Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [51]
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 of just 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.”
Armed with Woods as a witness, Peasley brought charges against McCrimmon, Minnitt, and Soto-Fong. The first El Grande trial, in 1993, was against Soto-Fong, who had worked at the store a few months before the murders. After the tip from Woods, Tucson police investigators determined that Soto-Fong’s prints matched those that had been found on plastic bags and a food stamp found at the scene. In light of this, Peasley said, “probably a third-year law student could have convicted Fong.” The court appointed James Stuehringer, a respected Tucson lawyer and a friend of Peasley’s, to defend Soto-Fong.
During the Soto-Fong trial, Stuehringer criticized the way Godoy had handled the evidence, especially the items with the fingerprints. Peasley defended Godoy with characteristic zeal, and, in the end, won a conviction and a death sentence against Soto-Fong. The trial deepened the bond between Peasley and Godoy. “I thought that Ken did a really good job putting everything back together and saying I’m not a bad cop,” Godoy told me. Godoy was so moved by Peasley’s defense of him that when he married for the third time he asked Peasley to perform the civil ceremony. (Tucson law enforcement is a small world, and Godoy’s wife is also a Pima County prosecutor.)
In 1993, Peasley also won convictions in joint trials against McCrimmon and Minnitt—first in the Mariano’s Pizza case and then in the El Grande murders, with Keith Woods as the key witness. Apart from Woods’s testimony, there wasn’t much evidence against McCrimmon and Minnitt in the El Grande case. Eyewitnesses described a gold Cadillac as the getaway car, and McCrimmon’s fingerprints were found on a car that was parked a few blocks away from the El Grande; but that car was neither gold nor a Cadillac.
It was in these trials, in 1993, that Peasley started bending the truth about the evidence. He knew that a jury would have suspicions about a dubious character like Keith Woods, so he tried to enhance Woods’s credibility, urging jurors to believe Woods because what he’d told Godoy was “something that Woods could get only from those people who were directly involved in causing the deaths” of the three victims. Peasley said that investigators knew nothing about the three defendants until Woods volunteered the information during his interview, on September 8, 1992. McCrimmon and Minnitt were sentenced to thirty-six years in the Mariano’s Pizza case and to death in the El Grande murders. With the convictions of the three men now complete, the case vanished from the front pages of the Tucson papers and the defendants began their wait