Man enters guilty plea in teen's death

Parley Jeffs Dutson, who once was found guilty of killing his teenage girlfriend but had the verdict reversed on a technicality, has pleaded guilty to a charge of murder.

Dutson, 21, entered a guilty plea this week to murder, a first-degree felony, for the 2007 shooting death of Kara Hopkins, 15, at a party. As part of a plea bargain, a second charge of aggravated sexual assault, a first-degree felony, was dropped.

Dutson's defense lawyers contend Dutson was high at the time on liquor and a home-brewed tea of psychedelic mushrooms that impaired his judgment to such a degree that he was experiencing a "hallucinatory paranoid and irrational" level of fear and did not intend to kill the girl.

Dutson was accused of trying to force Hopkins to have sex with him, despite the presence of other people. Prosecutors contended Dutson grew enraged when the girl resisted, and he then engaged in a cat-and-mouse game of pointing the gun at the girl as she moved and ducked trying to get away from him, then dropping the gun to his side, only to resume pointing it again.

The girl was shot in the back of the head, and witnesses testified that Dutson was chanting as he knelt next to her nearly naked body.

A jury convicted him on both counts after a four-day trial in 2008.

However, a judge later ruled that Dutson deserved a new trial because one female juror did not disclose during jury selection that she had been a rape victim herself years earlier.

The judge concluded that the omission violated Dutson's constitutional right to a fair trial.

Dutson was described by his lawyer as one of the "Lost Boys" who grew up in the Fundamentalist LDS Church town of Colorado City, Ariz.

Dutson left home at age 16, encountered a difficult life outside the FLDS world and ended up turning to alcohol and drugs.

Dutson is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 9.

— Linda Thomson