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3 The Man wITh Many naMeS Lead 511 began with an anonymous call to the Tucson Police Department. With the tape recorder running, Officer Brad Starr answered the phone. The caller said he had heard a guy talking about the murders at the Buddhist temple in Phoenix. He added that the guy had “a Bronco or a Blazer, something like that, and I remember watching on the news a while back they said that someone did drive off in a Bronco or a Blazer.” The caller refused to identify himself to Starr; later he would give his name as John. He said the man they should talk to was Kelsey Lawrence, who had tried to commit suicide and was now in the Tucson Psychiatric Institute. Before transferring the call to an officer assigned to the temple murders , Starr assured the caller that the phone line was “non-taped”—the first of many lies that would be told to suspects in the case. Starr quickly corrected himself—“I mean a non-traced line”—but other investigators would not be so scrupulous. This particular suspect, as would eventually become clear, was telling plenty of lies of his own. It would be many hours before the investigators learned that both John and Kelsey Lawrence were false names, or that the anonymous caller and the man he had implicated were the same person : Mike McGraw, known in his South Tucson neighborhood as Crazy Mike. And it would be much longer before they realized that this big break in their case was nothing of the kind. Transferred to Detective Tom Garrison, the caller repeated his story, coming up with more details each time Garrison asked a question. This time the Blazer or Bronco was beige or dark brown and “supposedly a stolen one.” The guys “went to Phoenix to party . . . and everybody got kind of pretty wasted, and then they went ahead and did something stupid.” Lawrence, the caller said, had checked into the psychiatric hospital because he was having “a real hard burden thinking about, you know, killing somebody and stuff, that he just wanted to get his head straight The Man with Many names 21 with God and everything.” In describing Lawrence, he gave significant details at odd moments, as in this exchange: “How much did he weigh?” “I don’t know. He is kind of a stocky guy.” “Oh really?” “Yeah, he carries a gun.” After Garrison tried several times to persuade him to give his name, “just the first name,” the caller finally offered “John.” Garrison’s other attempt at persuasion failed: John refused to meet with him, saying he was too busy. His excuse was an odd one to give the police. “I got a drug buy going on.” Near the end of their conversation, Garrison announced that officers were on the way down from Phoenix to talk to Kelsey Lawrence. “Oh shit,” John said. “Are you serious?” At the Tucson Psychiatric Institute, DPS officer Troutt and MCSO detective Griffiths asked for Lawrence. At 7:35 that evening, they began their interview with the suspect, or what some of their colleagues would later dub “the chat with the nut.” They were waiting in a conference room, a concealed tape recorder turned on, when nurse Sally Carroccio brought in the patient she knew as Kelsey Lawrence. After the introductions, Troutt said, “Why don’t you have a seat?” He suggested a nearby chair, but Lawrence chose a more distant perch. “More comfortable over here,” he explained. Troutt told Lawrence they were police officers and asked if he knew a man named John, who had called them about him. Lawrence replied that John had called him too. “I guess somebody had told him that I was involved in some bullshit. I don’t know what it is.” Unaware that the suspect was playing a multilayered game with the police, Troutt assured him, “I’m not playing games with you.” John, he said, had told them that “you wanted to talk to us about the temple situation in Phoenix.” Here Lawrence told the truth. “I don’t know anything about the temple thing in Phoenix.” But he got over that tendency very quickly. As the task force would gradually discover, Crazy Mike McGraw knew only what he made up. When Troutt mentioned the temple murders, he got a strong reaction . “Oh, no, no, no, no, uh, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t do murders, dude.” [18.218.55.14] Project...

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