Between August 2005 and June 2006 a gunman robbed, abducted, sexually assaulted and killed people across south and central Phoenix and in neighboring Tempe. Police first called him the Baseline Rapist, after Baseline Road in south Phoenix, where several of the early attacks took place, and then, in the spring of 2006, the Baseline Killer. Nine people were shot dead: eight women and one man. The Maricopa County Attorney's Office later counted 33 victims in 13 separate attacks.
On September 6, 2006, Phoenix police arrested Mark Goudeau, a 42-year-old construction worker on parole for a violent 1989 case, after a state crime lab matched his DNA to evidence from the attack on two sisters a year earlier. A jury convicted him in 2007 in that case. In 2011 a second jury found him guilty of all nine murders and 58 other counts, and sentenced him to death nine times. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences in 2016. Goudeau has always said he is innocent. In February 2026 his appeal lawyer filed a petition claiming that Phoenix police planted evidence; as of the latest report it had not been decided.
Goudeau grew up in Phoenix, according to the Associated Press. At his 2011 penalty hearing a defense psychologist, Mark Cunningham, told jurors that both of his parents abused alcohol, that his mother died when he was ten, that his father was largely absent, and that his older brothers and sisters raised him. Cunningham said Goudeau had probably been born with fetal alcohol syndrome and had grown up in an unstable family with a history of substance abuse. Goudeau himself had once blamed his violence on a weakness for crack cocaine, the Associated Press reported, and he described himself as a recovering addict.
In 1989, when he was 25, Goudeau was accused of raping and severely beating a woman, the Arizona Mirror reported in 2026. He was not prosecuted for the rape. While he was free on bond, he robbed a supermarket. He pleaded guilty to three counts of aggravated assault, for which he received 15 years, and was sentenced to 21 years for the armed robbery. Associated Press reports described the convictions as three aggravated assaults, armed robbery and kidnapping. A presentence report written in 1990 recorded that he read below a sixth-grade level.
He served about 13 years. In 2004 the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency released him on parole, years before the end of his sentence, partly because his wife had lobbied for it, according to the Arizona Mirror. At the parole hearing he told the board, "I would never hurt anybody again in my life." He found work as a construction and cement worker and lived with his wife in Phoenix. Neighbors later told reporters he was friendly and took great care of his yard.
The trial court divided the case into 13 "chapters", and the Arizona Supreme Court's 2016 opinion follows them in order.
On August 6, 2005, a man with a gun approached three young people, all minors, near a church in south Phoenix, told them he had just robbed a bank, and assaulted two of the girls. On September 20, 2005, two adult sisters walking in a south Phoenix park were stopped at gunpoint and sexually assaulted. On September 28, a gunman threatened three workers at a restaurant's take-out window and took a purse, then forced a woman and her twelve-year-old daughter to drive him away in their car, and sexually assaulted them both. On November 3 he robbed a store clerk at gunpoint and forced another woman to drive him, then sexually assaulted her. On November 7 he robbed two restaurants and a customer, then tried to rob a family and fired a shot into the air.
In between came the first killing. Over the next nine months the same man killed nine people. Through most of that time the public did not know that the robberies, the sexual assaults and the killings were connected.
Georgia Thompson was 19. She came from north Idaho, the sixth of nine children, and moved to Arizona in June 2005, the Phoenix New Times reported. When Goudeau was sentenced in 2011, the Associated Press described her as a young woman who had come to Arizona hoping to become a lawyer. Late on the night of September 7 to 8, 2005, she was shot in the parking lot of her apartment complex in Tempe. A neighbor heard a woman cry out "leave me alone", and then a gunshot. At the 2011 sentencing her mother was the first relative to speak. "I kept thinking they made a mistake," she told the jury. "Not my baby."
For almost a year her death was not counted as one of the Baseline cases. In December 2005, after a national television program covered it, a jail inmate in Paducah, Kentucky, told a Crime Stoppers line that a fellow inmate had bragged about a killing in Tempe. That inmate, J.M., was a 33-year-old man the Phoenix New Times described as a career criminal facing a long sentence for theft and burglary. In January 2006 a Tempe detective interviewed him in Kentucky and he confessed. His account contradicted known facts, and the New Times reported that the detective repeatedly supplied him with details. A grand jury indicted him the day after the confession, and he was extradited to Arizona and held on a second-degree murder charge.
