Pat Reavy interned with KSL in 1989 and has been a full-time journalist for either KSL or Deseret News since 1991. For the past 25 years, he has worked primarily the cops and courts beat.
SALT LAKE CITY — Stephen Elliard Vargas says he still thinks every day about the crime that sent him to prison 30 years ago, in addition to feeling constant guilt.
"It never goes away," he said Tuesday. "I can't forgive myself, and it probably is never going to happen. "But the daughter of 27-year-old Rebecca "Becky" Vargas — killed by Stephen Vargas more than three decades ago — says he only pretends to sound remorseful and uses words such as "cowardly," "pathetic" and "insignificant" when talking about him, while also calling him a predator.
"You know you are, and I hope that sits with you every day," Madeline "Maddy" Dulebohn said. On Dec. 27, 1995, Vargas bludgeoned his wife to death with a hammer in their Ogden apartment after she told him she wanted a divorce. During his trial, several witnesses testified that Vargas said numerous times he would rather kill his wife than let her leave.
Although he maintained his innocence throughout the trial, Vargas was convicted of murder and sentenced in 1996 to a a term of five years to life in the Utah State Prison. During his first parole hearing in 2016, Vargas admitted that he was responsible for Becky Vargas' death and claimed he was too embarrassed to admit before what he had done.
At that time, the parole board ordered Stephen Vargas to serve 10 more years in prison before another parole hearing was held. On Tuesday, Vargas, now 70, went before the board for the second time. He said jealousy, embarrassment and pride were the reasons he killed his wife.
"They were poor reasons, but those were the reasons at the time," he said. Board member Dan Bokovoy, who conducted Tuesday's hearing, noted that Vargas has had a good discipline record while incarcerated. But both Dulebohn and Sonja Rees — Becky Vargas' mother — strongly encouraged the board not to release him.
Dulebohn says she listened to a recording of Vargas' last parole hearing prior to Tuesday and believed that Vargas was just trying to say what the board wanted to hear because he wants to be released and that his remorse was "forced.
""Quite a show you tried to put on there," she said at one point. Rees says her family still lives in fear 30 years later because of Vargas' actions.
"We all carry the emotional scars of what happened," she told the board. "The fear is not imagined. … We all know what he is capable of. "Both women also noted
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