Peasley would sometimes arrive at his desk before dawn to prepare for trials, which he often scheduled back to back. His appetite for trial work was matched by a compulsive streak outside the courtroom. He arranged the papers on his desk in rigidly precise piles. He chain-smoked. He drank a case of Pepsi a day. (Later, he lost thirty pounds just by switching to diet soda.) "For me, it wasn't a job," Peasley told me."It was who I was and what I did."
Peasley was early for our first meeting, which was at my hotel's restaurant. He doesn't look like someone who could dominate a courtroom. He's on the short side, more shrunken than fit at fifty-seven, with thinning gray hair and a wispy beard, and he dresses in the civil-service uniform of white shirt, striped tie, and oversized aviator glasses. His voice, though, is a low growl that demands attention, and he talks in emphatic declarative sentences, like a man unaccustomed to interruption.The ordeal of his disbarment may have taught him a little humility, but just a little. He's more angry than sorry.
Peasley's father, a sign painter, and his mother, a legal secretary, moved from Michigan to Mississippi to Texas; they settled in Tucson when Ken was in junior high school. He attended the University of Arizona for college and law school, and served as an intern in the public defender's office. Stanton Bloom, who is still a prominent defense lawyer in Tucson, recalled, "I was supervising Ken, and we were raising an insanity defense in a case where my guy blew someone's head off with a shotgun.And we interviewed a witness who said my client was acting 'like the wild man of Borneo.' Later, I needed Ken to testify about that conversation, and he said he didn't remember and didn't have it in his notes. I could tell Ken just didn't like defending people. I told him he ought to get a job as a prosecutor, and he did."
As a deputy county attorney, Peasley thrived, finding satisfactions that had eluded him in his personal life. An early marriage ended in divorce, and Peasley does not see the two children from that union. His second wife, Elizabeth Peasley-Fimbres, was also a prosecutor, but that marriage ended after Peasley had an office romance with a college-student intern. (Peasley-Fimbres is now a juvenile-court judge in Tucson.) A third marriage also failed. Peasley and his fourth wife, a nurse, have been married for twenty years, and have teenage twin boys. "What he did for his job was his first love-more than women, more than his children," Lea Petersen, the former intern, told me. "It was his identity."
Peasley never tried to make friends in the courtroom. "I didn't believe in playing grab-ass or glad-handing during trial," he said. "If I went to trial on somebody, frankly, I was convinced that they had done something really bad and I didn't think that it was funny. So during the trials, no, I didn't kid around a lot.There was nothing to kid around about, from my point of view." Defense lawyers regularly asked judges to make Peasley stop glaring at their clients. "I was something of an asshole," Peasley said.
The burden of the El Grande investigation fell to Peasley and Joe Godoy. Peasley and Godoy made an odd pair. Godoy is genial and outgoing, where Peasley is taciturn and severe. Godoy is thickly built, with a big thatch of black hair and a drooping mustache that curls down to his chin. When he talked about the El Grande murders, the case that led to his departure from the force, he never appeared defensive or unsure. "Joe is just totally likable, and juries loved him," Judge Hantman said. "He was very soft-spoken, very credible, very sympathetic." First thrown together at crime scenes, Peasley and Godoy started working cases as a team, and then became friends.
The courthouse crowd in Tucson flees from downtown at every chance, and at lunchtime judges, cops, and politicians line up for Mexican food at Rigo's, in South Tucson, about fifteen minutes away. Godoy doesn't so much patronize Rigo's as preside there, in both English and Spanish. "I tried to think about El Grande the way a bad guy would," he explained, as we sat in a booth at Rigo's. "You had all these people killed, so maybe it was a stranger or maybe it was someone who knew them. So I decided to find all the people who had worked at the El Grande. It took weeks, but I found everyone except this one guy, this guy named Martin. I knew he was just a kid, and I kept just missing him. He was moving apartments, staying in different places. At first, I thought it was two different people, one named Soto and the other named Fong.Then I realized it was only one guy, Martin Soto-Fong, and he had never been prosecuted, never even photographed or fingerprinted. I was looking for him, but I was always one step behind him. I needed to make him or clear him."
The situation became even more pressing for Godoy and Peasley when a similar crime took place on August 26th: in the course of a robbery, masked gunmen shot the owner of Mariano's Pizza, though he survived. "Mariano's Pizza was something similar to El Grande because they shot someone when they didn't have to," Godoy said. "I learned from these other detectives that they were going to arrest these two guys, Chris McCrimmon and Andre Minnitt, and I wanted to be part of the arrest teams. I said, 'After you're finished with them about the robberies, I want to talk to them about the homicides at the El Grande.' " McCrimmon and Minnitt, both in their early twenties, were arrested, with Godoy's help, on September 2, 1992.
By that point, Godoy and Peasley regarded Soto-Fong, McCrimmon, and Minnitt as suspects in the El Grande murders, although there was little evidence against them. Then they discovered Keith Woods, who became the key witness in the case.
Woods, who was friends with Christopher McCrimmon, had been in prison on a drug charge. Although Woods was only twenty-one years old, he was already a three-time felon.When he was released, on August 21, 1992, McCrimmon picked him up to drive him home.A few days later,Woods was arrested for possessing cocaine, a parole violation that subjected him to a sentence of twenty-five years to life. Faced with this prospect,Woods told the detective who arrested him that he knew something about several recent crimes in Tucson, and detectives eventually steered him to Joe Godoy.
On September 8, 1992, Godoy sat down with Woods at Tucson police headquarters for an interview, which was tape-recorded. According to the transcript, Woods said that after McCrimmon picked him up from prison they met with their mutual friend Minnitt, and the two men revealed that they, along with a third man, committed the El Grande murders. In that interview,Woods said he knew the third person only as "Cha-chi," but he later said that it was Martin Soto-Fong. Woods also said that McCrimmon and Minnitt played a role in the Mariano's Pizza case. Peasley and Godoy decided not to pursue the parole-violation charges against Woods.
The use of criminal informants poses difficulties for prosecutors, because such witnesses can be extremely manipulative. Some informants lie, telling prosecutors what they want to hear, because they think they can get themselves a better deal. "You have to be tremendously careful that you don't give them ideas," says Stephen Trott, a federal appeals-court judge and former prosecutor, who lectures widely on the ethics of using informants."They know that the best way to stay out of jail is not to hire Johnnie Cochran but, rather, to turn on someone else. At a moment's notice, they will make stuff up and give it to you.With an interested witness, you do not lay information on the table and let him snatch it and say he knew it already."
As far as Peasley was concerned,Woods solved two high-profile crimes: the El Grande murders and the Mariano's Pizza shooting. Peasley told me that he understood the risks of dealing with Woods."He had priors. He was a drug user at the time. He had one ofjust about everything a witness could be impeached with," he said. "So he wouldn't have been my first choice. But he was who I had. And I was satisfied from the information he was giving that it was accurate."