LAS VEGAS -- Arthur Bennett had an elaborate plan to avoid a court-martial on charges he sexually assaulted daughters of fellow Marines. He would fake his own death and even have his family collect his military insurance, prosecutors argued.
Bennett nearly got away with it until he was found living in Utah under a different name.Now the mystery of whose body was found in Bennett's burned-out trailer will likely never be solved because the 45-year-old Marine had another plan. Facing a possible death sentence, Bennett committed suicide Monday night.
He hanged himself with a bedsheet in his cell at the Clark County Detention Center, two days before he was to face a court-martial on sexual assault charges.
This time, authorities say the dead man is Bennett, and they have the fingerprints to prove it.
"He has been positively identified based on numerous tattoos and fingerprints," Las Vegas homicide Lt. Wayne Petersen said.
Bennett, already serving time in Utah for assaulting his two teenage daughters and one of their friends, also faced murder charges here in connection with the February 1994 trailer fire authorities said he set to fake his own death.
The badly burned body found in the trailer, initially believed to be that of Bennett, may now never be identified.
"I have a feeling the identity of the victim went to the grave with Bennett," Clark County Deputy District Attorney David Schwartz said Tuesday. "I think he possibly could have picked up a transient, a homeless person, and lured him back to the trailer."
Bennett had been brought to Las Vegas this week from Yuma, Ariz., where he was being held pending court-martial on charges of assaulting the daughters of fellow Marines in Yuma and Okinawa, Japan.
Prosecutors here had said they would seek the death penalty for Bennett in the pending murder charge from the trailer fire.
Authorities contend Bennett's family collected $200,000 in military insurance at the time of the fire and that payments continued until the ruse was uncovered.
After the fire, Bennett and his family moved to Hurricane, in southern Utah, where he assumed the name Joseph Benson, dyed his hair red and bragged of a past life as a Navy SEAL.
His identity was discovered when his two older daughters, both in their mid-teens, went to Hurricane police with stories of ongoing sexual assaults. His arrest on Halloween 1997 led to a fingerprint check and discovery that the affable Benson was really Bennett, the man authorities thought had died in the Las Vegas trailer fire.
When arrested in Utah, Bennett took pills in what authorities described as a suicide attempt.