The Story of Serial Killer Robert Fry
By Robert Scott (www.kensingtonbooks.com)
Pages 240-241
The first problems came for Fry’s defense team, Ed Bustamante and Eric Hannum, who were suddenly removed from the case. The state’s defenders’ office stepped in and began to negotiate a contract with Santa Fe lawyer Stephen Aarons. Steve Aarons had a long and colorful career as an attorney. He had attended George Washington University, Saint Louis University and Oxford University. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps of the Army. He had prosecuted fifty court martial cases between 1980 and 1983 and was special defense counsel in a Nürnberg, Germany, murder trial. He spoke Spanish and German.
Aarons opened his own law office in Santa Fe in 1992, and he had been practicing as a defense lawyer since then, handling over thirty murder cases. One very interesting case that he was involved in just before the Fry/Tsosie trial was that of Judge Charles Maestas, of Espanola, New Mexico. Four women accused Maestas of propositioning them. They said that Maestas had promised to reduce their citations if they had sex with him. Suzette Salazar actually went ahead and had sex with Maestas – but she audio taped their sexual encounter.
At Maestas trial, Aarons acknowledged that the man did have sex with Salazar, but he said the sex was consensual. Aarons told Court TV, “It’s not illegal to have sex. Evidence will be presented that at least three of the four women did not tell the truth about their allegations.”
Things took an even more bizarre turn when the lead investigator for the state, Karen Yontz, was shot dead while allegedly trying to rob a bank. Aarons contended that Yontz set up the whole scheme to try and discredit Judge Maestas in the first place. Just before the Robert Fry trial began, Judge Maestas was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. It was a victory of sorts for Aarons because the jury had acquitted on over forty counts as to three of the four women and the sentence was light compared to the hundred years Maestas might have received.
