating factors of multiple murders and pecuniary gain.

That said, it could still be an expensive venture. Although some have floated $2.5 million as a cost of Pima County resentencings, prosecutor Rick Unklesbay said that could be "very conservative."

Between the costs of defense, prosecution, expert witnesses and court fees, the bill for capital cases is an average of $180,000. Even assuming that the juries are just doing the sentencings, with a target case cost of $100,000 apiece, that's still $3.3 million for Pima County's death row inmates alone.

Those inmates include:

* Jose Amaya-Ruiz, 45, sentenced in 1986. Soon after his arrival from El Salvador, Amaya-Ruiz got a job working for newlyweds Mark and Kimberly Lopez as a stableman at their ranch near Tucson.

He was convicted of stabbing Kimberly, who was four months pregnant, 23 times in March 1985. He shot her in the ear with her handgun and fled with the couple's truck.

* Shad Armstrong, 30, sentenced in March 2000. Authorities alleged Armstrong and two accomplices killed Armstrong's sister and her boyfriend in February 1998. Prosecutors said he killed her to stop her from cooperating with authorities and implicating him in a crime that would send him back to prison.

Armstrong dumped the bodies in a pit 350 yards from his home before returning to the victims' apartment to steal their truck and valuables. Armstrong was arrested in Oklahoma after appearing on America's Most Wanted.

* Frank J. Atwood, 46, sentenced in 1987. In May 1984, Atwood violated parole by coming to Tucson after a California conviction for lewd and lascivious acts and kidnapping an 8-year-old boy.

On Sept. 17, 1984, eight-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson was riding her bicycle home from mailing a letter. Atwood kidnapped and killed her, leaving her body in the desert. He was apprehended after fleeing to Texas. Her body was found in April 1985.

* Scott D. Clabourne, 43, sentenced in 1983. Clabourne was convicted of raping, choking and fatally stabbing University of Arizona student Laura Webster in September 1980. According to Clabourne's confession, one of his companions got Webster to leave the Green Dolphin bar on a ruse. The men took turns raping and sodomizing her. Webster, who had been strangled and stabbed, was found the next morning in the Santa Cruz riverbed.

* David S. Detrich, 44, sentenced in 1991. Detrich and an accomplice were driving from Benson to Tucson in November 1989, when they picked up 38-year-old Elizabeth Souter.

Angered at the quality of cocaine the three then purchased, Detrich raped Souter, stabbed her and slit her throat before dumping her body near Ryan Field, southwest of Tucson.

* Marcus LaSalle Finch, 33, sentenced in 1999; Keith R. Phillips, 25, sentenced in 1999. The two went on a 16-day run of violence starting in April 1998 that left one man dead and three critically wounded. Finch admitted he fatally shot double amputee Kevin Hendricks as he fled during the last of a trio of tavern heists.

The gunmen first struck on April 12 at a South Side tavern where Finch had worked previously, shooting a 23-year-old waitress in the chest as she lay on the floor to show no resistance. She survived.

A week later, the gunmen struck a lounge on the Northwest Side, shooting a patron twice in the back, who survived.

* Beau Greene, 37, sentenced in 1996. On Feb. 28, 1995, 58-year-old UA music professor Roy Johnson never returned from an organ performance at a Green Valley church. His body, with four blows to the skull, was found four days later in a muddy wash.

Greene took Johnson's car and used Johnson's credit cards to purchase survival gear, pornographic movies and groceries. Before his sentencing, he wrote a letter boasting about being on death row.

* Richard Greenway, 34, sentenced in 1989. In March 1988, Greenway and an accomplice burglarized the Catalina Foothills home of Lili Champagne. Greenway shot and killed the woman and her 17-year-old daughter, Mindy. The men then stole some property, including a white Porsche, which they later set on fire.

