Between February and March 1992, four people disappeared in Salt Lake County, Utah: Margo Bond, a 42-year-old school janitor; Stephanie Blundell, 13; and two friends, Lisa Martinez, 16, and Tuesday Roberts. For four years none of the cases was solved. In April 1996 a prison inmate named Roberto V. Arguelles, then serving a long sentence for abusing two young children, confessed to all four killings and led investigators to his victims' remains. He pleaded guilty to four counts of capital murder in May 1997, told the judge he wanted to die, and was sentenced to death by firing squad in June 1997. The Utah Supreme Court upheld the sentence. Arguelles never faced the firing squad: his execution was stayed in 2003 over his mental competency, and he died in the prison infirmary in November 2003, at 41.
The Deseret News, in a 1997 report, called him Utah's most prolific known serial killer. His case also raised hard questions about how the state's juvenile and parole systems had handled a young man whom two judges had warned should be kept away from the public.
Little is known of Arguelles's childhood. His record began early. According to the Utah Supreme Court, he was convicted of car and gas theft in October 1977, when he was fifteen.
In October 1978 he committed an offense against a ten-year-old girl, for which he was convicted in March 1979, with other charges. A further case, concerning a sixteen-year-old girl in February 1979, was dismissed after that conviction; the trial court that later sentenced him to death considered it as an uncharged crime, and the Utah Supreme Court held that it had been proven to the required standard.
Juvenile Judge Reginald Garff tried to keep him in secure custody. As the Deseret News reported in 1996, Garff first sought to place him in an adult sex-offender program at the state mental hospital, but hospital officials refused because Arguelles was not yet eighteen. The judge then committed him, at seventeen, to the state industrial school in Ogden, and in August 1979 wrote to the school's director asking that he be kept away from the public. Garff later told the paper he had rarely written such letters during his years on the juvenile bench. "I never did get an answer, they just released him," he said. Arguelles was held there only about four months. Garff, by 1996 a senior judge on the Utah Court of Appeals, described him as one of the young offenders he considered untreatable.
Less than a year after his release from the industrial school, the Deseret News reported, Arguelles was arrested for attacks on two teenage girls in Salt Lake County. In May 1980, according to the Utah Supreme Court, he was convicted of the attempted capital homicide of one fifteen-year-old girl, with other charges involving another fifteen-year-old girl. The Deseret News reported that he went to prison at eighteen on two consecutive sentences of five years to life. While he was in custody he escaped once, for about forty-five minutes, according to the Utah Supreme Court.
The prosecutor at the time, John T. Nielsen, wrote to Governor Scott Matheson calling the industrial school's decision to release him "a disgrace and a total breach of responsibility." Nielsen told the Deseret News years later that the state had lacked facilities to hold violent young offenders, and that the governor had called a meeting after his letter, after which the youth corrections system got a new director and was reorganized.
At his 1980 sentencing, the Deseret News later reported, then 3rd District Judge Christine Durham recommended that he be kept in prison as long as possible to protect society.
The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole held a hearing on Arguelles's case in 1985 and set a parole date for May 1988. Board records showed that date was rescinded because of trouble he had in prison. In June 1991, after eleven years inside, he was released on intensively supervised parole with electronic monitoring. According to board records reported by the Deseret News, the members who voted for the 1991 release were Gary Webster, Victoria Palacios and Paul Boyden.
When the paper looked into the decision in 1995, it found no written record in his board file of the judge's recommendation and no written reason for granting parole. None of the people it reached could remember the decision. Boyden, by then a deputy Salt Lake County district attorney, said the board had taken judges' recommendations "very seriously" but did not remember this case. The board's administrative coordinator said current members gave such recommendations "weighty consideration."
A woman who had known Arguelles since 1978 and who let him move into her home in west Salt Lake County after his release later told the Deseret News that his talk about hurting people became frightening in the fall of 1991. During one car ride, she said, she feared he would kill her; she pretended to be ill and telephoned his probation officer from a restaurant, and he was taken away that evening. She asked the paper not to identify her because she was afraid of him.
Margo Bond was 42, a West Valley woman who worked as a school janitor. The Deseret News reported that she disappeared from her job on February 21, 1992. An Associated Press report in 2003 said he had reportedly been at the school looking for girls. Her body was found in Tooele County; the Deseret News reported in 1996 that this was four months after she vanished.
