Innocent Until Interrogated: The True Story of the Buddhist Temple Massacre and the Tucson Four

Author’s Note

author’s note The temple murders and the related murder of Alice Marie Cameron are heavily documented. They spawned more than five hundred thousand digital records and six thousand pages of court transcripts, pleadings, motions, and opinions. Long before the trial began, file cabinets all over Phoenix accumulated the official reports from dozens of agencies, public and private individuals, and more than fifty lawyers. There are thousands of still photographs, hundreds of audiocassette tapes, scores of videos, and an incalculable number of private images in the hands of the lawyers , investigators, witnesses, suspects, victims’ families, journalists, and authors involved in the cases. It took more than four years to resolve the criminal and civil litigation. Even with all of that, some of the facts are not only unknown, they are unknowable. Just how many young people in West Phoenix knew who the real killers were before their apprehension is unclear. Some estimate the number at a handful; others at a dozen or more. However many there were, none of them came forward voluntarily to help solve the crimes. The number of people who investigated, analyzed, reviewed, prosecuted, defended, judged, consulted, and managed the criminal and civil cases spawned by the ten murders likely extends to the thousands. And yet, despite their prodigious efforts, no one can say with certainty exactly what happened inside the temple on August 10, 1991, or at Alice Marie Cameron’s campground twenty miles away and six weeks later. The first two chapters in this book are a reconstruction of the basic story from the forensic evidence, the confessions of the killers, the recollections of those who knew them, and the opinions of experts who second -guessed everyone, including one another. The remaining chapters, particularly the courtroom scenes and interrogations , necessarily present only a small part of the reality. I conducted more than fifty personal interviews and read the entire trial and appellate records in the cases. I reviewed three years of print and broadcast news xii author’s note coverage and read the police reports and the transcripts of all custodial interrogations and official interviews. In addition, I downloaded the digital discovery exchange between prosecutors and defense lawyers into an ISYS database containing digital files from Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, and nonprivileged files from various defense lawyers. I examined the exhibits admitted in evidence in the Doody trial, along with original court pleadings. This book is an excerpted and condensed narrative of what happened. The full truth lies in the interrogation transcripts, police reports, trial testimony, pretrial depositions, exhibits, and sworn affidavits. To make sense of that mountain of documentation, I eliminated redundancy, translated legal jargon, and tried to clarify the narrative. While all the stated facts are true, the opinions and legal interpretations in this book are strictly my own. ...