Original subtitles

I got a call at two or three in the morning.

I was told

that Lance Conway Wood was at the sheriff's department.

Sergeant Frank Slack is the one that called me,

and he said... He's telling me this tale

about somebody that was murdered.

"I think this guy is on meth or crazy,

but could you come down and help me with this?"

2:40 in the morning.

We're at the Iron County Jail facility

asking some questions of Lance Wood.

Lance Wood informs John Grath and Sergeant Slack

that he has some information

about a possible homicide.

He told a horrific tale.

So it was me, Mike...

You're driving down the road.

All I know is that...

he was driving and Mike slit his throat.

- While he was driving? - While he's driving,

and then he cut his shoulders, too.

All the dude says is "ouch," you know?

And what happened after he cut him?

Cut him, dude pulled over...

Mike had sex with him on top of the...

- With the guy? - With the guy.

I've stayed in the car while this is happening.

He got out,

I know he picked up, like, the tire iron,

start smashing his head.

And I remember thinking, This is too violent,

too sad, too outrageous to be true.

Mike tell you why he killed this Church?

'Cause he's a faggot.

That's what he said?

I was about ready to wrap it up,

and then I remember looking down on his shoe

and I saw one speck of blood.

And that changed everything for me.

So I came out of the closet in 2011

and moved to Utah.

At a certain point, I started researching gay hate crimes.

You ever heard of Matthew Shepard?

I remember the case.

Hit national news. It was huge.

And his name is remembered.

People honor him. There are memorials

and funds and scholarships, and...

- Gordon has been forgotten. - Just kinda drifted away.

I mean, not forgotten by his family, but...

No. No, I know what you mean.

Will you tell us your name, please?

My name is Nancy Church.

And you live in Delta, Utah?

Yes, I do.

Who is your spouse?

David Church.

Can you tell us if you have children,

and how many children?

Yes, I do.

I have three sons.

A son Craig, who is in Cedar City,

a son Kevin, who's in Philadelphia,

and a son, Gordon, who's dead.

The case of Gordon Church

kind of took over my life at a certain point.

It became kind of a personal mission

to see Gordon remembered and honored.

At the age of 28, he was living in Cedar City, Utah,

attending Southern Utah State College

as a theater tech major.

He was a very small guy, I mean, very skinny.

Very nice guy.

He had the perfect '80s hair!

And just...

just a normal 28 year-old.

He loved his family very much,

and his personality reflected that.

With respect to your son Gordon,

where did he live in November of 1988?

November of 1988, he was living in my mother's house.

He had decided that he wanted to go back to school.

And so he rented a room from my mother,

which was more economical for him,

and it helped her out,

because she's retired and living on limited money.

And then he would shovel her snow

and take care of her, and so it was a relief to us

to have someone with my mother.

We would meet pretty much every day

after one of our classes for coffee.

We would just talk.

We'd go cruise Main Street,

the whole five minutes,

and then we'd go park in the park,

and just sit and chat.

He needed an outlet that he...

someone that he could talk to, and so did I.

He tended to seek out people that wouldn't reject him

for what he was.

We used to talk about guys.

We both liked the same kind of guy,

only difference is, Gordon wanted one shorter.

I wanted a six foot two guy,

and he wanted a five foot eight guy.

When I met Gordon, he was a lot more different.

Uh, he...

experimented, is we will call it.

He had many boyfriends, suitors, lovers.

We actually would go to 7-Eleven.

Gordon always got his Mountain Dew,

or in the evenings, the Diet Coke.

And he would get his cigarettes.

And that was,

I guess, you could say, both of our vices.

And when I got to college,

that was when I had my first intimate experience ever.

And, Gordon was a big part of that.

And I was like, wow, this is a rush.

I don't want to leave the house any more.

Always relaxing, always very comfortable.

He was a nice guy to be around.

Makes me miss him.

Is what you told us...

freely and voluntarily and comes from your own volition?

Yes.

- Nobody's forced you... - No.

I want to know what protection I could receive,

can receive.

Are you frightened because you're afraid of Mike?

Yeah and what he might do, you know?

If he's in jail, you know, for just a...

or for at least 72 hours, I can try...

we can probably find a new apartment.

Or we can do better than that.

We're gonna find the body.

- Yes. - Okay.

An apartment for me, though.

Yeah. All right.

Well, we got a long ways to go. First, we gotta...

I'm concerned Mr. Archuleta's on the street,

and in this type of murder...

The murder took place one day ago.

I'm concerned that it's 2:30 in the morning,

you say he's gonna "cruise."

- Yeah. - It tells me

he's gonna leave the area,

and I want to...

make arrangements to go pick him up.

So we'll conclude the interview at this time.

- Thank you. - Alright.

So I remember I called our sheriff, Ira Schoppmann.

And he said, let's put this little feller in the car

and let's go see if we can find us a body.

We got to a turnoff, mile marker 138,

and he said, "I think it's over there."

And they realized that

this was something very real.

They had a body on their hands.

And there was a dangerous man still free.

So they rushed back to Cedar City

to get Michael Archuleta.

He was with a girlfriend.

They were sleeping in an apartment in a bed.

I remember we kicked the door in.

And I distinctly remember,

because it was one of the highlights of the day,

is a Cedar City police officer

shoving a. 357 Magnum in his mouth,

and, you know, begging him to move.

Archuleta was very compliant.

Denied everything.

And I think before we even asked him any questions,

he was already pointing the finger

at Lance Wood.

Once Archuleta was in custody,

police went back with Lance Wood

to begin processing the crime scene.

The area is Dog Valley area,

located approximately milepost 138.

The scene of a homicide, case number...

As I walked forward, taking photographs

from the freeway,

we could see that it was...

it was a red substance on the road.

Hair,

what appeared to be skin.

We knew we had something serious here.

It kind of led us up a trail.

You could see where something had been drug.

We got into the area

where we could see what was underneath there,

and it was a human body.

And I, seeing the body laying there, I thought,

why, I know this guy. I know this guy.

Took a picture of the driver's license.

And then had

Captain Dekker look at it.

And he identified our victim as Gordon Church.

I remember looking at that

and seeing the address is Delta, Utah,

and I said, "Oh, crap, I do know this kid."

I hollered up to my sheriff,

and I said, "Sheriff, this is one of our residents."

And I remember we called his neighbor,

the Churchs' neighbor,

was one of our deputies,

to go make the notification.

Now that was difficult for him,

because he lived three, four houses away.

When I walked up to the door,

Nancy opened the door, she knew

right off something was wrong. They had been expecting

a call from Gordon.

I think he was coming home for Thanksgiving.

At ten hundred hours,

reporting officer met with Mr. and Mrs. David Church,

the parents of the victim, in Delta.

The Churches had several questions

as to the things that had taken place

in reference to the homicide.

I mean, it just tore them apart. I mean..

And it was tough,

toughest thing I think I've ever done.

This is KUTV News.

Lack of funding is forcing Utah's first AIDS support group

to shut down in January.

We certainly don't need homosexuals

teaching us about AIDS,

when we can thank the homosexual community

for this scourge in the first place.

