On May 11, 1996, Ronald Jones, an adult male resident of Peoria, Arizona, whose exact age and race/ethnicity are not reported in publicly available case records, left the home he shared with his live-in girlfriend, Alicia Sosa, around 1:00 p.m. He told Sosa that he was going to deliver documents to a loan company. At some point that day, Jones received a page from Myla Hogan, a woman he knew socially through her housemate and his acquaintance, Mary Keovorabouth, who lived in a shared house on
81st Avenue in Peoria. Jones picked Hogan up at that 81st Avenue residence, and the two went out to lunch together before returning to the house.
What Jones did not know was that Hogan’s housemates—Christopher George Theodore Lamar, Keovorabouth, Ouday “Tim” Panmany, Vincent Macchirella, and Richard Valdez—had already devised a plan targeting him. According to court records, before May 11 the group had agreed to kidnap and rob Jones. Their stated goals were to steal his money and possessions so they could pay their rent and to “rough him up a little bit” to discourage him from continuing to spend time with Hogan. When Jones and Hogan returned from lunch, the others were waiting inside. Lamar confronted Jones about his relationship with Hogan; Jones replied that he had not known she was involved with Lamar. Lamar then punched Jones, knocking him to the floor, while Macchirella pointed a gun at him. At Lamar’s direction, Abraham Hermosillo retrieved duct tape and bound Jones’s hands and ankles, beginning a prolonged and terrifying ordeal.
After restraining him, Lamar and Macchirella moved Jones into a bedroom and robbed him of his shoes, jewelry, approximately fifty dollars in cash, and some crack cocaine. Jones cried and pleaded for his life, offering to write a check if they would let him go. Lamar demanded the gun from Macchirella, reportedly remarking that he had “done this before.” The group then took Jones upstairs, where they held him captive for hours. As they watched television, different members of the group took turns guarding him with the gun while he repeatedly begged to be released. When it grew dark, they forced Jones downstairs again and into the front passenger seat of his own car. Lamar sat behind him while directing Macchirella to drive toward an area near 35th Avenue and Broadway Road in Phoenix, a neighborhood familiar to Lamar and Hermosillo. At one point on the drive, Lamar pressed the gun to Jones’s head and pulled the trigger; the weapon misfired, and Jones broke down in tears and pleas when he heard the click but realized he was still alive.
Eventually, Lamar told Macchirella to pull the car over near a vacant lot. The three men—Lamar, Macchirella, and Jones—got out and walked to the rear of the vehicle. At Lamar’s direction, Macchirella opened the trunk. Lamar then shot Jones, and medical testimony later established that Jones sustained two gunshot wounds to the head. As Lamar and Macchirella lifted his body into the trunk, Jones was still making “gurgling” sounds, as though choking on his own blood. Meanwhile, Panmany, Valdez, and Hermosillo, who had been following in a stolen truck and had briefly stopped elsewhere, heard gunshots from a nearby relative’s home and returned to the scene. When they asked what had happened, Lamar opened the trunk and patted Jones’s back, a chilling gesture illustrating his control over the situation.
The group decided to conceal both the body and the vehicle. When Jones’s car would not start, they pushed it to a nearby parking lot. Someone obtained a shovel, and under Lamar’s direction, Macchirella dug a shallow grave in a gravel pit area near 43rd Avenue and Weir. Lamar, Hermosillo, Panmany, and Valdez dragged Jones’s body from the trunk, placed him in the grave, and covered him with dirt and brush. They removed items from the car, including a cellular phone, a radio, a CD player, a toolbox, and a tool belt—property later connected back to Jones and Sosa—and then set the vehicle on fire. Some secondary accounts note that the group assembled a makeshift gasoline bomb to ignite the car more thoroughly, further destroying potential evidence at the scene.
In the hours that followed, the group tried to resume a semblance of normalcy. Macchirella used Jones’s cell phone to call back to the Peoria house and told Keovorabouth they had “made a mistake,” prompting Lamar to chastise him for using a phone that could be traced back to the victim. The group then went to a party in Lamar’s old neighborhood. Lamar’s cousin Frances later testified that she saw blood on Lamar’s shoes, and that as she drove him to Mesa at his request, she witnessed him throw one of his shoes out of the car window—behavior prosecutors later portrayed as an attempt to destroy incriminating evidence. After returning to the party, Lamar and several of the others went back to Peoria in the stolen truck, which they abandoned in a parking lot before walking back to the 81st Avenue house. When Hogan asked Lamar where they had been, he responded, “Don’t ask,” and she later described him as looking extremely pale, as if he had just seen a ghost.
The crime remained unsolved for several months until September 1996, when Silent Witness received an anonymous tip—apparently from Lamar’s cousin Frances—indicating that a body could be found buried in a vacant lot near 43rd Avenue and Weir. Investigators from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office interviewed Hogan, Frances, and Frances’s sister Marie, then searched a gravel pit in the area. There, they located human remains later identified through dental records as those of Ronald Jones. Detectives executed a search warrant at the apartment of Lamar’s aunt, Debra Lamar, where Lamar and Hogan sometimes stayed. In a trash dumpster behind the building, officers found a tool belt wrapped in a diaper; Debra admitted she had discovered it in the pantry where Lamar stored his belongings and had thrown it away. Inside the apartment, police also found a toolbox on a rear kitchen shelf. Sosa identified tools in the box as belonging to Jones and recognized her own handwriting on a note found with them, directly tying Lamar’s living spaces to property taken in the robbery-kidnapping.
On the basis of the physical evidence, witness statements, and the recovery of Jones’s body, a grand jury indicted Christopher George Theodore Lamar in February 1997 for the kidnapping and first-degree murder of Ronald Jones. Lamar was tried before a jury and, on December 10, 1999, was convicted of first-degree murder under both premeditated and felony-murder theories, as well as kidnapping. The trial court imposed a death sentence for the murder and a consecutive twenty-one-year term of imprisonment for the kidnapping. Two of Lamar’s accomplices, Vincent Macchirella and Abraham Hermosillo, accepted plea agreements in exchange for their testimony in any trial connected to the crime; each pled guilty to second-degree murder, with Macchirella receiving a thirteen-year sentence and Hermosillo a ten-year sentence. Other individuals present that day—Hogan, Keovorabouth, Panmany, and Valdez—were identified in court records as having participated in the events leading up to and following Jones’s death, though the Arizona Supreme Court’s published opinion focuses primarily on Lamar’s prosecution and the plea deals of Macchirella and Hermosillo.
