A sex offender charged Monday with killing three girls and a woman was so violent as a juvenile that judges and prosecutors appealed to corrections officials and then-Gov. Scott Matheson to keep him locked up.
But Roberto V. Arguelles, 34, was held only four months in the state's industrial school after he was convicted of raping a girl in 1978. He was 17 at the time Judge Reginald Garff committed him to the center in Ogden.Garff urged school director Ralph Garn to keep Arguelles away from the public.
"I don't believe that anyone else should be jeopardized by his behavior until the state has met its responsibility to treat the problem; or if that isn't possible, to hold him in custody," Garff wrote in August 1979.
But the school released Arguelles anyway. He was arrested less than a year later after raping two teenage girls in Salt Lake County; he tried to kill his second victim by slashing her throat ear to ear and stabbing her in the chest.
John T. Nielsen, then chief deputy of the Salt Lake County Attorney's Justice Division, was disgusted enough with Arguelles' early release that he wrote a letter to Matheson.
"I can't express the degree of resentment and dissatisfaction I feel for the manner in which the youth authorities of this state deal with those who constitute such an extreme danger to society," Nielsen wrote. "I think it is absolutely a disgrace and a total breach of responsibility that Arguelles was released (from the center) with his obvious propensities."
Garff, contacted by the Deseret News early Tuesday, said Youth Corrections officials never explained why they let Arguelles go despite his letter.
"I never did get an answer, they just released him."
He said he first tried to commit Arguelles to an adult sex offender program at the state mental hospital. But officials there refused his request because Arguelles was not yet 18, Garff said.
"Robert was 17 going on 26. He was very mature for his age, and I thought that program would be most appropriate. When they didn't, I had few choices but to send him to the industrial school and write that letter."
Garff, now a senior judge on the state Court of Appeals, said he rarely wrote such letters during his long tenure on the juvenile bench.
"There are those who are not treatable, and I think I was able to recognize that category, and I think Robert fit in that category," he concluded.
Nielsen recalled Tuesday that Matheson responded immediately to his letter, calling him to a meeting with social services and Youth Corrections rep-re-sen-ta-tives.
Nielsen spoke at the meeting for a while, and then the governor excused him. A short time later, Youth Corrections got a new director, and the department underwent several changes.
"I don't recall specifics, but it strikes me they were an improvement over the past. However, it was still my opinion and still is today that we didn't and don't have enough facilities to incarcerate violentyouth offenders," Nielsen said.
Arguelles was on parole for 18 months in 1991-92 after serving 11 years for attempted murder and aggravated sexual assault for raping the two teenage girls.
He is currently serving consecutive nine-years-to-life sentences for molesting a brother and sister, ages 11 and 8, behind a school in December 1992. He was arrested three days later while stalking a girl outside a high school. At the time, investigators found handcuffs and several knives in his vehicle.
Last Friday, he confessed to the unrelated slayings of three girls and a woman.
Prosecutors charged him Monday with four counts of capital murder for the 1992 deaths of Stephanie Blundell, 13; Tuesday Malisa Roberts, 15; Lisa Martinez, 16; and Margo Bond, 42.
He told investigators he strangled Blundell, Roberts and Bond. Martinez was stabbed repeatedly with a "sharp instrument," according to the charges filed in 3rd Circuit Court.
Bond was the first to disappear. Arguelles confessed he abducted her at knifepoint just after 6 a.m. on Feb. 21, 1992. Her body was found in a shallow grave in Tooele County, 45 miles west of Salt Lake, four months later.
Arguelles said he next abducted Blundell on March 19, 1992, while on her way to school. He led authorities to her grave Saturday near Tibble Creek in American Fork canyon.
The charges state Blundell was last seen getting into a "dark sedan." The Associated Press quoted anonymous sources late Monday who said Arguelles' three young victims all willingly got into his vehicle after he asked them if they wanted a ride.
Last July, Arguelles took lawmen to a west-side Salt Lake County pig farm where they found the bodies of Roberts and Martinez buried in a canal. At the time, he said he had only witnessed the killings by two other men.
Arguelles has hinted to investigators that he may be responsible for as many as two other homicides, the Associated Press said.
Arguelles has been a suspect in the slayings for nearly two years since he first mentioned he might know something about the Martinez case to Department of Corrections investigator Jenny Glover.
Since then, he has been the focus of a sheriff's unsolved homicide task force, and Salt Lake District Attorney Neal Gunnarson said his office has been poised for months to charge him in the Martinez and Roberts cases.
Instead, however, they've let Glover and sheriff's detectives build Arguelles' trust during a series of interviews.