But with the fear of the AIDS crisis

that have just came out, you almost fear like,

you know, I need to couple up

with somebody who doesn't have it.

I don't even know how you get it,

how you give it to somebody,

or how it's brought out into the relationship,

but I need to find somebody right away that doesn't have it.

Yeah, being gay in the 1980s

was completely different than it is now.

I mean, there were more closeted gays.

It just wasn't as accepted.

He tried to hide it.

He never wanted it to be seen.

And I was actually part of his secret life.

As far as being in Cedar,

it's such a tight-knit little Mormon community

that you just didn't show it.

He was...

I think, in his eyes, disappointing his family.

The Church family was...

They were just good home-grown people.

They kind of knew that he was not...

that he was not the good little Mormon boy

that they wanted him to be.

What had been... I would describe it as a...

pretty happy and robust family,

the entire Church family.

They were always up, so to speak, you know?

This incident just

virtually destroyed that whole family.

It ruined Dave for a while.

He quit going to church.

Really got quiet, never visited with anybody.

It tore him up pretty bad.

It was just a...

life-changing event for a lot of people.

I did not attend Gordon's funeral in Delta, no.

We knew that the family didn't want us there.

Because that would have meant to them

accepting the fact that that Gordon was gay.

Well, what I was told in my youth

and growing up years

is out in Dog Valley here

that it was heavily infested with prairie dogs.

This is the typical temperature and so on

of the exact morning that all of this occurred,

and the days leading up to it.

It was damn cold weather.

At this point, we got Wood here, we had heard his story.

He had indicated where this had all happened,

the homicide had happened, and where the body was.

And I worked the camera,

and on videotape,

he agreed to do what

I called a crime scene re-enactment.

We'd be continuation as if we're in a vehicle.

- Okay. - Still in the vehicle,

Archuleta's still driving.

Right.

And I thought, man, this doesn't happen

very often, you get somebody was there

can be a witness.

But as we walked around that crime scene down there...

- You're still in the vehicle? - We're still in the vehicle.

My gut started to churn and I just thought,

this isn't right.

This guy is leading us down this

merry little path...

...that he wants us to know, and so I've started

correcting some of my questions in a different way.

He opened the trunk, and...

he got jerked out of the trunk.

Church dude says, "You're gonna kill me, aren't you?"

Archuleta goes, "No, I'm not gonna kill you."

Lance seemed to be

really excited about telling everybody.

Started lifting him

and he started wrapping the chains around him,

I think the chains, he hooked the chains up.

And then he hooked the jumper cables to the guy's balls.

I mean, we just let him rattle on.

I mean, it's just amazing.

You know, we had decided

that's the take on it,

that's what we were gonna do.

I just didn't trust him at the time.

I could just tell there was

more to it than what he was saying,

and I think everybody was the same way.

Archuleta told me that he'd have to kill him.

On and on and on that day,

from the time of the meeting in Fillmore

on the ride out here,

battin' his gums,

and then out here, he was just all show and tell.

Which arm and which leg did he use?

The guy was laying like this,

so it had to be this arm and this leg.

Was he laying on his back or his stomach?

Oh, I think his...

back, I think, or stomach. Probably stomach.

Lance was enjoying everything he told us about it.

I could see that in his face.

He's, you know, he's laughing

and smiling about things, and...

My God, I wouldn't be

laughing and smiling about beating somebody's head in.

Once again, he told you why he killed Mr. Church?

Yeah, because he's a queer.

With Gordon and I,

I wouldn't say that we were flirtatious,

it was more like

we were just two friends that just loved to giggle

and loved to laugh.

Thing is, as you know, I knew

Jesse was gay, and I knew Gordon was gay,

so the fact that they were together made me happy, too,

because, you know, at least they had each other.

I think we were watching...

I know we were watching the production of Hair.

He was on this side of me,

sitting on the floor, on the couch.

And our hands kind of,

you know, I could feel that my knee was touching his knee,

and that my hand was getting

really close to touching his hand,

and it felt really comfortable,

it felt really good, and he gave me a sense of...

I don't know, this is exciting.

This is something I didn't think I was gonna have

with a really good friend of mine.

There were times when I would be around him,

and he would flame up,

so to speak, and I could see the flames.

And he had a...

like a Streamline, a Streamline trailer.

And so we went back there,

and stayed up till all hours of the night

just sharing stories,

looking out one of the windows and seeing the stars.

The stars was just insanely big and beautiful at the time.

I remember, as a young adult,

that was the first time I ever noticed that

the stars are so thick down in southern Utah.

It's the sky, it's just so full.

And I remember the phrase in my head

that I carried, from now until then.

I just remember

when you're holding each other so tight,

and it just feels so good and so connected,

that when you look down and you can't see

whose arm belongs to who,

and whose leg belongs to who,

and in the distance you look out the window

and you just see all those stars,

and I mean, I was in love.

Jesse left Cedar City at a certain point,

and he and Gordon were dating long distance for a while.

It put a lot of strain on their relationship.

When we talked on the telephone,

it was one of the last conversations we had.

He would say things are gonna be okay,

and I cried.

And I just thought

I don't understand what's going on here right now.

A few months later, I remember,

getting a phone call from one of my good friends, Loy.

Loy had told me that

that Gordon was dead.

I just couldn't understand.

I just couldn't understand how somebody could do that.

How somebody could do that to another human being, you know?

It was just not right.

Especially to Gordon.

I wish that when he had passed away,

that I could tell his parents,

his family, you know,

that this is

not necessarily the way he wanted to come out to you,

but he's a good person.

And he had a good soul and a good heart.

Gordon wouldn't have that kind of coming out story.

He wouldn't have anybody to hold him.

This was how the people were holding him.

They're killing him!

And there's nobody in that room...

Who's gonna be able to talk to him

and tell him, you know,

"I still love you," or,

"It's gonna be okay."

Some time later, we decided

that we've got to arrest this guy,

although we didn't have anything to hold him on the murder.

When I got there, I was advised

to take custody of Lance Wood.

They wanted to do

what they call a Code R kit, or a rape kit.

He wanted to appear to be very helpful.

He wanted to appear to be the good guy.

That his involvement was minor and out here,

and this other guy was the animal.

At this point, you have to understand

that we have two criminal defendants,

two people who just got out of prison,

pointing the finger at each other.

We got Lance Conway Wood with blood on his shoe,

and the person that took us to the crime scene,

telling us that he had nothing to do with it.

And then we have Michael Anthony Archuleta,

saying, "What does this have to do with me?

I did nothing, I'm here with my girlfriend,

trying to sleep."

So we went back to Cedar City,

Thanksgiving night,

interviewed Archuleta till wee hours in the morning.

I guess, why don't you just start

and just tell us how did you meet this guy.

On Main Street.

He advised us at that time,

you know, that they were both...

he and Wood were both willing participants in this.

Lance walked up to him.

He grabbed his neck and tried to break it.

He grabbed it from, like this behind and twisted it.

They all lied.

Wood lied, Archuleta lied,

and, if you saw that scene,

I think anybody that was even involved in that would lie,

because you do not want to be associated with what happened.

