Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [49]
Government, including law enforcement, dominates Tucson in the way that business, notably real-estate development, controls Phoenix. Dingy municipal buildings, not gleaming office towers, predominate in downtown Tucson. A couple of forlorn palm trees, and a cactus here and there, offer the only reminders of its desert setting. The county attorney’s office long ago outgrew its quarters in the courthouse and now occupies nine floors in a dreary building a few blocks away. There, from a corner office on the tenth floor, Ken Peasley could watch storms roll in over the Santa Catalina Mountains.
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