* Levi Jackson, 27, sentenced in 1994; Kevin Miles, 35, sentenced in 1996. On Dec. 7, 1992, 16-year-old Jackson and Miles and another accomplice planned a carjacking and waited for a car to stop near East 24th Street and South Columbus Avenue. The three approached Patricia Baeuerlen, 40, and asked for a "light." As she reached for the lighter, Jackson pointed a gun at her head and the three took control of the car, driving it to a desert area. Baeuerlen, a mother of two, was fatally shot in the chest.

* Barry L. Jones, 45, sentenced in 1995. Jones was convicted in the 1994 sexual assault and slaying of 4-year-old Rachel Gray. At her death, she had blood in her ear, a gash on her head down to her skull, a ruptured small intestine and cuts and bruises. Some of the blows were caused by a crowbar.

Jones would not let the girl's mother take her to the hospital. She had been dead three hours when they brought her in.

* Robert Jones, 33, sentenced in 1998; Scott Nordstrom, 35, sentenced in 1998. Jones and brothers Scott and David Nordstrom went on a rampage starting with the Moon Smoke Shop robbery in May 1996, followed by the Firefighters Union Hall robbery the next month.

Jones was convicted in the deaths of two people during the smoke shop robbery on Tucson's North Side, as well as the deaths of four others at the union hall holdup. While Jones executed four of the victims himself - Scott Nordstrom killed the other two - they were both found guilty of all six because they jointly participated in the robberies.

David testified against the others in exchange for murder charges being dropped.

* Thomas A. Kemp, 55, sentenced in 1993. On July 11, 1992, 25-year-old Hector Soto Juarez disappeared after leaving his North Side apartment. A security camera at a bank snapped a picture of a man resembling Kemp using Juarez's bank card to withdraw $200 from an ATM. An accomplice told police that Kemp shot Juarez in the head.

At his sentencing, Kemp said he was not sorry since Juarez was a Mexican national. "Wetbacks are hardly an endangered species in this state," he said, adding he was sorry he didn't kill his accomplice.

* Joe L. Lambright, 56, sentenced in 1982; Robert D. Smith, 54, sentenced in 1982. The two picked up Sandra K. Owen, 29, while she was hitchhiking in Tucson in March 1980. She was then driven into the desert northwest of the city and raped. A woman with the two men, testifying under immunity, said Owen was stabbed, her throat was sawed and rocks were thrown at her.

* George M. Lopez, 50, sentenced in 1990. Lopez was living in a Tucson apartment with his girlfriend and their year-old son, Anthony, in August 1989. When the woman came back from shopping one day, the boy had bruises on his forehead and chin and seemed unusually quiet. The boy later died at a hospital with a fractured skull, broken ribs and a torn pancreas.

* Eric O. Mann, 42, sentenced in 1994. According to court records, Mann set up a deal in November 1989 to sell Richard Alberts some cocaine for about $20,000 but actually planned to give Alberts a shoebox filled with newspaper and then kill him. When Alberts showed up with a second man, Ramon Bazurto, both were killed.

The murders remained unsolved until 1994 when Mann's ex-girlfriend told police of the shootings.

* Jasper McMurtrey, 51, sentenced in 1981. McMurtrey was convicted of the Aug. 10, 1979, shooting deaths of Barry E. Collins and Albert Hughes Jr. at the now-defunct biker hangout, the Ranch House Bar.

A federal judge in March ruled there was reasonable doubt that he was competent when he stood trial in 1981, but the state has appealed that decision and still has him on death row.

* Angel M. Medrano, 46, sentenced in 1988. In January 1987, Medrano was on a weekend pass from a federal correctional halfway house in Tucson, when he drove to the home of 28-year-old Patricia Pedrin. Medrano served time in prison with her husband. After the eight-weeks-pregnant woman opened the door, he raped her and stabbed her more than 20 times with a knife. Her two young children found her body the next morning in a pool of blood.

* Danny Montaño, 22, sentenced in 1999. Montaño, a member of a prison gang, was serving two concurrent life terms on armed robbery convictions in Phoenix when corrections officers found inmate Raymond Jackson lying on his bunk in a pool of blood. He had been stabbed 179 times, conscious for much of the attack because other inmates heard his screams for several minutes.