Yet Lance is saying that you killed the man.

You're saying that Lance killed him.

How are we gonna know who's telling the truth?

I guess it's my word against his.

Yeah, that's kind of what it is, right now,

I guess.

The stories just weren't making any sense.

They weren't from the beginning.

I've heard enough stories to know when blinds are coming.

And I believed blinds were coming.

Things have a way of working out.

The truth is gonna come out sooner or later.

Yeah.

And it does.

Whether you want to tell me the truth or not,

but, you know...

I'm gonna find out what the hell the truth is.

It was a crime that needed to be solved,

and it's too bad,

but in a way we owed that to Lance Conway Wood.

But we still have him being involved in the crime

and trying to get himself out

by coming to tell us the things that he told us.

And saying, look at me,

I'm free and clean, I didn't do this.

I'm just trying to help you guys out,

'cause I'm a good guy.

He's not a good guy.

If what you tried to tell us thus far

were the truth, then why were you lying to us?

About lots of things.

Not lots of things.

There is just a couple of things left out.

You need to level with us, young man,

if that's what you want to do.

I think that's the right and the proper thing to do.

And what's gonna happen to me then, though?

What do you mean, what's gonna happen to you then?

What's gonna happen to me then, you know?

I don't understand the question

"What's gonna happen to you then?"

Uh...

The parts I told you what happened

up at the murder scene was true.

Some parts I left out.

You weren't sitting in the car this whole time.

Don't give me that nonsense.

I was sitting in the car.

No, you weren't.

Yes, I was.

I don't believe that.

You know, if you want to jerk us around,

play games, I'm not gonna do that with you.

Lance, I'm telling you that right now.

You know, you come to us

like you're kind of the victim here,

that Archuleta did the whole darn thing,

and you're scared of him,

and you didn't know what to do, and all this nonsense.

And yet, you come with a bunch of half-truths,

you leave out a whole bunch of stuff.

It doesn't cut it, man, you know, it doesn't wash.

You haven't told us the truth.

And there isn't anybody in the world

who's gonna believe that.

And that doesn't look good for you, I don't think.

You're sitting there and trying to...

I don't know what the word is,

to manipulate the system.

You wanna get immunity, and stuff like that.

It's not gonna work.

I can tell you that, right up front.

I don't see any remorse in you,

right here, right now.

And I don't understand that.

Remorse? What do you mean?

You know what remorse means?

Yeah, I know remorse, but what? Remorse for what?

For killing a man's life!

And you were

very much involved in that thing.

You didn't do a damn thing to save him, did you?

You were involved...

I tell you lot of things, and...

I did what I had to do.

You can believe that or not, but I can prove that.

Why, that's what you're gonna have to do,

- young man. - I know.

The bottom line is,

both of those guys killed this guy.

And nobody's more innocent than the other.

Both of them were involved. Both of them were...

devils.

I think both of them lied to the bitter end,

and I think if you

interviewed them today,

they'd lie to you today.

Look.

And I don't make any excuses what I did.

But some way, and the point,

is that I know that I didn't murder Gordon Church.

We were in shock.

Utter, I mean, shock, couldn't even believe it,

He had just been here at the house,

and I thought, Well, Mike is not capable

of anything that bad.

But then I thought, you know, something, when he's drugging

and drinking,

I guess he's capable of just about anything.

So when the police officers came here,

I came over and sat with Mom and Dad,

and they went downstairs into his room

and found some things that

had belonged to Gordon

that Mike had had and left downstairs in our basement.

And so it just it just went from there,

you know, the nightmare began.

Get that camera out of my face.

Did Mike ever admit to you what happened,

- or did he give you the details? - No.

He's talked to Peggy

more than to anybody else, I will say.

He's told me, he says,

I'll take responsibility for what I did, Mom.

He says, and I know what you've heard.

Here's what I want you to know,

that I didn't do those horrible things,

but I did do some.

It's just shocking.

You just can't even believe that

my little brother, this little boy that I, you know,

that I watched grow up,

that I knew was a troubled young man,

that he was capable of doing such things.

Archuleta's parents

were good people.

He was in a very

loving family setting with his adopted parents.

Oh, he was an adorable little boy.

First time I saw him, he was hell on wheels.

We went to the adoption agency,

and they had him there to meet us.

And there was the cutest little boy

with a head full of curls.

And he was sitting in the middle of the floor,

and he'd emptied a whole box of crayons,

and he was just throwing them in the air,

just like raining down on him and laughing.

And we're like, whoa, but that was Michael.

I mean, he was all over the place.

And I looked at him, and we were gonna take him forever,

and I knew that little boy's gonna be mine.

He arrived with a paper bag

With some white t-shirts

and maybe a pair of jeans.

Those were his worldly belongings.

He'd come to the door and he says, "Hi, I'm Michael."

And I says, "And I'm Stella."

"Are you my mom?" I says, "Yeah, I'll be your mom."

When we met Mike,

he had been in foster care for a number of years,

and he had been placed in numerous foster homes.

They told us seven different foster homes

in a four-year period.

From what we gathered,

he'd been born to a teenage mother.

His mother had,

at 16, had actively been engaged

in drugs, alcohol and prostitution.

And he had scars on his bottom,

like he'd sat on or been sat on a hot grate.

He had little criss-crosses, and he had

cigarette burn marks on his legs.

One time, I had to go to his school,

'cause they called me and told me

Mike has barricaded himself in the bathroom

with a ball bat, and he won't let nobody in.

So I went over there,

and I knocked on the door,

I says, "Mike, are you in there?"

And he says, "Yes, I'm not coming out."

I says, "Well, let me in." He says, "Okay."

So I went in, and I talked to him

and I got him out and I took him home.

They says, Well,

we can't have him in class, he's too disruptive.

He was a troublemaker.

He just seemed to always be in, you know, in trouble.

Not that he was maliciously trying to get in trouble,

but he just always found it.

Went out for Halloween,

he says, "Those hippies in that apartment down there

put razor blades in my apple."

And I says,

"What happened?" I mean,

"Did they check them out?"

they're not supposed to give out apples, anyway."

"No," he says, "It had razor blades."

Well, my mother called me in the other room

and she says, "Well, Jerry and I watched him,

and he put the razor blades in that apple himself.

He's trying to get somebody else in trouble."

He was always getting expelled or asked to leave,

or he couldn't go back.

And so, he had to go to school somewhere,

and so he started going into facilities

in order to be able to go to school.

It seems like he turned 13 at the state hospital.

And when he came back from there,

he was different, he was more quiet,

more subdued, more...

He wasn't so out in the open with everything he did.

He was kind of like more secretive.

We didn't learn it at the time, we found out since.

There was, a psych tech, they call him,

that had befriended him,

and used to take him home on weekends

to help him do yard work.

And we found out then that

that he had been sexually abusing Michael.

And when he came out, he was acting up more than ever.

He was sneaking cigarettes and beer

and sneaking out the window and little things like that.

He even went looking for the person years later,

you know, going to the house

where he remembered going to help

work in the yard, looking for him to...

get even, retaliate, I don't know.

