1851
The town began about 1851, when about thirty-five men arrived to establish an iron works.
about 0:06:37The story
Cedar City sits in Iron County in southern Utah, about 250 miles south of Salt Lake City, and at the time of the murder it had a population of roughly 36,000, including some 7,000 students at Southern Utah University. Claudia Ben, 49, had moved there a little over a year earlier to work as a tribal substance abuse counsellor for the Paiute community. She had spent years at the University of Utah Women's Center, and her daughter Carol Pickyavit already lived in the area. Claudia was described as hard working, quiet outside work and devoted to helping her own people; she ran workshops and went wherever she was needed. On the evening of 9 July 1998 she attended a Paiute tribal council meeting and spoke about a spiritual trip she had made in the first part of June to tribal land along the Colorado River, where she had climbed a hill and felt the presence of her ancestors. Friends said she had never seemed happier.
They had a two-year-old daughter together. He had recently been sacked by a temp agency, SOS Staffing Services, for absenteeism from jobs at Western Rock, O'Sullivan Industries and Goer, a store fixtures manufacturer, and was known around town as the man who was always drunk. He was also seeing another woman, Shiloh John, and on the night of 9 July he was at Shiloh's home.
She refused because she had to work the graveyard shift at O'Sullivan Industries, where she was a temp hoping for a full-time job. He told her that if she did not come he would kill her mother, her sister and all the children, and that he would take their daughter rather than kill her. He called twice more before half past ten, repeating and escalating the threats, and once more after she left for work at half past ten. Carol left her two-year-old daughter with Claudia; her sister Benita left her two children there as well. All three children were in their pyjamas and ready for bed.
He rode in the front and said he was going to Fiddler's Canyon to visit a friend. The taxi company later noted that he had not been taken to the address where the murder happened.
What happened next, as the state reconstructed it, was that Claudia found him at the back sliding glass door and told him to leave. He said she insulted him and told him her daughter was too good for him. He picked up a large rock, smashed the glass door, cleared the shards and went in through the kitchen, where he took a serrated butcher knife. Claudia grabbed a knife from the counter and ordered him out; he grabbed her arm, took it from her and held it to her throat. He claimed they fell and she landed on the knife, that he had only meant to frighten her and that she was not meant to die.
Neighbours began calling 911 just after midnight on 10 July. One reported screaming and loud behaviour, another a possible gunshot, and a woman staying nearby heard a man and woman yelling and children crying. Officers arrived at 12.20am, six minutes after the call, and found the sliding door broken out. He then said Satan wanted her dead, and begged the officers to shoot him. He repeated over and over that Satan made him do it, and as he was put in the police car he looked at the sky and shouted that he would find her again and kill her again. Officers Destry Griffiths and J.R. Robinson both described him as disoriented and intoxicated.
Inside, Claudia lay face down in the living room, partly naked, a telephone in her left hand and the bloodstained butcher knife near her head. Blood was pooled around her head and smeared through the kitchen, bathroom and closets, but nothing had been ransacked. There was a large bite mark on her left arm. The three children were found alive; two had blood on them and one was covered from head to toe, wearing only a T-shirt and not the underwear she had worn when her mother left. Examiners concluded that the child had been fondled and injured.
Dr Maureen J. Fricky of the state medical examiner's office found that Claudia died from multiple knife wounds to the throat. Her neck was cut about four times from ear to ear, the start marks running together into a deep cut that reached the backbone, with three further cuts into the bone. She had also been stabbed at least three times in the vagina, with two wounds passing into the pelvic cavity, and cut around the anus; her scalp, mouth, buttocks and thighs were bruised. Fricky could not say whether the sexual injuries came before or after death, because the whole assault happened within about a minute.
The Iron County attorney, Scott Burns, called it the worst degradation and humiliation of a human body he had ever seen. Instead the defence argued that the sexual aggravators should fail because Claudia had to be alive for a rape to have occurred, and the medical examiner could not rule out that the mutilation happened after death. The prosecution answered that the knife was found by her head because he did the lower injuries first and then cut her throat.
The court held that Utah's sexual assault law does not require the victim to be alive. In 2005 he raised 68 claims, mainly about the prosecutor's remark that he had not murdered a drunken Indian in the park. The court called the comment demeaning, offensive and clearly improper, but said the judge had not been influenced by it. In 2008 a federal judge allowed his habeas petition to proceed.