SALT LAKE CITY — When longtime Salt Lake County deputy district attorney Robert Stott retired last month, Utah's criminal justice system lost a wealth of experience.
Although Stott's name may not be well known outside judicial circles, the notorious men he helped put away over his career certainly are. Names like Ted Bundy, Mark Hofmann, Ronnie Lee Gardner, Arthur Gary Bishop, Ervil LeBaron, Joseph Paul Franklin, Mark Hacking, Curtis Allgier and dozens of others.
But perhaps more important, friends and co-workers say Stott, 71, is more than just a great prosecutor. Along the way, he mentored younger prosecutors, gained the respect of those he engaged with through a humble, even-tempered personality and built a career focused on doing what was right in the pursuit of justice.
“The problem today is that the district attorney’s office, the state of Utah and the judicial system loses a leveling influence in this county that they have not had or will not have with you not there,” Ron Yengich, a prominent Salt Lake attorney who has often defended clients Stott was prosecuting, said at a recent retirement ceremony in Stott’s honor.
“We’re at a loss today, Bob, because you are everything it means to me to be a great lawyer and a great prosecutor.”
For 40 years, Stott prosecuted some of the most difficult and high-profile cases in Salt Lake County, working almost solely on murder and capital punishment cases.
“When you think about sort of the history of criminal justice and prominent cases in our history and our community … there isn’t a major case in which Bob didn’t either play a direct role or has had significance there in terms of guidance, giving support, giving a word of encouragement, helping to process that case,” Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said.
“It is a tremendous body of work in terms of his legacy and the contributions he has made.”
From his start at the then-Salt Lake County Attorney's Office in 1975 through his retirement at the end of January, Stott could be found guiding murder cases through the court system with his expertise and trademark, straightforward style.
Childhood dream
As a young boy, Stott said his mother would bring him to Salt Lake City from their home in Pleasant Grove to do some Christmas shopping. In wonder, he recalled taking in the grandeur of what felt like a metropolis. He was in awe of the well-dressed men and women who seemed to be quickly moving to important places.
“And I kind of half wished, 'Wow, wouldn’t it be something if some day I could walk the streets of Salt Lake and I could have an important job and I could meet with important people?'” Stott recalled. “That came true and for many years I walked the sidewalks of Salt Lake and I met with important people and I had important things to discuss.”
But his storied career started simply, when childhood interest combined with the desire to be able to best his older brother.
“I always wanted to be a lawyer,” Stott said. “I guess watching television and movies and reading books, I just felt that was where I wanted to go. And another reason was, I had an older brother who was big and strong, and so whenever we had a disagreement, if it got to be physical, he won. I figured, 'Why don’t I see if I can just out argue him, out-talk him?' So that kind of led me to thinking about arguments and counseling and being a lawyer.”
He attended BYU as an undergraduate before moving on to the University of Utah for law school, graduating with a law degree in 1971. Within a month, he was graduated, married and working as a clerk for a district court judge in Clark County, Nevada.
He spent the next three years after that working as a public defender in Las Vegas. It was a job he had wanted since graduating, fueled by an “idealistic viewpoint” that there was corruption in the system that needed to be corrected.
“And then after three years of defending, I realized that that just wasn’t the case,” he said. “I was a defense attorney for three years and represented hundreds of people for jaywalking to murder and, I’ll tell you, as I look over those defendants and those cases, there wasn’t one case where I could say this guy was innocent and was wrongly convicted.”
So when he learned some funding for a career criminals program had opened up positions for both legal defenders and prosecutors in Salt Lake County, Stott applied for both, feeling strongly about wanting to continue in the criminal justice system.
“I always enjoyed being in the courtroom,” he said. “I loved the battles that occurred back and forth, the test of your intellect, the test of your ability to argue. It’s a great experience to be in a courtroom and to be able to present yourself and present an argument and see the results of those arguments, the results of the case that you’ve prepared.”
He was offered a position in the Salt Lake County Attorney’s Office and was surprised how easily he made the transition from defense to prosecution.
