The insurance company for Richard and Karen Worthington has settled a lawsuit filed by David Roth, whose wife was gunned down during a siege at Alta View Hospital nearly four years ago.
Rather than try to prove Karen Worthington was not negligent in her husband's homicidal rampage, Allstate Insurance has decided to pay Roth $97,000, said Colin King, Roth's attorney.A settlement stipulation between the parties was approved Tuesday by 3rd District Judge Kenneth Rigtrup, effectively closing the last chapter in one of the most sensational and heart-wrenching crimes in Utah history.
Roth's wife, nurse Karla Roth, 37, was shot to death Sept. 20, 1991, by Richard Worthington, who, armed with guns and a bomb, stormed the hospital and held eight people hostage for 18 hours. He was angry that a doctor had performed a tubal ligation on his wife without his permission.
Since November 1991, David Roth has been trying to collect on the Worthingtons' $100,000 homeowner's policy, arguing that Karen Worthington was civilly liable for the death because she knew that her husband was going to commit a criminal act yet failed to stop him or warn others who could.
"Not only didn't she do anything but she knew what he was going to do, that he was taking a bomb and guns and where he was going," King said. "This case establishes some precedence for a claim against someone who knows of planned criminal conduct and does nothing about it."
The case, which went to U.S. District Court in Utah and then to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, has taken about three years to settle.
King said David Roth, who has not remarried and is living in Washington state with his four children, will get just under two-thirds of the settlement proceeds. The remainder will pay court costs and legal fees.
Worthington, 40, pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping and burglary charges and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. After making several suicide and escape attempts in Utah, Worthington was sent to the New Mexico prison system. Authorities there could not deal with him either and transferred him to Nevada on Oct. 26, 1993. He hanged himself in an Ely prison cell two weeks later.