Mark Goudeau guilty on first-degree murder in ‘Baseline Killer’ case
A jury on Monday convicted Mark Goudeau of nine counts of first-degree murder and dozens of other charges in a string of attacks attributed to the so-called “Baseline Killer.”
Jurors deliberated for seven days before returning the verdict to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Warren Granville, who oversaw the 5-month-long trial. Goudeau was convicted on all but five of the 72 counts: He was acquitted of three charges of armed robbery or attempted robbery and a charge of kidnapping; the jury hung on a count of sexual abuse.
Next up for the jury: An aggravation/mitigation hearing that would determine whether Goudeau will be sentenced to death for the murders. That process starts 10 a.m. Wednesday.
Attorneys for Goudeau, a 47-year-old former construction worker, had maintained he is not guilty of the murder counts and the other charges, including rape, kidnapping and child molestation. The charges stem from the Baseline Killer case that, along with a second set of serial killings linked to suspects who were dubbed the “Serial Shooters,” terrorized Phoenix over the span of roughly a year.
The Baseline Killer attacks began in August 2005 and continued until the end of June 2006. Goudeau was arrested Sept. 6, 2006, after crime lab experts were able to identify his DNA from an attack on two sisters in south Phoenix in 2005.
Goudeau went to trial in that case in 2007 and was convicted of 19 felonies and was sentenced to 438 years in prison.
He went back to trial in early June 2011 on 72 more counts, including multiple counts of attempted first-degree murder, sexual assault, attempted sexual assault, sexual abuse, aggravated assault, kidnapping, child molestation, armed robbery and attempted armed robbery.
All but two of the 33 victims were females, most were Hispanic. Four were adolescents, one as young as 12. Eight women and one man died, and on two occasions, the attacker’s gun misfired, in one case while it was held to the head of a woman who was being sexually assaulted. She had refused to perform oral sex, and the attacker cocked the hammer of the gun and told her that her parents would read about her death in the newspaper the next day. He pulled the trigger. She heard only a loud click, and then ran for her life.
Six of the murdered women were found with their shirts lifted and their pants unbuttoned, as if they had refused to go any further and were executed. Two other women, and the one who walked away from the misfired gun, were more fully undressed, but they had all apparently said “no.”