A killer wrote his own death warrant and Arizona finally signed it

Yahoo

20-03-2025

Photo by Pict Rider | Getty Images
When the warden asked if he had any last words, Aaron Gunches squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.
He was strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber, waiting to die, projecting a desire to just get it over with after nearly 23 years.
In 2002, he killed a man named Ted Price, by taking him out to the desert and putting four bullets in him for reasons he must have imagined made sense. Now, it was his turn and his time to die.
On a closed circuit TV screen above the big window into the execution chamber, a hand pushed a plunger, sending the killing drug pentobarbital along a long tube from a control panel in another room into Gunches' veins.
Pento kills by inducing pulmonary edema, essentially ripping the lungs apart and filling them with fluids that drown a person in minutes. Experts opine that it is a terrorizing, painful way to die: The drug only renders the drowner unresponsive, but it doesn't mean he can't feel anything.
Gunches showed nothing. He kept his eyes closed. He coughed lightly. His hands twitched once or twice. He let out a few huffing breaths, then exhaled with a light snore. After about three minutes, he just laid still.
An anonymous voice came over a loudspeaker announcing the time of death: 10:33 a.m. The drugs had taken 18 minutes to do their job.
'The death penalty is the law of the land in Arizona, Attorney General Kris Mayes said an hour or so later in a post-execution press conference. She hit the usual notes: Justice served. Closure.
We were told that Gunches' last meal had been a double western cheeseburger and a gyros with onion rings and baklava. It did not sound appetizing.
One of Price's sisters expressed her relief that it was finally over.
What more could anyone really say?
It was never a high-profile case, and it didn't even make the newspapers until eight years after the murder, when the death sentence was thrown out by the Arizona Supreme Court, a rarity. Then the second trial also stayed under the radar, and no one heard of Gunches again until 2023, when he demanded to be executed, and then-Attorney General Mark Brnovich agreed. But then Arizona changed governors and the execution was put off until this year, when politics made it unavoidable.
As brutal as the murder was, it probably would not have ended in a death sentence, according to several of his attorneys and one judge, if Gunches hadn't insisted he knew better than anyone else.
He was a big man, six feet tall and 210 pounds at the time of his arrest. He cropped his hair short because he was balding. He had jug ears and his face pinched into a permanent squint. His lawyers have described him as 'somehow likeable,' in spite of it all, protective of his friends, rigid in his ideas of good and bad. He was also obstinate and averse to logic once he had made up his mind with his limited and drug-addled reasoning faculties.
He came from a dynasty of drug abusers: his grandparents, his father, his father's siblings and several of his cousins. Six served prison time and four died from substance abuse, according to court records. Gunches had suffered more than one head trauma and had to wear dark glasses because of resultant light sensitivity.
He would not allow any of that information to be used as mitigation. He insisted on firing his attorneys and defending himself, then did nothing in his own defense. He has, on occasion, told acquaintances that he did not commit the murder, but would not say who had. And he never brought that up in court. His advisory attorneys are still haunted, because they felt they could have helped him reach a plea agreement and a lesser verdict — maybe second-degree murder, maybe less than a life sentence, even.
But he refused to cooperate and held to a prison-mentality honor code in which he would implicate nothing and take the punishment. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Timothy Ryan spent months trying to convince him to use an attorney before grudgingly finding him competent to defend himself.
'Well, I mean, this is not an A-plus passing on your competence by the experts,' he told Gunches. 'I hope you realize that.'
Ryan told the Mirror that, through his refusal to prevent the jury from knowing anything about him, Gunches was leaving them no choice but to sentence him to death.
One of his trial court judges, Joseph Kreamer, asked point-blank if he was trying to 'commit suicide by jury.'
'Do you believe in the death penalty?'
That's the question Price's sister asked me. And when she didn't get a definitive enough 'yes,' she clammed up.
Ironically, it's the same question Gunches asked of another reporter, and he wanted the same answer — agree to let me die— before he, too, stopped talking.
The woman at the center of the killing nearly 23 years ago wouldn't talk at all. The long-ago relationships are ill-defined in the record: She was an ex-girlfriend of some kind to Ted Price and some kind of girlfriend to Gunches, the man who killed him.