But he had a lot of anger

and a lot of bitterness about that.

Lance Wood grew up in Bountiful, Utah,

in a very loving LDS family.

He was the youngest of four kids,

and had a pretty happy childhood.

I found out that I was adopted,

I believe, when I was 12 years old.

I can't say that was the beginning of my problems,

but it did escalate from there,

in all sense of the word.

I should have went to college, I should have, you know...

Given all the things that I went through,

and yet I chose a criminal life,

and just not the murder,

but my extensive criminal activity

prior to that.

And there was really no sense of it.

I mean, I was stealing things that

I didn't want or need,

you know, so maybe it was oppression.

When I was being oppressive

Tell me when you first met Archuleta.

In, I think...

Cedar City Correctional Facility.

Now, you've now been paroled.

And how is it you both ended up back down here in Cedar City?

Because of Paula. Paula Jones.

Okay. It's a girlfriend.

And you ended up here because of...

Brenda.

Brenda.

And Paula, yeah.

Paula and Brenda are living together.

Okay, so prison inmates

meet local girls,

and come back to live there. Okay.

And he was a nice-looking guy.

Not something that you would expect to see behind bars.

Well, she worked as a DJ at the radio station.

I called them up and donated some tapes

and we kind of got hooked up from there.

Well, of course it was behind glass,

but he would call,

and so we would talk for hours.

A lot of it was, you know,

about how he could change his life

once he got paroled out.

We were supposed to get married.

Things worked a little different once he got out.

It's fortunate, probably, that we didn't get married,

and, you know, and all this, but...

It was difficult for her.

Lance was lazy, you know?

The things that we had talked about...

It wasn't the same, and there was just

a very strange feeling.

Relationships that I had,

had not been meaningful relationships,

and the feeling of love is there,

but it's always the next one, you know.

After that one, I wanted to move on

to the next one and the next one.

It was no difference with Brenda.

And so I had an apartment set up for him,

and the original plan was just,

you know, Paula and me and...

Lance, to live there.

And so Mike and Paula started a relationship.

I think he thought he was gonna go down there

and be with her and they were gonna get married

and live happily ever after.

And then we found out that Mike was on his way

up to Cedar City.

Me and Brenda, you know, we're scared.

We informed my parole officer beforehand,

and they said they knew that something was gonna happen.

And I warned them,

and they didn't take precautions.

Did he ever threaten you

during any of these contacts?

Not really,

but you could tell that he

had some kind of problem with me.

How could you tell?

He just had this attitude towards me.

When, or did you and him ever leave alone?

Did you and him ever leave alone?

7-Eleven, sometimes.

Can you tell the court and the jury

when the last time was that you recall seeing Gordon?

November the 19th, 1988.

We had gone down to Cedar City,

to see our boys.

Gordon didn't make too much money at K-Mart,

and I was always concerned

whether he had enough money or not.

I asked him to...

you know, how things were going financially.

I tried to do that in private and those kind of things,

because he hated to take money from me.

I asked him how he was doing,

and he said, "Fine, pretty good."

And that's what he always used to say, "pretty good."

And I always knew that meant,

"not really well."

So I just gave him a 20 dollar bill.

The last time I spoke to Gordon

I was sitting in my car.

And I looked up,

and I saw Gordon with his backpack on,

and I had a feeling

it was the last time I was gonna see him.

Gordon and I were supposed to get together

to go to dinner, it was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

He had called and said that he was going to run

to the 7-Eleven to grab cigarettes

and then he was going to be over and

we waited, I think, about two hours.

According to Lance, this is where they met Gordon.

And Gordon agreed to give them a ride around.

You'd never met this...

I never met this guy before.

What did he tell you, did he live there in Cedar?

Yeah, he told me he lived there in Cedar.

Lived with his grandma,

explained about his family on the way up.

Him and Mike communicated the most

during that period of time.

My concentration was the women,

you know, driving up and down in the cars.

You're trying to get them pulled over.

And that's what I believe

all of us were trying to do at that moment.

Uh...

I'm not sure when

we found out that Gordon was a homosexual,

or that...

these guys may have been homosexual,

these guys being Archuleta and Wood.

My biggest thing is,

is reflecting back now, was that he knew Gordon.

You know, he knew whether...

He just didn't meet him that night.

I mean, it wasn't like,

"Hey, can we go cruising with you?"

or, "Hey, take us cruising."

It was like, "Hey, get in the car."

Like he already had talked to him.

He'd developed some kind of rapport with Gordon.

They went up to Canyon Cedar City for what?

They went up there for one reason.

They were gonna have sex with Gordon.

And they ended up going to a place they call Pussy Hollow.

Did the subject of sex come up?

Yeah, that's when he told us he was a homosexual.

Out there by the river?

- Yeah. - Up there.

And I think it just took off from there,

that, you know,

we're gonna go work this gay guy over.

My first thought was,

there was a time we used to go to Salt Lake and...

go to the graveyard and roam.

Steal their jackets, you know,

and, you know,

gay individuals who were out there we would roam,

we would chase them.

That was my thought we were gonna do.

Was there any argument or anything?

Was there anybody mad at anybody?

Not at that point.

You know, everything was okay.

I believe, after a while,

nothing happened, so I told them, let's go.

And that's when Mike pulled out a knife

and put it to Gordon's throat.

I reached out and grabbed his elbow.

That's when he kind of shot me

a look, a cold look.

And Gordon took off at that time.

He'd broke and run

and they tackled him and he broke his arm.

What did you do while he took off running

after this stuff?

I was just sitting there, standing there.

Freaking out,

And when they came back,

that's when Lance cut his throat,

he cut him, and I said, "Oh my God."

I didn't think he'd do it, you know.

It wasn't until after he caught him

and brought him back up to the car,

that he cut him again.

And so that's where you get the X mark.

He was calling out that he has pain in his shoulders.

His leg hurt.

Lance kept telling him,

"You say anything,

we know you got family,"

that he would kill his family, too.

He, uh...

bent Gordon over the...

the...

the hood of the car.

And the dude said, "I want you to use a condom."

Who's the dude? The victim?

Yeah, and he gave Archuleta a condom.

He pulled out the rubber.

Handed it to me. He said,

Gordon said, "Yeah, it's your game.

Do it to me."

He was asking for it, I couldn't believe it.

Did he?

'Cause the guy had his throat cut,

his arm may be broke,

and banged up

and he's undoubtedly worried,

scared to death that you're gonna kill him, right?

That don't make sense, that he's asking you to

have sex with him at that point, does it?

No, it don't.

Did you have sex with this guy?

No, I didn't.

Did Lance?

I didn't see him, or anything.

Mike then turned to me and asked me if I wanted any.

I shook my head, negative.

There's only one part that I'm lying about.

And what is it?

It wasn't forcible or anything.

He wanted it.

This is straight up, okay?

I did enter him,

and I backed right out.

I could...

I don't even know why I did that.

I'd never done it with anybody else before,

not even a woman.

I don't get off on getting down on guys.

When Gordon got put in the trunk of that car,

what did he think was gonna happen to him next?

