In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  Finally, after eleven hours of interrogation, with frequent breaks for coffee from a vending machine, Tony broke and said he alone “killed Chief, but it wasn’t premeditated.

  “I didn’t plan it that way,” Tony added. “It just turned into a big old stink, that’s all. About him and my wife.”

  “And how did you kill the Chief?” Miller asked.

  “With a rock, that was on the coffee table,” Tony said. “Chief was crazy, and weird. He even talked to that rock. He’d stare at the TV for hours looking for lines on the screen, and he’d say, ‘This right here, if I leave it this way, it’ll bring in the Playboy channel.’ ”

  “Well, you’ve gotten a lot off your chest tonight, haven’t you?” Detective Miller said, as if reassuring Tony.

  “The reason why it’s driving me crazy is because I know what it’s gonna do to me, how it’s gonna affect my marriage,” Tony said with resignation. “It’s all over with.”

  “Do you have any feelings for the people that died?” Miller asked him as they were preparing to wrap up the questioning.

  “Well, I got feelings for me now because it’s gonna be me that’s gonna die,” Tony replied, expecting he would get the death penalty. “The gods come for me now.”

  After a pause, Tony added a final thought that closed the interview. “I got a lot of brothers. I can’t believe I’m actually leaving them forever. That’s my punishment from God.”

  * * *

  —

  After Tony confessed, on November 17, 1991, clearing Paula of any role in the murder, they were both flown back to Tucson. Tony was indicted for first-degree murder, a potential death-penalty crime in Arizona, but Paula was indicted only for theft of the home entertainment center, a charge that could at most send her to prison for a few years.

  Locked up in the Pima County jail in Tucson awaiting his murder trial, Tony stewed about the unfairness of his predicament and obsessed about how Paula would soon be free to have sex with other men. Jealousy was a powerful force in his life, perhaps exacerbated by the paranoia that was part of his diagnosed episodes of schizophrenia. On December 15, Tony asked a guard to get in touch with Detective Miller. “My wife and I gave some false statements from the beginning,” Tony told the guard. “I was clearing my wife of any involvement in the murder and confessing to doing the whole dang thing by myself,” Tony said in a tape-recorded conversation. “But she hit this man in the head with a rock, you know, and it knocked him silly. And then she hit him again and it knocked him really silly and then she gave it one real good one. And then I came home and grabbed him around the neck and it killed him.

  “I cannot just let my wife get outta jail and leave me,” Tony said to the guard, “leave me to do the whole sentence by myself, or maybe leave me to the chair. They are blaming the whole thing on me.”

  The guard contacted Miller, who showed up early the next morning to talk to Tony and began by asking whether Tony had informed his then court-appointed attorney, James Cochran, about meeting with the detective. No, Tony replied. He knew his lawyer would advise against talking to the police, but he had something important he needed to say.

  “Back in Reno all I wanted to do was to protect my wife,” Tony said. “But I don’t want to go down and do twenty-five years or get the gas chamber either, and there is a whole lot of people telling me the truth now is better for me than a lie.”

  “What is the truth?” Miller asked.

  “The truth is that Paula was involved with the murder,” Tony blurted out. “She hit him. Hit him in the head. She was hitting him in the head with a rock. She knocked him silly. And then she gave him one real good one.”

  How many times did Paula hit Chief with the rock? Detective Miller asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tony answered. “I saw Chief had a knife, and he was real good with knives, like an Indian, so I grabbed him around the neck, because I was scared of him with that knife. And this is the truth. I know I’m gonna do time. I know that I’ve lost my freedom. But I’m not going to go to the electric chair.”

  “When you stopped was he dead?” the detective asked.

  “He was. I murdered him,” Tony said.

  “This is the third story that you’ve told me,” Miller said.

  No, Tony replied. “The fourth, fifth, sixth, whatever. Chief was a genius, but he was nuts. He was crazy and he wanted my wife. He kept saying, ‘Under Indian law, she’s under my roof and I get to have some of her.’ I kept warning him about that and we got into fights about it, and that’s what made this all happen.”