She wasn't charged in the murder, though she went to prison on drug charges that turned up during the investigation. When she had done her time, she moved away from Arizona, got married, changed her name, and started a new life. But do you ever escape this kind of trauma? When asked for comment, she had someone else return the call and demanded to be left out of the story, which is impossible.
But now Gunches is dead, too, and whether his death at the hands of the state fulfilled any of their expectations remains to be seen. The answer is probably no.
Aaron Gunches killed Ted Price on November 15, 2002, late at night in a river bottom east of Phoenix. Gunches was executed March 19, 2025, on a prison gurney in Florence. That's the beginning and end to the story. Here's the in-between, sketched out from court records and conversations with attorneys and a judge.
Gunches came to the Phoenix area from Carlsbad, California, sometime in the 1990s. He had a high school diploma, he worked as a mechanic and in construction, and he had a talent for fabricating glass pipes for smoking methamphetamine. By 1999, he had already amassed three drug charges and a charge of misconduct with weapons, and he had done two-and-a-half years in prison, getting out in 2001 when he was 30.
A year later, 2002, he was in a relationship of some sort with Kathryn Lecher. Gunches later denied to one of his attorneys that he and Lecher were a couple, though he sometimes spent the night. But with his prison honor code, and what an attorney called 'an exaggerated sense of chivalry,' he may have been covering up.
Ted Price, 40, was an electronics technician, according to his obituary. He was originally from Utah but had moved to Massachusetts, where he left a divorce and two kids before moving back to Utah. Somewhere along the way, he and Lecher, herself divorced with two teenagers, had had a relationship that lasted about 10 years.
In November 2002, Price took a bus from Utah to Mesa. He was studying to be an X-ray technician and waiting for a student grant so that he could get a place of his own in Arizona. But in the meantime, he was sleeping on a couch at Lecher's apartment.
It was a crowded place. Lecher's two children lived with her, and so did a 17-year old named Jennifer Garcia, Garcia's father, and another woman. Everyone did drugs, including the kids, and according to court records Gunches and other men came and went.
This didn't sit well with Price, who had hopes of getting back together with Lecher. She was not at all interested. Price, according to his sister, was alarmed at the drug use and said so. And on Nov. 14, 2002, after about five days, things exploded. Though the record does not detail what the argument was about, Lecher became so enraged that she threw a telephone — not a cell phone, mind you — and hit him full in the face, knocking him down.
Price lay on the floor, dazed, unable to stand on his own two feet. Lecher made a phone call. Enter Gunches.
According to statements from others in the house, Gunches was polite at first, and then lost his temper, grabbing Price by the hair and holding a gun to his head, saying, 'I should just take you out of this world right now.'
One of the roommates called Greyhound to find out how much bus fare would cost to send Price back home. They gathered Price's things, though Gunches took Price's guitar, handed it to Lecher's son, and said, 'Compliments of Ted.' They half-carried Price to Lecher's car and loaded him onto the backseat. Gunches insisted that Jennifer Garcia drive, even though she had other plans.
They drove to the bus terminal. Gunches went inside, telling Garcia to make sure Price didn't leave. He came out shortly, claiming he didn't have enough money for a ticket, and got back in the car. And though Garcia offered to chip in for bus fare, Gunches refused and ordered her to start driving up the Beeline Highway. They turned off the road toward Saguaro Lake, and when the car bottomed out at an area favored by dirt-bikers, Price and Gunches got out of the car.
'Where are we?' Price asked, and 'What are we doing?'
'We're going camping,' Gunches said.
Gunches rooted in the trunk of the car while Price staggered about. He pulled out a gun, wrapped a towel around his hand and shot four times, hitting Price three times in the chest and once in the head. Price fell to his knees and then collapsed on his side.
Though she initially testified that Gunches had made her fire the gun, too, Garcia never left the car. (The lie was encouraged by her father, who said she needed to embellish her story to make it more believable.) On the way back to Lecher's place, she said, Gunches tried to caress her hair. When they got there, Garcia left to walk around. When she got back, Gunches was asleep. She took the car keys and drove away.
Price's body was not found for nearly a month, and it's debatable whether anyone was even looking. But hikers or bikers came across the body on Dec. 10, 2002. Maricopa County Sheriff's deputies combed the murder scene. There was no identification on the body, but Price was eventually identified by the serial number on a hip replacement.
