http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0725serial-chronology0725.html
Baseline Killer's bloody trail
Almost a year of brutality
Judi Villa, Michael Kiefer and William Hermann
The Arizona Republic
Jul. 25, 2006 12:00 AM
He is brazen.
He once robbed a store at gunpoint, then ran across the street to carjack a woman and sexually assault her.
He strikes at night and wears disguises, snatching women from crowded corners to rape them or kill them.
And he kills without lingering, sometimes leaving the bodies just a short distance away.
Phoenix police believe the "Baseline Killer" is linked to seven sexual assaults, eight robbery incidents and six homicides. The latest was a woman abducted from a carwash and killed on June 29.
It started with a sexual assault in August, but police didn't know it yet. By late September, they started making connections.
Sept. 28
Victims: A 12-year-old girl and her 36-year-old mother.
Attacker: Unknown.
They sat in their car in a restaurant parking lot at South Central Avenue and Baseline Road, waiting for someone inside to return. It was 9:30 p.m.
Nearby, a man jumped through the restaurant's takeout window, snatching a purse and other items from an employee before he left through the same window. In the parking lot, he saw the woman and her daughter and forced his way into their car at gunpoint. He made the mother drive. In the back seat, he sexually assaulted her daughter.
Then he told the mother to park nearby. She was next.
The following day, police went public with their suspicions. The attack was similar to two others in August: Two girls, ages 13 and 14, had been sexually assaulted at gunpoint behind a church, and two women had been forced into the bushes and sexually assaulted as they walked home from a park.
In all three attacks, the description of the rapist and his behavior were remarkably similar.
As the almost-yearlong investigation progressed, police would link 21 incidents to the attacker from Aug. 6 to June 29. Known first as the "Baseline Rapist" and now as the Baseline Killer, he has shot six people to death and is connected by evidence to three robbery incidents. His tally of violence would include seven sexual assaults and five other robberies, although there is no firm forensic evidence in the latter cases. In many of those incidents, there was more than one victim.
But, back in September, police weren't 100 percent sure what they had. They released a composite sketch of the rapist, a Black man with dreadlocks and what looked like a fishing hat.
"We were going to hopefully get a handle on it before we got much further," Assistant Police Chief Kevin Robinson said of the decision to go public.
But it wasn't just sexual assaults. Early on, the robberies started, too.
Nov. 3
Incidents to date: Nine.
Victims: A 61-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman.
Attacker: Unknown.
A man with dreadlocks and a fishing hat walked into a lingerie shop on North 32nd Street.
"I'm a little nervous," he told the woman behind the counter. She didn't think much of it. A lot of guys say that when they're buying lingerie or sex toys.
Owner Henry Loeb, who was not present during the robbery but arrived shortly afterward, said the man pulled a gun and ran out of the store with $720. Less than 10 minutes later, the same man reportedly abducted a woman from a grocery-store parking lot across the street and sexually assaulted her. She had been putting clothes into a donation bin when she was taken in her own car.
Four days later, on Nov. 7, a Black man with a wig and a fishing hat robbed a Mexican grill, a pizza place next door to it and four people standing in the parking lot at 32nd Street and Thomas Road. Police reports say he made off with $463 and fired a round into the air as he fled on foot.
By this time, police already had cast a wide net, looking at every robbery involving a Black man with a gun to see if they might possibly be linked and if any could provide valuable clues. They were looking at sexual assaults, too, and noticed similarities between the Nov. 3 attack and the three previous ones, even though the rapist apparently had moved from south Phoenix to east Phoenix.
Police again released a description of the rapist, noting his shoulder-length hair was possibly a wig. He had round plastic glasses.
Dec. 12
Incidents to date: 14.
Victim: A 39-year-old woman.
Attacker: Unknown.
Tina Washington regularly took the bus to work. She was a preschool teacher and a mother of two. She had told co-workers that two men had been harassing her as she waited at the bus stop at 40th Street and Southern Avenue to catch a ride home to Tempe.
Just before 7 p.m., a witness heard shots and saw a man with a drawn gun standing over a woman behind a fast-food chicken restaurant and a gas-station convenience store at Southern Avenue and 40th Street. Washington had been shot in the head. Another bullet had ripped through her hand as if she was trying to protect herself.
Washington was the Baseline Killer's second murder victim, although police didn't know it yet. Georgia Thompson, 19, had been shot in the head Sept. 8 in the parking lot of her Tempe apartment complex. It would be 10 months later and seven months after Washington's death before police forensically linked Thompson's murder to the Baseline Killer.