  “I still don’t understand why you did it. I hope this version might be the truth,” said Miller.

  The following day the detective went to see Paula in the women’s part of the county jail. He explained he had talked with Tony the previous day and that Tony was changing his story to now implicate Paula in Chief’s murder. He advised her again of her legal right not to speak to him and asked if she was still willing to talk. Yes, Paula said.

  “Yeah, I might as well,” Paula said. “I don’t think anything is gonna hurt anything. Chief tried to rape me.”

  He was trying to rape her on the day of the killing, Paula related, but he had tried it before too. It was getting close to evening time, Paula said, with Tony due to come home from work, and Chief began by trying to fondle her. He was “grabbing my breast and my butt,” Paula said. “I told him to leave me alone. And then he said I was a whore and that I deserve what I am going to get and he approached me and tried to rape me. He ripped my shirt open, and I struggled and then I seen the rock and I hit him with it and got him away from me. I had hit him three or four times when Tony came in the door and grabbed Chief around the neck and started choking him.”

  Paula said she shook Tony and asked him to stop, but he didn’t hear her for a minute. When he did let go, Chief fell to the floor. She could see an open knife in Chief’s hand. When she checked his pulse, there was none.

  If Paula had accepted a suggestion by Tony at this point to call the police, that might have been the one thing to save him from a long prison sentence or the death penalty, said David Sherman, the public defender who was ultimately assigned to defend Tony. “Tony had a triable case, that he was acting in self-defense,” Sherman said. In addition, it was never medically clear which of the two of them inflicted the mortal wound, Paula by hitting Chief in the head with the rock or Tony by putting him in a choke hold to pull him off her. But they didn’t call the police.

  * * *

  —

  All these statements and the trail of evidence were a bonanza for the prosecution in the killing of Chief. They also posed some tricky legal and ethical challenges. Tony and Paula had both initially claimed they were innocent. Then they both confessed. Ultimately, they said they did the killing together. Before bringing either of them to trial, the prosecutor would have to decide who really had killed Chief and what was a fair interpretation of the evidence.

  The prosecutor assigned to the case, Kenneth Peasley, a deputy Pima County attorney, was the most feared prosecutor in Tucson, if not in all of Arizona. “He was a cop’s prosecutor,” said Tony Miller. “The cops loved him. He didn’t plea bargain. He hung the bad guys up by their toes. He told us he didn’t care how we investigated a case, just get the results.”

  Peasley had a prodigious memory for the details of a case and did his cross-examinations and closings from memory, without notes, Miller said. Peasley was a slight figure with slicked-back gray hair and a gray beard, and when he was doing a closing argument all the other lawyers in the courthouse would come in to listen. He spoke in a deep, fast growl, like one of the fighter jets taking off from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on the south side of Tucson. He often got right up in the face of a defendant as a way of indicating how deeply he was convinced of the man’s guilt, and would stick his finger close to the defendant’s eye in an inti
midating gesture.

  Peasley had an extraordinary record of success in convicting defendants. He bragged that from 1978, when he began as a prosecutor in Tucson, until the time he tried Tony and Paula, he sent more men to death row in Arizona than any other prosecutor—about one-tenth of all prisoners on death row in the state. Peasley tried 250 felony cases during that time, including 140 homicides.

  In early 1992, Peasley decided to start by trying Paula, but only for the theft of the home entertainment center. On April 2, 1992, she was quickly convicted of the theft and sentenced to five years in state prison. At her sentencing Paula surprised the judge and the prosecutor by announcing that she was more responsible for Chief’s death than her husband was.

  “It’s not fair that my husband is taking full responsibility for the homicide,” Paula told Judge Gilbert Veliz of Pima County Superior Court. “I was involved in it. In fact, I probably killed him, not my husband.”