Stephanie Blundell was thirteen, a student at Brockbank Junior High in Magna, less than a month short of her fourteenth birthday. She was reported missing on March 19, 1992, after she failed to arrive at school; her friends told sheriff's deputies they had not seen her all day, and she was not on the bus home. At her memorial service in 1996, friends described a bright girl who loved to sing and dance, played church basketball, doted on her cat and treated her parents with respect. Her best friend called her a peacemaker who "would never do anything that would violate her standards." A family friend said that if there was ever a child who was a good girl, "it was Stephanie."
Lisa Martinez, 16, and her friend Tuesday Roberts disappeared together on March 30, 1992. An Associated Press report carried by KSL gave their full names as Lisa Vickey Martinez and Tuesday Malisa Roberts. Tuesday's age is given as fourteen in the Utah Supreme Court's opinion and in some Associated Press reports, and as fifteen in most Deseret News reports. The Associated Press reported that in 1992 the girls had been dismissed as runaways.
The Utah Supreme Court's opinion, drawing on the confession Arguelles gave in 1996 and on the record of his penalty hearing, sets out the four killings in order. On February 21, 1992, he took Margo Bond from the school where she worked and drove her to Tooele County, where he sexually assaulted and strangled her. On March 19 he offered Stephanie Blundell a ride, and strangled her. On March 30 he offered Lisa Martinez and Tuesday Roberts a ride. He stabbed Lisa to death and strangled Tuesday. He told investigators that he killed her so there would be no witnesses.
News reports at the time described all four killings as abductions, and the charges to which he later pleaded guilty were capital murder counts, with other charges.
According to the Deseret News, on August 10, 1992, about fourteen months after his release, he was arrested in connection with offenses against two young children, a brother and a sister, in West Valley City. The paper reported in 1996 that he had posed as a security officer. The Utah Supreme Court's account says he returned to prison in August 1992 after offenses against two young children; the Deseret News reported that his parole was revoked in December 1992.
He was convicted of two first-degree felony counts involving the two children, with other charges, and sentenced by 3rd District Judge Kenneth Rigtrup to consecutive minimum-mandatory terms of nine years to life. The judge added a handwritten note recommending that he never be paroled. Arguelles appealed. His lawyer argued that his trial attorney had wrongly advised him not to testify, that the judge should have excused a prospective juror who knew the children and their mother, and that testimony about a detective's interviews had been wrongly excluded. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Michael Zimmerman and reported in July 1996, the Utah Supreme Court rejected every argument and affirmed the convictions.
By the time of his 1992 conviction, the disappearances of the three girls were still unexplained. According to the Associated Press, Margo Bond's remains had been found in Tooele County while Arguelles was serving his sentence for the 1992 case.
The case broke through people who knew him. The Deseret News reported in 1996 that a former girlfriend told detectives in August 1995 that he had boasted to her about the killings and had shown her jewelry that belonged to Margo Bond. Police dug up a yard that month but did not find the jewelry. At first, the paper reported, Arguelles claimed he had only watched others bury Lisa Martinez and Tuesday Roberts. In 1996, officials told the Deseret News he had been a suspect for nearly two years before he confessed.
The remains of the two friends were recovered in west Salt Lake. The Deseret News reported in April 1996 that Arguelles had led investigators to them on July 26, 1995; a KSL report also said the bodies were discovered in 1995, while a later Associated Press report placed the recovery in 1996, after his confession. The Utah Supreme Court's opinion says only that he showed investigators where the bodies of Lisa Martinez, Tuesday Roberts and Stephanie Blundell were.
Arguelles first talked about the killings with Jenny Glover, a corrections investigator, beginning with the deaths of Lisa Martinez and Tuesday Roberts. On Friday, April 26, 1996, he confessed to all four killings in an all-day session with Glover and his then-attorney, Bob Steele. The Deseret News reported that in return he asked to be moved to the maximum-security block that housed death-sentenced inmates and to be given a color television, which other inmates had to earn by good behavior and pay for each month.
That night, police from several agencies were searching near American Fork. Officials withheld the name of the girl they were looking for until her family had been told. Stephanie Blundell's remains were recovered there after Arguelles led investigators to the site, and the Deseret News reported the recovery in early May 1996. The Deseret News reported that pieces of jewelry believed to have belonged to Margo Bond were later recovered from a place in Murray where he said he had hidden them.
