His August open-heart surgery, a wrongful arrest lawsuit and the occasional political obituary notwithstanding, the sheriff appears serene. Though the investigation of the murders of nine people at Wat Promkunaram, a Thai Buddhist temple in the west Valley, has been criticized by everyone from the county attorney to Senator Dennis DeConcini, Agnos seems relaxed behind his substantial desk. Two weeks ago, he was compelled to release from jail four young men from Tucson he says participated in the murders, but today the sheriff's grip is padded steel and his eyes lock like gunsights.
Agnos' face is florid but not flushed and his breath comes in easy measures; there is nothing labored or frenetic in his manner, no beads of "flop" sweat dewing on his brow. He talks about the temple case in that open, confidential way police officers adopt when they want to establish a rapport and gain your trust--the way they talk when they want you to believe they're "sharing" with you.
Most of the time it works. Agnos has explaining to do, and he does it well.
In the early hours of August 10, six monks, an acolyte, a temple helper and an elderly nun were methodically murdered inside Wat Promkunaram. It was the largest mass murder in modern Arizona history.
"When they called me at home, I couldn't believe it," Agnos says. "I went out there, and there were any number of possibilities. We thought from the beginning it might have been a botched robbery, but we maintained an open mind."
Nine days later, the sheriff of Maricopa County would undergo a double by-pass operation. Three weeks after the reconstruction of his heart, he would attend a press conference to announce the arrest of the Tucson suspects. A few days more, and he was back at work full-time.
Now Tom Agnos is smoking again.
While he was in the hospital, he was briefed twice a week on the progress of the investigation. His doctors think he came back to work too soon, but Agnos shrugs off any suggestion that his is perhaps not the most prudent recuperative regime.
Wearing his bureaucratic white shirt and obligatory "rep" tie, he lights a filtered cigarette, covertly undressing the pack beneath the desktop. He is, he insists, on top of the investigation conducted by a multiagency task force under the direction of his department. Furthermore, it has been a good investigation. Agnos says he sees nothing improper in the way the Tucson suspects were interrogated, and while he acknowledges it will be extremely difficult to re-arrest the Tucson men, he believes there will be more arrests in the case. It does not trouble him that at least one of the west Valley teenagers who remains charged in the crime has said that he doesn't know the Tucson suspects. And Agnos has no problem with the way the murder weapon was recovered and processed--although it took six weeks before ballistic reports linked the weapon to the crime.
The sheriff does not say it directly, but it is clear he wants to create the impression that there is much yet to be revealed in the case, information that would cast the temple-murder probe in an altogether more flattering light.
"There's been a lot of stuff we couldn't comment on," he says. "We couldn't talk about a lot of things that have been said or been speculated--[but] the perception has not always meshed with the reality."
He says sheriff's departments cannot choose their cases, that investigators only can do so much with the evidence they uncover. Though the politicians and the press are allowed to grow impatient with the progress of a case, Agnos says the only way to conduct an investigation is methodically, by checking out every possibility, however remote it may initially seem. Facts and scraps of information are processed, combed through, sorted and filed--it is the only way, the sheriff says, to ensure that nothing is overlooked. During a murder investigation, detectives are likely to have a number of strange conversations with various possible suspects. After someone has been linked to a crime, it is easy to look back and find significance in odd behavior or an inappropriate remark. But for the detectives, the first job is to load it all--the facts, rumors and scraps of carpet wool--into the investigative hopper.
Not that Agnos doesn't have his intuition. He believes that somewhere out there lurks a person who put two boys from Phoenix together with four men from Tucson for the express purpose of burglarizing Wat Promkunaram. The sheriff thinks there are others, perhaps not directly involved with the crime, who know something about what happened in the Buddhist temple. He hints that there is more to the statements of the two suspects in custody than what has been reported--he cannot discuss the details, but he does let the air hang pregnant with possibility.
Agnos is speaking the day before the County Attorney's Office will release the taped statements of Mike McGraw, Mark ~Nun~ez, Dante Parker and Leo Bruce--the four men against whom charges have been dismissed. He says if the media work through these tapes, it will be clear that the sheriff's office had to hold these men, that "turning them loose was not an option," despite an admitted lack of physical evidence linking them to the crime.
Transcripts of the tapes show that all four admitted some degree of involvement in a vague, clumsy robbery that degenerated into mass murder. Though their stories are confused and do not neatly dovetail, Agnos says this is "typical" of statements made by interrogated suspects. In the statements, three of the suspects seem to minimize their involvement, while the fourth, Leo Bruce, admits he told a number of people inside the temple to kneel down and that he shot them in the head with his Marlin .22-caliber rifle.