In July 2006 Phoenix police announced that forensic evidence "definitively" linked Thompson's death to the Baseline cases, The Spokesman-Review reported; investigators later said the shell casings matched. On August 3, 2006, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office dismissed the murder charge against J.M., with the support of former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, who had been appointed as special prosecutor. County Attorney Andrew Thomas said the man "appears to have made up a story." At Goudeau's 2011 trial J.M. testified that he had never been to Arizona, that he took the idea from the television program because he hoped for a lighter sentence in Kentucky, and that "basically everything I said" in the confession was wrong. The Tempe detective told the jurors, in tears, that she had mishandled the investigation.
Tina Washington was 39, a preschool teacher who lived in Tempe and had three sons. Her co-workers knew her as "Old Faithful" because she was so reliable, according to the Phoenix New Times, and her son said she always wore a custom-made ring. On December 12, 2005, she was on her way to a Christmas party, the Associated Press reported. She was shot in an alley behind a warehouse in south Phoenix.
A man working nearby heard "a couple of bangs" and stepped out. He saw a man holding a silver gun pointed down at a body. The gunman turned the gun on him, he heard a click, and he ran inside and locked himself in the building. At the 2011 trial he identified Goudeau as the man he saw. Washington's ring was missing. Police would later find it in a small bag tucked inside a shoe in Goudeau's closet. In June 2006 firearms examiners, using the national NIBIN database, linked the shell casings from her killing to those from Georgia Thompson's, the New Times reported.
On February 20, 2006, Romelia Vargas, 38, of Avondale, and Mirna Palma-Roman, 24, of west Phoenix, were found shot inside the food truck where they worked, on the west side of the Phoenix area, the West Valley View reported. The truck belonged to Vargas. A prosecutor later described the victims of the series to jurors as people attacked in the middle of ordinary life, among them a woman cooking in a food truck.
Liliana Sanchez-Cabrera was 20. On March 14, 2006, she had just finished her first day at a Phoenix restaurant, and a co-worker, Chao Chou, known as George, offered her a ride home, the Phoenix New Times reported. Chou was 23, and he would be the only man among the nine people killed. Sanchez-Cabrera was found shot inside a car that evening, and Chou's body was found in an alley the next morning. His car keys were missing, and neither of them had any cash left, the Arizona Supreme Court noted. Months later a crime lab found Chou's blood on a pair of tennis shoes taken from Goudeau's home.
Kristin Gibbons was killed in Phoenix on March 29, 2006, about two weeks after Sanchez-Cabrera and Chou. Her body was found days later, on April 6 by the New Times account. Her purse and phone were missing. The Phoenix New Times called her Nicole Gibbons. Her blood was later found on a ski mask seized from Goudeau's house. Little about her life was reported.
Sophia Nunez was 37 and a mother of three. On April 10, 2006, she was killed at her home on the west side of the Phoenix area, and her eight-year-old son found her when he came home from school. The Phoenix New Times reported that she was the only one of the victims who knew Goudeau personally. Police did not publicly add her death to the series until December 2006. Goudeau's DNA was found on her body, the Arizona Supreme Court said. After the death sentences in 2011 her mother stood outside the courtroom holding her photograph.
On May 1, 2006, a masked gunman forced a woman into her car in central Phoenix and threatened her. His gun misfired, and she escaped. On the night of June 29, 2006, Carmen Miranda, 37, a mother of two, was vacuuming her car at a self-service car wash in central Phoenix when a man forced his way in and drove off with her. A security camera recorded the abduction, but the footage was too grainy to identify the man. Her body was found in a lot a few hundred yards away. Police called it a "blitz attack." She was killed around the corner from Goudeau's house, the Associated Press reported.
She was the last person killed. Nine people had died. Her killing was the last known crime in the series.
