In the spring of 2001, a tragic series of events unfolded in Phoenix, Arizona, culminating in the deaths of 19-year-old Tanya Sue Ramsdell and her boyfriend, Charles Findley. Ramsdell, who was five months pregnant, shared a home on East Roberts Road with Findley and an acquaintance, Tracy Allen Hampton. The catalyst for the violence occurred on May 16, 2001, when Department of Public Safety officers visited the residence to serve a traffic ticket to Hampton.
He was not present, but in an effort to assist the officers, Findley provided them with a photograph of Hampton. This act of cooperation would prove to have fatal consequences.
Hampton perceived Findley's action as a betrayal, labeling him a 'rat.' In the early hours of May 17, after consuming methamphetamine with others at the house, Hampton confronted Findley about the police visit. Later that day, around noon, Hampton returned to the residence. He found Findley in a back room and, after turning up the volume on a CD player, shot him in the forehead. Immediately after, Hampton proceeded to a bedroom where Tanya Sue Ramsdell was sleeping and fatally shot her in the head, also killing her unborn child.
Tracy Allen Hampton was arrested on May 31, 2001. While awaiting trial, he reportedly confessed the details of the murders to a fellow inmate. His motivations were chillingly clear. He killed Findley for being an informant. His reasons for killing Ramsdell were rooted in his white supremacist beliefs; he allegedly killed her because he believed she was pregnant with a Black man's child. In 2002, a jury found Hampton guilty of two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Findley and Ramsdell, and one count of manslaughter for the death of the unborn child. The court found the crimes to be especially heinous and depraved, and Hampton was subsequently sentenced to death for the murders.