Gunches was long gone. On Jan. 15, 2003, two months after the murder, he was pulled over on I-10 near Yuma because of a burned-out taillight. He came out of the car shooting, striking the DPS officer in the chest, but not injuring him because he was wearing body armor. Gunches' shoulder was grazed, and he was shot in the head, though he later claimed he pulled the bullet out with his fingers. He fled the scene but was found the next day, hiding in a haystack in the town of Wenden, and arrested. He was put on a medical helicopter and rushed to a hospital.
La Paz County prosecutors charged him with attempted murder, and he had already been convicted and sent to prison with a 23-year sentence before Maricopa County investigators connected him to the Price murder. He was indicted on murder and kidnapping charges in May 2004, one year and five months after he killed Ted Price.
Garcia pleaded guilty to manslaughter and kidnapping in exchange for her testimony and was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Lecher was investigated, but not charged in the murder, and instead was convicted of child abuse for sharing drugs with her children, an allegation that arose during the investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.
Gunches' case went into suspended animation as court-appointed attorneys and psychologists tried to determine if he was competent to stand trial — and, after he insisted on firing his attorneys, whether he was competent to defend himself in court. Some of the evaluators found him incompetent, others said he was competent.
Judge Timothy Ryan was increasingly frustrated with Gunches' refusal to defend himself at all. He pleaded guilty. He refused to sit for any more psych exams. Then he signed off without contesting the aggravating factors — that the murder was cruel and heinous and that he had been convicted of a prior serious offense, the cop shooting, which had actually taken place after — which are necessary to prove that the murder was among the worst of the worst. And he refused to present any mitigating evidence — family background, mental health issues — anything that could make a jury opt for life instead of death.
Ryan was exasperated.
'You understand that, essentially, you are dictating that the jury impose the death penalty?' he said.
The trial — what remained of it — began in late 2007, in the courtroom of Judge Rosa Mroz. There was little for the jury to consider. Gunches insisted on wearing his jail clothes instead of dressing out. Defendants usually do not appear in court in jail stripes or handcuffs, so as not to give the jury an impression of guilt.
He called only one witness, Jennifer Garcia.
'I just got one question,' he said to her. 'How does it feel to get away with murder?'
Whatever that meant, the question was never answered. And Garcia didn't get away with anything. She went to prison.
On Feb. 14, 2008, the jury sentenced Gunches to death.
All death sentences go directly to the Arizona Supreme Court, and that takes a while.
On June 16, 2010, the state high court threw out Gunches' death sentence because of the prosecutor's allegation that the murder was cruel and heinous. The jury had passed on 'cruel,' but agreed on 'heinous.'
But 'heinous' requires a finding that the murder was senseless — that the killer relished the crime, that there was gratuitous violence, that the victim feared for his life. The Supreme Court saw none of that.
Writing for the majority, then-Chief Justice Scott Bales wrote, 'Even when viewed in the light most favorable to sustaining the verdict, the evidence suggests that Price's final shot (lapsing into case law) 'came in an attempt to kill the victim, not to engage in violence beyond that necessary to kill.''
Though the court held the other alleged aggravator to be valid, they thought the jury might have been unduly influenced by the 'heinousness' error. They threw out the death penalty and sent it back to Superior Court.
Gunches' second trial didn't take place until 2013, and he was just as recalcitrant as before. He again insisted on defending himself, though it was more of a surrender.
Marci Kratter was assigned as his advisory counsel.
'Gunches and I would get into fights every day of his trial,' she said.
The judge repeated the question of whether he was committing suicide by jury. The state had a heyday. When the prosecutor would overstep his bounds and Kratter would object, Gunches would say, 'Judge, tell her to sit down and shut up.'
Kratter described Gunches as 'obstinate, fact resistant and logic resistant.' She thought he was 'not right in the head.' But it pained her that there was no attempt to follow the legal process and that the jury was forced to reach a serious decision without being provided any information.
'How can you decide whether someone should live or die when the person puts on no evidence?' she asked.
Needless to say, Gunches was sentenced to death again, and in 2016, it sailed through the Arizona Supreme Court. The opinion noted that his attorney didn't think he should defend himself, and that the trial court judge worried he was not attempting to avoid the death penalty. The justices knew that no mitigation had been presented and didn't care that the prior bad act had, in fact, occurred afterward. The verdict stuck.