In January, though, police sifting through evidence began to suspect that Washington's murderer might be the same man who had committed the three robberies on Nov. 7. While forensic evidence seemed to link the crimes, there was nothing that conclusively pointed to one attacker.
A day after Washington's murder, another woman was robbed. Then three months passed with no similar crimes.
March 15
Incidents to date: 16.
Victims: A 23-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman.
Attacker: Unknown.
Chao "George" Chou and Liliana Sanchez-Cabrera left their place of employment, Yoshi's restaurant, at 24th Street and Indian School Road, at about 10:30 p.m. on March 14. Chou, a Taiwanese national described by his boss as a "very nice and polite young man," had been working at the restaurant about four years. Sanchez-Cabrera had just completed her first shift .
They left together in Chou's vehicle.
At 8:02 the next morning, employees of another fast-food restaurant across the street and down the street at 22nd Street and Indian School called police to report finding a body in a car in the parking lot. It was Sanchez-Cabrera's. She had been shot in the head at close range.
Nearly four hours later, Chou's body was found in an alley about a mile away. He also had been shot in the head.
March 29
Incidents to date: 18.
Victim: A 26-year-old woman.
Attacker: Unknown.
Glenn Notsch, who runs a swimming-pool service from a home on 24th Street about a mile south of Thomas Road, parked his car in the back of the business eight days or so after Chou and Sanchez-Cabrera were found dead and noticed drag marks in the gravel and patches of blood on the stones. He called police, who looked around and found nothing.
The next week, on March 29, Notsch noticed a strong odor when he came to work. His dog insisted on nosing through a pile of debris between the house used by the business and a storage shed. Notsch moved some boards.
"I remember seeing an arm and a leg with no clothing on them. And I just ran out of there," he said.
It was the body of Kristin Nicole Gibbons. She also had been shot in the head, and her body was badly decomposed.
Police say evidence indicated that the three murders were connected and that all three were linked to Washington's death.
A small task force formed in April, and police prepared to go public with the information linking all the murders and the three robberies.
But before they did, a man in a latex Halloween mask abducted a woman in a car from a parking lot on 32nd Street at Thomas, right in front of the Mexican grill and pizza joint that had been robbed in November, and sexually assaulted her at gunpoint.
The May 1 attack "told us a number of things that we needed to know," Sgt. Andy Hill said. But Hill would not be more specific.
What was clear was that police then knew they had a serial killer and robber who looked to be the rapist who had first attacked last August. They went public on May 5 with a list of 18 violent crimes they believed to be linked.
The composite remained the same: a Black man with dreadlocks and a fishing hat. Police said it was the best description they had. The attacker likely wore disguises and committed his crimes after dark. They appealed for tips.
"We don't want anyone else to be harmed," Robinson, the assistant police chief, said at the time.
June 29
Incidents to date: 20.
Victim: A 37-year-old woman.
Attacker: Unknown.
Carmen Miranda, a mother of two, went to a carwash at 29th Street and Thomas Road, just a few hundred yards from parking lot where the November robberies and the May assault took place. It was 9:30 p.m. She washed her car and was at the vacuuming station, standing by the driver's side. The car door was open. Miranda was talking on a cellphone.
A man approached from the passenger side, said James Garnand, who owns the carwash and saw the attack on surveillance video afterward. Miranda told the friend she was talking to on her cellphone that someone had just asked for her change.
Then, according to Garnand, the man charged around the car, grabbed Miranda and threw her into the back seat.
As word spread by telephone that Miranda had been kidnapped from the carwash, her friend Leybi Muñoz, 33, rushed there, arriving at about 11 p.m. Miranda's family was already there. Police were putting up crime-scene tape.
"They took us to the apartments alongside the carwash," Muñoz said. "We waited there until about 4 or 5 in the morning. That's when they told us they had the car with a dead body in it. That's all they said."
Miranda's body was found behind a barbershop about 100 yards away. She had been shot in the head.
The surveillance video showed her vehicle exiting the carwash's parking lot, but it did not give a clear view of the attacker.
Police called it a "blitz attack."
That was nearly four weeks ago. Police and residents alike wait and wonder if he will strike again and where.
Today
Total victims: Six killed; 11 sexually assaulted; 22 robbed.
Attacker: Unknown.
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Wow. It's disturbing to know that some of his first victims were children. I thought they were all adults, but now we know he's sexually depraved. I guess I should have known. And the direct contact he has with the victim, the conversation, the sexual assults, the robberies, the close-range murders - he enjoys watching the fear on their faces.
