Pedro Galvan, a 26-year-old Hispanic/Latino male, was working the overnight shift alone at the Mobil station at Mill Avenue and Broadway Road in Tempe, Arizona, when he was killed in the early morning hours of March 23, 1995. His body was discovered at about 1:52 a.m. by a customer, Ed Lynch, who had stopped at the station to buy cigarettes and found Galvan sprawled on the floor of the cashier booth. Galvan had been shot in the side of the head with a shotgun at close range.
Police said the cash register had been cleaned out, and the last recorded transaction at the station was at 1:24 a.m., suggesting the robbery and shooting happened sometime in the narrow window before his body was found.
Investigators believed Galvan may have opened the locked cashier booth door just before the attack. Police found a car radio on a counter inside the booth, and Galvan's girlfriend, Jennifer Aubrey, said he had removed the radio from his car and appeared to have been working on it during his shift. Because the booth door locked automatically, police speculated that Galvan may have stepped outside to retrieve something from his car, which was parked nearby, and was ambushed before he could get back inside. There were no signs of a struggle. Authorities described the killing as senseless, with Tempe police noting that Galvan had been killed for what appeared to be a relatively small amount of money.
Galvan's killing was quickly connected by police to a violent series of robberies that had unfolded across the Phoenix area that same night. About 11:25 p.m. on March 22, two robbers held up a customer outside Pleasure World at 4029 E. Washington Street in Phoenix. Roughly an hour later, at about 12:30 a.m., a cashier at Castle Boutique at 300 E. Camelback Road was shot in the back of the head with a shotgun during another robbery. That cashier survived and was able to give police a description of the attackers, saying he watched them run away, get into a small late-model red four-door car, similar to a Honda Civic, Nissan Maxima, or Nissan Sentra, and flee the scene. About 80 minutes after that shooting, Galvan was found dead at the Tempe Mobil station.
Police said there was a strong possibility the incidents were linked because of the unusual similarities: two cashiers shot in the head with a shotgun within about an hour and 15 minutes, along with another robbery believed to involve the same men. Tempe police initially said detectives were convinced the same pair responsible for the Phoenix shooting and robbery had killed Galvan, while Phoenix police later said there were many similarities but stopped short of confirming the connection absolutely. Authorities also suspected the same pair could have been responsible for other robberies and killings in Phoenix during the preceding three weeks, though the articles did not identify those additional cases by name.
The suspects were described as two men in their 20s. One was said to be about 25 to 30 years old, between 5 feet 7 inches and 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing 170 to 200 pounds, with short hair. The second was described as about 25 years old, around 5 feet 7 inches tall and 170 pounds, with short hair and a well-trimmed beard. Phoenix police later released a composite sketch of the suspected gunman, who was described as about 25 years old, 5 feet 6 inches tall and 180 pounds. Police said the second suspect did not have a composite available and was described only more generally as being in his 20s.
In the days after Galvan's killing, Mobil Oil offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his killers, and the Arizona Petroleum Marketers Association added another $2,500, bringing the total reward to $12,500. Friends of Galvan also tried to raise reward money, desperate for someone to come forward. Publicly available reporting provided here does not name any arrested suspect, list criminal charges, describe a trial, or report a conviction in Galvan's death. The case, as reflected in these sources, remained centered on the search for two shotgun-wielding robbers believed to have terrorized cashiers across Phoenix and Tempe during a violent overnight spree.
