The county where it happened just dropped every charge against the man accused of being the East Valley attacker — dismissed with prejudice, so those charges can never be refiled in Cochise County.
John Daly III, a retired Border Patrol agent, was accused of the 2001 attack of a Bisbee woman — a cold case that sat for two decades until forensic genealogy cracked it. He was arrested in May 2021, and for four years the case moved through Cochise County’s courts, including a no-release jail ruling in 2023 and a bail reduction in November 2025.
Then County Attorney Lori Zucco’s office dismissed everything. A comprehensive review, she said, found significant evidentiary and procedural problems with how the decades-old case was charged and handled. She stressed the dismissal does not diminish what the victim endured and says nothing about her credibility.
Daly still faces active prosecutions in Maricopa County for attacks on multiple women across Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler between 1999 and 2001.
Here’s the part that doesn’t go away: the 2021 Cochise case was charged under then-County Attorney Brian McIntyre — who is now the chief criminal deputy in Zucco’s office. The same office that dropped the case. And that office already made headlines when its chief civil deputy was arrested in the Target camera case.
It took twenty years to make an arrest. It took four more years for the home-county case to disappear. Was justice delayed here — or justice dropped?
Sources: KVOA Tucson; Herald/Review (Sierra Vista); Mesa Police Department; ABC15 Arizona.