For much of 2006 Phoenix was hunting two unrelated sets of killers at once. Besides the Baseline cases, a gunman or gunmen known as the Serial Shooter had been firing at pedestrians and cyclists, most of them late at night, since May 2005. By the summer of 2006 police attributed 41 attacks to the two, with 11 people dead, the Phoenix New Times reported. Residents told reporters they avoided walking alone at night. Gun sales rose and self-defense classes filled, NPR's Phoenix member station reported, although its reporter thought national descriptions of a city under siege went too far.
The police convened task forces for both cases in early 2006. More than 120 Phoenix officers were assigned almost full time, according to the New Times, and detectives ran down thousands of leads. A composite sketch, based on two survivors' accounts, showed a Black man with dreadlocks under a fisherman's hat. Survivors' descriptions varied: a bald man, a man who might be Hispanic, a man in dreadlocks that police suspected were a wig. The man wore masks, wigs and other disguises and fled quickly. In 2006 twelve large billboards went up across the city showing the sketch and offering a reward, and the department's Silent Witness line took more than 5,000 calls in two weeks, NPR reported.
In August 2006 police arrested two men in Mesa, Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman, in the Serial Shooter case. Hausner was convicted in 2009 of six killings and sentenced to death six times; he later died by suicide in prison. Dieteman testified against him and received a life sentence. The Serial Shooter case had no connection to Goudeau, and police said the only thing the two series shared was the apparent randomness of the victims.
On July 14, 2006, a woman who had seen the composite sketch told the authorities that the man in it was Mark Goudeau, the Phoenix New Times reported in 2009. A task force detective went with Goudeau's parole officer to his house, a short walk from the place where Carmen Miranda had been abducted. Because of his violent record and his address, supervisors put him under surveillance. Police later told reporters they had first heard his name in mid-July, had spoken to him earlier, as they had to many people, and had named him a suspect only on the weekend before the arrest. After the June 29 killing at the car wash, he had chatted with a neighbor about the Baseline investigation, the Associated Press reported.
The DNA evidence came from the sisters' case. Between September 2005 and September 2006 the Phoenix Police Department's crime lab ran standard STR tests on samples from victims and from items the attacker had touched, the Arizona Supreme Court recorded. In August 2006 detectives sent swabs from the September 2005 attack on the sisters to the state Department of Public Safety lab, which could run Y-STR testing, a method that looks only at the male Y chromosome. Phoenix had no Y-STR system of its own. Detectives let the state lab use up the samples. The test produced Goudeau's full Y-STR profile on a swab from one of the sisters.
Police arrested Goudeau on September 6, 2006, at his home in Phoenix. He was booked on charges from the sisters' case only. "He has been arrested for the sexual assault of two victims in one case only," Police Chief Jack Harris told reporters, and a spokesman said all the other cases were still open. A police commander said Goudeau looked like the sketch; his neighbors said he did not. His wife told the Associated Press that her husband was innocent and that the arrest was "a huge miscarriage of justice."
Police searched the house three times. On the day of the arrest they took shoes and other items. On September 15 they took computers and electronics. On October 6 they took clothing, shoes and a ring. In the closet they found Tina Washington's ring in a small bag inside a shoe. Testing of the items from the first search found blood matching George Chou on the tennis shoes and blood matching Kristin Gibbons on a ski mask, the Arizona Supreme Court recorded.
In December 2006 police said that DNA, ballistics and other evidence pointed to Goudeau as the Baseline Killer, closing what officials called the largest investigation in the department's history. They revealed a ninth killing, that of Sophia Nunez, and recommended 71 charges to the county attorney, including nine counts of first-degree murder. "We couldn't and wouldn't say that we had a serial killer, but the community knew," Mayor Phil Gordon said. "Today, we now have the evidence we need." About half the attacks had taken place within three miles of the house Goudeau shared with his wife, the Associated Press reported. In January 2007 a grand jury indicted him on 74 felony counts arising from 13 attacks on 33 victims. Two counts were later dropped.