  Nevertheless, before imposing his sentence, Judge Veliz said he would ignore her murder confession because she was not charged with that crime.

  I asked Peasley how he decided whom to prosecute for Chief’s murder. One of his strongest recollections of the case, Peasley said, was how bizarre Tony had been. Tony first told the police that he alone had killed Chief, but then after being brought back to Tucson, he wrote Peasley letters addressed to “The Avenging Angel.”

  “Tony became consistent that he wanted me to prosecute her,” Peasley said. “It was pretty unusual. He wanted to make sure his wife went to prison, not out there having sex with other men. Jealousy seemed to be a big part of the story.”

  But beyond that, Peasley said, “I didn’t really need to figure out who did it. I was persuaded that Tony did it. He had the long criminal record. And I always wanted to get the really bad guy.” Peasley was not following the established rules of the criminal justice system, a breathtaking leap for a prosecutor.

  Peasley had Tony alone indicted for first-degree murder in the killing of Chief, and the trial began in Tucson in late March 1993, a year and a half after the crime. Tony made it clear that defending him was not going to be easy. The first three attorneys assigned by the Pima County Superior Court to represent him all petitioned Judge Veliz for permission to withdraw. The last of these three lawyers, James Cochran, wrote that since Tony’s arrest in Reno in October 1991, he “has related various versions of the incident to nearly everyone who was willing to listen,” and had also, contrary to Cochran’s advice, “engaged in a letter-writing campaign directed to the police, the prosecutor” and other legal authorities. “An analysis of the statements made by the Defendant to date show that the Defendant has consistently been unable to tell the same story twice,” Cochran wrote. Separately, Richard Bozich, a private investigator assigned by Judge Veliz to help with Tony’s defense, reported that his behavior was so bizarre that it made working to help him impossible. “During an interview, the defendant would look at the wall or ceiling and speak to it as though it was me or another person,” Bozich said. In addition, he reported, Tony “does not appear to grasp the seriousness of the crime for which he is charged,” and that he “would appear calm and collected one moment and then become enraged the next and start yelling.”

  Ultimately, the task of defending Tony fell to David Sherman, a smart, experienced and even-tempered public defender. Sherman said he quickly came to realize Tony had been so damaged by his family upbringing that “his orientation to reality was off, skewed, even delusional, and that he had his own way of seeing the world that he would stick with even when it was transparently absurd and wouldn’t help his case.” Tony’s emotional state even showed up in the handwritten letters he sent to Sherman, Judge Veliz and the prosecutor. The script might start off large and then turn small, even tiny to the point of being miniature and illegible, or go from printing to cursive and then run right off the edge of the page. Tony often continued his letters by writing all over both the outside and the inside of the envelopes in which they were enclosed, so it was difficult to decipher what he meant.

  What comes through in several letters Tony later wrote to me from prison in Arizona is a kind of dangerous insanity mixed with painful memories of his youth. In one letter, Tony said that “Paula got pregnant at age fourteen and gave birth at age fifteen. Her lover, Mario, was an illegal immigrant from South America who was crazy about having sex with under-age girls. Jack King (Paula’s stepdad), asked me to kill Mario.”

  Tony then jumped, with no transition, to recalling how his father used to drive him by the Oregon State Correctional Institution when he was a teenager. “He would point right at it and say, ‘You’ll soon be there, son.’ My dad never saw me doing great in the future, he saw me going to prison.

  “It was easy for him to predict since his hands shaped my future and made me a pirate,” Tony wrote. “He didn’t need a crystal ball to make that prediction. His own failures made him aware that I would be the byproduct of his own handiwork. Like a lazy farmer knows his crops will only be third grade produce. The die was cast even before I was born. Dad knew his offspring won’t be senators and boy-scout leaders and police officers.”

  Reading Tony’s letters and spending hours talking with him before his murder trial, Sherman observed that Tony had a real “dichotomy in his personality. He could be articulate and insightful about his case one minute, then crazy the next.” One day when they were working on his defense, Tony told Sherman, “Don’t worry. I won’t spend much time in prison even if we lose.”

