Mark Hopkinson had a choice: Just plead guilty and spend the rest of your life in prison. No death penalty.
Hopkinson said, "No deal." He would not admit crimes he said he did not commit."He rolled the dice on that one. And he lost," said Robert Van Sciver, a Salt Lake attorney who defended Hopkinson on charges he killed four people in southwest Wyoming.
Hopkinson, 42, died early Wednesday morning by lethal injection at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlings, the first inmate executed in Wyoming since 1965. Throughout his 13-year stay on Wyoming's death row he has maintained his innocence.
While Hopkinson's execution ends the life of a man prosecutors say masterminded four killings, there remains a sense of mystery about the crimes - the kind of "what-if?" questions that will captivate folks in western Wyoming coffee shops for many years to come.
For many ardent believers, it will remain a question of "Did he really do it?"
Born and raised in Fort Bridger, Hopkinson was popular and gifted. An all-state football player, Hopkinson packed his bags in the late 1960s for the University of Arizona, where he played linebacker.
But the small-town boy never found the big-time glory many had predicted. Following a knee injury, Hopkinson tried to cash in on the local marijuana trade and got caught. "When picking friends and associates, he didn't use a lot of common sense," said Hopkinson's brother, Scott, a Murray resident.
After 18 months in a federal prison, Hopkinson returned home to Bridger Valley, finding it in the throes of an oil boom.
Again trying to cash in on the moment, Hopkinson began developing a 40-unit trailer park in Mountain View, near Fort Bridger, and opened a clothing store in nearby Urie. Hopkinson was certain riches were just around the corner. He wore flashy clothes, drove a Lincoln Continental and was a flytrap for beautiful women.
The first hint of trouble appeared in April 1977 when Jeffrey Green, then a 21-year-old laborer and employee of Hopkinson, was stopped for speeding in Hopkinson's car near Coalville, Summit County. Troopers noticed a bomb in the back seat, and Green was arrested.
About that same time, Hopkinson was involved in a well-publicized dispute with a local water company, which had demanded $12,000 for water and sewer hookup fees to Hopkinson's trailer court. When Hopkinson made threats, the board sued for $50,000 in exemplary damages.
In August 1977, the water company's attorney, Vincent Vehar, 67; his wife, Beverely, 51; and their son, John Vehar, 18, were all killed when a bomb containing 30 sticks of dynamite exploded in the basement of their Evanston home.
Mike Hickey confessed he had dynamited the Vehar home at Hopkinson's request. Hickey received total immunity from prosecution.
In 1978, Green - also a suspect in a rash of thefts as well as the 1976 killing of a 15-year-old girl - told investigators Hopkinson had ordered him to plant a bomb in the car of Phoenix lawyer George Mariscal, who apparently owed Hopkinson $10,000. Green also said he suspected Hopkinson in the Vehar killings.
Pending a trial on the explosives charges, Hopkinson was sent to a federal prison in California. In exchange for Green's testimony, charges against Green were dropped.
Green disappeared in 1979, two days before he was to appear before a grand jury to testify against Hopkinson. His body was discovered near an I-80 rest stop in southwestern Wyoming. One eye had been burned completely out of its socket, probably with a cigarette, and his body bore the marks of about 140 other burns. He had also been shot.
Hopkinson was convicted in September 1979 in connection with all four killings. He received life sentences for the Vehar killings and the death sentence for killing Green, even though no physical evidence was presented linking Hopkinson to Green's killing.
Wyoming defense attorney Gerry Spence, a friend of the Vehar family, asked to prosecute Hopkinson simultaneously for the Vehar bombing and the Green murder. He convinced a jury that Hopkinson ordered Green's murder by telephone from his California prison.
Hopkinson's death penalty was later overturned, then reinstated in 1983 following a second penalty phase.
But disturbing questions still haunt Hopkinson's supporters:
Who actually killed Jeffrey Green? Where is the physical evidence that Hopkinson actually ordered Green's killing? Why did prosecutors never reveal to defense attorneys that police had identified other suspects?
And why was the confessed killer of three people given total immunity from prosecution? Were prosecutors blinded to justice by their friendship with the Vehar family? Did Hopkinson become a scapegoat for a murder investigation that was bungled from the beginning?
"He got a fair trial in the context of what Wyoming thinks is a fair trial," Van Sciver said in a 1990 Deseret News interview.
"I think they all want to see him die," Scott Hopkinson said, "to hide the whole truth of the story. There's a lot of people who have this on their conscience because they know he is not guilty."