The first trial covered the attack on the two sisters. Goudeau faced 20 counts, all but one of them from that attack, and pleaded not guilty. The trial opened in July 2007 before Judge Andrew Klein of Maricopa County Superior Court. His lawyer, Corwin Townsend, had tried and failed to move the trial out of the Phoenix area because of the news coverage. He also asked for the case to be dismissed because the state's DNA technicians had used up the original swab, leaving nothing for an independent test. Judge Klein refused, accepting the prosecution's assurance that the defense could still test a DNA extract from the original work. Neither sister had picked Goudeau out of a photo lineup before his arrest and his photograph appeared on television, and one had earlier identified another man, the Associated Press reported; by the trial both said they recognized him.
A Department of Public Safety analyst, Lorraine Heath, testified that Goudeau was almost certainly the source of the male DNA, and that he was 360 trillion times more likely to be its source than an unrelated African-American man. Under cross-examination by Townsend she agreed that the match covered only three of 13 genetic markers.
In September 2007 the jury convicted him of 19 offenses, including sexual assault, sexual abuse, kidnapping and aggravated assault. On December 14, 2007, Judge Klein sentenced him to 438 years in prison, CBS News and the Associated Press reported; the County Attorney's Office later gave the figure as 428 years. Prosecutors had first said the maximum was 285 years, but Deputy County Attorney Suzanne Cohen proved his prior violent record in court, which allowed a longer term. Goudeau again said he was innocent: "I had nothing to do with it." The judge said he seemed to have two "diametrically opposed" personalities. One of the sisters told the court through an interpreter that she hoped he would never get out. His wife called the hearing "just another freak show" and said the jury had relied on "junk science." The jury foreman said the DNA "was really a lynchpin to the case." The conviction was upheld on appeal, and a petition for post-conviction relief in that case was dismissed in the month before the 2011 death verdicts, the County Attorney's Office said.
The murder case took more than four years to reach a jury. A county attorney's spokesman said the delay was due to its size. The trial began with jury selection on April 19, 2011, before Judge Warren Granville. Goudeau faced nine counts of first-degree murder and 65 other charges, among them attempted murder, sexual assault, child molestation, kidnapping and armed robbery. The prosecutors were Deputy County Attorneys Suzanne Cohen and Patricia Stevens. His trial lawyers were Randall Craig and Rodrick Carter.
The defense asked to try the attacks separately. The court refused and instead set out the evidence in 13 chronological chapters. The trial lasted about seven and a half months, with about 70 days of testimony. In June the prosecution told jurors the attacks were random, and prosecutors described Goudeau as a "ravenous wolf." Craig told the jury there were more likely suspects and attacked the DNA tests.
Identity was the only disputed issue, the Arizona Supreme Court later wrote, and it summarized the state's case on that point. Seven victims identified Goudeau in court, and an eighth identified his voice in a voice lineup. One witness had seen him pointing a gun down at a murder victim's body. Blood from two of the murder victims was found on items taken from his home, and his own DNA was found on Sophia Nunez. Tina Washington's ring was in his closet. A firearms examiner testified that the same .380 caliber handgun had been used in all nine killings. The gun itself was never found.
After seven days of deliberation, on October 31, 2011, the jury found Goudeau guilty of 67 counts, including all nine murders. It acquitted him of one armed robbery, two attempted armed robberies and one kidnapping, and could not reach a verdict on one count involving Sophia Nunez. Goudeau kept his head down as the verdicts were read, shaking it from time to time. Craig said the defense respected the verdict, and that his heart went out to the Goudeau family.
In the penalty phase the jury found aggravating circumstances for every killing: a prior qualifying conviction, a prior serious offense, and the fact that he was on release from prison at the time. It found eight of the murders especially cruel, and four of them committed during another murder. Stevens argued that the victims had endured terror before they died.
The defense called the psychologist Mark Cunningham to describe Goudeau's childhood. During that first mitigation witness, Goudeau stopped his lawyers from calling anyone else who might argue for a life sentence. Against their advice, he then addressed the jury himself. He told the jurors to follow their hearts, insisted he was innocent, and offered no apology to the victims' families, as the prosecutors pointed out. Carter told the jury a life sentence would not be a light one.
On November 30, 2011, the jury returned nine death sentences, about a month after the verdicts. Judge Granville entered them at once. Before the jury decided, relatives of the victims had addressed it, and many jurors wept during their statements. County Attorney Bill Montgomery called Goudeau "a terrible scourge on our community" who had now been held accountable, and said the system must make sure the death sentences were carried out as quickly as possible. Afterward some jurors told the Associated Press the six-month trial had given them nightmares, and that the hardest part had been keeping it from the people they loved.
