Vicki Lynne Hoskinson

Case background and investigation

Vicki Lynne Hoskinson was born on February 2, 1976 and lived with her family in Tucson, Arizona. On the afternoon of Monday, September 17, 1984, the eight-year-old set out on her bicycle to mail a birthday card to an aunt. She did not come home. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, her bicycle was found lying in the street a few blocks away.

A coach at a nearby elementary school had noticed a man sitting in a car in an alley that day and thought the driver's behavior was suspicious. He memorized the license plate, wrote it down and gave it to police. The plate was traced to a car belonging to Frank Jarvis Atwood, a 28-year-old from Los Angeles who was on parole in California following a conviction for a sexual offense against a child. Atwood was detained within days in Kerrville, Texas, where his car was being repaired, and was returned to Arizona on a kidnapping charge, to which he pleaded not guilty.

On April 12, 1985, a hiker found a child's skull in the desert northwest of Tucson, roughly 20 miles from where the bicycle had been recovered. Dental records confirmed that the remains were Vicki's. Because of the condition of the remains, the cause of death could not be determined.

The trial was moved to Phoenix because of the publicity the case had received in Tucson, and it began in January 1987. Prosecutors relied largely on physical evidence from the vehicle and the bicycle. Experts testified that pink paint on the bumper of Atwood's car was consistent with the bicycle, that nickel plating from the bumper was found on the bicycle, and that damage under the car corresponded to one of its pedals. On March 26, 1987 the jury found Atwood guilty of first-degree murder, and on May 8, 1987 he was sentenced to death.

Atwood consistently maintained that he was innocent. In appeals that lasted 35 years, he argued that police had tampered with the evidence on his car and pointed out that nothing was found inside the vehicle linking the child to it. State and federal courts rejected these claims; KGUN reported that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied his appeal, a ruling Wikipedia dates to September 2017. In April 2021 the Arizona Attorney General's office notified the state Supreme Court that it would seek an execution warrant, according to KJZZ. The clemency board unanimously declined to recommend clemency in May 2022, ABC15 reported.

Atwood was executed by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence on June 8, 2022. Vicki's mother, Debbie Carlson, became an advocate for crime victims; Wikipedia credits her with helping to establish Arizona's Victims' Bill of Rights in 1990 and the Amber Alert system for southern Arizona.