Exactly what I think we all knew was gonna happen next.

He knew he was... gonna die.

They drove from Cedar Canyon

to mile marker 138,

so that's got to be 70, 80 miles,

It's got to be over an hour in the trunk of a car.

That hour or so,

as they drove north,

is the hardest part of the story for me.

Knowing that he was in that trunk,

having been raped, with broken bones,

bleeding and gagged and in chains.

Was he praying, was he weeping,

was he calling out for his mother?

Well, he didn't like elevators.

He would use the stairs before he would use an elevator.

He didn't like to be

closed in a room without a window in it.

He didn't like to have anything held over his head.

Just, he didn't like to be where he felt he couldn't get out.

Were you talking to him at all?

Yes.

Yelled back there, and asked him if he was okay.

Said, "Yeah, I'm alright."

All I know is Archuleta was yelling back there,

"Don't break the lights,

don't mess with the lights."

Stuff like that.

Church was just saying, "Okay, okay."

And how Lance told it,

saying we're gonna go up to Bountiful,

where he is from.

They were gonna drive Gordon's car off

this cliff.

Lance kept saying, "Well,

if we just leave him in the trunk

someone can pick him up,"

so we went to Dead Man's Point

to let the car go off the edge.

They'll never find it there.

What'd you say to that?

Said, "You're crazy, man."

We're both in a lot of trouble right now as it is.

I told him, just...

"Leave the car, let the dude go, and let's get out of here."

Lance kept saying, "He's gonna rat on us,

he's gonna rat on us."

He said they got driving along,

he says they got up north,

to the Dog Valley off-ramp.

Archuleta pulled off right here.

Did he say anything at this point?

He just pulled off?

Yeah.

They went underneath the freeway

and went to the west, and north a little ways,

and stopped in the middle of the roadway.

You know, Gordon just terrified,

scared to death, he'd already been through

a beating or two, and a rape.

And...

all in all, they were gonna kill him here

or whatever, and...

they were trying to assure him everything was gonna be okay.

I think, one of the first things,

when they got him out of the trunk of the car,

was an attempt by Archuleta

to break his neck.

I heard the guy fall.

And Archuleta's talking to him,

I guess he was crying, saying, "Please," you know.

He said that they took battery cable

and they tried to jump-start him.

A couple of real geniuses,

I don't know what they're thinking about.

They're gonna electrocute him or whatever.

Tell me how he hooked him up.

Clipped them on and said, "Go for it."

I don't know whether they were feeding off of one another, like

"Look what I've done."

"I'm gonna do something worse.

Something more horrific."

What he did,

it didn't work, I guess,

because he reached in the trunk

and grabbed the tire iron

out of the trunk

and started beating the guy on the head,

I don't know how many times.

Then, I guess that didn't work,

'cause he reached in and grabbed the jack,

what you jack up the car with

and brought that out.

He's bringing it to full swing on that,

Just like you would swing an axe or something.

It was just...

a lot of blood.

Really a lot of blood on there.

You didn't beat Gordon?

I didn't beat Gordon.

Did you punch him?

- I didn't punch him. - Did you kick him?

I didn't kick him.

And you're saying that you stayed in the car

while Mike beat Gordon to death?

Yeah.

I didn't even hear when he got him out of the trunk

I just heard a crack, and I looked up.

Wham, hit him in the back of the head with a

He looked at me all wild

and took a swing at me.

And I got out of the car

and I think what he'd done is he took the...

tire iron and shoved it up the guy's anal.

It was so brutal.

It was so ugly, it was so mean,

and I think, what...

What causes somebody to do that?

But they dragged him off in this direction here.

And we found him up here under

a tree.

Probably...

could have been any one of these trees,

but he was kinda tucked up under

the boughs of one of these cedar trees

and somewhat concealed.

You know, and if, in reality, if...

Wood hadn't buckled his knees and got

trying to cover his ass,

it's hard to say

how long it would have been before

Gordon's body would have been discovered here.

Mike and Lance drove Gordon's car

to Salt Lake City.

Millard County deputies

searched the hillside to find more clues,

but two key pieces of evidence

were found 175 miles north in Salt Lake county.

And then Mike left this...

his murder victim's car

in the lot at his brother's apartment complex.

Earlier today, officers picked up

a pair of blood-covered men's Levi's

on I15 at 45th South,

and impounded this 1978 Ford T-Bird in West Valley City.

Investigators found blood smeared

in the back seat and trunk of the car.

So Mike and Lance went on

a weird series of misadventures

as they kind of hitch-hiked their way back to Cedar City.

Mike and Lance ended up in Salem,

at Mike's home,

and his father Amos made them eggs.

Mike went down into his childhood bedroom,

which is where he left Gordon's watch.

So again, he left Gordon's car

at his brother's apartment complex,

he left Gordon's watch in his parents' home,

for the police to go gather this evidence later,

and they sat with his father and ate eggs.

When they got back to the apartment,

Mike had sex with his girlfriend and fell asleep.

Lance went and talked to his friend Tony,

and came up with the plan to turn himself in,

so he went down to the same 7-Eleven

where he had picked up Gordon initially,

and called his parole officer,

John Grath, and said, "I just witnessed a murder,

please come pick me up."

Before John arrived, Lance threw away Gordon's wallet

out of his own pocket, right there at the gas station.

But I believe that it was a hate crime, simply,

because of the way he was treated,

the raping,

the breaking of arms and the jaws and the

wrapping him in chains...

I'm...

I think it started out as a hate crime.

I wouldn't know if the murder would be a hate crime,

but I believe that it started out to be hate,

'cause of who he was.

Wood and Archuleta targeted Gordon,

merely for the fact that he was gay,

and they were they were out to teach the...

"the faggot" a lesson,

and that's not a word that I use lightly.

You know, I always believed that Archuleta had

homosexual tendencies,

and rage about that.

He chose the manner of death, I think, to send a message.

Oh, well, my brother Michael does not

consider the crime a hate crime.

He considers it more of a crime of

excessive drug and alcohol,

and a whole lifetime of making bad choices.

But he just really felt like

it was a night that got out of control.

It just got away from him.

As part of my research

into the Gordon Church case,

I put in a request with the police,

and was given permission to

look at some of their gathered evidence,

including those crime scene photos.

Turning the pages in that photo book,

they start off relatively...

tame.

They're showing the perimeter of the crime scene.

There's dirt and sticks and mud and snow and frost.

But then you start seeing the blood,

you start seeing the pieces of bone.

Look at the blood. God.

There's the tire iron.

When you see the pictures of the body,

I would not recommend that to anybody.

Those images will be in my brain forever.

It's heart-breaking.

There's something that just...

It's one thing to read the story,

but to see it,

to see it, hurts.

Mike had a violent

way of dealing with things.

Maybe dealing with his own demons.

If it's true that he knew Gordon

prior to that,

I believe now

it's Mike's doing.

He's gonna have to answer that question

as to why Gordon died.

Why was this guy killed?

I don't know why he was killed.

I do not know why.

So much went on that night,

it's hard to remember everything.

I was weak.

