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“He even said he was at the scene at the time it happened-he mentioned Alex’s name, he mentioned Rolando Caratachea,” Rowlett said. “They had gone in there for robbery purposes, to get what they wanted and leave, but one of the monks woke up, and he [Doody] didn’t want nobody to I.D. them, so he started shooting. He said that he shot some and Alex shot some.
“All he said was that they took money, things of value, gold, things that they could sell, statues of Buddha, gold… . They were dressed up in full military clothing, in BDUs [Battle Dress Uniform],” Rowlett said, adding that Doody told him he was wearing a combat vest and carrying knives and an L-shaped military flashlight.
“I thought he was just foolin’ around,” Rowlett said. “I didn’t think he was serious.”
Neither did Victoria “Vickie” Jones, a 17-year-old Agua Fria senior, who described herself as Doody’s “girlfriend” from mid-May 1991 until she wrote him a “Dear John” letter a few weeks after his arrest.
Jones, a petite, polite girl with piles of auburn hair, dressed for court in a blue-striped sweater, jeans and black L.A. Gear high-tops with yellow laces. She barely glanced at Doody through her testimony.
Jones and Doody were in the same ROTC flight, and they saw each other every day at drill-team practice. Just about every weekend they would go to movies, or “do something outdoors, teenager stuff.” A few times they double-dated with Alex Garcia and Melanie Sprouse, a gum-cracking girl who attends Trevor Browne High School and reads “Sweet Valley High” romances. Sprouse first encountered Garcia at a Civil Air Patrol meeting and, coincidentally, had been a classmate of victim Matthew Miller.
Jones did not see Doody much over the summer. After school let out, she went to California to stay with her mother, and Doody and Garcia drove there once for a short visit in July. When she later returned to the Valley, Jones raced off to a weeklong ROTC leadership camp in Gila Bend. She returned from the camp on Friday, July 26, and left the next Monday to visit an aunt in Las Vegas.
She stayed in Las Vegas about a month, and when she returned, Doody’s parents and brother had moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where his father had been transferred.
Over the summer, Doody’s life was in flux. He kept trading marginal jobs and addresses, staying with his parents on base housing only occasionally. When his father, Brian Doody, received word that he was to be transferred to Peterson Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, Johnathon decided to remain behind, with his friends at Agua Fria.
He began the summer working at McDonald’s, first in Avondale and later at the one on Glendale Avenue and Litchfield Road. Though he was considered a good employee, Doody abruptly quit McDonald’s and for a time worked at Anthony’s Pizza, a concession restaurant inside the Luke Air Force Base Exchange. For a time, he worked both at Anthony’s and as a grocery sacker at the Luke Commissary, until sometime in August, when he was either fired from or quit his job at Anthony’s.
Doody was also having trouble keeping a roof over his head. Though his family did not move to Colorado Springs until the end of August, Doody moved out on his own in July. At first he was living in a Glendale apartment with Moses Cruz, a 19-year-old who had just been graduated from Agua Fria. After Doody lost his job at Anthony’s Pizza, Cruz evicted him, tossing his duffel bags out on the lawn. The two young men almost came to blows, and Cruz says Doody threatened to shoot him.
At the end of August, Doody moved into an apartment near the base gates with Rolando Caratachea and Michael Myers, a member of the Agua Fria Class of 1991. About a month later, Caratachea and Myers kicked out Doody for nonpayment of rent. He then moved in with Alex Garcia’s family, in a modest house on West Tuckey Lane.
Jones said she had a couple of conversations with Doody about the temple case, and that he once told her he was helping the Luke Air Force Base Office of Special Investigations investigate the case. Then, about a week before his arrest, a few days before Doody allegedly made his incriminating statements to Ben Lenininger, she says they had a disturbing conversation:
“We were by Angel Rowlett’s house at the park, and we were going to the haunted house that night-Saturday, I think-and I just wanted to talk to him. He asked me, `How do you think me and Alex got $2,000?’ What he told me was that he and Alex used to kill people for money. I didn’t know what to say. He was like a little upset or something… . He told me that he had them on their knees and shot them in the back of the head.”
JOSEPH BRANDON BURNER describes himself as Johnathon Doody’s best friend. He is also friends with Alex Garcia. He says that if he had to rate his friendship with the two, he’d put Johnathon at about an “eight,” and Alex, whom he was just getting to know when Alex was arrested, at about a “five.” Burner is also an ROTC cadet. Everything is “yes, sir” and “no, sir,” and he maintains an even, respectful tone. He is lean and pimpled, and he wears one of those scientific haircuts, the kind with which Hollywood adorns its hotshot fighter pilots. He says he used to have long talks with Doody about cars, ROTC, sports, parents and girls, and that he would see him nearly every day. He remembers well the events just before the temple homicides-that was the weekend when Johnathon told him he was going to play some war game near the temple with Garcia, something he called “intrusion alert.”
Burner says he remembers being with Johnathon and Alex on the eve of the massacre, that he went with them to Metrocenter, where they played video games. Later, Burner says, they dropped off Garcia at his house on Tuckey Lane and stopped by a house at the corner of Maryland and 134th Avenue.
Amanda Hoelzen’s parents own the house, but sometime before the summer they had moved to a new home in the Estrella subdivision. During the summer, Amanda, a classmate of Doody and Burner at Agua Fria, would often stay at the house, usually on the weekends. Rolando Caratachea was also crashing there regularly and the house, with its backyard basketball court, had become a popular gathering place for some of the Agua Fria kids. Directly across the street from the house is a stretch of scrubby desert, littered with cigarette butts and crumpled beer cans.
