On the night of September 20, 2005, two sisters walking home from a city park in Phoenix, one of them visibly pregnant, were stopped by a man with a gun. He forced them into the bushes, told them not to look at his face, and sexually assaulted the younger sister while he pushed the gun into her sister's pregnant belly. He rubbed dirt on one of them to remove his saliva and wore a condom. DNA was collected from the women that night. Nine months before an arrest was made, the Phoenix police had the evidence that would crack the case and failed to analyze it in time.
The attacker had begun on August 6, 2005, forcing three teenagers behind a church near Baseline Road and molesting two of the girls. Police first called him the Baseline Rapist. Over the next ten months he robbed restaurants and shops, abducted women from parking lots and sexually assaulted them in their cars, and from the spring of 2006 he was the Baseline Killer. He wore disguises: a Halloween mask, a fisherman's hat and dreadlocks, the clothes of a homeless man pushing a shopping cart. The shell casings came from the same gun.
The dead were Georgia Thompson, nineteen, shot at her apartment complex in Tempe on September 8, 2005; Tina Washington, thirty-nine, shot in the head behind a fast-food restaurant on her way home from the preschool where she worked, on December 12; Romelia Vargas, thirty-eight, and Mirna Palma-Roman, thirty-four, found shot inside their snack truck on February 20, 2006; Liliana Sanchez-Cabrera, twenty, and Chao Chou, co-workers at Yoshi's restaurant driving home together, killed on March 15; Kristin Nicole Gibbons, whose body was found about a week after a businessman noticed blood in a parking lot on March 29; Sophia Nunez, killed on April 10; and Carmen Miranda, thirty-seven, abducted from a self-service car wash while she was on her phone on June 29 and shot behind a barbershop, an attack caught on closed-circuit video. Eight were women. Phoenix was also being terrorized at the same time by a second, unrelated pair of killers known as the Serial Shooters.
A man in Kentucky, James Dewayne Mullins, confessed to Thompson's murder and was charged, then recanted; the charge was dropped on August 3, 2006, after police linked her death to the Baseline Killer. That August, parole officers told the police task force that one of their parolees resembled the sketch on the billboards. Mark Goudeau, born September 6, 1964, a construction worker, had served thirteen years of a twenty-one-year sentence for aggravated assault, including beating a woman's head with a barbell, and armed robbery; rape and kidnapping charges in that case had been dropped. In his house they found a ski mask and a realistic toy gun. On September 4, 2006, he was arrested for the attack on the sisters, his DNA matching what had been taken from them.
He was convicted of all nineteen counts in the sisters' case in September 2007 and sentenced on December 14 to 438 years. On January 16, 2007, he had been indicted on seventy-four felony counts in the wider series; two were dropped. At the murder trial a Department of Public Safety analyst testified that male DNA on one victim was 360 trillion times more likely to be his than an unrelated man's, and the defense pointed out that it matched at only three of thirteen markers. On October 31, 2011, he was found guilty of sixty-seven counts, including all nine murders, and on November 30 the jury returned nine death sentences, entered immediately by Judge Warren Granville. The non-capital counts brought his total to more than 1,700 years. In June 2016 the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the death sentences and the convictions, rejecting his argument that the murders should have been tried separately and his claims of police and prosecutorial misconduct.
His wife, Wendy Carr, has always said police arrested the wrong man, and friends described a loving husband who kept his lawn immaculate. A leaked 2009 police report named another man, Terry Wayne Smith, as a possible accomplice in the snack-truck killings; police said he had been questioned and cleared. In a petition for post-conviction relief filed in Maricopa County Superior Court in February 2026, twenty years after his arrest, Goudeau, now in his sixties, alleges that Phoenix detectives planted evidence in his house, including a ring they bought to match one stolen from a victim, and tampered with the DNA findings, and that he has borderline intellectual functioning. He asks for a new trial or a life sentence. He is on death row at the state prison in Florence, where his disciplinary record describes a model prisoner.