For Margarita Parada, a 19-year-old from a village deep in Mexico, the adventure of a lifetime is about to start. It is April 11, 2005, and Margarita has stuffed a suitcase and her backpack with favorite clothes and personal mementos. Margarita is the second youngest of Maria and Pablo Parada’s…

Gabe Cruz was pumped as he left work at 3 a.m. on the morning of March 3, 2005, a Thursday. Gabe had put in a long shift as a “bar back” at Graham Central Station, a popular Tempe establishment. He’d hustled all night, cleaning tables and stocking the bar at…

Gary Sedlacek is awakened by someone pounding on a side door to his home in downtown Phoenix’s historic Coronado District. It’s about 5:30 on a dark, drizzly morning, February 19, 2005. At the door is Shawn Drake, Sedlacek’s 29-year-old neighbor from a few doors down on North Richland Street. Drake…

Dave Uribe reports for duty at 6 a.m. on May 10, a Tuesday. Uribe had been a Phoenix police officer for 22 of his 48 years. He still loved being a street cop in the sprawling Cactus Park precinct, in the west and northwest parts of the city. Every day’s…

It’s a Saturday evening in late November on the border of Phoenix and Glendale. The scent of barbecue drifts through the brisk air on a residential street just north of Camelback Road. All seems quiet at the moment in this working-class neighborhood. But just after 10 p.m., two cars turn…

Warren Granville is about the last judge anybody expected to become the target of attack dogs from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Granville was a prosecutor for two decades before he became a judge in 2000. He takes the city bus to the downtown Phoenix courthouse every day, walks to…

The six members of the Phoenix Police Department’s C-32 homicide squad, plus their sergeant, gather at a midtown diner for their usual early lunch. It’s 11 a.m. on May 6, a mild day for Phoenix when the temperature will only reach 81 degrees. Three of the detectives are on call…

One of Arizona’s most enduring murder mysteries resurfaced recently when the convicted killer of Phoenix heiress Jeanne Tovrea returned to court for his re-sentencing. Now 51, James “Butch” Harrod has been incarcerated on Arizona’s death row since shortly after he was sentenced in November 1997 for first-degree murder. Though the…

Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas stood before an eighth-floor conference room packed with reporters recently and invoked the disgraced name of Gary Jay Karpin. Thomas gestured toward an easel holding a large placard that featured a color jail-booking photo of the 54-year-old erstwhile mediator whose main business, “Divorce With Dignity,”…

On July 18, a cruel day in Phoenix when the temperature reached a record-tying 113 degrees, fire paramedics responded to an emergency call from a downtown apartment-dweller. The caller was a woman who lives at Ninth Avenue and Grant. She said a man was on the ground in her front…

Anita Watson was overwhelmed July 19, after a nine-person jury awarded her and her family $28 million, at the conclusion of a civil trial in downtown Phoenix. But it wasn’t like she was thinking about how to spend her share of the money. “I kept thinking about my mom and…

Robert Shawn Owens stepped into the 4th Avenue Jail in downtown Phoenix about noon last Wednesday, July 20, crisply attired in khakis and a pink pinstriped shirt. Owens didn’t forget his glasses so he could read the legal papers about his case at his initial appearance in court later that…

Gina Niedzwiecki was thrilled to learn of the Maricopa County grand jury indictment and July 11 arrest of Valley “divorce mediator” Gary Karpin. “I’m gleeful, to put it mildly,” says Niedzwiecki, a Phoenix single mother of two who suffers from multiple sclerosis. “I’d like to think that stepping up and…

An unfolding television crime story on the morning of last February 25 grabbed the attention of Estela Sanchez. Phoenix police were investigating the pre-dawn shootings of a man and woman just outside the Coconut Groves apartments at 2028 West Indian School Road. The detectives seemed focused on a lime-green taxicab…

At 2:30 p.m. on May 14, 2002, Maricopa County jail psychiatrist Joe Franzetti scribbled a note into the medical chart of his patient, inmate Steve Cervantes. He wrote that Cervantes was “stable, compliant, and with a brighter mood. No homicidality. No suicidality. No delusions. Insight and judgment improved. Socializes appropriately,…

In February 1997, self-styled businessman Emmanuel Agyeman boarded a bus in Carson City, Nevada. His destination was the central Arizona town of Eloy, which sits between Phoenix and Tucson. It was Agyeman’s first visit to the Grand Canyon State, but it was hardly a vacation. Earlier, immigration authorities had picked…

Earlier this month, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association commandeered the National Press Club for a “media briefing.” Reporters from publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal showed up en masse. The news of the day on March 11 was the filing of a mammoth lawsuit…

Sometime soon, a marked man named Ike Diogu will make a momentous decision — whether to stick around Arizona State University for his senior season or set sail for the National Basketball Association. The Pac-10’s Player of the Year would be a probable first-round selection in the upcoming NBA draft…

Trouble is, now I’ll never be able to collect that $21,000 that Hunter S. Thompson’s owed me for going on 20 years. Not that I ever had expected to see a bloody nickel of the money that the son of a bitch had avoided coughing up until he recently blew…

Two women hug like long-lost sisters beneath a gazebo at north Phoenix’s Roadrunner Park. Gina Niedzwiecki and Ruth Murray had been chatting by phone for months, since they’d learned of their sadly similar stories. But this sunny day in mid-January marks the first time they’ve met in person, and their…

On the morning of January 6, veteran prosecutor Cindi Nannetti received two visitors in her fifth-floor offices at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. There, the longtime chief of the agency’s nationally respected sex-crimes unit learned from Phil MacDonnell and Sally Wells, top aides to new County Attorney Andrew Peyton Thomas,…

Phoenix residents awoke on the morning of March 9, 1991, to terrible news. Someone had bludgeoned an elderly father and his daughter to death inside their small east Phoenix market. For those who didn’t know 72-year-old John Lee or his 50-year-old daughter Ginger, the apparent robbery-murder was just another lousy…