At a separate hearing on the non-capital counts Judge Granville added more than 1,100 years in prison on 58 felony counts, the Phoenix New Times reported; the West Valley View later described the total as two life sentences and more than 1,000 years. Handcuffed and shackled, Goudeau told the court, "I'm simply here to say that I'm an innocent man," and, "You will see in time, I had nothing to do with these crimes." He blamed his defense team, the police, the prosecutors and a state lab scientist, and said police had framed him and planted evidence.
Because of the death sentences, the appeal went directly to the Arizona Supreme Court. It heard argument on October 13, 2015, KJZZ reported. His appellate lawyer, David Goldberg, raised 17 issues, among them the legality of the searches of his house, the admission of evidence, and whether trying all 74 counts together had overwhelmed the jury.
On June 17, 2016, the court affirmed every conviction and all nine death sentences in an opinion by Vice Chief Justice Pelander for a unanimous court; it was amended on July 5, 2016, when the court denied reconsideration. The court held that the third search warrant, the one that led to the ring, was supported by probable cause. It found no due process violation in the state's use of all of the DNA samples, because there was no sign of bad faith, and said any error was harmless because later results repeated the earlier ones. It found no violation of his right to confront the DNA experts, whom his lawyers had cross-examined at length. It held that trying the counts together was not fundamental error, because the evidence of each attack was admissible on the question of identity in the others, and because the acquittals showed the jury had followed its instructions. It found the court's inquiries into Goudeau's complaints about his lawyers adequate, approved the use of the sisters' case as other-act evidence, and upheld the in-court and voice identifications and the firearms testimony. After its own review it found death the appropriate sentence for each of the nine murders.
Families of victims sued the City of Phoenix in 2010 and 2012. They argued that the police crime lab had collected the two swabs from the sisters' case in 2005 and stored them for months without the testing that would have identified Goudeau, and that earlier action could have prevented some of the later murders and assaults. In 2014 Judge Arthur Anderson of Maricopa County Superior Court dismissed the suits.
In July 2016 the Arizona Court of Appeals agreed with him. Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Randall Howe found that the city had no special relationship with the families and so owed them no duty to identify and arrest the suspect, that public policy did not create such a duty, and that the state's immunity law covered the claim that the city had failed to arrest Goudeau before September 2006. "Merely investigating a crime, without any specific endeavor to provide specific protection that would otherwise create a special relationship, does not create a duty to a victim's family," Howe wrote. The families' lawyer, Marc Victor, said they were very disappointed: "First the criminal justice system had failed them, now the civil justice system has failed them." He said he planned to appeal. A later ruling on that appeal was not reported.
After the direct appeal, a California lawyer, John Mills, was appointed in 2016 to handle Goudeau's post-conviction case. In February 2026 he filed a 384-page petition for post-conviction relief in Maricopa County Superior Court, cut down from more than 500 pages, with exhibits to follow, the Arizona Mirror reported in April 2026. Mills blamed part of the delay on slow disclosure of records by the Phoenix police and the county attorney's office, and on the pandemic.
The petition's claims are Goudeau's allegations, not findings. It alleges that detectives planted a copy of Tina Washington's ring, after buying a plastic copy and a similar ring, and then "found" it in a shoe; that officers put blood from autopsy tubes on the ski mask and the shoes; that the Y-STR testing was unreliable and handled by inexperienced analysts; that the prosecutors let witnesses lie and ignored misconduct, and that the trial judge allowed it. It alleges that his trial lawyers failed to challenge the ballistics, the DNA and the identifications, did not use phone records that could have given him alibis, and did not pursue other suspects, and that the jury may not have known he could never be paroled. It also argues that he has an intellectual disability and so cannot be executed under the 2002 Supreme Court decision in Atkins v. Virginia, citing "borderline intellectual functioning." He was found competent before trial. Mills told the Mirror that Goudeau "would not want an Atkins claim emphasized," and that "what he cares about is the misconduct in the case and his innocence."
