Maybe they thought the prosecution would show the community in a negative light. Maybe nobody could really believe a mother who worked as a police dispatcher for St. George would be involved with someone who would hurt her child.

Maybe officials were overwhelmed with the complexity of evidence, all the intricate medical details about Ronnie's brain injuries, the magnitude, when and how they could have happened.

Maybe, too, officials had a hard time resting their case on the work collected by a police chief who'd been in the job only 1 1/2 years. There were four officers on the force at the time.

"I was in way over my head," Chandler said recently. "We had to swim really hard to get this thing done."

But swim he did. With Washington city officer Reed Allsop, who had a 3-year-old child of his own then, Chandler waded through 15-hour days, countless trips between Washington, Utah and Clark County, Nev. He called attorneys at the National Child Abuse Center in Denver for advice about the case.

He interviewed nurses, doctors, witnesses, baby sitters and others that amounted to 2,500 pages of transcripts, testimony and medical records.

Dave Schwendemann and Rob Parrish, who both then worked for the Utah Attorney General's Office in Salt Lake City, took over the case.

When Chandler and officials from the attorney general's office went to arrest Tom DeMille in the early afternoon that summer of 1985, the Washington police chief found the suspect at home.

Jan Davies was there, too, pregnant with another child.

Chandler shook DeMille's hand. "I think you know this is coming. You are under arrest."

DeMille and Jan Davies were married before the trial. Because they were now married, Jan Davies couldn't be forced to testify against her husband in the death of her son.

A jury convicted DeMille of felony second-degree murder.

Today the case is recognized by attorneys and child advocates as a turning point in Utah's history — the first case in Utah to be recognized as a non-accidental trauma child death.

"I didn't know at the time we started that Utah hadn't done much of this kind of prosecution at all," Chandler said. Children with head injuries were presumed to have suffered "accidents." There hadn't been many child homicides in Utah at the time.

"This was the cutting edge," he said.

Rob Parrish, now a guardian ad litem for the state, agrees. The case was the first in which a parent or parent's paramour was charged with — and convicted of — murder in a child's death. Prior to that time, almost all such cases were charged as manslaughter, with much lighter penalties.