As well as Myers thought she knew Heikki, she knew nothing about his life before Arizona.

Myers was from Provo, but she didn't know about Heikki's roots in Utah. She knew nothing about his immigrating from Finland or his job as a counselor for young people under psychiatric care in Primary Children's Medical Center.

She knew nothing about his running, his trophies, his win in the grueling Wasatch Front 100-Mile Endurance Race or his third-place finish in a 50-mile race in Lake Tahoe a couple of years earlier when he was 44.

But Myers ended up knowing more about circumstances leading up to Heikki's death than anyone else. She became a prime witness to a life far removed from his friends and family in Utah. Police say she was a suspect in the case at one point.

She saw Heikki come out of the brush with a bloody eye when he said he'd been beat up out back.

She gave him bandages and Neosporin for his injuries the night he said someone came to his back door and punched him in the face. And she watched him fall the next day.

"I know Heikki had some problems, but nobody deserves this lack of justice." — Erja Springman, Heikki Ingstrom's sister

On Christmas Day in 2005, news was delivered to Ingstrom family friends that Heikki had died a few days earlier in a Phoenix hospital after apparently collapsing from a massive brain hemorrhage.

By then, he had been away from Salt Lake City for nearly a year. Friends in the running community found out through e-mails and phone calls.

Some have spent the past six months trying to piece together what happened in that year after Heikki left Salt Lake City.

He married a woman few people knew about. A handful of Heikki's friends met Ana S. Valdez Cordova at his funeral in Tucson. She did not return multiple phone requests asking her to help with this story.

Initially, the couple lived in Tucson. Heikki worked in landscaping. But he'd been in Tucson only a few weeks when he stepped off a curb wrong and slipped a disc in his back. One of his legs was partially paralyzed, and Heikki couldn't walk, much less run.

"That had to be the catalyst for his decline, the inability to run," Makarewicz said. "That was his whole world, and when he couldn't run for so many months, I am convinced that was the beginning of the end."

Initially, he liked Ash Fork. It was beautiful in an austere way, he told friends.

By the time the Ingstroms moved to Ash Fork, Heikki's state of mind, the couple's living conditions and Heikki's safety all went downhill quickly, along with his excessive drinking.