Fossil Creek

Konstantin Simberg was a 21-year-old Russian immigrant living in the Phoenix area. In 2001 he became involved in a plan to steal about 6,000 vials of human growth hormone from a delivery truck outside a Scottsdale pharmacy. When the scheme fell apart, Simberg agreed to cooperate with police and began telling a detective who else was involved.

Late that year, Chris Andrews, Dennis Tsoukanov and Mikhail Drachev grabbed Simberg while he was on the phone with that detective. They bound him and drove him north to Fossil Creek in the Coconino National Forest. There he was beaten, stabbed, doused with gasoline and set on fire, and his attackers left him by the creek. His body was found near the water, and detectives first suspected the men behind the hormone plot, though no link to them was ever proved.

Tsoukanov pleaded guilty, and Andrews, who had fled to Spain, came back and was convicted of murder and kidnapping. Drachev fled and spent several years as a fugitive, and his case was featured repeatedly on America’s Most Wanted. In 2007 he was arrested in Canada after a girlfriend, who had known him under another identity, reported him. He was returned to Arizona, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2014, and was sentenced that August to 37½ years in prison, the last of the three to be sentenced.