Menzies is competent to be executed for women's murder in 1986, judge rules

Ralph Leroy Menzies is mentally competent enough to face execution for the 1986 kidnapping and killing of a Utah woman, a state judge has ruled.

The ruling from 3rd District Judge Matthew Bates late Friday afternoon said that Menzies’s attorneys have not proven that the 67-year-old killer is too mentally impaired to be executed.

“Although Menzies has shown he has vascular dementia, he has not shown by a preponderance of the evidence that his mental condition prevents him from reaching a rational understanding of the punishment or the State’s reasons for it,” Bates wrote in his order.

Menzies was first sentenced to die in 1988, after a jury found him guilty of killing Maurine Hunsaker. Menzies kidnapped Hunsaker from a Kearns gas station, slit her throat and left her body tied to a tree