Glover later testified that Arguelles told her the only way he could atone for the murders was through his execution. He told a Deseret News reporter in May 1996, "I felt like (confessing) was the right thing to do," and added, "I know right and wrong." The former girlfriend who had called his probation officer in 1991 doubted his remorse. "He definitely confessed because there was something in it for him," she told the paper.
Stephanie Blundell's family held a memorial service in Magna in May 1996, four years after she disappeared, at the Lake Ridge 11th Ward, and she was buried in a West Valley City cemetery. A family friend said the family's faith in life after death had sustained them, and another said he had wondered for four years what had happened to her and was glad the family finally knew. Their bishop told the family that Stephanie was happy and waiting for them.
Lisa Martinez's grandmother told the Deseret News she had learned of the confession from a friend and then from television news. "It hurts, but it's better to know who did it," she said. She wanted to know how her granddaughter died, she said, but did not want Lisa's mother to hear the details, because Lisa's mother was taking the news very hard.
Three days after the confession, prosecutors charged Arguelles with four counts of capital murder, a charge that carried the death penalty in Utah. He was arraigned on May 7, 1996. From the start he said he wanted to plead guilty and be executed.
The case stalled over who would represent him. He was first assigned lawyers from the Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association, Karen Stam and Vernice Ah Ching. Prosecutors moved to disqualify them because an investigator working for the defense had, as a sheriff's detective, investigated Arguelles's 1980 crimes and could be a significant witness against him. The defense called the motion a ruse. Arguelles said he would plead guilty as charged if prosecutors dropped the motion.
The hearing on the motion before Judge L.A. Dever, reported by the Deseret News on August 1, 1996, was interrupted when Lisa Martinez's mother rushed through the swinging doors that separated the gallery from the attorneys and went for Arguelles's head, calling him an animal. Prison officers and two sheriff's deputies pulled her away. Arguelles, shackled and handcuffed, ducked his head and lost some hair but was not hurt. As she was led out he told the officers, "Go easy on her," and said later that he was "the one that hurt her family." The prosecutor, Kent Morgan, said he would not seek assault charges against her because he had "a lot of compassion for her." A courthouse security officer said the episode showed how much worse things could have been had she been armed.
On September 25, 1996, the court disqualified the Legal Defenders Association. In January 1997, three new lawyers were appointed: Edward K. Brass and two others identified in the Supreme Court opinion as Anderson and Donaldson.
In January 1997 the Deseret News reported that in the spring of 1996, in the days after his confession, Arguelles had drawn up a plan to escape while leading investigators to his victims' graves. He had asked a friend outside prison to hide a gun along the route to one of the sites; he would tell detectives there was another body there, and grab the weapon when they arrived. A Department of Corrections spokesman, Jack Ford, said investigators had learned of the plan, changed the route, added SWAT officers and kept Arguelles shackled, knowing the helper would not appear and no gun would be there. Ford would not say how they found out.
Arguelles complained to the paper that the state had delayed his case. "Because of the state, this thing has gone nowhere. I would have pled guilty a long time ago," he said. At the same time he filed motions of his own from prison, one seeking to remove the prosecutors, Kent Morgan and Richard Hamp, for an alleged conflict of interest, and another seeking to learn who had tipped off investigators about the escape plan. Brass suggested the motions reflected his client's frustration.
Arguelles had filed several motions asking to act as his own lawyer. On April 23, 1997, after questioning him, a magistrate found that he had knowingly and voluntarily waived his right to counsel, and his three appointed lawyers became standby counsel. At his first hearing before 3rd District Judge David S. Young, on May 12, 1997, he confirmed that he wanted to represent himself. "I have these attorneys now, and I am easier just to continue with these attorneys now as stand-by counsel," he told the court, as quoted in the Supreme Court opinion.
That day he pleaded guilty to all four counts of capital murder. Judge Young went through the charges and his rights with him line by line before accepting the pleas, and the Supreme Court later held that he had entered them knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently. He also gave up his right to have a twelve-member jury decide the sentence, leaving the choice to the judge. Brass told reporters that Arguelles was competent to represent himself and was sincere in wanting to ease the families' loss. "This is not a game for him," he said. Salt Lake County District Attorney Neal Gunnarson said death was "the appropriate penalty," but compared the plea to the playoffs: the sentence still had to be decided with care. Judge Young set the penalty hearing for June 17; Arguelles said he was ready to go ahead "now."
