In the spring of 1998, the life of Donald Tsosie, a 40-year-old Navajo man, was brutally cut short in San Juan County, New Mexico. On March 31, 1998, Tsosie was at the Turn Around Bar in Farmington when he accepted a ride from two men, Robert Fry and Leslie Engh. This fateful decision led to a horrific sequence of events that ended in his death.
The journey home turned into a violent altercation. Investigators later learned that Fry and Engh beat Tsosie with a shovel.
After the brutal assault, they drove him to Head's Canyon, a location approximately 1,400 feet from the edge of the Navajo Reservation. There, in the remote landscape, they threw his bruised and bleeding body off a cliff. His death was the result of the severe beating.
For a time, the case of Donald Tsosie's murder remained unsolved. The break in the investigation came two years later, following the arrest of Robert Fry and Leslie Engh for the murder of another individual, Betty Lee, in June 2000. During the investigation into Lee's death, Engh confessed to his and Fry's involvement in Tsosie's murder. Engh admitted to the police that they had robbed and beaten Tsosie before pushing him from the cliff. A former friend of Fry's also testified that Fry had bragged about beating a Navajo man to death.
Leslie Engh pleaded guilty to his role in the murders of both Donald Tsosie and Betty Lee and was sentenced to life in prison. He was expected to testify against Robert Fry. Fry was ultimately convicted for the murder of Donald Tsosie and received a life sentence for the crime. This was in addition to a death sentence he received for the murder of Betty Lee and two more life sentences for the 1996 murders of two other men. Fry's death sentence was later commuted to life in prison in 2019 after New Mexico abolished the death penalty.