* Robert J. Moody, 44, sentenced in 1996. Moody smirked during his sentencing, when the judge recounted the murders of Michelle Malone, 33, and Patricia Magda, 56.

Moody, who said he killed while under the control of space aliens, brought Malone roses before Moody forced her to write him a check for $500. After tying her to a chair, he hit her in the head with a BB gun butt, then shot her with a rifle in the chest, neck, abdomen and wrist. Five days later, he bound Magda at knifepoint and placed a sofa chair on top of her while he used her bank card to withdraw $300. He stabbed her several times in the back, neck and left arm, before striking her more than eight times with garden clippers, crushing her skull and cutting her brain.

* Kajornsak Prasertphong, 24, sentenced in 2001. Christopher Huerstel and Prasertphong were convicted of three murders at an East Side Pizza Hut at closing time in January 1999.

The two ate a meal there, paying with Prasertphong's debit card, then shot kitchen worker James Bloxham, 17, manager Robert Curry, 44, and waitress Melissa Moniz, 20. Moniz did not die immediately, so Prasertphong admitted to attempting to manually snap her neck.

The state Supreme Court last week overturned Huerstel's conviction, citing judicial error.

* Charles Reinhardt, 22, sentenced in 1996. Reinhardt and his accomplice killed Michael J. Ellis, 26, in a 1995 drug deal gone bad. When the drugs did not arrive, the two men took Ellis to Redington Pass northeast of Tucson, where they beat him with a gun, shot him in the shoulder and smashed his head with rocks.

* Alfonso R. Salazar, 40, sentenced in 1988. In July 1986, Salazar and an accomplice pulled the wrought-iron bars from a window and entered the Tucson home of 83-year-old Sara Kaplan, who weighed 90 pounds and wore a patch over one eye. The two beat her and strangled her with a telephone cord.

* Ronald Schackart, 40, sentenced in 1985. Charla Regan, 22, and Schackart were classmates through high school and college. Schackart told police that he didn't mean to kill her when he lured her to a hotel room, where he raped her at gunpoint, beat her with the gun and strangled her. Her sock was jammed so deeply down her throat that her tongue was torn.

* Martin R. Soto-Fong, 28, sentenced in 1994. Soto-Fong and his accomplices in 1992 robbed the El Grande Market, where Fong had previously worked. After money was taken from the cash register, the three people in the market - Fred Gee, Huang Zee Wan and Raymond Arriola - were shot in the head, execution-style.

* Christopher J. Spreitz, 37, sentenced in 1994. A jury convicted Spreitz of the May 1989 beating death of Ivy Mae Atherton, 38, based on statements he made to police. He admitted striking her several times before raping her, then crushed her head with a rock to keep her from screaming. He said he was drunk and didn't mean to kill her.

* Robert Walden Jr., 36, sentenced in 1992. Walden was sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of 31-year-old Miguela Burhans, one of three women he admitted killing. Burhans' husband returned home to find Burhans partially nude, her throat slashed. She'd also been strangled with a telephone cord.

* James Wallace, 53, sentenced in 1985. Wallace confessed to the February 1984 slayings of his girlfriend, Susan Insalaco, 36, and her two children, 16-year-old Anna and 12-year-old Gabriel Monzon, in her mobile home near Marana. After Insalaco asked him to move out because of his drug use, the unemployed carpenter clubbed each to death with a bat or pipe wrench as they came home from school or work.

* Thomas West, 44, sentenced in 1988. Donald Lee Bortle, 53, was tied up, gagged, beaten and robbed in his West Side trailer in June 1987. West was arrested after bragging to friends about the attack.

* Joseph R. Wood, 44, sentenced in 1991. In August 1989, Wood stalked into the family business where his 29-year-old ex-girlfriend, Deborah Dietz, worked. First he shot her father, 56-year-old Eugene Dietz. Then as several employees fled, he shot Deborah Dietz in the stomach and chest. Police, who followed him to the scene because of a traffic violation, shot him several times. He survived after surgery.

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