A Utah death row inmate who escaped execution last fall after developing dementia has just died of what officials say appear to be natural causes, according to the state’s Department of Corrections.
Ralph Leroy Menzies, 67, had spent 37 years on death row for the 1986 abduction and murder of 26-year-old mother of three Maurine Hunsaker.
He was scheduled to die by firing squad in September, but the Utah Supreme Court halted the execution in August after his attorneys argued that his dementia had progressed to the point that he was no longer competent to be executed.
A new competency hearing had been planned for mid-December.
Hunsaker’s husband, Jim, told The Associated Press he felt a sense of relief when he learned that Menzies had died.
“I felt a happy feeling,” he said.
“I think a lot of it is going to be just healing now.
“I don’t think there was a day that I didn’t think about it.”
But he also expressed frustration with the decades-long legal process.
“It seems like everything went his way,” he said, calling the judicial delays “one disappointment after another.”
Menzies was convicted of abducting Hunsaker from the convenience store near Salt Lake City where she worked.
She managed to call her husband to say she had been robbed and kidnapped, but believed she would be released.
Two days later, a hiker found her body 16 miles away in Big Cottonwood Canyon.
She had been strangled, and her throat had been slashed.
Investigators found her thumbprint in a car Menzies was driving, discovered her purse in his apartment, and recovered her wallet and other belongings in his possession when he was later jailed on unrelated charges.
At the time of the killing, he was already out on parole.
Utah Attorney General Derek Brown said the state’s long effort to carry out justice had come at a heavy cost for the family.
“Maurine Hunsaker was a cherished wife and mother whose life was stolen in an act of horrific violence by Ralph Menzies,” Brown said.
“For decades, the state of Utah has pursued justice on her behalf.
“The path has been long and filled with pain, far more than any victim’s family should ever have to endure.”
Menzies had chosen execution by firing squad decades earlier, a method that has been used only six times in the United States since 1977.
Utah has not conducted a firing squad execution since 2010 and carried out its most recent execution, by lethal injection, just over a year ago.
In a statement, Menzies’ legal team said:
“We’re grateful that Ralph passed naturally and maintained his spiritedness and dignity until the end.”
For Maurine Hunsaker’s family, however, Menzies’ natural death closes a case that has dragged on for nearly four decades, but not without lingering questions about a system that allowed one of Utah’s most notorious killers to outlive his own execution date.
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