November 26, 2025 — Ralph Leroy Menzies, a Utah inmate who had been removed from an imminent execution after developing dementia, died Wednesday of apparent natural causes, the Utah Department of Corrections announced.
Menzies, 67, died at 1:45 p.m. local time at a hospital. Officials said his next of kin and the family of Maurine Hunsaker, the woman he was convicted of abducting and killing in 1986, have been notified. The department declined to release additional details about his medical condition.
Menzies had been scheduled to die by firing squad in September, but the Utah Supreme Court in August blocked the execution after his attorneys argued his dementia had progressed to the point that he was not competent for execution. A judge had set a new competency hearing for mid-December to reassess his mental state.
Menzies was convicted in 1988 of abducting and killing Hunsaker, a 26-year-old mother of three who worked at a convenience store near Salt Lake City. Police say Hunsaker was taken from the store on Feb. 23, 1986; she called her husband to say she had been robbed and kidnapped and that her abductor intended to release her. Two days later a hiker found her body at a picnic area in Big Cottonwood Canyon about 16 miles away. Authorities reported she had been strangled and her throat was slashed.
Investigators say Hunsaker’s thumbprint was found in a car Menzies was driving, her purse was recovered in his apartment, and he had her wallet and other belongings when he was jailed on unrelated charges.
Utah Attorney General Derek Brown said Hunsaker was a cherished wife and mother whose life was stolen in a horrific act, and that the state had long sought justice on behalf of her family.
Menzies had chosen the firing squad decades earlier when offered execution methods. Had the execution proceeded, he would have been the seventh person in the United States put to death by firing squad since 1977. Utah has not carried out a firing-squad execution since Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010; the state’s most recent execution, by lethal injection, occurred just over a year ago.
In a statement, Menzies’ legal team said they were grateful he died naturally and that he retained his spiritedness and dignity until the end.
Separately, the item noted growing use of firing squads this year elsewhere: earlier this month South Carolina executed Stephen Bryant, 44, in a case prosecutors say involved the 2004 killing of Willard “TJ” Tietjen. Bryant was reported to be the third man this year in South Carolina to be executed by firing squad after the state adopted that option; in March it carried out the nation’s first firing-squad execution in 15 years amid difficulties obtaining lethal-injection drugs.