“I don’t think I could have done it until I had the actual experience of representing defendants and then I saw that I could easily go to the other side,” Stott said.
First prosecution
One thing he appreciated about the switch was the ability it gave him to have more control over the cases he handled and make decisions about where they would go. It was something he came to value even more early on, when his first case seemed like it would result in an easy conviction but ended in a dismissal.
It was an aggravated robbery, Stott said. The victim was a convenience store clerk and a strong witness who had clearly identified the defendant during a previous hearing as the man who had threatened and robbed her. But then the investigating officer came back to Stott and said he had been reading reports from other jurisdictions, found a similar robbery and discovered that the suspect in that case looked a lot like the defendant in Stott’s case.
The officer interviewed that man and he eventually copped to the robbery Stott had been prosecuting.
“And so I ended up dismissing the case, because we had the wrong guy,” Stott recalled. “That was a lesson to me. At first, I was kind of dejected, because, 'Hey, I’m going to lose my first case. That’s not a good way to start off.' But then I realized (it was) a great way to start off, because I was actually performing a great role. I was helping make sure that justice was achieved in this area, because my job was not to convict people, but to convict the right person.”
Yengich said Stott is a man who understands the power that a prosecutor has and was always willing to listen to defense attorneys. He said Stott never put ego before doing what was right.
“It wasn’t ever about Robert Stott,” Yengich said. “It was about justice. It was about fairness. It was about the ability to do what you were asked to do.”
Second District Judge Ernie Jones worked with Stott for 20 years at the county attorney’s office and the two were longtime tennis and racquetball partners. He said Stott’s professionalism and personality gained him the respect of those who worked with him.
“He had that ability to get along with everybody, which is not something you find every day,” Jones said. “Sometimes attorneys have this ability to push your buttons and make things miserable, but he always had this ability to disarm the other side and talk through it without a lot of anger and emotions.”
Jones said he thought Stott’s likability even extended to juries, who Jones said appreciated the way Stott presented a case.
“He never lectured the jury,” the judge said. “He presented the case and let them reach the conclusion. He advocated the position, but he wasn’t overbearing. Some attorneys try to make it about themselves — it’s a game or a show that they put on. The jury wants someone who is going to give them the facts, the evidence and was well prepared and Bob had all those things. … He was there to do his job.”
Stott said he always wanted people to trust that if he was pursuing a case, it was because he truly believed the defendant was guilty and he had the evidence to prove it. He never wanted anything personal or professional to trump justice.
“I think as a prosecutor you’ve got to be guided by this idea and this ideal that justice in the criminal justice system is the most important ideal,” he said. “If you lose that by the desire to look good, the desire to win the case just to win the case, then you’ve really compromised your position as a prosecutor.”
Mark Hofmann case
He was committed to this even in the face of difficult cases, unexpected legal issues and immense pressures. In the Mark Hofmann case, Stott said there was an intense amount of interest surrounding the case.
In 1985, a bomb killed businessman and document collector Steven Christensen. A second bomb later that day killed Kathleen Sheets, the wife of Christensen's former employer. The next day, Hofmann was severely injured when a third bomb exploded in his car. Hofmann was a minor celebrity at the time, known as a man who had discovered many historical Mormon and American documents, signatures, photos and coins.
“We took three months to do the investigation after the murders and people were very upset with us,” Stott said. “There was so much pressure put on my boss and he wanted to file the charges and we weren’t ready. We didn’t have the right amount of evidence and so I resisted and that was an interesting time.”
One thing the prosecution aimed to do was prove that the documents Hofmann had been peddling were false, but some experts were convinced they were authentic and said they would testify on Hofmann’s behalf. Proving they were bogus took time, but prosecutors convinced all of those experts, which Stott said made a large impact on the case.
“That’s the kind of thing we sometimes do and the public doesn’t realize,” he said. “When we’re taking the extra time, we’re making the case much better and much stronger.”
Eventually, Stott and his team zeroed in on Hofmann's motive: a tangled web of lies, debts and forgeries that had made Hofmann feel backed into a corner. He is currently serving a life prison sentence.
