The Murder Trial

Some 23 years after Rashad Khalifa’s death, the Pima County Attorney’s Office had a murder case to prosecute. Three years after the case was reopened, the authorities arrested Glen Francis in Calgary, Alberta. Francis fought extradition for two years, but ultimately went on trial here last month.

Not much is known about Francis. Sean Bruner, of the Pima County Public Defender’s Office, cast his client as somebody who moved around to pick up the odd job, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who came to Tucson in 1990 to work illegally. Bruner suggested Francis was an unlikely suspect for a murder that might have been driven by religious zealotry.

Francis appeared to have lived in the area under an alias, according to the judge’s pretrial factual findings in the case. And he was at least once picked up by federal authorities, who took care to take a DNA sample. Ultimately, with the local cold case squad revived, that DNA sample was matched to blood evidence taken from the murder scene in 1990.

The question of whether people had been out to kill Khalifa for religious reasons had taken interesting turns over the intervening years. Two men arrested as a result of the F.B.I.’s 1989 raid of the reputed Al Fuqra storage unit in Colorado were ultimately convicted of conspiring to kill Khalifa. It was even believed by law enforcement that one of the people involved in tracking Khalifa was Wadih el-Hage, who is serving life in prison for his role in the 1998 bombings of United States embassies in Africa.

But prosecutors, all these years later, have made little effort trying to determine or prove Francis’s possible motive, beyond some long-ago statements Francis might have made about Khalifa’s teachings and murder. Whether he was acting on the orders of others has not been raised. The case they put on last month was almost strictly driven by the DNA evidence.

“They had all these big names and big-time people wanting to kill this guy, and there’s no motive for this guy, there’s no history for this guy, there’s no nothing,” Bruner said of Francis.

During opening arguments, Sam Khalifa sat with his sister while their mother watched from a chair at the back of the room. He and his family had waited a long time for justice.