Shirley Kyle had been on the jury for a year and a half before she finally grasped why she should be interested in Rocky Flats. Unlike Peck, the other grand jurors had started their Rocky Flats investigation with no thoughts at all about the weapons plant. “Ken heard it, we all heard it, so let’s go on.” “Wes, you’ve said your piece,” she pointed out. The foreman wanted to push the matter further, but Shirley Kyle, always the peacemaker, stepped in. “Thank you for your opinion,” he smiled when McKinley had finished. They just don’t like suits and lawyers, he reasoned. If anything, Peck enjoyed the confrontation. He asked Peck to resign from the grand jury. In January, 1991, the cowboy Wes McKinley, by then the grand jury’s foreman, forced a showdown. One witness, fed up with Peck’s high-pressure grilling, had actually stood up and left, saying he wasn’t going to answer such questions. If his confreres couldn’t stand how he talked to them, they liked even less how he often talked to witnesses. In fact, his high-strung, aggressive manner made the other grand jurors’ skin crawl. Thin, almost six feet tall, with owlish glasses and lots of neck, Peck was not the most soothing of characters. Much of it was directed at Ken Peck, the lawyer and one-time Rocky Flats gadfly. Most of all, though, there was animosity.
There was mystery-one juror with a perpetual snarl and an uncertain occupation showed up regularly in strange hats and Salvation Army trench coats, snorting “What’s it to you?” when asked how things were going. There was inanity-two or three jurors with vision and hearing problems never seemed to understand where they were and why they were there. There was boredom-more than once, Ken Peck turned around in his seat to find all the other grand jurors dozing while lead prosecutor Ken Fimberg droned on with a witness. Shirley Kyle’s extended absences from the tiny east Colorado town of Farley forced her to close her hairdressing salon.
There were sacrifices, traveling so regularly to Denver from distant reaches of the state. FOR THE 23 COLORADO CITIZENS SUMMONED TO SERVE AS GRAND jurors in the investigation of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, the two years of weeklong sessions each month between mid-1989 and mid-1991 did not provide an entirely tranquil or enjoyable experience.
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