But I gotta take responsibility

for actually causing his death as much as Mike killed him.

In Provo today, testimony wrapped up

in the trial of Michael Archuleta,

accused of brutally killing a Central Utah man.

I'd been to several trials at that time,

but there's nothing like a homicide trial.

They are a total different animal.

It was ugly.

It did affect our family.

And it affected the extended family,

'cause some of them didn't want to claim him.

They got on TV and says, "Well, you know,

he's not even related to us,

he's adopted, so we don't even know him."

And that was hurtful.

And Archuleta,

he tried to dress up in a suit and a tie and look sharp,

but he still had his tattoos showing above his shirt collar,

and just kinda hard for him to hide

that he was a hardened man.

He was this big, husky,

good-looking guy with all this curly hair.

And a little bit on the cocky side.

And he gave me the thumbs up, like,

"It's gonna be okay, Mom."

But deep down I knew that this was a horrible thing,

and it was not gonna be okay.

They took me into the courtroom, swore me in,

and...

they had me testify that Gordon was gay.

Then, they actually

said that was enough.

And they had me get up and leave.

And as I was walking out,

they brought Archuleta out of the courtroom.

And he grinned at me.

And I was so mad

that I just wanted to slap the smile off his face.

Dave and Nancy,

they never missed a hearing,

they never missed a minute of the court.

They was there the whole time.

And I know Nancy,

when she took the stand, she stared at both of them,

each individual, when she was on the stand,

of Archuleta.

Archuleta finally looked down.

He showed just a little bit of remorse for her.

Wood never did.

Never would blink an eye.

I testified at Michael's trial.

And even at the trials, he was actually...

more friendly.

He would give me eye contact and smile,

where Lance wouldn't,

and we were

engaged still, at that time.

Archuleta knew that he was in for the long haul.

I think he knew that he had

really screwed up bad.

Mike Archuleta's trial

went very well, I thought.

I felt confident

in what was presented, and how it was presented.

I mean, it just went through the whole

episode here,

showing both of their participations,

who was doing what.

And I didn't feel like our attorneys at the time

did a real good job of

defending Michael.

They were trying to get him off

with the fact that Archuleta had been

supposedly raped by somebody that was gay,

or something like that,

or molested by somebody that was gay.

Do you think race played a factor as well?

Very possibly, mmh-hm.

One's last name was Archuleta and one wasn't.

I am incensed

when people use

the fact that "I'm a minority,"

or "I had a rough go."

A lot of people had a rough go in life,

and they do not

torture, rape and kill

a kind and gentle

young gay man.

Good evening. I'm Michelle Kean.

And I'm Bob Evans.

Tomorrow, the jury begins deliberations

in the Michael Archuleta murder trial in Provo.

You know, they said

they had no idea how long it was going to be,

and...

we came home,

and I got a phone call that the jury had reached a verdict.

And when I heard he'd been found guilty, I just...

I don't know how I got to bed,

somebody put me there,

but I didn't get there on my own power.

I don't know if I passed out or what happened,

but the shock was...

'Cause it was so final.

It was so final.

But...

what could you do?

Condemned killer Michael Archuleta

now has an execution date.

Fourth District Judge George Baliff

signed Archuleta's death warrant today,

scheduling him to die by lethal injection

on February 19th.

It's quiet joy

and satisfaction when

Archuleta was sentenced to death.

I thought it was the appropriate sentence.

For me, the fact that he was going to be put to death,

seemed like justice.

Do you celebrate? No.

Are you happy it's over with?

Definitely happy it's over with.

And, you know, I always recognized

that my brother's crime was a horrible thing.

And maybe it's selfish of me,

but I really just don't want to see him executed.

Do you believe Mike Archuleta deserves the death penalty?

I believe so.

Why?

Because it was a ruthless

murder.

I believe everyone's entitled to forgiveness.

I believe everyone has

the right to be forgiven of things,

but I also believe that there is a right for justice.

Lance's trial

happened in February of '90.

It was like the JonBenét Ramsey of the time, you know?

It was huge.

Everybody in the state of Utah,

people in Idaho knew about it.

It was actually...

I believed that I wasn't...

going to lose, you know?

I believed that I was gonna actually

witness that trial.

The courtroom was full,

all the time.

Yeah, he didn't even cut his hair,

and I had girls chanting for Lance, you know?

Now...

as a mother,

I can't even imagine

the pain and the horror

that I brought to the Church family

by doing that.

My trial didn't go as well as I thought it'd go.

You know?

He told me that he was not supposed

to show any emotion at all.

So he was cold.

There's a feeling that you get when you

know when you're screwed,

when you know you're kind of...

There is no hope in that situation.

And I stayed the whole time.

Even after I gave my testimony,

I was not let back into the courtroom.

I was considered a hostile witness.

Because I was under such

the impression that Lance was innocent.

It was almost as if

they were the enemy.

And, you know,

I think the biggest thing

was in the closing arguments.

My attorney goes,

"Lance was not a bystander,

Lance is a liar."

And that was my own attorney,

stating that to the jury, after I testified.

And when the verdict was read,

there was cheering,

and there was booing.

For me, I was praying.

Mr. Wood's continued

changing of his stories

was his effort to avoid responsibility

for a crime he participated in.

And I think the jury saw that.

He'd already been found guilty,

the same as Archuleta,

but now the sentencing phase kicked in

and Lance's attorney

and his family brought in just a bunch of people

to tell you how good a guy Lance was.

According to what they said and everything,

he was a prize, man.

That guy was a number one kid.

But according to what happened, I don't think he was.

I think he had the same problems as Michael did,

but they made him look like

a sterling scholar and the whole bit.

You know, they brought a lot of

religious background into it, you know.

Well, they took in his baptismal thing,

and they brought in all his Scout

merit badges.

And they did a pretty good job

making an angel out of this guy.

Well, he wasn't an angel.

I wanted to stand up and yell at the jury

and say, "This isn't the guy that did this!"

And so

he got off with...

with life.

I mean, I just felt if two people

are involved in the same crime,

they should both have

the same punishment.

In my opinion,

both of them deserved the death penalty.

Archuleta got it. Lance Wood didn't.

Lance Wood should have.

I believe that some aspects,

like I said, I deserve time,

but what do I deserve time for?

He didn't, because,

I think, as the facts shook out,

for lack of a better analogy, he didn't pull the trigger.

He didn't impale Gordon, he didn't rape Gordon.

You know, I guess a lot of Nazis

have that same defense

when six million Jews were killed.

"Well, you know, I was following orders,"

"I was afraid for my own life,"

or, "I just did what I thought I should do."

I know that they said he just watched,

but he watched!

He shouldn't have been there, he should've stopped it,

he shouldn't have...

let it happen.

To me... I don't know.

I think they both should have gotten death, to be honest.

It didn't really... matter.

The fact that neither one of them

could hurt someone else ever again

was the be-all and end-all.

When Gordon Church was murdered in 1988,

Utah didn't have any hate crimes legislation.

But, within a few years,

representative David Litvack introduced a bill

in the Utah legislature

to protect all groups from hate crimes in Utah,

including gay people.

