The Baseline Killer

On August 6, 2005, a man with a silver handgun forced three teenagers behind a church near Baseline Road in south Phoenix and assaulted two of the girls. Over the next ten months, a run of robberies, sexual assaults and killings across the city was traced to the same attacker, and reporters began calling him the Baseline Killer.

Nine people were murdered. Georgia Thompson died in September 2005 and Tina Washington that December. Romelia Vargas and Mirna Palma-Roman were killed in February 2006, Liliana Sanchez-Cabrera and Chao Chou in March, Kristin Gibbons later that month, Sophia Nunez at home that spring, and Carmen Miranda in June. The break came from a September 2005 attack on two sisters in a Phoenix park: DNA from that case matched Mark Goudeau, a construction worker and paroled felon. Officers arrested him in September 2006 and reported finding Tina Washington’s “We Love Mom” ring at his home along with bloodstained shoes and a ski mask.

Goudeau was tried first for the sisters’ assault and sentenced in 2007 to 438 years. A second trial ended on October 31, 2011, with conviction on sixty-seven counts, including all nine murders, and a month later he received nine death sentences. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld them in June 2016. In February 2026 his lawyers filed a post-conviction petition in Maricopa County.