Shortly after midnight on December 27, 1989, security guard Richards Butts, a 61-year-old male whose race or ethnicity was not specified in available public records, was working the overnight shift at the Short Stop convenience store at 48th Street and Broadway Road in Phoenix, Arizona. He was stationed there to protect the small neighborhood market and its clerk, Ron Barman, during the quiet but vulnerable late-night hours.
Contemporary accounts describe the store as nearly empty at that hour, with only the two employees present when an armed robber stepped through the door and turned a routine shift into a fatal encounter.
The intruder was later identified as Eric John King, who entered the store armed with a handgun, described in later summaries as a. 357 revolver. He confronted the clerk at the counter and demanded money from the register, turning the robbery into a tense and chaotic scene captured on the store's time-lapse surveillance cameras. The footage, later used in court, showed a man brandishing a pistol and wearing a distinctive dark sweater with a band of light-colored, diamond-shaped markings across the chest and arms. During the course of the robbery, both Barman inside the store and Butts, serving as security, were shot. The entire crime netted only about $72, a detail often highlighted to underscore how little was gained at the cost of two lives.
A passing driver discovered Butts lying outside the store, his service holster empty. While the witness was calling 911, the gunman briefly returned to the scene and was seen bending over the fallen guard, wiping Butts's holster and belt with a cloth, apparently trying to remove fingerprints before fleeing again into the night. Inside and around the store, investigators recovered evidence and secured the scene, working from the grainy but crucial surveillance video and statements from early witnesses to build a picture of what had happened in the minutes before and after the shots were fired.
One of the key breaks in the case came from a woman named Nekita Renee Hill, who lived within walking distance of the Short Stop. She later told investigators that she saw King, whom she knew, walking toward a nearby dumpster shortly after the crime, carrying a thin plastic bag. Police recovered that bag and found inside a handgun along with a dark sweater bearing a white diamond pattern, matching what Hill remembered King wearing earlier that night and what appeared on the surveillance images. Another witness, Michael Jones testified that he had gone to the store with King to buy wine, stayed outside, heard gunshots, and then saw King leave the store holding a gun while the security guard lay on the ground. Jones ultimately became a cooperating witness; he was released and no charges were filed against him, while King became the primary suspect.
Police moved quickly after the shooting. Newspaper summaries from that period noted that “suspects” were arrested in connection with the killings at the 4200 block of South 48th Street, and later accounts specify that King was taken into custody on December 28, 1989, the day after the crime. Investigators tied together the surveillance footage, the recovered gun and sweater, and the eyewitness testimony from Hill and Jones to build the case that King had carried out the robbery and shootings, with Jones acting as an accomplice who remained outside the store. Over time, public court records and case summaries consistently identify King as the gunman and Jones as his accomplice or companion that night, though only King was ultimately prosecuted for the murders.
King was tried in Arizona state court for the armed robbery and the murders of Ron Barman and Richards Butts. On September 5, 1990, a jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder along with related robbery charges. On March 4, 1991, he was sentenced to death. Over the next two decades he pursued numerous appeals in state and federal courts, challenging aspects of the prosecution, the evidence, and the conduct of the trial, but the convictions and death sentence were repeatedly upheld. Meanwhile, media coverage and later commentary sometimes noted that King had only recently been released from a prior seven-year prison term for kidnapping and sexual assault at the time he killed Barman and Butts.
The legal process culminated on March 29, 2011, when the State of Arizona executed Eric John King by lethal injection at the prison in Florence. Reports from that day indicate that he had no final words before the sentence was carried out. News articles and statements from officials emphasized that he had been convicted of fatally shooting security guard Richards Butts and clerk Ron Barman in a robbery that yielded less than a hundred dollars, and that the families of both men had long described how the loss of their husbands and fathers devastated them. Even as some commentators and advocacy groups later raised questions about aspects of the case, the judicial findings regarding King's role in the murders stood unchanged, and the killing of Richards Butts remains recorded as a solved double-homicide tied to a convenience-store robbery in Phoenix.
