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UTAH STATE PRISON — A man who was 17 when he was convicted of killing a Cedar City woman while trying to rob her of drugs and guns, dumping her body and then burning her trailer, had his first parole hearing Tuesday.
Zachary Russell Beatty, 32, was 17 when he and Carl Gary Wilcken, 18, made a plan to rob Cynthia Boggs of drugs and guns in 2001. Beatty pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to five years to life in prison. At the time of their trials, each teen accused the other of being the one who pulled the trigger.
Tuesday, at his first parole hearing before Utah Board of Pardons and Parole member Clark Harms, Beatty said it was Wilcken who pulled the trigger. But he read a letter to the board accepting responsibility for Boggs' death because it was his gun that was used to shoot her, it was his car they used to dump her body a short distance from her trailer, and he knew going into it that there was the potential for someone to get hurt.
"I am ashamed of myself for this and always will be," he said in a recording of the hearing, while also calling himself a "coward."
Beatty said it took him several years after he was sent to prison to fully understand the magnitude of what happened that day. He spent his early years in prison feeling like he was the victim because he was sentenced for murder but didn't actually pull the trigger.
"I was more worried about the consequences I was facing than (about) her," he said.
But after successfully taking several life skills classes while in prison, Beatty said he now thinks about Boggs a lot and what her family is going through.
When asked about that day, Beatty said he and his friends didn't really think about the consequences of their plan.
"I don't know, it was a reactionary thing. I don't think we knew what we were doing," he said. "I think it's a combination of addiction, but also two troubled people who are in a toxic friendship, and we kind of fed off of each other and felt the rules didn't apply to us."
When he was 17, Beatty said he didn't think about what would happen longer than 10 minutes into the future. That lifestyle eventually "snowballed," leading up to the shooting.
Under the current sentencing guidelines, Beatty would be held until at least 2021, Harms told him. He noted that Beatty had made good use of his time while incarcerated. And although it will be up to the full five-member board to decide whether to grant parole, Harms said it was likely they will recommend a new hearing five years from now and look at both his progress and risk assessment then.
"I don't know that it's going to be a life sentence, I don't think so," Harms said.
