The Case of the Grim Tweaker

"I can't forget it, I can't forget that day," Backseat Johnny says softly. "I try and I try; it keeps playing in my head."

Johnny says he's sure that Chris Wilson knew Donnie was about to shoot the officer. To prove his point, he acts out his chilling recollection of what happened, pretending for a moment to be Chris.

Johnny shows how Chris leaned back in the driver's seat just before Donnie reached across Chris' face with a gun and started firing at the cop.

As soon as the mortally wounded Uribe crumpled to the pavement, Chris hit the gas pedal and sped off into the neighborhood south of Cactus Road. Chris stopped the car down the road from the shooting, and the three men jumped out.

There, Johnny heard Donnie say, "We gotta burn the car! I just shot a cop!"

Johnny then made one of the most momentous decisions of his young life.

"I just walked away and kept walking," he says.

Chris and Donnie went one way, Johnny another.

Johnny says he soon heard two more shots, but he kept moving until he reached a music store on West Peoria Avenue.

He called his parents, who picked him up. But he didn't tell them then about what had happened.

Johnny says he never spoke to Donnie or Chris after they separated. His reason for not calling authorities until after the arrests a few hours earlier: fear that the other guys would come after him or his family before police nabbed them.

Backseat Johnny's narrative passes Femenia's smell test. Why, the detective reasons, would the young man accuse his friend Donnie of being the killer rather than Chris Wilson, whom he barely knew?

Meanwhile, the interviews of Donnie Delahanty and Dave York have been ongoing since just before 7 p.m.

Neither interviewee knows that the other is there, just a few feet across a hall.

York is a burly man with a brusque manner. Why he'd been hanging out with the likes of Donnie Delahanty and Chris Wilson can be summed up in one word: methamphetamine.

York has been on leave from the Arizona Department of Corrections since the previous February for personal problems. The "problems" include the habitual use of meth and other illegal drugs. Since then, he's left his wife and children and floated around the Valley, until moving in a month or so earlier with a new girlfriend at the address where police found him.

York has become close over the last months with Chris Wilson, whom he'd met through Chris' mother Bobbie (they are not blood relatives, as many people had thought). York and Chris had been spending a lot of time together, drawn to each other mostly by a mutual love of meth.

York repeats what he'd told Detective Middleton on the night of the murder: The last time he saw Donnie or Chris was at his barbecue on May 9, the day before the killing. He tells Detective Orona that he suspects Donnie Delahanty shot Uribe.

Orona moves the interview along slowly, locking York into a story as he encourages him to talk. Then the veteran detective moves things up a notch.

"I appreciate your candor and your openness," he tells York. "I need you to be truthful when I ask this question."

"Sure."

"Do you know where that gun is?" Orona asks, speaking of what is then believed to be the murder weapon.

That's a zinger.

"No, sir, I don't," York says, trying to ooze sincerity.

"You're positive?"

"I'm positive."

Without confronting York directly, Orona tells him, "[We have information that] the gun was given to you to dispose of."

"Not me," York insists.

"We're going to be doing a search warrant of your house. And we're not going to find anything there?"

"No."

"Neither one came to you and asked you to dispose of the gun?"

"No," Dave York says. "My hands are clean, partner. I'm telling you."

For the first time, Steve Orona mentions York's garage attic as the gun's possible location.

"Oh, shit," York says, brow furrowing deeper. "I hope to God it's not there, man."

Orona leaves York for a few minutes, to hear what's been happening with Ballentine next door.

York starts talking to himself: "Son of a bitch. I don't believe this shit. That motherfucker. Goddamn it . . . I'll bet you $20 that fucker put it in the attic."

After reading Donnie Delahanty his Miranda rights against self-incrimination, Jack Ballentine tells him this:

"You're a lead, and I needed to talk to you because I know you were there, okay? I know that! I know so much! I need to see how honest you are, and I need you to help me the rest of the way."

Donnie wants to know how police learned where he'd been hiding.

"That's my secret," Ballentine says, smiling. "I can't share that."

Soon, the detective asks about the Monte Carlo and the fatal traffic stop on West Cactus Road.

Donnie claims that he was sitting in the back seat when the cop pulled Chris over. As Uribe approached the car, it was Chris Wilson who had panicked, not him.