All four men later recanted their "confessions"--Leo Bruce said he recanted about 15 minutes after making his statement--and claimed they were coerced.
Since his release, Bruce has filed a lawsuit against Agnos and Maricopa County, alleging his civil rights were violated by his wrongful arrest and imprisonment. Though Bruce's lawsuit, filed in Pima County, asks for "fair, reasonable and adequate" compensatory damages, a letter of demand sent by Bruce's attorney to Agnos and Maricopa County asks for $10 million.
Bruce alleges that his coerced confession was based on information provided him by detectives, and that he was questioned in a room where photographs and other information about the case were posted on a wall.
Agnos says the "prop room" in the task force's headquarters has such a wall, and he concedes that some of the suspects may have "gotten a look at that." But he maintains that it would have been impossible for anyone to reconstruct the case from the material posted on the prop-room wall.
And, though the tapes reveal that intense psychological pressure was brought to bear on the suspects--for instance, investigators told each suspect that others had placed him at the scene of the crime--on tape, at least, there are no overt threats. While Bruce has said the detectives constantly threatened him with "death, the electric chair, the gas chamber," no such threats appear on the tape. To the contrary, Agnos swears the investigators conformed to the customary limits of police interrogations.
"We kept them comfortable, we didn't deprive them of food or water, I don't see any coercion," Agnos says. "We talked to them for a long time, but we didn't question them for 21 hours straight."
Furthermore, the sheriff points out, two of the suspects, McGraw and Parker, had criminal records, while the other two were "hardly naive." If the investigators overstated their case against the suspects, if they lied to convince the suspects that several others had implicated them in the crime, then that was a moral choice justified by the eventual confessions.
And the Tucson confessions, the sheriff says, follow a classic pattern.
"They, the suspects, go through stages," Agnos says. "First, it's denial. It's `I wasn't there.' Then, after a little while, after you wear them down a bit, little bits of information begin to come out. In the second stage, it becomes `What if I was there?' and it becomes something like a bargaining process. They might say, `I had a dream about it' or they might offer a guess about who might have done it.
"In the third stage, they take you around in circles, they leave out things, they try to protect themselves as much as possible, but you get a story: It's rambling and it's convoluted, but it meshes together with the others. You let them play that out. As it goes along, each one of them diminishes their own involvement, but you've got a narrative."
Indeed, the statements of the Tucson suspects do seem to fit the pattern sketched out by the sheriff. Only McGraw voluntarily gave up information at the beginning of the interview, but all four suspects eventually described a fumbly, alcohol-sodden night capped by murder.
Mark Nunez's statement, which Agnos describes as the most "sketchy" of the four, is perhaps the most unsettling. Parts of it read like a David Lynch script, rife with psychological cues and phantasmic detail. In it the 19-year-old Nunez essays gothic family life, beer-fogged weekends, banal violence and, as FBI agent Gary Woodling questioned him, a distressing "dream":
Woodling: This dream, when do you think it happened?
Nunez: I don't even remember when I had the dream. . . . I freed Charles Manson.
Woodling: You like, you like freaked out . . . Charles Manson situation?
Nunez: No, I mean, I let him loose, of jail. And he went crazy, he choked these people and I had to shoot him. And I had to talk to a friend of mine. And then I woke up, I was scared--that's the dream I had.
Woodling: How long ago did you have this dream?
Nunez: I cannot believe, I . . . no, no. I don't remember anything.
Woodling: Then why did you say Charles Mansion, Manson, I mean, why would you say you let him out?
Nunez: I don't know, I was so afraid. I . . . about it.
Woodling: About this dream you had . . . Like what happened in this last one--you let this Charles Manson out--what happened?
Nunez: He had a gun. He was shooting everybody.
Woodling: How was he shooting everybody?
Nunez: Like . . . I remember going home . . . home. I was afraid to take it to my family. And he followed me. . . . I don't know.
For Agnos, it is simple.
"What I keep coming back to, is why would four streetwise kids confess to a murder they didn't commit?" the sheriff asks.
And the sheriff promptly answers his own question.
"The reason they confessed is because they thought we had 'em. Generally, where there are no witnesses left alive, all you've got is the individual's conscience. You've got to make them think that you know more than you do, that you know everything anyway, and all they're doing is unburdening themselves."
But are these young men "unburdening" themselves of the August 10 nightmare? Or are they instead describing other crimes they've witnessed or participated in, and doing their best to make those incidents fit the facts of the temple horrors?
At various times in their confessions, both Nunez and Bruce seem to allude to crimes other than the temple slayings. Still, Agnos dismisses the possibility that the suspects may have had guilty consciences but no involvement with the instant case. If they were innocent, he says, they would never have been able to provide detectives such rich detail, even if they had all been questioned in front of the prop-room wall.
