Was there really a Baseline Killer? A new appeal claims Phoenix police framed Mark Goudeau

Twenty years after he was arrested and identified as the Baseline Killer, Mark Goudeau still maintains that he is innocent.

Goudeau, now 61, alleges that Phoenix
Police detectives planted incriminating evidence in his house and
tampered with DNA findings, according to an appeal filed in Maricopa
County Superior Court in February. He further alleges that prosecutors
committed misconduct; that the judge violated his right to due process;
and that his defense attorneys were woefully ineffective. 

The case was so flawed, according to the appeal, that it took 384 pages to explain exactly why.

As a result, the appeal suggests that
Goudeau was convicted of nine murders that may have been unrelated and
that he didn’t commit.

Perhaps most surprising, his current attorneys claim that Goudeau is constitutionally ineligible for the death penalty under a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court opinion concerning defendants who were considered “mentally retarded” in the phrasing of the time. 

And the recourse, they suggest, is to
throw out the convictions and sentences and send the case back to
trial. Or let Goudeau go. Or at least commute his death sentences.

The summer of fear in Phoenix

For 13 months in 2005 and 2006, the Phoenix metropolitan area was beset by what seemed to be two serial killers. 

The Serial Shooter,
a name coined by police, cruised from Tolleson to Chandler, shooting
from car windows as if playing video games in real time; 10 horses,
several dogs and at least eight people were killed, 18 others wounded.

The other serial killer snatched
women off the street, sometimes in broad daylight, attempted to rape
them, shot them in the head if they didn’t cooperate and left their
bodies tauntingly close to where he took them from. Then he vanished.

Police called him the Baseline Rapist
at first, and then the Baseline Killer, because some of the attacks
took place on or near Baseline Road in South Phoenix. In fact, more
attacks occurred in the square mile between Thomas and Indian School
Roads and 24th and 32nd Streets. Eight women and one man were killed. At
least five women and three minor girls were sexually assaulted and
survived. Several businesses and individuals were robbed. There were at
least 43 victims overall.

When someone thought to be the
Baseline Killer was seen on surveillance video snatching a woman from a
Central Phoenix carwash in late June 2006 — the woman was found dead a
block away — the city was thrown into panic.

But Phoenix Police task forces
tracked down the killers. The Serial Shooter was, in fact, three men,
and they were arrested in Mesa in August. A jury imposed six death
sentences on Dale Hausner, who later committed suicide in prison. Samuel
Dieteman pleaded guilty to involvement in two murders and is serving
natural life in prison. Hausner’s brother, Jeff, received a lengthy
sentence for non-fatal stabbings the three committed together.

Goudeau was arrested a month later,
on September 6, 2006, initially for sexually assaulting two sisters at
gunpoint in a south Phoenix park nearly a year earlier.  He made the
sisters spit in his hand and rubbed it on the body parts he had touched
with his mouth to frustrate DNA sampling. 

That strategy almost worked. Standard
DNA testing could not pull a complete profile out of the genetic soup
he had made. Phoenix police used an experimental new DNA test that
focused on the Y chromosome, the male portion of the DNA sample, to
identify Goudeau. 

In January 2007, he had already been
found guilty of multiple counts in the rape case and sentenced to 438
years in prison before police linked his DNA to a murder they had
overlooked because it didn’t fit the pattern. Ballistics linked that
case to the other eight. In 2011, a second jury found him guilty of 67
offenses, including all nine murders and sentenced him to death nine
times.

Goudeau swore he was innocent in his
statements to the jury before his sentencing. His wife swore he was
innocent in multiple interviews. His neighbors claimed that he was a
good man, always working around the house, frequently seen with his wife
going off to hike with friends. One attorney even described him as
charming.

But he had a dark past. There was a
rape allegation for which he was not prosecuted. In 1989, when he was
25, he was arrested and accused of raping and beating a woman so badly
that she had a fractured skull. And while he was out on bond awaiting
trial for that assault, he robbed a supermarket in his neighborhood to
get money to buy cocaine. Instead of going to trial for sexual assault,
he was allowed to plead guilty to three counts of aggravated assault and
was sentenced to 15 years in prison; the armed robbery bought him 21
years.

Thanks to his wife’s lobbying and a
record of good behavior in prison, he was paroled after 13 years, in
2004. His parole file is full of testaments from friends and relatives
as to how he was a changed man and had learned his lesson.

“I began to realize … how many people
I did hurt …. I have no excuse for it because it was my choice using
drugs,” he said at his parole hearing. “But I can assure you that I
would never use drugs or alcohol again. I would never harm anyone…. I
know what I have to do to stay out of [prison] … I would never hurt my
family or myself. I would never hurt anybody again in my life.”

The Baseline attacks started a year later. Goudeau had drugs in his possession when he was arrested.

