On March 30, 1992, Lisa Martinez, sixteen, and her friend Tuesday Roberts, fifteen, set off on foot for the Valley Fair Mall in West Valley City, Utah, and did not arrive. A month earlier Margo Bond, forty-two, a janitor, had vanished on her way to work at Kennedy Junior High School; she was found stabbed to death four months later in Tooele County. Stephanie Blundell, thirteen, was stabbed to death in American Fork Canyon. None of the cases was solved in 1992.
The man responsible had been out of prison less than a year. Roberto V. Arguelles was born on February 14, 1962, in Kearns, Utah, one of two brothers, and grew up working on his stepfather's hog farm in Salt Lake City. At fifteen he was caught trying to steal a car. In June 1978 he was sent to a youth shelter for beating his girlfriend, his brother and his mother, and that October he kidnapped and molested a ten-year-old girl, for which the juvenile court put him under house arrest. While awaiting trial he was charged with raping a seventeen-year-old in February 1979. The State Youth Development Center in Ogden had no treatment program for juvenile sex offenders, the Utah State Hospital would not take him, and on December 19, 1979, he was released with nothing more than periodic sessions with a university sociology student.
On March 3, 1980, he kidnapped a fifteen-year-old Granger High School student, raped her at an old shooting range and threatened to kill her if she told. Three days later he picked up a fourteen-year-old on her way to West Lake Junior High, raped her at knifepoint near his stepfather's farm and, when she fought him, cut her throat. She walked to a house for help and gave the police a description of him and his truck. He pleaded guilty in adult court to two counts of attempted murder, aggravated rape and sexual abuse. The parole board turned him down several times before releasing him on June 25, 1991.
On August 1, 1992, posing as a security guard, he stopped a ten-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother outside Orchard Elementary School, claimed he was looking for stolen goods and molested them under pretense of a search. A week later, on August 8, a highway worker saw him outside Hunter High School trying to lure two ten-year-old girls into his car with a fake police badge and called the police. He was convicted of molesting the siblings and given life with the possibility of parole; the judge, Kenneth Rigtrup, said he hoped it would never be granted.
In prison he bragged to cellmates about abusing and killing girls and a woman in 1992, and about demanding ransom from their families. Investigators interviewed him in July 1995. He confessed first to killing Lisa Martinez and Tuesday Roberts and led them to the girls' graves near his stepfather's hog farm; he said he had stabbed Martinez at least forty-three times with a wood chisel and strangled Roberts with a rope. Months later he admitted killing Margo Bond and Stephanie Blundell. A woman who had lived with him and his mother in their Kearns trailer, Pamela Milstein, said he had shown her jewelry belonging to Blundell after her death. The jewelry and other items that might have tied him to the victims were never found.
When the murder case came to court in May 1997, he announced almost at once that he would plead guilty, waive his appeals and seek execution, and he represented himself at the sentencing hearing, with lawyers standing by as advisers. They suggested blackouts and possibly a multiple personality disorder; he questioned witnesses, among them the detective from his 1980 case, forbade press photographs as distracting, and asked that the judge, not a jury, sentence him to death. On June 21, 1997, Judge David Young did, and Arguelles chose the firing squad.
On death row he came apart. He tried to hang himself with a laundry bag in 2000. In court in 2003 he wore a net to stop him spitting at people, seemed incoherent, and claimed a guard had injured his neck and spine. His firing squad execution, set for mid-2003, was stayed after the Utah Department of Corrections and the lawyer Ed Brass questioned his competency; Brass also took to the U.S. Supreme Court the question of how far a man can represent himself in a capital case. Corrections officials later said he had been eating his own feces and swallowing plastic bottles. He developed an intestinal blockage and, by one account, refused treatment for it.
He died in the prison infirmary on Saturday, November 15, 2003, at forty-one. The warden, Clint Friel, said the death did not appear suspicious or a suicide. "I don't think there will ever be peace," said Tuesday Roberts' brother Shawn, a Salt Lake County sheriff's deputy. "This is just one more event that's occurred in this tragedy."