It was soon after his start at the county attorney's office that Stott got involved in the aggravated kidnapping case against Ted Bundy. He said David Yocom was handling the case and enlisted Stott’s help, since he was new and didn’t have a large caseload.
“That was the gateway to me being able to be involved in other significant cases,” Stott said.
Early on, he worked on murder cases and if he wasn’t prosecuting the case, he was usually involved with the screening process, when prosecutors work with police to determine whether to file charges and what those charges may be. He eventually found that, especially in the higher-profile cases, there was often a common element.
“The problem with a murder case, and especially a capital case, is all the pressure that everyone is under,” Stott said. “There’s much more pressure and so people act a little differently and in a more strange manner and you have to understand that and appreciate what you’re going to get into and then work around it and work through it and I always felt that I had a good understanding of that.”
The high-profile cases also had a way of being sidetracked by unusual issues that didn't necessarily relate to the charges. In the Curtis Allgier case, there were a number of motions and hearings about whether the heavily tattooed man should cover with makeup the many tattoos on his face and elsewhere that were inked after the crime to better reflect the way he looked at the time he killed Utah Corrections officer Stephen Anderson.
In the Hofmann case, the Utah Supreme Court ultimately had to rule whether the testimony of a nurse who interacted with Hofmann in the hospital was privileged and therefore inaccessible to police and prosecutors.
"When Hofmann was in the hospital, he called the police and the police rushed up to the hospital and knew that he was going to confess," Stott recalled. "But meanwhile there was a nurse who had talked to Hofmann and then the nurse called his defense attorneys, and so by the time the police got there, the defense attorney had reached Hofmann and had persuaded him to not talk to the police."
Police believed the nurse was a witness and wanted to question her about what Hofmann said, but she refused based on patient-client privilege. Stott said prosecutors weren't sure such a privilege applied, so they investigated, wrote memos and held hearings over the question.
"It went all the way to the (Utah) Supreme Court and in a very surprising resolution the Supreme Court ruled that there was no nursing privilege, but that she was acting for and behalf of the defense and so there was a legal privilege," Stott said. "That was a very strange ruling and one that we never would have anticipated, but what it meant was that we could never interview her and we never did interview her."
'An institution'
Jones said Stott was always respectful and professional regardless of what happened in a case. He never let things ruffle his feathers or get the best of him.
“He was laid back,” Jones said. “He didn’t get too wound up. He was focused on the case, but didn’t get to the point where he was out of control. It was more, this is my job and he put in his eight hours and sometimes more, but he was not a flashy guy and wasn’t in there all about himself.”
Deputy district attorney Vince Meister, who has worked with Stott since Stott handed him a murder case in 1993, said this was something he always admired about the man. Despite the high stakes involved in the cases they worked on, Stott was never disagreeable.
“You didn't see him get angry,” Meister said. “He would raise his voice, he was passionate about whatever it was and he would support what he wanted to do … but it wasn’t an argument. I’ve worked several cases with Bob where we sat and discussed things and say, ‘I want to do this, I don’t know about that’ and we came to an agreement without a lot of consternation. … You get others in the office and it can be fairly heated battles, but you could have civil discussions with him and get to the same point.”
As time passed, Stott’s catalog of cases and experience grew as his personality and reputation saw him evolve into something of an office mentor. It was common to see him in court, even on cases that weren’t his, providing support and guidance to other prosecutors.
It was something his fellow prosecutors welcomed. Deputy district attorney Rob Parrish, who worked with Stott on the homicide team, said Stott would attend trials and offer words of praise and encouragement.
“I really appreciated his insights,” Parrish said. “That’s one thing we’re going to miss, because there’s really nobody else in the office. I keep joking that we should designate his office as the Bob Stott Memorial Suite and somebody should aspire to become that, but none of us are there yet. He’s kind of irreplaceable in that way.”
Gill said when he took over as district attorney in 2010, he told Stott he needed him to stay for the next four years. Gill knew he wanted to start a team that focused on homicides and Stott would be crucial to that team.