Things did not get better for Gunches' attorneys in the next appeals stage, called post-conviction relief, back in the trial court, where defendants can raise new issues for the first time.
Gunches again convinced the court to let him defend himself, then promptly fired his lawyers and withdrew the appeal. He never filed another, though it would have been within his rights to do so.
As one lawyer said, 'He has been the architect of his own disaster. Even if he's the biggest assh**e in the world, are we okay with this unexplored case resulting in death?'
Gunches wasted no time in trying to get the sentence carried out. According to a handwritten brief he sent to the Arizona Supreme Court, he first wrote to then-Attorney General Mark Brnovich in 2018, shortly after his last appeal, asking to be executed. He asked five more times before Brnovich agreed.
It was an inauspicious time for executions. The courts and the previous governor had paused executions pending litigation after a seriously botched one in 2014. And the drugs needed for further executions were unavailable until 2020, when U.S. Attorney General William Barr's administration decreed that the FDA had no control over execution drugs. A Connecticut company saw an open market and filled it.
The U.S. government executed 13 people in 2020, in the last months of the first Trump administration. Similarly, Brnovich executed three Arizona prisoners in 2022, his last year in office. It was no coincidence that both men were running for office, and the death penalty is Republican doctrine for being tough on crime.
Gunches hoped to piggy back on that killing spree. Almost as an afterthought, Brnovich sought a death warrant for Gunches, but he was out of office by the time of the execution date set by the court. Gov. Katie Hobbs and the newly elected AG, Kris Mayes, let the death warrant expire and declared a new moratorium on executions.
But Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell intervened on behalf of Ted Price's family, and asked the Supreme Court if she could sidestep the AG's jurisdiction and request a new death warrant for Gunches herself.
Gunches persisted. On Dec. 30, 2024, he filed a hand-written motion for his own death warrant, asking the Arizona Supreme Court and the state to stop 'foot dragging.' He asked to be executed on Valentine's Day, though it's uncertain who that romantic irony was supposed to gore, or if it was merely because the day was the anniversary of his first death sentence.
Mitchell persisted, too, again asking the court to let her intervene in the name of justice. This time, the court said it would entertain the idea. And so, faced with litigation that could end by badly blurring lines between jurisdictions, Hobbs and Mayes folded. Mayes requested a death warrant.
On Feb. 11, despite friend-of-the-court briefs hoping to stop the execution, despite the fact that there were no new evaluations conducted on Gunches to ensure he is mentally competent, as is customary when Death Row prisoners volunteer for execution, The Arizona Supreme Court issued the warrant.
Gunches was to be executed on March 19, 2025.
The day came soon enough.
Executions are awkward, surreal rituals, and this one seemed equal parts prison opera and sci-fi fantasy.
The witnesses had been chosen, vetted, warned and wanded: Six reporters, a county attorney, a defense attorney, a victim's rights attorney, an attorney general. There was Price's sister and her escort from the Department of Corrections, and a couple no one could identify. We were seated on padded benches in a 10-by-20-foot room with white stucco walls. At the back of the room, closed venetian blinds hid the state's gas chamber, which hasn't been used since 1999.
At precisely 10 a.m., two TV monitors lit up, and on screen Gunches was led in, wearing what looked like a giant white onesie. He was laid on the gurney.
The cameras now looked on from above. Three sets of arms in black sleeves and black gloves quickly strapped Gunches to the table and then covered him up to his chest with a white sheet, tucking him in as if he were a child preparing for bedtime.
Then the black curtain opened, and there he was Aaron Gunches, looking straight up at the ceiling. It was hard to tell if his eyes were closed or just squinting. He never once looked into the witness room to see who was there.
Now the medical team was fussing about him — four men dressed in white gowns, their identities hidden by white hoodies and white face masks, wiping his arms with cotton, setting catheters into the inside hollows of his elbows and pasting heart monitors on his chest.
The anonymous voice read the death warrant, fast as an auctioneer, and then asked, 'Mr. Gunches, do you have any last words?'
None.
He blinked. He grimaced. He flicked his tongue to wet his lips. He coughed. The announcer said the execution had begun. Gunches huffed and snored. Then he went motionless.
We waited. Five minutes. Ten. Seventeen.
To those of us in the room, it only seemed an eternity.
For Gunches it truly was.
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