PHOENIX (AP) - The Arizona Supreme Court has upheld the murder convictions and death sentence of a Phoenix man in the killings of two people whose bodies were later found buried in his mother’s backyard.
The court concluded Wednesday that jurors didn’t abuse their discretion by sentencing 48-year-old Alan Champagne to death in one of the two 2011 killings for which he was convicted. He didn’t prevail on any of the legal issues raised in his appeal.
Authorities say Champagne fatally shot 32-year-old Philmon Tapaha at his apartment, choked to death Brandi Nicole Hoffner, put their bodies in a box, poured in lime to help with decomposition and buried it a half-mile (0.8 kilometers) away at his mother’s home.
Champagne was sentenced to death in Hoffner’s killing, while he received a 20-year prison term in Tapaha’s death.
The big break in the case came when a landscaper doing remodeling work at the home after his mother’s eviction had discovered the box containing the corpses.
The 2011 killings weren’t Champagne’s first convictions for murder. He previously served 14 years in prison for fatally stabbing a man in 1991 at a block party while high on alcohol, LSD and paint fumes.
Eight months after the killings of Tapaha and Hoffner, Champagne barricaded himself in his mother’s home and opened fire on officers who went there to arrest him on an unrelated aggravated assault warrant, police said.
He surrendered after he ran out of ammunition. No one was injured but authorities apparently didn’t search the property closely enough to find the bodies buried in the backyard, even though family members had already reported Tapaha and Hoffner missing.
He was sentenced to a 700-year prison sentence in the barricade case.
Authorities said they learned that Champagne, while jailed in the barricade case, wanted to post bond so he could move the buried bodies, so they sent an undercover officer into the jail posing as a dirty private investigator in the hopes of getting information.
The undercover officer spoke with Champagne at the jail seven times in 2012 and 2013. In one conversation, Champagne gave the undercover officer a copy of a police report about Tapaha and Hoffner’s disappearance and said, “This is my problem, know what I mean.”
In his appeal, Champagne had argued a lower-court judge violated his constitutional rights by refusing to throw out incriminating statements he made to the undercover detective.
The state Supreme Court ruled the judge correctly threw out the last jailhouse conversation that Champagne had with the undercover agent, because by that point he had been charged in the killings and had a right to legal representation.
But the Supreme Court also ruled the judge correctly allowed six other earlier conversations between Champagne and undercover agent to be heard at trial, because he wasn’t charged in the killings at that point.
No clear motive for the killings had emerged, but police say Champagne had been smoking methamphetamine an hour before the killings and was feuding with Tapaha over a relationship.
After Tapaha was shot in the face, Champagne strangled Hoffner with an electrical cable while was she puffing on a glass bong. Police say his girlfriend, 26-year-old Elise Garcia, was at the apartment during the killings.
She was sentenced to 16 years in prison last fall after pleading guilty to murder in Hoffner’s death.
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Follow Jacques Billeaud at twitter.com/jacquesbilleaud.
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