The Jack in the Box Murders

Late on Sunday, May 19, 2002, three people were working the overnight shift at a Jack in the Box on East Main Street in Mesa, Arizona: assistant manager Fausto Jimenez and Beatriz “Betty” Alvarado, both thirty-one, and Kenneth Brown, twenty-seven. Christopher Hargrave, twenty-one, had been fired from that store after Jimenez reported cash missing from Hargrave’s register. He knocked, said he had been called in to work, and Jimenez unlocked the door.

Hargrave let in Steve Boggs, who was armed. They took less than three hundred dollars and left the safe alone, then marched the three workers into the walk-in freezer and shot them. Brown died there. Alvarado made it outside before she collapsed, and Jimenez reached a phone and called for help before he died. Boggs pawned the Taurus .45 two days later, and ballistics tied it to the killings.

Investigators found that the two men had started a white supremacist group they called the Imperial Royal Guard, and prosecutors argued the workers were chosen because of their race. Boggs was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 2005, and the Arizona Supreme Court upheld that in 2008. Hargrave was tried separately, convicted, and sentenced to death in February 2006; his case was affirmed on June 14, 2010.