For example, Agnos says Dante Parker described a ring one of the victims, Foi Sripanpraset, a Buddhist nun, was wearing the night of the murder. Parker said he grabbed Sripanpraset from behind, with his hand covering her mouth, when he noticed she was wearing a gold ring, cast in a spiral and set with "itty bitty" diamonds. Sripanpraset's family later verified that she had such a ring.
"We didn't even know the ring was missing when he described it," Agnos said. Other details, however, don't fit so cleanly or support the task force's case as well. Though in his statement Bruce indicates that he used his own gun to kill the people inside the temple, ballistic tests did not match Bruce's weapon to any of the 17 .22-caliber shell casings found at the scene. The shell casings were used, however, positively to identify another .22 rifle as the murder weapon.
While this second rifle is the strongest single bit of real evidence against the two west Valley teenagers who remain incarcerated for the murders, it may also strengthen Bruce's claim that investigators fed him details on the crime scene.
On August 20, just ten days after the temple slayings, security police at Luke Air Force Base stopped Johnathan Doody and Rolando Caratachea, two west Valley teenagers, for "suspicious activity." Inside Caratachea's 1972 Nova, they found a .22-caliber rifle. The officers told Caratachea to put the gun in his trunk and sent the youths on their way.
The next day, security officers spotted Caratachea and Doody in the latter's 1983 Mustang and again stopped them. According to court documents, they asked Caratachea about his rifle, and he "replied by telling the officer that Johnathan had nothing to do with the rifle" and that he had left it in the back seat of the Nova, which was parked in front of Doody's parents' house on the base.
The security officer asked Caratachea for permission to search the car, then went to Doody's parents' house and searched the Nova. He found the rifle in the back seat, partially covered by clothes--Caratachea told the officer he had been living out of his car since "his father had kicked him out of the house." Because the Luke security police officer thought Caratachea's weapon might have been concealed, he called the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.
Deputy County Attorney Dan Terrell responded to the call from the base and spoke with both the security police officer and Caratachea. Terrell determined there was no legal cause to seize the weapon or charge Caratachea with a crime, so again the rifle was returned and the young man sent on his way.
A couple of weeks later, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Luke, which was cooperating with the task force investigating the temple murders, came across the incident reports on Caratachea's rifle.
On September 10, this office contacted the task force about the rifle. That same day, Detective Rick Sinsabaugh went to the Litchfield restaurant where Caratachea worked and interviewed him, telling him he was working on an investigation and that his rifle might be involved. Caratachea agreed to turn over the rifle voluntarily to the sheriff's office for testing, and the detective drove him from the restaurant to the Glendale apartment he shared with Johnathan Doody.
When Sinsabaugh retrieved the rifle, he noticed what he thought might be bloodstains on the barrel, and he asked Caratachea about the possible blood. According to the court documents, Caratachea told the detective that he had lent the rifle to a friend who had returned it dirty. Sinsabaugh didn't ask who the friend was, and Caratachea didn't volunteer a name.
While he was at the apartment, Sinsabaugh had a bizarre conversation with the two youths later charged in the temple killings--Doody and Alex Garcia. Doody reportedly told Sinsabaugh he had a brother who had been an acolyte at the temple until a few weeks before the murders. Sinsabaugh noted that Doody was "visibly nervous" and "shaking slightly" during their conversation, and that he avoided eye contact. At one point, the court documents report, the 16-year-old Garcia "confronted" Sinsabaugh, claiming he was Doody's legal guardian and that the detective could not question Doody without Garcia present. When Sinsabaugh asked how old Garcia was, the youth reportedly told him "17."
After collecting the rifle, Sinsabaugh drove Caratachea back to work. The gun was then submitted to the Arizona Department of Public Safety laboratory for comparative analysis, but despite the detective's unusual conversation with Doody and Garcia, and the apparent bloodstains on the barrel, the rifle was submitted with nonpriority status--which meant it was treated the same as the 75 to 80 other weapons collected by the task force. The rifle was put in queue and the results on the weapon were not returned to the sheriff's office until nearly six weeks later. Then, on October 24, criminalist William Morris called the task force to let its members know they had a murder weapon.
"At the time, it was just one of a number of rifles we had collected," Agnos says. "There was no reason to focus on that rifle in particular."
And there might have been another reason Caratachea's rifle was not assigned a higher priority. On the same day Rick Sinsabaugh was talking with Caratachea, Doody and Garcia, Sergeant Tom Garrison of the Tucson Police Department received a telephone call from a man investigators later identified as Mike McGraw, who professed to have information about the murders at a "Budapest church."