Tuesday Roberts's father told the Deseret News he had mixed feelings. He hoped Arguelles would never be released, he said, and was glad that he wanted the death penalty.
Arguelles also removed one of the possible outcomes. The Supreme Court opinion records that he opted to take life without the possibility of parole off the table as a sentencing option. The Salt Lake ACLU's staff attorney, Jensie Anderson, said after the sentence that because he chose not to contest a death sentence, the judge had been left without that option, which she said was available only for crimes committed before April 1992.
The penalty hearing lasted three days. Prosecutors presented his earlier crimes, the four killings and testimony from the victims' families about their loss. Arguelles represented himself with his standby lawyers' help. He had told the court beforehand that he would offer "very little, if any" evidence in mitigation. He called a single witness, Jenny Glover, and put in five medical and psychological documents and a handwritten list of mitigating factors. Glover testified that he had told her his execution was the only way he could atone.
He also asked the judge to stop press photographers from taking his picture in court, saying it was "very distracting and irritating." Judge Young refused but said, "We'll see how it goes," and later agreed that the photography was distracting, though only "modestly." The Supreme Court later held that any error over the cameras was harmless, while urging caution in future capital cases.
On Friday, June 20, 1997, Judge Young sentenced Arguelles to death. His ten-page memorandum decision found eleven aggravating circumstances and four mitigating ones, proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and concluded that "the aggravating circumstances outweigh, if not eclipse, the mitigating." Reviewing Arguelles's record from the car and gas thefts at fifteen onward, the judge spoke of the brutality of the crimes and of a "reign of horror and terror."
Utah law then let a condemned prisoner choose between lethal injection and the firing squad. "I would elect to be executed by firing squad. And I'd rather not have a hood," Arguelles told the judge. Brass said the request suggested that he wanted to see it coming. The judge set an execution date of August 22, 1997, and stayed it at once for the automatic appeal to the Utah Supreme Court. After the hearing Judge Young met with the victims' families, and Arguelles shook the judge's hand and thanked him.
Tuesday Roberts's brother said the family was "elated" and credited the prosecutors. Lisa Martinez's grandmother attended because Lisa's mother could not bear to; she said she had come to be strong for her family. Stephanie Blundell's sister said the sentence would help the family heal, though she wished she had learned more about what had happened to her sister; the Deseret News reported that Arguelles had refused to give further details of the crimes, saying he wanted to spare the families more pain. Deputy District Attorney Richard Hamp said prosecutors had done their job for the victims.
Not everyone agreed with the process. The ACLU's Jensie Anderson called it "a one-sided battle." Brass said he was troubled by the lack of a full adversarial process, and wondered whether earlier attention to Arguelles might have changed the outcome.
The appeal was mandatory under Utah law, whatever the prisoner wanted. Arguelles said repeatedly that he wished to give up his appeal. The Supreme Court named Brass as an assistant to the court to brief and argue the issues.
On August 12, 1998, Arguelles tried to hang himself with a laundry bag in his cell at the Utah State Prison. Associated Press reports said the attempt left him briefly in a coma. The Utah Supreme Court put the appeal on hold and ordered an evaluation of his competency. He was removed from the prison's death row program on February 7, 2000, for disciplinary reasons that included the suicide attempt; by April 2000 he was allowed out of his cell alone for an hour and fifteen minutes a day, five days a week.
At a hearing in April 2000 he told Judge Young he was tired of waiting and was having problems in prison, including people telling him that he did not want the death penalty. His court-appointed lawyer, Jim Bradshaw, said he was very frustrated and wanted the case to move quickly. The judge apologized for the delay but said the court had no power over the prison's decision to remove him from the death row program.
Before a competency hearing on May 30, 2000, three evaluators, Drs. Gardner, Kovnick and Bigler, examined him. Two diagnosed antisocial personality disorder; Dr. Bigler found that he had suffered an acute brain injury in the suicide attempt. All three found him able to consult with counsel, and the district court declared him competent. According to the opinion, Arguelles said he could not remember events but wished to die for them. He also claimed that inmates and guards were tampering with his shampoo and toothpaste, and he said he would not cooperate with any further mental examinations. In March 2001, Karen Stam, his former lawyer, wrote to the Utah Supreme Court that he "continues to deteriorate mentally."
