Douglas Kay, one of two men convicted in the robbery-slayings of three people at a southern Utah bar a decade ago, now says that he alone killed two of the victims.
The admission may save the life of Kay's co-defendant in the Valentine's Day 1984 murders, Norman Lee Newstead, who is facing a death sentence in an unrelated Oklahoma homicide.Newstead's defense attorney contends that when jurors condemned Newstead for the murder of Tulsa cab driver Larry Buckley, they were under the impression he had killed four people in two states.
But in a Utah State Prison interview with The Daily Spectrum recently, Kay said he shot all three victims at the Playhouse Bar in Cedar City and was directly responsible for at least two of the deaths.
"Newstead shot that one guy first, and then I shot the other two," Kay said, adding that he shot all the victims a second time "because I didn't think I'd shot them good enough."
High on cocaine, quaaludes and alcohol, Kay, Newstead and Cynthia Brosemer, a former bar employee, had planned to burglarize the Playhouse. But Kay said their plans changed to robbery because they got tired of waiting for the victims to leave.
Bar employee Patricia Frei and two customers, Robert Bull and Ronald Schmidt, were slain - each shot at least twice in the head. The robbers took about $500.
It was the only triple murder in the history of Cedar City, a small college community of 13,400.
Brosemer, who maintained the killings took her by surprise, surrendered and exchanged her testimony for freedom. She identified Newstead as a suspect and led police to Kay, who was arrested at a Las Vegas hotel.
Kay confessed to three counts of murder in exchange for life in prison. Initially, Kay said he shot all three victims, but only after Newstead shot them first.
Kay's latest revelation parallels Brosemer's earliest account. She said Newstead shot only one of the victims, but she later changed her story.
Still, Newstead's attorney said the Oklahoma jury may have given her client a lighter sentence if it had read Brosemer's earliest testimony.
"The impression that they were given was that Norman Newstead was the one that killed everybody. I think - at least the defense attorneys believe - was the deciding factor for the jury as far as the death penalty goes," Patti Palmer said.
She has asked the state Court of Appeals to order a new trial or commute Newstead's death sentence to life imprisonment.
Kay offered no explanation for changing his story, but the act surprised his attorney, R. Clayton Huntsman.
"He may have found his conscience, or he may want to just make a clean breast of it. Or, I don't know, it's possible he could be saying what he thinks people believe of him anyway," Huntsman said.