After more than three decades as a prosecutor in Southeast Missouri, Morley Swingle is settling into a new life as a private defense lawyer in Colorado.

The Cape Girardeau-born Swingle pulled up stakes last fall and headed to Denver to set up his practice and be with his new wife, Lane Thomasson.

"I met her when I was prosecuting Joe Buerkle, who had embezzled her inheritance," the former Cape Girardeau County prosecutor said in a telephone interview Wednesday. " ... She jokes that she lost her inheritance, but she found her husband."

Buerkle, a Cape Girardeau lawyer, pleaded guilty in August 2010 to taking money from a trust fund he was overseeing for Thomasson.

Swingle's relationship with Thomasson, which began while he was still married to his previous wife, raised eyebrows when it came to light through a video of Thomasson reciting a love poem to him.

Swingle recused himself from the case against Buerkle in November 2010, but questions arose about his timing.

In January 2011, Swingle told the Southeast Missourian, "When you develop a conflict, you're required to get a special prosecutor appointed, and I did that, instantly."

During his divorce from Candace Swingle, however, the former prosecutor testified he began exchanging personal emails with Thomasson three weeks before Buerkle pleaded guilty. Morley Swingle's ex-wife presented a stack of printed emails in court and said some of them detailed sexual acts.

Critics have suggested Swingle should have requested a special prosecutor as soon as the tone of the emails changed from professional to personal. Swingle said in a letter in the summer of 2011 to the Southeast Missourian he met Thomasson for the first time on the day the suspect pleaded guilty on Aug. 30, 2010, and he did no work on the case after that.

Emails exchanged before Aug. 14, 2010, didn't indicate a physical relationship, Swingle's ex-wife testified, but they detailed plans to be intimate when Thomasson came to the United States for a plea hearing.

Thomasson lived in London at the time.

Swingle has maintained he did nothing inappropriate from a professional standpoint.

Swingle served as Cape Girardeau County prosecuting attorney from 1987 until November 2012, when he resigned to become a federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office, a position he held for about a year.

He married Thomasson in August and moved to Denver to be with her three months later.

"I fell in love with a woman who wanted to live in Colorado, and -- boom! -- here I am," Swingle said.

Swingle said he went to visit Thomasson, who is now a second-year law student, when a trial was canceled in August. She met him at the airport and suggested they get married that weekend.

"Here in Colorado, you don't need a judge, and you don't need a minister," Swingle said. "You can get the marriage license from the recorder of deeds and say your vows to yourselves."

The pair got the license, hiked up Berthoud Pass -- elevation 14,000 feet, he said -- and exchanged vows over the Continental Divide.

"Our entire wedding cost $40 for the license fee and one tank of gas," Swingle said.

epriddy@semissourian.com

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Pertinent address:

Denver, Colo.