How sad! At such a young age, one can do such damage. Of all the places he could rob, he had to rob a temple? Such negative karma, killing Sanghas and robbing a temple. I wonder if he regretted his doings...
PHOENIX — One of two young men charged in the 1991 murders at a Buddhist temple was found guilty on all counts Thursday in Maricopa County Superior Court.
Johnathan Doody, 39, sat impassively as the court clerk read the verdicts: nine counts of first-degree murder, nine counts of armed robbery and single counts of burglary and conspiracy to commit armed robbery.
The jury began deliberations Jan. 13. After announcing the verdict, the jury began deliberating aggravating factors in the case immediately.
On Aug. 10, 1991, nine bodies were found face-down on the floor of the Wat Promkunaram Buddhist temple in Waddell, Ariz., west of Glendale, Ariz., near Luke Air Force Base.
All the victims — six monks, two acolytes and a nun — were Thais or of Thai descent, as is Doody.
Doody has been in custody since his 1991 arrest when he was 17 years old.
The shocking story went international, and in their haste and desire to solve the case, Maricopa County Sheriff's deputies rounded up four men from Tucson and extracted false confessions from them.
Then, by accident, they stumbled upon one of Doody's friends, specifically the one from whom Doody and his best friend, Alessandro "Alex" Garcia, had borrowed the murder weapon, a .22 caliber rifle. The gun was in the friend's car.
Doody and Garcia, were taken to a hotel, and interrogated and they confessed. Garcia, was so worn down by the deputies that he told them what they wanted to hear: he had committed the murders with the so-called Tucson Four.
But the Tucson men were cleared in the case, and three of them won lawsuits against the county. The story narrowed down to Doody and Garcia.
According to Garcia, who pleaded guilty and escaped the death penalty (which was still being imposed on juveniles in 1991) in exchange for his testimony against Doody, he and Doody put on their high-school ROTC uniforms and boots that they thought would disguise their footprints. They brought a 20-gauge shotgun from Garcia's house and borrowed the .22-caliber rifle and knocked at the temple door. They ransacked the temple's adjoining living quarters while holding the residents at gunpoint. Then, according to Garcia, Doody shot them all in the head with the .22, and he discharged four shotgun rounds into the bodies.
In 1994, both were sentenced to hundreds of years in prison for the murders; Garcia had also killed a woman camping in the Tonto National Forest between the time of the Temple Murders and his arrest.
But Doody's case was thrown out by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 because the sheriff's deputies had improperly obtained his confession.
Doody went back to trial last August, but in October, the jury reached an impasse and the judge declared a mistrial. The third trial began in December. In both retrials, because Doody's confession was off-limits, the case hinged on Garcia's testimony and whether the jury believed him.