McGraw's telephone call set off a 48-hour chain of events that ultimately resulted in the arrests and indictments of the four Tucson suspects.
Task force detectives briefly interviewed McGraw at the Tucson Psychiatric Institute. McGraw had checked himself into the hospital on September 7, reportedly because he was suicidal. Known as "Crazy Mike" around the South Tucson neighborhood he frequented, McGraw had done a five-year stretch in prison for car theft and was generally regarded as a buffoon. Yet Agnos says McGraw was able to provide detectives with enough information about the crime that they arranged to bring him to Phoenix for questioning.
"A lot of people have asked how could we have believed someone who was in a mental institution," Agnos says. "Well, first of all, you've got to look at why did he check himself in? Was he truly entertaining suicidal thoughts because he felt guilty about something he had witnessed or taken part in? To deny that anyone who is in a mental hospital might have some valuable information to offer is something you can't do . . . you can't write them off."
After about 90 minutes of questioning inside task force headquarters in downtown Phoenix, McGraw had implicated himself and several others--including Mark Nunez and Leo Bruce--in the killings at Wat Promkunaram.
There were several nagging discrepancies in McGraw's story. Court documents reveal that he initially told detectives that he, Nunez, Peter Sherfield and Victor Zarate had planned the robbery of the temple during a meeting at Tucson's Lakeside Park on the morning of August 9, and that he subsequently traveled with the men to Phoenix on that date. McGraw's timecard at McCulloch Corporation, however, indicates that he worked on August 9 and did not leave the plant until 8:30 p.m.
On the basis of McGraw's statement, five other Tucson men were detained or arrested and brought to Phoenix for questioning. Three of them--Nunez, Bruce and Dante Parker--eventually made statements implicating themselves and others in the murders. Peter Sherfield apparently satisfied investigators he was a victim of mistaken identity, and he was released after questioning. The other man, Victor Zarate, refused to talk to police without an attorney present. Zarate was jailed and released a week later when his employer produced a videotape that apparently showed Zarate at work on the eve of the murders.
Agnos says he has reviewed the confessions and the process through which they were obtained, and he is convinced the Tucson suspects were involved in the case. The sheriff allows, however, that some of the men from Tucson might not have known the real purpose of their trip to Phoenix.
And, the sheriff still believes there is a link between the Tucson suspects and the Phoenix suspects, and that, eventually, his investigators will find it.
"What we've maintained all along is that not all of them knew one another, and not all of them knew what they were going to do," Agnos says. "Dante Parker, for instance, he told us he thought they were going to Phoenix to do a drive-by shooting."
Agnos decribes a possible scenario where at least eight people, both groups of suspects and some others, were brought together for the raid on the temple. Information may have been dispensed on a "need-to-know basis," and some of those involved may have used false names.
"I don't think we'll ever get anybody who knows exactly what went on in there," Agnos says. "I think they all know a little part, their little part, and that there's somebody who put this all together."
But that somebody is far from a master criminal.
"No, it was someone who thought they knew what was in the temple," Agnos says. "It was a problem in perception that got these people killed. Someone thought because they were foreign, because they were strange to them, that they had all kinds of gold, a golden statue of Buddha or something.
"They led very private and austere lives, we've recovered some property we think is theirs, but there's no way to identify what was there: There are no victims left to tell us what was taken. It's stupid--a failure of perception killed these people."
He disagrees with the common notion that the investigation has proceeded slowly. A month after the murders, there were suspects in custody. Four months after the murders, the sheriff is satisfied the two teenagers in jail were deeply involved in the crime. These things take their own time, Agnos explains, and this is not a television show where everything is resolved within the hour.
For at least the next 13 months, Tom Agnos will remain sheriff of Maricopa County. No matter what they say about him, he can still be patient, waiting for the code to crack.
Sheriff Tom Agnos selects and lights another cigarette.
A gray skein scales his face, as he leans forward, and then rocks back, contemplating the various ways misperceptions can be fatal.
Agnos believes that somewhere out there lurks a person who put two boys from Phoenix together with four men from Tucson to burglarize the temple.
"I freed Charles Manson. . . . And he went crazy, he choked these people and I had to shoot him. And then I woke up, I was scared-- that's the dream I had."
McGraw's telephone call set off a 48-hour chain of events that ultimately resulted in the arrests and indictments of the four Tucson suspects.
Agnos says he has reviewed the confessions, and he is convinced the Tucson suspects were involved in the case.
"I think they all know a little part, their little part, and that there's somebody who put this all together," Agnos contends.
