In the legal tug of war over Utah’s impending execution by firing squad, there’s a name that has not been uttered with the same frequency as the condemned: Maurine Hunsaker.
Her family has waited for 39 years for justice to be done. In July, during a court hearing where lawyers for her convicted killer were asking a judge for another competency evaluation, those frustrations started to boil over for her son, Matt Hunsaker.
“This is the first hearing I've heard my mom's name, and her addressed that much, in decades,” he testified in court. “Decades. This is the first hearing.”
Hunsaker’s family got another opportunity to tell her story — and say her name — as they were given time on the final day of the commutation hearings for Ralph Menzies. The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole heard two days of testimony as they weigh whether to commute his sentence to life in prison with no chance of parole or continue with his Sept. 5 execution.
Speaking during the hearing, Launi Stone, victim advocate for the Utah Crime Victims Legal Clinic, said it was time to change focus.
“Throughout the long history of this case, the focus has often been on anything and everything, but what it should have been, and that is Maurine Hunsaker and the family that she was forced to leave behind.”
Maurine Hunsaker was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1959 to Neiland and Betty Forschen. Her obituary remembered her as an active Latter-day Saint and a loving wife and mother. She and her husband Jim married in February 1984 and lived in Kearns. Maurine was mother to three children, ages 10 years to six months — Matt, Nicholas and Dana — as well as step-son Kris.
Maurine’s older sister, Carol Sommer, told the parole board that her sister was “a person who gave herself to her family and her community without a thought or care.”
“That's the way she was,” Sommer said. “She was beautiful and special in every way.”
On the night of Feb. 23, 1986, Maurine Hunsaker was 26 years old and working as a gas station cashier. She was kidnapped from work. She was allowed to call her family to tell them what was happening, but that she would be coming home. A hiker found her body two days later at the Storm Mountain Picnic Area in Big Cottonwood Canyon.
Hunsaker’s daughter, Dana Stinson, was six months old when her mother was murdered. She said she never got the chance to know her, and memories of her mom come from court cases and the news.
“I'll never be able to call her when I'm having a bad day. I'll never hear her say that she's proud of me and that I'll be OK,” she said. “My children will never know their grandmother, and I have no memories I can share with them except my pain.”
Still, through reading her mom’s old journal entries, Stinson said she knows how much she loved her.
“There is a diary where she talks about being worried about bills and being able to pay them, and what she's going to do to take care of us. She writes about her worries. As a mother myself, I know this is how she loved me.”
The family was united in their call for the state to go through with the execution. There was no mistaking the grief in the voice of Maurine’s husband, Jim Hunsaker.
“I love that woman with every inch of my body, soul, mind, everything,” he said. “What this man did does not deserve two seconds more to live, not at all.”
Menzies has been in prison for Maurine Hunsaker’s murder for 37 years. He’s now 67 and has been diagnosed with vascular dementia. In June, a Utah judge ruled him competent, and on Aug. 14, he denied a new mental evaluation.
Stinson said the years of waiting turned her life upside down.
“We're asking today that you see the games that have been played for years, my whole life, actually, and not be fooled and to let justice finally be carried out.”
Matt Hunsaker was less measured in his testimony to the board. He said what he had to say “is going to be a little bit more brutal.” Any calls to show Menzies mercy, he said, grant him a privilege Maurine Hunsaker didn’t get.
“This man deserves no mercy,” he said. “He needs to be executed in 21 days. Twenty-one days, Ralph, 21 days. I pray to God, if there's a God, that in 21 days from right now, it's 10:15, your dead body's in a bag.”
Throughout his testimony, though, Matt Hunsaker expressed regard for the defense team, including attorney Eric Zuckerman.
“I 100% recognized you using my mom’s name. 100% thank you for that. That is very much appreciated, and I respect you a lot for that.”
In Friday’s closing arguments to the parole board, Zuckerman reiterated their position that Menzies’ dementia has worsened. The death penalty is unnecessary, the attorney said, because his physical and mental state no longer poses a risk to society. Zuckerman also pointed to testimony he argued was perjured before sentencing, which makes the decision to impose death “fundamentally unfair.”
Blake Hills, interim chair of the Board of Pardons and Parole, said they would issue the decision in writing “as soon as practicable.”
Matt Hunsaker, who criticized the board for scheduling the hearing when he had to be out of town for work, asked them to wait until at least Tuesday to release the decision so he would be home with his family.
Ralph Menzies’ defense is also pursuing an appeal with the Utah Supreme Court, which will be heard Aug. 21.