Unfortunately, that bill was hijacked

by a Republican legislator,

and it really was sort of gutted

in a way that has made it unenforceable.

The original hate crimes law just didn't cut it.

In fact, we actually had a court case that came back

that clearly indicated that the current hate crimes law

couldn't be applied in most cases.

It was that weak and that watered-down

that it was really, truly, ineffective.

Nobody wants to come to terms with,

I punch someone in the face,

is a misdemeanor.

But I punch someone in the face

because they're gay or they're black,

or they're Jewish,

makes it a felony.

It's interesting that the pioneers who came to Utah

came here, trying to avoid hate

and people attacking them for what they believed in.

And yet, it took us a long time to figure out

that if we're gonna have a law on the books,

we need to have a law that works.

And that's kind of how I came to the point

where I told Senator Thatcher,

"I wanna be your sponsor in the House side."

When someone is convicted of a crime,

and only

after someone has been convicted of a crime,

do we enter the sentencing phase.

The sentencing phase is when we decide,

"Okay, they did it,

how bad was it?

What should the punishment be?"

Now, some people,

and one of the largest objections

that I've had to overcome

from people who don't like

the idea of an enhanced sentence is,

"Well, a crime is a crime is a crime.

We should treat all crimes the same."

Well, the challenge with that is,

that is literally the exact opposite

of how our criminal justice system works.

Kind of like murder.

Murder's broken down into various categories.

So, a murder, obviously you lose a life.

But if you have a murder where somebody is drunk

and didn't mean to kill somebody,

it's considered, uh,

I hate to say it, but a lesser murder.

And they're probably not gonna get

a death row for something like that.

But I don't think any of us can realistically say

that spraying your girlfriend's name

on a fence or an overpass

is the same crime

as going to a Jewish synagogue

and spray-painting a swastika

and the words, 'Die, Jews.'

Now if you believe that those are the same crime

because in both cases you still have to clean up graffiti,

then with respect,

you probably will not come on board for this bill,

and you probably should vote against this bill,

if you truly believe

that those two crimes should be punished the same.

The way our law's gonna work is,

we'll convict you of the crime first.

And then we'll add an additional penalty on

because the fact

your selection of your victim

had everything to do with

a particular character or preference,

not because of anything else.

Can't prevent everything, but

this law, by passing it,

putting it in place with SB103,

I think, down the road, will make a difference

in making people stop and think about what they do

and why they're doing it.

Let's move forward with the solution

that we know is 100% constitutional,

that we know is 100% legally sound.

When we're looking at complex legal issues,

if we're smart,

we listen to our subject matter experts.

We listen to the Sentencing Commission

who talks about what punishments ought to be.

We should listen to our Chiefs, our sheriffs,

we should listen to our religious communities,

which are united.

I am not aware of a single religion

that has come forward and said,

"We don't want this protection."

We should listen.

We should listen.

After Lance was convicted,

he was sentenced to life in prison,

and ended up in Draper, Utah, initially.

He became known as kind of a prison snitch,

and after a while they transferred him

up to Orofino, Idaho, to serve his time.

While he was there, he ended up having

several different long-term sexual relationships

with female staff at the prison,

and so they transferred him to Napa, Idaho,

which is where he met Renee McKenzie.

My ex-husband was a senator,

a state senator.

Since I wasn't a politician, I was kind of in the background,

and so I

learned a lot about Idaho politics.

My first meeting with Lance was,

I went to prison and I said,

"I'm working on prison reform,

I'm writing

some legislation for the parole board."

At first, I thought it was a senator's

either daughter or sister or relative,

because to me, in my mind,

senator, old, you know, 98 years old.

You know, I didn't know, so it was kind of,

"Hey, this is pretty nice," you know?

All I wanted to talk to him about was prison reform,

what could be done on the inside of prison to improve,

you know, what Idaho had going.

Renee, much like me,

was enamored by this...

individual.

Uh...

So there was an immediate attraction there then?

Immediate attraction to her.

And so I came home

that night,

and I remember going in the computer room

and looking him up,

'cause I just thought, I wonder what he's in prison for?

His crime is absolutely horrific.

So, uh...

being the interrogator that I am,

I wrote down my thousand questions,

and went back and slapped

my folder on the table, and I said,

"I got some questions for you,

and you're gonna answer all of them."

She was drilling me, all right?

And it was funny as that, for some reason,

I've always...

been not totally truthful

with... with everyone,

it just never happened.

But with her, I just couldn't shut up.

So I feel like he was

transparent, I don't think he was hiding anything.

He answered all my questions.

And at the end, she closed the folder and said,

"I'm glad that you didn't lie to me.

I'm glad that you were actually honest with me."

She had

gotten the same types of stories from Lance that I got.

And Lance was very convincing.

So we built a real quick friendship.

We didn't become romantic,

but I think, when two people are working on a cause

so hard and so emotionally,

you kind of click, as far as

what you're trying to accomplish,

with prison reform.

Were you flirtatious? Were you complimentary?

No, I was all business.

And it wasn't until after our first trial

that we kind of admitted to each other

that we had feelings for each other.

Did you and Lance fall in love?

Um...

Those are hard things to answer and I don't know.

Yeah, we absolutely fell in love.

When Renee's husband found out

about her relationship with Lance,

it hit the local newspapers and there was a lot of drama.

Lance ended up getting transferred again,

this time to a minimum security prison in Pendleton, Oregon.

Renee moved there to be with him,

after divorcing her husband.

And she and Lance ended up getting married

in the prison there.

Lance Wood was sentenced to life in prison

with the possibility of parole.

He could see the light of day again.

At this point, he's applied for parole twice

and been denied both times.

Every denial as of yet has been

based solely on the crime itself,

and not my behavior in prison.

Okay. Do you feel like you've had good behavior?

You know, my ill behavior

is probably the staff relationships.

I guess I'm not Irish,

but for the luck of the Irish, you know,

the women have just been coming to me, so...

Lance Wood is a very

charming person.

I was fired, let go from Hospice Care

for having several relationships

with the female staff down there, the nurses.

He's also very...

cunning.

In Lance's own words, he's called himself a womanizer.

Lance is a womanizer.

What's your opinion on that?

Um... He loves women.

And he went into prison when he was, what, 21?

So think yourself, in prison, at 21.

If you're a womanizer, you're gonna womanize.

Let's see, one was a Sandy Martin.

And...

Cheryl Davis,

and three others

that I don't wanna mention their names

just because they...

We had never met with any investigator.

I guess, the way I could

possibly best describe it, is...

Ted Bundy.

He is a very nice-looking man,

who...

who manipulates people.

Let us see, I followed suit down there.

Started a few more relationships.

That's when I met Cheryl... I mean...

Renee.

Yeah, when people go to prison,

they have nothing but time on their hands,

and it sounds like he's used that time to

continue to wreak havoc in multiple people's lives.

He says, "A lot of people believe

'an eye for an eye',"

he says, "How do you feel about it, Mom?"

And I says, "Well,

that's what it says in the Bible,

I guess, I've never read it.

But I don't know, some people believe in it,

and I keep thinking, you...