The petition asks the court to vacate the convictions and sentences and order a retrial or release, or failing that to set aside the death sentences and resentence him to life. The Arizona Attorney General's Office had not answered the petition and declined to comment, the Mirror reported. If the petition is denied, a federal appeal is expected.
As of April 2026 Goudeau, then 61, was on Arizona's death row, and his online prison disciplinary history showed him to be a model prisoner, the Arizona Mirror reported. No ruling on the petition had been reported by then. His wife has said in many interviews that he is innocent.
Goudeau's guilt is disputed only by Goudeau, his wife and, since 2026, his petition. The courts have found the evidence sufficient, and the Arizona Supreme Court upheld every conviction. The petition's claims of planted evidence and false testimony have not been tested in any hearing reported so far.
The DNA in the sisters' case was a partial Y-STR match, three of 13 markers by the analyst's own testimony, and the original swab was used up, so the defense could not retest it. At trial his lawyers pointed out that a Y-STR profile matches male relatives too, including brothers and nephews. The Arizona Supreme Court found no bad faith in the consumption of the samples. The murder convictions also rested on blood from two victims on items from his house, his DNA on Sophia Nunez, the ring, the ballistics and the identifications.
A Phoenix patrol officer pursued another man, T.S., as a possible accomplice in 2006, the Phoenix New Times reported in 2009. T.S. was never charged in any Baseline case. A task force detective had excluded him in May 2006 because he was in jail when Kristin Gibbons was killed, and DNA testing in 2009 found no match to any victim profile.
The count of crimes changed over time. Police linked 21 or 23 crimes to the Baseline Killer in 2006, recommended 71 charges in December 2006, and the grand jury returned 74 counts; the 2011 jury convicted on 67.
1989: Goudeau is accused in an assault and a supermarket robbery; he pleads guilty to aggravated assault and is sentenced for armed robbery.
2004: Paroled after about 13 years.
August 6, 2005: First charged attack, on three minors in south Phoenix.
September 8, 2005: Georgia Thompson, 19, is killed in Tempe.
September 20, 2005: Attack on two sisters in a south Phoenix park.
September 28, November 3 and November 7, 2005: Robberies, abductions and sexual assaults.
December 12, 2005: Tina Washington, 39, is killed in Phoenix.
January 2006: A Kentucky inmate falsely confesses to Thompson's killing and is indicted.
February 20, 2006: Romelia Vargas, 38, and Mirna Palma-Roman, 24, are killed in their food truck.
March 14, 2006: Liliana Sanchez-Cabrera, 20, and George Chou, 23, are killed.
March 29, 2006: Kristin Gibbons is killed.
April 10, 2006: Sophia Nunez, 37, is killed at home.
May 1, 2006: A woman escapes when the gunman's pistol misfires.
June 29, 2006: Carmen Miranda, 37, is abducted from a car wash and killed.
July 14, 2006: A woman names Goudeau after seeing the composite sketch.
August 3, 2006: The murder charge against the Kentucky man is dismissed.
August 2006: The state lab's Y-STR test matches Goudeau to the sisters' case; two men are arrested in the separate Serial Shooter case.
September 6, 2006: Goudeau is arrested.
October 6, 2006: Third search of his house; Tina Washington's ring is found.
December 2006: Police name him as the Baseline Killer and add Sophia Nunez to the series.
January 2007: Indicted on 74 felony counts.
July 2007: Sisters' trial opens.
September 2007: Convicted of 19 counts in the sisters' case.
December 14, 2007: Sentenced in the sisters' case (438 years, by CBS News and AP).
2010 and 2012: Victims' families sue the City of Phoenix.
April 19, 2011: Murder trial begins.
October 31, 2011: Guilty of 67 counts, including nine first-degree murders.
November 30, 2011: Nine death sentences.
2014: The families' suits are dismissed.
October 13, 2015: Arizona Supreme Court hears the appeal.
June 17, 2016: Convictions and death sentences affirmed.
July 2016: Court of Appeals upholds dismissal of the families' suits.
February 2026: Post-conviction petition filed.
April 21, 2026: Latest report; the petition is pending and he is on death row.