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UTAH STATE PRISON — Walter Andrew White says he knows what he did was wrong.
Ten years ago, he and teen girl he was having an illegal sexual relationship with entered into a suicide pact.
White survived. Sixteen-year-old Samantha Mikesell didn't.
"I accept full responsibility for it," White told a member of the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole on Tuesday in a recorded hearing.
"I wasn't able to show at my sentencing the proper amount of empathy for her family because it was a loss for me, and it was something I was unprepared for and didn't know how to cope with. And in that respect, I disrespected her family and I didn't mean to. It was all my responsibility. It was all my fault," he said.
White was 38 and married with a child when he struck up a relationship with Samantha, who was 15 at the time. Their relationship became sexual, and the two saw each other for about a year before the teen's mother found out what was happening.
On July 6, 2006, "the day everything went bad," as White called it, Samantha's mother told her then 16-year-old daughter that she was sending her to live with her father and was going to call police on White.
"We both panicked. We didn't know what to do," he said. "(Samantha) knew that I would kill myself. Everything just snowballed from there. I got the pills and the alcohol, and we went into the woods and just took the pills. She said, 'If you're ready to go, I'm ready to go.' And that kind of made it a pact."
White said they went to Mueller Park Canyon in Davis County and hiked to an area where they believed they wouldn't be found. White said he took his antidepressant medication first, combined with alcohol, and passed out. But he didn't die.
A toxicology report for Samantha showed she had seven times the legal dose of the drug imipramine in her system when her body was found.
White pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain to second-degree felony child abuse homicide and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. As of Tuesday, he had served 10 years of his sentence.
White said Tuesday that he didn't think Samantha would go through with the suicide pact. Denise Porter, who conducted the parole hearing — White's first since being sentenced to prison — noted that whether White took Samantha to the mountains to either watch him die or to die with him, his "lack of judgment is almost incomprehensible."
"Nothing justified it. Everything that I did was wrong. It was bad judgment. It was the worst judgment," White said.
With the exception of one day of not making his bed, White has not had disciplinary problems while in prison, though he has been on suicide watch, according to Porter.
White was already on the sex offender registry for lewdness involving a child. He also admitted after his arrest to having a sexual relationship with another teen girl.
During Tuesday's hearing, White admitted to being attracted to 15- and 16-year-old girls because he has "a problem trusting adult women."
Those issues arose from being molested as a child, White said, an incident that required him to be hospitalized for more than a month. He was molested again by other family members after being released, he said.
Although White has taken about 30 life skills classes while in prison, Porter said the board would likely require him to enroll in sex offender treatment before considering his release.
White said that's something he's ready to do.
"I've never gone into my past and dealt head-on with all the issues," he said.