You had to pay for your mistakes."

When Mike first went to prison,

he was very, very angry,

and he was very suicidal, and he was very depressed.

Well, at the beginning, it was kind of hard on him,

I mean, he'd been incarcerated before, many times.

But like he says, "This is a big boy thing,"

this is not a

young punk, type thing,

this is... this is a big thing.

I think finally he just settled down

into the fact that this is where he was.

This was his life,

and he got older, and matured.

Like he told me, he says,

"If I knew then what I know now,

and how many people care about me

and what I could have done with my life,"

he says, "I've wasted my whole life

just being bitter and angry."

Michael talked about,

after the crime,

that he felt

that Gordon had come to him,

that he dreamed him regularly, all of the time.

He says, "Like I could almost smell him,

it's like he died in my cell."

He says it was hard,

so he lost a lot of weight

because he just couldn't sleep.

They work out a lot at the prison,

and he had rigged up his own weights,

milk cartons full of water, and weights on them,

to pump iron, and ironically,

it was on the anniversary

of the date of his crime.

He says he heard a pop,

and the other guys around him

heard the pop sound like a gunshot.

One of the elastics snapped on his weights

and came back and hit him in the eye

and ruptured his eye and he lost his eyeball.

He says, "I should have been dead."

He says, "If that had gotten just a little fraction

of an inch or whatever,"

he says "it would had probably blown my brains out."

He says, "But there was a reason why it didn't."

He said it was just so strange

that it was on that day.

He almost felt like

it released some kind of almost, some guilt with him.

Michael Anthony Archuleta

has not been executed.

And, uh...

that's a tragedy, and it's a failing of our system.

I don't know if they'll ever

execute Archuleta or not.

You know, he's been there for

thirty years, almost, now, and...

still fighting it, which is ridiculous.

Good morning again, Mr. Chief Justice,

Associate Chief Justice, members of the court.

May it please the court, my name is Charlotte Merrill.

Again, I represent Michael Anthony Archuleta.

So there are a lot of things that came to light.

The sexual abuse, you know, when he was at State Hospital.

Of course, none of this was known

at the time of his original trial.

Mr. Archuleta was entitled to the effective assistance

of post-conviction counsel

in his initial post-conviction proceedings.

But his counsel was conflicted,

under-qualified, and under-funded,

and missed serious red flags,

that he was intellectually disabled,

and, thus,

ineligible for execution.

He went through all of his state appeals,

they finally finished, I think, about five years ago.

And then the federal appeals started.

And I don't understand why

all those appeals weren't taking place at the same time.

I don't understand that.

You know, a wrongly-imprisoned

criminal defendant who has claims,

has every incentive to bring those claims early,

and to pursue them aggressively.

It's the opposite if you have a guilty person on death row.

That person

has every incentive to wait until the last possible minute

to bring claims to gum up the works of litigation.

And all we're appealing now is,

little, teeny, micro-technicalities,

and that's what's drawing this whole thing out,

and keeping him alive.

I mean, they filed their federal petition in 2012.

We're standing here in 2018,

and really nothing's happened in the federal case,

because we've been litigating these the whole time.

And that's already a victory for their client.

Sitting on death row, while intellectually disabled,

is not a victory.

Knowing the horrific situation with Mr. Archuleta,

I don't know why we're paying for all of his medical bills,

and all of the things to keep him alive.

I think that,

realistically, the state of Utah needs to carry out

what it's intended to do.

He's been given execution dates,

that have come and gone, but you never know when,

when it's not, you know?

So we've geared ourselves up,

and then it doesn't happen,

and then we geared ourselves up,

for many, many years.

We as prosecutors concentrate

on the victims, and the victims' families.

And for them to wait

five years, and then a decade, and then two decades...

It takes its toll

on the families.

The day may come,

and we've always known that,

but,

that's the one thing I don't want

my Mom and Dad to have to go through is,

his execution.

The end of every story,

the one that gets to tell the story

is usually the victor,

and in any case right now,

it seems like the only victor

is still the murderers,

so it almost feels like they're the only ones that are

getting their stories told and their intimate details,

not this amazing man that they...

that they ended his life.

But I think the Gordon Ray Church story

will help,

because we can look back thirty years and say,

My God, I cannot believe that happened in southern Utah.

I think the Gordon Church case

is one of those cases

that kind of shocked the people's conscience,

and probably moved us forward and said,

it's time for a change.

And I think SB103 is gonna go down in history

as one of the defining moments in Utah's history,

as far as making the right decisions

and doing the right things.

You had me at SB103.

Thank you very much for your work.

I know this hasn't been easy,

but I'm very supportive.

After a long fight, on April second of this year,

SB103 was finally passed into law,

and we have hate crimes legislation in Utah now.

It was shocking, the fact that we got

a veto-proof margin in the House of Representatives,

to support this,

which tells me that Utah has realized

that the time had come to have a law that works.

And I think it may save lives.

I do believe that by having a law like this on the books

is gonna send a message to people that

we're a civil society and a civil state,

and people can't get away with these kind of crimes in Utah.

You have to love your kids,

no matter what.

You can't just love them when they're good.

You have to love them when they're bad, too.

That's all there is to it, I mean,

that's how it is.

I think I've learned from my parents

about unconditional love.

Never have they quit loving Michael.

Never has my mom,

never have we denied him,

never have we quit caring about him.

Never have we not

considered him a part of our family.

And so if anything,

I have learned that from my parents,

that if you really love someone, you love someone.

I would hope that

from this case,

people would be more understanding

of their own children,

of their neighbors.

We're all different.

And because someone is black,

or bald, or short

or has a speech impediment,

or is gay,

is not license to treat them with anything but

respect and love.

Gordon should be remembered,

because of all the young kids that are in this world right now

that are dealing with being gay,

and not have had the opportunity to tell their parents.

That's a good thing, because it allows people

to be who they are,

and not have to hide in the shadows.

If you could say anything to Gordon now,

what would you say?

I just I don't have any words. I...

I don't know, just how sorry I am, and...

how the hell I wish somebody had

been able to protect him at the time.

How'd we do?

Did we get it right?

Did we get it right for you,

did we represent you as well as we could?

Everyone who's been involved in this case,

we did our very best,

I know he's in a better place. Enjoy.

I would...

He's so tiny, I'd pick him up.

And give him a nice big squeeze.

He didn't deserve to die.

I've got a gay grandson,

and I mean, I wouldn't want anyone to do that to him

for that reason.

It just breaks my heart that

somebody I know and love

has been involved in hurting someone so much,

and wish I could change it, and I just can't.

I'm so sorry.

Oh, so sorry.

I'd really like the image of you being hurt,

to go away, I don't want you to hurt.

I'd want you to go back to that same moment,

from where we're looking out the window,

and you see the stars so clear.

I just want to hold each other and, you know?

One of the biggest things anybody wants to hear

is that things are just gonna be okay.

And when I hear that voice, it's ever so soft in my head,

and I know a lot of times,

he's one of the voices that says, it's gonna be okay.

And,

I would want to tell him it's gonna be okay.