On October 25, 2002, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the death sentence. Chief Justice Christine Durham wrote the opinion; Associate Chief Justice Matthew Durrant did not take part, and Court of Appeals Judge Pamela Greenwood sat in his place. The court issued an amended opinion on January 14, 2003, with the same result: "We therefore affirm Arguelles's sentence."
The court considered every issue Brass raised and rejected each one. It found no substantial doubt about Arguelles's competency when he pleaded guilty, and held that the post-sentence evaluations were adequate. It held that he had been competent to waive counsel and had done so voluntarily, noting that a history of mental illness and a wish to die do not by themselves make a defendant incompetent, and that a defendant may decline to present mitigating evidence. It upheld the disqualification of the Legal Defenders Association, finding that the trial court erred in refusing Arguelles's waiver of the conflict without weighing the interests involved, but that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. It found that the judge had properly treated future dangerousness and the brutality of the crimes as aggravating factors, that counting heinousness and brutality separately was duplicative but harmless, and that the victim-impact evidence had been minimal and was not counted as an aggravator. It found no right to a speedy appeal, noting that the delays had come from the court assistant's requests for more time and from the suicide attempt. And it again upheld Utah's aggravated murder statute and death penalty scheme.
Brass called it "a sad day." Assistant Attorney General Thomas Brunker said, "We've won," and predicted that an execution date could be set within about three months. He said the state would not oppose another method if Arguelles chose one, but was unsure whether the prison could carry out a firing squad without a hood.
The case returned to 3rd District Court to set a date. Associated Press reports in 2003 said Arguelles had been asking the state to let him die for five years, and that his execution by firing squad was set for June 27. At a hearing on May 1, 2003, to sign the death warrant, he screamed obscenities at the judge, yelled and cursed, and at times seemed to be choking and gasping for air; a KSL report said a net was placed over his face because he often spat, and that he was taken out of the courtroom several times. He had fired Brass and the other court-appointed lawyers and repeatedly asked for Karen Stam, the lawyer first assigned to him in 1996. Prosecutors said indigent defendants had no right to choose their lawyers and called his demands an attempt to "derail the system." Deputy District Attorney Kent Morgan told KSL that Arguelles deserved to die for the four killings.
Brass, unsure where his role began and ended, kept filing motions because he believed Arguelles was not competent to proceed alone. He asked the courts to halt the execution, order another competency evaluation and appoint a new lawyer, citing reports that Arguelles yelled and screamed constantly and collected and ate his own feces. Stam said none of the psychologists she had consulted believed such behavior was a sign of faked mental illness. Corrections officials said he could behave rationally and acted out when he knew he was being watched. When Stam and a law clerk visited him on May 15, he told them that prison staff were using mind-reading equipment and making fake court documents to trick him. "He wants lawyers, and he wants to pursue some remedy," Brass said.
The Utah Department of Corrections raised its own questions about his mental state, and a state judge ordered a full competency evaluation, which stayed the execution. Brass was appointed to represent him in that evaluation. Brass had also petitioned the United States Supreme Court to review the Utah court's decisions, arguing that the unusual procedures in the case raised questions about how capital cases are tried and appealed when a defendant represents himself. The Supreme Court agreed to consider his petition to pursue an appeal on Arguelles's behalf, even without Arguelles's permission. Brunker said that did not mean the Court would hear the case. It had not ruled when Arguelles died.
On Saturday, November 15, 2003, guards at the Utah State Prison noticed at about 11:30 a.m. that Arguelles looked pale and unwell. At 2:30 p.m. he was moved to the prison infirmary and placed under a physician's care. He stopped breathing shortly after 5 p.m., attempts to revive him failed, and he was pronounced dead at 5:27 p.m. He was 41. Warden Clint Friel said the death did not appear suspicious or to be a suicide. In the weeks before, Arguelles had been taken to the prison infirmary and to University Hospital, and the Deseret News reported, citing unnamed sources, that he had been hospitalized for intestinal problems and had refused treatment for a blockage. Affidavits filed in 3rd District Court in June 2003 said that for the previous eighteen months he had been swallowing court documents, plastic and his own feces.
The Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office investigated, and the state medical examiner performed an autopsy. In January 2004 the medical examiner ruled that he had died of natural causes, with inflammation of the peritoneum, caused by the many items he had swallowed, as a contributing factor. A sheriff's sergeant, Keith Stephens, said the items had caused a perforation and that "the natural poisoning of his system took over from there."
His death ended the case. Brass said he did not know whether the issues before the United States Supreme Court survived his client's death. Brunker said they did not, and planned to ask the district judge to rescind the competency evaluation and close the case. His death left ten people on Utah's death row.
Brass offered condolences to Arguelles's mother and to the victims' families. "I hope everyone can be at peace now," he said. Tuesday Roberts's brother, a Salt Lake County sheriff's deputy, did not think that was possible. "I don't think there will ever be peace," he said, calling the death one more event in the tragedy. Her father said he did not know how he felt, and that an execution would not have satisfied him either, because it would not bring his daughter back. A brother said Arguelles had got off too easy but that the family could now move on. Stephanie Blundell's sister said her family was having a hard time taking in the news, "but it's a relief that it's over."
Other killings. In 1996 officials told the Deseret News that Arguelles had hinted he might be responsible for up to two other homicides. The former girlfriend who spoke to the paper said she believed he had killed more people than the four he confessed to, though he never admitted it to her. No other killing was charged or proven.
Tuesday Roberts's age. The Utah Supreme Court and some Associated Press reports give her age as fourteen; most Deseret News reports give fifteen.
The finding of the remains. Reports differ on when Lisa Martinez's and Tuesday Roberts's remains were recovered. A Deseret News report in April 1996 gave the date as July 26, 1995, and said Arguelles led investigators there; a KSL report also put the discovery in 1995; a later Associated Press report placed it in 1996, after his confession. Reports also differ on when Margo Bond's remains were found in Tooele County: four months after her disappearance in one Deseret News report, and late in 1992 in an Associated Press report.
The date of the 1992 arrest. A 1995 Deseret News report gives August 10, 1992, and the Utah Supreme Court says he returned to prison that August; a 1996 Deseret News report describes the child-abuse offenses as taking place in December 1992, the month in which other reports say his parole was revoked and he was convicted.
The suicide attempt. The Utah Supreme Court and the Deseret News in 2000 date it to August 1998. Some reports in 2003 placed it in 2000, the year of the competency hearing.
The planned execution date. Associated Press and KSL reports from 2003 give June 27; Deseret News reports after his death refer to an execution scheduled in May or in June.
October 1977: Convicted of car and gas theft, at fifteen.
October 1978: Offense against a ten-year-old girl; convicted March 1979, with other charges.
1979: Committed to the state industrial school in Ogden; Juvenile Judge Reginald Garff writes in August asking that he be kept from the public; he is released after about four months.
May 1980: Convicted of attempted capital homicide, with other charges, after attacks on two fifteen-year-old girls.
1985: Parole board sets a May 1988 parole date, later rescinded.
June 25, 1991: Paroled after eleven years.
February 21, 1992: Margo Bond, 42, disappears from her work at a junior high school.
March 19, 1992: Stephanie Blundell, 13, of Magna, disappears on a school day.
March 30, 1992: Lisa Martinez, 16, and Tuesday Roberts disappear.
August 10, 1992: Arrested in West Valley City on charges involving two young children.
December 1992: Parole revoked; returned to prison after conviction on two counts involving two young children, with other charges (consecutive terms of nine years to life).
August 1995: A former girlfriend tells detectives he boasted of the killings.
April 26, 1996: Confesses to all four killings; charged three days later with four counts of capital murder.
July 1996: Utah Supreme Court affirms the 1992 convictions.
September 25, 1996: Legal Defenders Association disqualified.
April 23, 1997: Waives counsel.
May 12, 1997: Pleads guilty to four counts of capital murder.
June 20, 1997: Sentenced to death; chooses the firing squad.
August 12, 1998: Suicide attempt.
May 30, 2000: Competency hearing; found competent.
October 25, 2002: Utah Supreme Court affirms the death sentence; amended opinion January 14, 2003.
May 1, 2003: Death warrant hearing; execution later set for June and stayed for a competency evaluation.
November 15, 2003: Dies in the Utah State Prison infirmary, aged 41.
January 2004: Medical examiner rules the death natural.