[3] The victims were all linked to the temple and either Thais or of Thai descent: the abbot, Pairuch Kanthong; five monks, Surichai Anuttaro, Boochuay Chaiyarach, Chalerm Chantapim, Siang Ginggaeo, and Somsak Sopha; a nun, Foy Sripanpasert; her nephew, Matthew Miller, who was a novice monk; and a temple employee, Chirasak Chirapong.
Mike McGraw, a patient in a mental hospital in Tucson, had called sheriff's investigators in Maricopa County, saying he knew who did it and providing names.
[7][11] The fourth suspect maintained his innocence through two extensive rounds of interrogation and was later released, after investigators finally looked into his alibi and found video evidence showing him working at a dog racing operation hundreds of miles away at the time of the murder.
[3] Police found the murder weapon, a .22-caliber rifle belonging to a 16-year-old, in the car of a friend of 17-year-old Johnathan Doody, an ethnic Thai born in Nakon Nayok in Thailand.
[10] Garcia, along with his girlfriend Michelle Hoover, also pled guilty to murdering Alice Cameron two months after the temple massacre.
[24] Initial suspect McGraw, while offering tantalizing details on the shooting for months,[25] was later found to be unreliable, as he had a history of making outlandish claims while he was in prison in 1988.
But that part of the investigation stopped after McGraw's phone call led to the Tucson Four's arrest – the actual murder weapon sat behind a door in a detective's office for weeks before being tested.
[24] A homicide chief for Maricopa County Sheriff's Office at the time said the interrogators hammered on the suspects until their will was broken, and that "after a while, they were willing to say anything.
[10] Gary L. Stuart, a lawyer with deep knowledge of the case, said Doody's confession never should have stood up in court at the 1994 trial.