But still, he insisted to the jury
that he was a changed man. Prison had taught him a lesson. And the only
reason he was arrested and charged was because of that past conviction. 

The jury found him guilty anyway and sent him to death row.

Ten years ago, in 2016, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld all 67 convictions
and knocked down Goudeau’s claims of police and prosecutor misconduct.
And it refuted his allegations that his attorneys failed to communicate
with him.

He has been a model prisoner since then, according to his prison disciplinary history online.

A litany of new claims

It alleges that Phoenix police
planted evidence during searches of Goudeau’s house. One planted piece,
Mills claims, was a duplicate of a ring that was stolen from one of the
murder victims. Police had gone to Walmart for a plastic copy of the
ring so that detectives would know what to look for when they scoured
pawn shops for the original. The petition alleges they went a step
further and purchased a similar ring so that they could “find” it in a
shoe in Goudeau’s closet during a subsequent search.

A ski mask and a pair of shoes at
Goudeau’s house were found to have traces of blood from two other
victims. The petition alleges that officers had withheld tubes of blood
from autopsies and squirted it on the confiscated clothing to make their
case.

And the DNA, which had been an issue
at trial, was suspect and its handlers were too inexperienced to be
trusted. During both of Goudeau’s trials, defense attorneys noted that
YSTR DNA, the technique that focuses on the Y chromosome, was
inconclusive because unlike standard testing, it does not paint a unique
genetic fingerprint, but is identical to that of all males in the
family. In other words, they argued, it could have belonged to any of
Goudeau’s brothers or nephews, some of whom also had criminal records.

The prosecutors, Suzanne Cohen and
Patricia Stevens, allegedly allowed witnesses to lie on the stand and
failed to acknowledge corruption in the police department and in their
own office, according to the petition.

The judge, Warren Granville, allowed it all to happen, thus violating Goudeau’s constitutional rights, the petition claims.

The majority of the document, like
all PCR petitions, focuses on what “competent counsel” would have and
should have done. In Goudeau’s case, this meant questioning the
ballistics; the DNA; and the witness identifications of Goudeau, both on
the stand and under police questioning.

“Much of the testimony witnesses
offered at the prosecutor’s suggestion was demonstrably false,” the
petition states, “but counsel failed to introduce prior statements to
prove as much.”

The attorneys also failed to show how
Goudeau’s phone records would provide an alibi in many of the crimes,
because he was on the phone to his wife or relatives, or he was driving
his brother to the parole office.

Then there was a dizzying roster of
third-party suspects for most of the murders, husbands and ex-husbands,
boyfriends and pimps and neighborhood bad elements. Another Phoenix
police officer had created a dossier blaming the crimes on a local gang
member. The petition suggests that the defense attorneys could have at
least implied reasonable doubt by suggesting other men committed the
murders.

All of these things, the petition contends, could have led to a different trial outcome

Under one U.S Supreme Court ruling,
the jury may not have been properly informed that Goudeau was
ineligible for parole, a common legal problem at the time. Juries could
be left believing that, if they did not sentence a defendant to death,
that he could one day be released on parole and kill again. Parole was abolished in Arizona
for most cases in 1993. The only option for Goudeau, if found guilty,
would have been natural life sentences with no chance of release, but
the jury did not know that.

And the defense attorneys had not
offered up sufficient mitigating evidence that might have convinced a
jury to spare Goudeau’s life, Mills argues in the petition. They hadn’t
detailed his mother’s early death, for example, his father’s boozing and
womanizing, the poverty of 13 children left to fend for themselves or
shuffled from one relative to another. 

Perhaps most shocking is the contention that Goudeau cannot be executed under a U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Atkins v. Virginia,
which prohibits the execution of people with intellectual disabilities.
In the original language of the 2002 opinion, it was described as
mental retardation.

Goudeau, according to the petition, has “deficits in social interactions and practical day-to-day tasks.’”

He has “borderline intellectual functioning and severe verbal deficits that would impact his ability to understand his trial.”

In the end, the petition argues, the
court must “vacate and set aside his convictions and sentences and order
that the State retry or release him; or vacate his death sentences and
resentence him to life.”

It will not happen any time soon. The
Arizona Attorney General‘s Office has yet to respond to the petition
(and declined comment to the Arizona Mirror), and there will be back and
forth for an indefinite future. If the petition is denied, the case
will be appealed in federal court.

‘It never crossed my mind’

Let me step out of the third person for a moment, because this is personal.

I began covering the Baseline Killer
case in summer 2006, before Goudeau was arrested, talking to terrified
neighborhood folks and playing 20 Questions with the cops. I attended
both of Goudeau’s trials and reported on the Arizona Supreme Court
opinion. I know the detectives who investigated the case, the
prosecutors and the judge who tried it, and the attorneys who defended
Goudeau in both trials. I interviewed Goudeau’s wife in her living room
and interviewed some witnesses, as well. I have visited all but two of
the rape and murder sites, and in each case thought, “This is a shitty
place to die.”