“Bob Stott is an institution,” Gill said. “(He) was hands down the best capital prosecutor in Utah, if not the western United States. There was nothing phony or pretentious about him. There was a sense of humility, a sense of competence and confidence in skill. When you have that kind of skill, you don’t need bravado.”
There was also Stott’s example, which demonstrated a commitment to doing the right thing. His colleagues within the justice system, including those in the district attorney’s office and outside of it, repeatedly point to Stott’s strong sense of integrity and ethics.
“He’s a great prosecutor and he has a great knowledge about the law, but the thing I value most about him is, if you have an ethical dilemma, go talk to Bob,” deputy district attorney Fred Burmester said. “His standards are so high — you can never go wrong in talking to Bob.”
Stott said the role of ethics in prosecution was always obvious to him.
“That’s the role of the prosecutor,” he said. “We’ve got to do the right thing, we’ve got to do the ethical thing, we’ve got to be concerned that the right person is prosecuted and if a person is prosecuted that didn’t do it, then we’ve got to make sure that the person is discharged from the crime. … I’ve always taught that being ethical is the most important part of being a prosecutor.”
Family
Stott was much more than a prosecutor, though, as he raised six children with his wife, Deanie. Stott’s daughter, Jenna Riggs, said her father usually made it home by 5:30 p.m. and was able to leave whatever stress and sadness that came with his job at the door.
“Dad was successful in giving time to his family, never making us feel second to his job,” she said. “Even though Dad has seen a great deal of despicable human behavior, he always managed to stay on the sunny side of life, never letting paranoia or depression overcloud his judgment.”
She said he has been an involved father who coached T-ball teams and developed an impressive talent for pie making. She admires the way he balanced his career with family life.
He said he wanted to be a present father and husband and was able to turn off the heaviness of his work when he came home. When he was prosecuting the case of Arthur Gary Bishop — a man who would later be executed for sexually abusing and murdering five young boys — one of Stott's own sons was the same age of some of Bishop's young victims.
His wife wondered how he could handle that case without breaking down because of that connection.
"Of course I knew I had a boy that age and, of course, I was so appreciative that my boy wasn’t involved, but I didn’t bring it home," Stott said. "When you’re involved in these kinds of cases on a regular basis, you have to develop the ability to not let them linger with you off the job, because if you don't, then it’s 24 hours a day and that’s no good."
He said he thinks most who regularly work on these types of cases learn to compartmentalize work and personal life.
"When they're at the office working, then they're thinking about the case, then they’re assessing the case. … If they have any feelings about it, that’s when you feel them," he said. "But when they get home, they shut it off because it’s time to shut it off. You have to have a break, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to last very long in the office."
He knew early on he didn't want to sacrifice his home life for his career. He said that in law school they reiterated that lawyers needed to invest all of their time, efforts and thoughts into their work.
“In other words, it’s not as important to be a family guy or to be involved in your community, you had to spend all your time at your office,” Stott said. “I soon learned that wasn’t something I wanted to do. That wasn’t a good life. So as a prosecutor, except when I was working on a big case, I could come home after eight hours on the job and I could forget the job and could be involved with my family and to me that’s a much better career than this idea than you spend 24 hours at the law office.”
Now, he said he plans to spend his retirement volunteering, perhaps serving a local service mission with his wife for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s a fitting continuation of the 40 years he’s spent as a public servant.
“There’s so many factors involved in the appreciation of your work and I think one is that you’ve just got to be thrilled with your work and challenged by your work and I’ve always found that I’m challenged with what I was doing,” Stott said. “But the other thing is you’ve got to be able to feel like you’re accomplishing something and not just accomplishing something for yourself, but for other people. You have to be able to say, ‘Yes. My job is important in society or for other people,’ and I felt like what I was doing was important for other people.
“There were hundreds and thousands of victims that I was involved with and my job was to help them in the most devastating time in their life. … What made my job so special, was that I was able to help them search and sometimes achieve justice for them.”
Email: emorgan@deseretnews.com, Twitter: DNewsCrimeTeam