In the days before Fred Alvarez was shot execution-style with two friends on his verandah, the strapping Cabazon tribal leader feared he was a marked man: His motorcycle had been tampered with, his mailbox shot up and his house ransacked.

He visited the local newspaper several times to say that he'd uncovered something big enough to get him killed. He arranged to talk with a lawyer to divulge what he knew, but never made the meeting.

On that day, tribal member Joe Benitez swung by Alvarez's stucco house tucked among tamarisk trees in the wind-swept sand dunes of rural Rancho Mirage, about 130 miles southeast of Los Angeles. There, he found the bloated bodies of Alvarez and his friends Patricia Castro and Ralph Boger, all fatally shot.

Dried puddles of blood stained the sand near mattresses they had dragged outside to escape the sweltering desert heat. The three had been sitting in a semicircle. Police estimated they had been dead two days.

But why was Alvarez killed? That's what police and loved ones wanted to know in the summer of 1981, when the killings happened.

Now, 28 years later, the arrest of a murder suspect has revived the question, which lengthy investigations and a grand jury probe failed to answer.

Some believe the former college football lineman with tattoos, long black hair and a Fu Manchu mustache discovered money-skimming by outsiders helping the tiny Cabazon Band of Mission Indians manage its fledgling casino.

Others believe something hinted at by documents over years: Alvarez had stumbled onto plans for a top-secret weapons deal.

"When a guy comes in off the streets and says, 'Somebody's going to kill me,' you think he's out of his mind. But he was right," said Jim Lycett, an editor at the now-defunct Indio Daily News who met with Alvarez before his death. "Obviously, it's because he knew something that was going to get somebody in a whole lot of trouble."

Authorities are saying little about their suspect, Jimmy Hughes, a 52-year-old former tribal security official-turned-preacher.

Hughes was arrested in September in Miami as he sat on a Honduras-bound plane. He faces three counts of murder and a count of conspiracy for allegedly killing Alvarez to prevent him from exposing illegal reservation activities.

Hughes, who is fighting extradition, declined interview requests.

"More than anything we really wanted it to be over and to have peace," said Linda Alvarez, Alvarez's sister. "All these years, everything I've been saying, maybe now they'll believe me."

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