I have also covered more capital murder cases than I can remember and have witnessed six executions. 

The Goudeau trials are etched in my
memory. The prosecutors laid out the murder trial in what they called
chapters, 13 of them, read chronologically. The same points kept
emerging: the patterns and the patter of the attacker, the crackly
voice, the cold demeanor. The DNA evidence was complex but convincing.
The prosecutors were as methodical as the killer had been.

The present court action is referred
to as a petition for post-conviction relief, or PCR. Appeals are limited
to the four corners of a trial, based largely on transcripts. PCR takes
the case back to the trial court, and it is the first opportunity to
introduce new evidence and to allege “ineffective assistance of
counsel,” essentially, that the lawyer didn’t do the job and thus
violated the defendant’s constitutional rights. It’s also the last place
to get information on the record before taking the case to federal
court. The ability to introduce new evidence in federal court is very
limited, and so it must play out first in state court.

This one was filed by California
attorney John Mills, who was appointed by the court shortly after
Goudeau’s direct appeal was finalized in 2016. He has spent a decade
assembling his case, a task slowed by the pandemic and by the glacial
speed of extracting discovery from Phoenix Police and the Maricopa
County Attorney’s Office. It was edited down from more than 500 pages to
the current 384. Exhibits supporting the allegations will be filed
separately with the Clerk of the Court.

Parts of the petition are shocking, if true. The case stands out in my memory as the cruelest one I covered in more than 20 years of crime reporting.

The two sisters who were sexually
assaulted at a south Phoenix park in 2005 describe trying to fight off
their rapist, even getting their hands on his gun but not figuring out
how to fire it. The older sister was in the late stages of pregnancy.
The attacker pointed the gun between her legs and made her beg for the
life of her unborn child.

One victim who escaped detailed how
she was hijacked in her car, forced to disrobe, ordered to perform oral
sex. When she refused, her attacker put the gun to her head and told her
that her family would read about her in the paper the next day. The gun
misfired and she bolted from the car. It was an insight into what the
other murdered women heard and the terror they experienced in their last
moments. 

There are statements made by
surviving family members that I still cannot repeat without crying. For
example, the mother who said she wished she could put her hand into her
chest and pull out her heart and show it to the court. I watched the
husband of another victim follow a witness out of the court room, a man
who had tried to save the wife’s life as she bled to death. Out in the
hallway, the husband thanked the witness for being there and trying to
help. Then the two of them collapsed into each others’ arms and stood
there weeping for several minutes.

And how to imagine Mark Goudeau as
intellectually disabled? He was a man liked and respected by his family
and his neighbors and his coworkers, and especially by his wife, a
sophisticated and intelligent businesswoman, who it would be hard to
envision partnering with the man described in the petition.

They had apparently never seen his
other side. Despite low grades in school, he held a job, carried himself
through life with apparent dignity. He also eluded police for more than
a year, and thought up ways to avoid detection, like having his victims
spit in his hand and rubbing it on them to stymie traditional DNA
testing. 

It would be a major mind challenge to
so thoroughly balance Dr. Jekyll with Mr. Hyde. Conversely, if Goudeau
were intellectually disabled, it would be unlikely he could have
committed the crimes and gotten away with it for so long. 

Corwin Townsend, the lead defense attorney in the rape case, was surprised at the allegation of intellectual disability. 

“It never crossed my mind,” he told me.

Goudeau’s 1990 presentence report
noted he was one credit shy of graduating from high school and chose to
go to work instead of summer school. It noted that he had a reading
level below the sixth grade. But he was submitted to testing before his
trials began and was found mentally competent. The new petition places
those results at lower levels.

“He was engaged in the case,”
Townsend said. “He knew all the fine points. He wanted all the details
of everything and he was a complete participant in his case.”

“He was in the upper echelon of defendants I’ve had,” he said.

Mills, the attorney directing PCR, acknowledges the awkwardness of the intelligence question.

“I know that Mark would not want an
Atkins claim emphasized,” he told me, referring to the Supreme Court
case. “What he cares about is the misconduct in the case and his
innocence.”

In Goudeau’s second trial, his
attorneys tried to present mitigation that would convince the jury to
spare his life. Goudeau shut them down because it embarrassed him.
However, as the PCR petition points out, much of the initial mitigation
evidence was framed as an explanation of why Goudeau’s background might
make him violent.

During the murder trial, Goudeau and
his attorneys met with the judge outside the presence of the prosecution
to discuss the defendant’s differences with his attorneys. More than
once, the attorneys requested that Goudeau be tested for mental
competency. He refused that, as well.

But at the end of the trial, he spoke eloquently when he addressed the jury and told them he was “no wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Then as now, he professed total innocence.