Burner remembers going to Amanda’s house several times during the summer, and on at least one occasion-he thinks it was in Julyhe saw Caratachea’s .22 rifle there. Burner said he hefted the gun, fitted it to his shoulder and looked down the barrel. It was the same rifle investigators say was used to execute the residents of Wat Promkunaram.
After spending some time at the house talking with Caratachea, Doody drove Burner home just before midnight. Burner claims he didn’t speak to Johnathon again until after the murders.
At about 7 p.m. on the Saturday the bodies were discovered, Burner said he went to the Luke Air Force Base Commissary, where Doody worked sacking groceries. At the time, Burner had not yet heard about the slaughter at the temple.
Doody told him.
“Johnathon said that the people there had been murdered,” Burner said. “He said they had been shot in the head and chest and that it had happened early in the morning. He said his mother said it could have been a racial thing, that it could have been the KKK or a gang.”
Burner said he asked Doody how he knew so much about the case, and that Doody told him he had heard it all from his mother. Chawnee Borders, one of the temple members who discovered the bodies that morning, was a close friend of Doody’s mother. On August 10, Borders called several people, including the Doodys, to inform them of the murders.
Burner knew about the temple because he had been there two or three times with Johnathon either to pick up or drop off David Doody, who was training as a novice monk. The last time he went, which he believes was just a few days before the monks were shot, he accompanied Johnathon and David Doody and Alex Garcia when they went to deliver a “Terminator II” souvenir cup to Chirasak Chirapong, the temple helper known as “Boy.”
He remembers that he and David went inside the temple, while Johnathon and Alex stayed in the car. Burner was curious about the temple, about the odd, beatific monks in their saffron robes. He says that Johnathon told him they had money there in the temple, a “chest full of money,” and that David was well-paid for his service at the temple.
BUT IF JOSEPH BURNER was indeed Johnathon Doody’s “best friend,” it seems Doody cordoned off a sizable section of his life. Burner was apparently not a member of the “A.M. Posse,” a group of kids Michael Myers describes as a gang. “A.M.,” Myers says, stands for “after midnight.”
At Doody’s transfer hearing earlier this month, Myers testified that the “posse” consisted of seven present and former Agua Fria high school students: Jason Kubica, Rolando Caratachea, Alex Garcia, Johnathon Doody, Frank Arciniega, Mark Arciniega and himself. During the summer, members of the posse would often meet at the Whataburger at Dysart and Van Buren, that they would cruise and hang out together. Myers remembers that members of the group became embroiled in altercations with other teenagersthat once or twice a gun was brandished, but nothing came of it. Most of the gang’s mischief, says Myers, was accomplished with spray paint.
A current Agua Fria student who asked that he not be identified said the A.M. Posse was “kind of a joke, a sort of white boys’ club” that no one took very seriously, not even the members themselves. He says affiliation with the gang did seem to effect a change in Johnathon Doody, however, and that the ROTC cadet would often talk about “shooting up the cars” of people with whom he came in conflict. “He made out like he was a big-deal weapons expert,” the student said. “I don’t think anybody believed him: A lot of the ROTC guys were into playing soldier. It was pretty weird.”
Moses Cruz also said Doody threatened to shoot him when Cruz kicked him out of the apartment the two young men shared in July and August.
“I said, `Go ahead and shoot me,'” Cruz said.
Slight, soft-spoken Johnathon Doody didn’t have a reputation as a tough guy. He was known, in Vickie Jones’ words, for “jumping down the throats” of cadets under his command during drill practice, but otherwise he showed no propensity for physical violence. Almost without exception, however, his friends and acquaintances note Johnathon Doody’s fascination with military hardware. One of his most prized possessions, one of the few items he lugged with him in his duffel bags during the summer of 1991, was a set of books on military survival techniques and hardware.
“He knew the name of every weapon, from every country,” the student said. “He studied that stuff when most kids would probably just look at the pictures.”
Doody was apparently not one of the stronger personalities in the gang. Myers said Kubica was the leader. Rolando Caratachea, however, said that while “we all listened to each other,” he-Caratachea-was “number one.”
For the most part, Alex Garcia also was apparently something of a junior figure in the A.M. Posse. Students at Agua Fria remember him as being quite mild. One story that has made the rounds at school is that, as a lineman on the junior-varsity football team, Garcia would apologize to teammates when he hit them in practice.
ROLANDO DAVID CARATACHEA is 17 years old, three months younger than Johnathon Doody. But he looks years older, less man than clever boy with a worked-for patina of sophistication. He holds his cigarette in a casual way that suggests practice before a mirror, and his smile is toothy and facile. Self-possessed and intelligent, he seems like an able sort, a smirky kid with a knack.
On the witness stand, though, his flat belly trembles beneath his tee shirt, and his answers sometimes come in gulps. If Caratachea is drowning, he hasn’t begun to thrash, but it’s clear he has a lot to worry about. Though he has not been charged in the temple killings, it was his gun investigators say was used to execute the temple residents. In their statements, both Johnathon Doody and Alex Garcia put Caratachea at the scene as an active participant in the burglary. And Doody told investigators it was Caratachea’s idea to go to the temple early on the morning of August 10.
part 2 of 4
TEENAGE WASTELAND DEATH AND BOREDOM IN T… v2-19-92