  “I asked him what he was talking about,” Sherman related. “He said, ‘My brothers will break me out.’ ”

  “I said, ‘What, do you think they will fly in to rescue you in a helicopter?’ ”

  “And Tony said, ‘I like that idea. But no. They will kidnap a bunch of schoolkids and threaten to execute one every hour till I am released.’ ”

  Sherman was stunned but assumed Tony was joking.

  Sherman now also realized he could not present a conventional defense. So in his opening statement to the jury, after saying that Tony was “legally justified” in killing Chief because Chief was in the process of trying to rape Paula, Sherman startled the jury. “Now, let me tell you what this case is not about. This case is not about whether Tony Bogle is a liar, because if that’s what the case was about, I could make it real easy right now and tell you, he’s a liar.

  “Let me tell you what else this case is not about,” Sherman continued. “This case is not about what kind of character Tony Bogle has, because I’ll make that one easy right now too. He is a very strange character. And you’re going to hear evidence about his strangeness. He has a history of mental problems. He’s had a history of living on the margins of society, of being in trouble with the law, of having a bad upbringing. He is not somebody who has been involved in the mainstream of society. Everyone in this case—the defendant, the man who is dead, Tony’s wife, Paula, some of the other witnesses—all of them are not exactly working on all cylinders.

  “Now, let me tell you what this case is about,” Sherman said to the jury. “Your decision in this case will come down to one question: What happened in that room that night? It’s true that Joe Brennan died in that room. And it was a horrible thing. But why did he die? How did he die? Where is the evidence of what happened in that room, the physical evidence, the witnesses, the statements?”

  Framing the argument this way, Sherman thought, was the one chance he had of getting Tony off, of using all the conflicting, contradictory admissions by Paula and Tony in his favor and taking advantage of what Sherman knew would be inconclusive physical evidence by the medical examiner about who actually delivered the fatal blow to Chief. Sherman had Paula testify that Chief was trying to rape her and that she grabbed a rock and hit him multiple times in the head before Tony came home and put Chief in a choke hold.

  In fact, the medical examiner, Dr. Ann Hartsough, t
estified that “the cause of death was blunt force trauma with asphyxia.” Chief had been hit four or five times in the head, not hard enough to cause fractures to his skull, but enough to cause bleeding from his scalp,” Dr. Hartsough said. He had also suffered from something that reduced the flow of oxygen to his brain, which could have been “caused by an arm being placed around his neck.” The blows to the head were not “in and of themselves fatal,” the doctor said. Nor was there serious damage to Chief’s neck, she testified. In her opinion, it was not just the blows to the head or just the choking of Chief’s neck that killed him, but the combination.

  Until this point in the trial, Sherman thought he had a chance of getting Tony acquitted on the first-degree murder charge. To achieve that, Sherman believed he had to keep Tony from taking the stand and testifying. Tony was simply too unpredictable, too crazy and too prone to telling outrageously false stories to survive a cross-examination by Kenneth Peasley. “I begged him not to testify; I said we had a chance to get a few jurors and hang the case up,” Sherman recalled. “But Tony said, ‘No. I am going to testify. I will persuade them.’ He believed he could con them. He was just like his father.”

  Peasley made no attempt at small talk when his turn came to cross-examine Tony, no effort to soften him up. He went right to the murder. “When you went in the apartment, sir, and grabbed Chief around the throat, did you apply as much pressure as you possibly could?” the prosecutor asked. “Did you squeeze him as hard as you possibly could, sir?”

  “I—I—I grabbed him,” Tony mumbled in response, thrown off balance.

  “My question was, Did you squeeze him around the neck as hard as you could, sir?” Peasley added.

  “Yes, I grabbed the Chief around the neck as hard as I could and—”

  “And you kept squeezing him around the neck, didn’t you?” Peasley asked.