But within three months, Addam Swapp and John Timothy Singer blew up an LDS stake center in Kamas and fatally shot corrections officer Fred House, bringing on both a federal bombing case and a state murder case.

"That changed the course of my work in the A.G.'s office," Horton said with a wry smile. "It pretty much set the tone that I wasn't the white-collar crime guy."

From then on, when Horton wasn't working a murder case, he was advising attorneys on murder cases or developing legislation related to murder cases, eventually becoming the criminal justice division chief.

Horton is especially pleased with a bill he worked on that in 1992 allowed "life without parole" as an option alongside "life with parole" and the death penalty.

In the former "life" or "death" system, Horton watched too many murder cases fall short of a death penalty verdict because one lone juror couldn't impose the ultimate sanction. That meant that a convicted murderer who logically should never be released from prison might be paroled short of a life sentence.

Life without parole provides a harsh, final penalty that protects the community and avoids the long, painful appeal process for victims' families in death penalty cases, Horton said.

After spending hours each day on such tragic cases, Horton said he used music and even poetry to separate himself from work.

"I don't claim these images after hours," was the subject of one poem.

"Some of it is kind of hard to take," he continued. "But there's also the sense when you're working on a case and exposed to something rough, you're doing it for a purpose."

For Horton, it always comes back to that purpose: promoting the public good. But minus that purpose, he's not interested.

Which is why he doesn't watch those intense, gory movies.

"When you see enough in real life, it doesn't become your entertainment," he said. But now, retired at 59, he's ready for some real entertainment: Europe for a month with his wife and two daughters.

"We're going to use up our whole life savings," he said, chuckling. "We'll come back flat broke."

Then, he jokes he'll need to find another job to keep him busy and pay the bills. Maybe he'll write a book.

Or there's always music. He plays the banjo, mandolin, guitar, keyboard, piano and kazoo.

A musical "Jack of all trades," as he calls himself, he played in a Tijuana brass-type band in high school, then a ragtime group that got free pizza for weekend shows. Currently, he plays guitar for the group JABOOM — or Just A Bunch of Old Men. They rock out to pretty much anything.

If he's feeling more mellow, there's always the family's Celtic band, Aberdeen, with his two daughters.

But his sonorous skills are not what others remember most about the curly haired prosecutor.