Judge says no new trial for Utah death-row inmate Douglas Lovell

An Ogden judge has refused to grant a new trial for Douglas Anderson Lovell, the man recently sentenced to death for the second time in a 1985 murder case.

Second District Judge Michael DiReda ruled Thursday that Lovell's attorneys were mostly rehashing issues that he had already ruled on before the March trial — including allegations that DiReda erred by not allowing Lovell to enter a conditional guilty plea, had prohibited Lovell from reading letters at trial that he had written to the "young men" of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and allowed questionable witness testimony.

DiReda ruled that no errors had been made, and denied the motion for a new trial.

Lovell's attorneys also claimed church lawyers tried to keep out testimony from five ecclesiastical leaders who had interacted with the death row inmate during the last three decades while he has been at the Utah State Prison.

Defense attorney Sean Young claimed in court papers that the church's attorneys sought to limit the testimony to only facts about their involvement with Lovell at the prison, and did not want leaders to solicit any opinions or give any personal insight. This was harmful to Lovell's case, Young claims.

In DiReda's ruling, he did not specifically address these allegations, ruling only that Young's claim — filed in a separate motion weeks after the original motion for a new trial was submitted — was not filed in a timely fashion.

The three church leaders who testified in March all recalled that Lovell was interested in the church, and seemed remorseful for murdering Joyce Yost.

"He never made light," former bishop Gary Webster testified. "He never made fun. He was always concerned about the crime, the impact."

After two weeks of testimony in March in the sentencing phase for Lovell, 12 jurors deliberated for nearly 11 hours over two days before deciding the 57-year-old man should be executed for killing 39-year-old Yost in 1985 to keep her from testifying against him in a rape case.

Following the verdict, DiReda ordered Lovell to die by lethal injection, but immediately stayed the execution pursuant to an automatic review of the case by the Utah Supreme Court.

Lovell had already been sentenced to death once for Yost's murder, but the case came back to the district court on appeal in 2011.

Events leading to Yost's murder began in April 1985, when Lovell followed Yost home from a Clearfield restaurant, kidnapped her from her apartment parking lot and sexually assaulted her in the parking lot and at his home.

After she reported the crime to authorities, Lovell began to plot the woman's death to keep her from testifying at his upcoming trial, according to testimony at Lovell's murder trial. He tried twice to hire men to kill the woman — which failed both times — and then decided to do it himself Aug. 10, 1985.

He kidnapped the woman again from her South Ogden apartment and took her to the mountains east of Ogden, where he strangled her and left her body under handfuls of dirt and leaves.

Yost — whose body has never been found — was considered a missing person for six years until Lovell's ex-wife, Rhonda Buttars, confessed to police what she knew of Yost's death. Buttars agreed to wear a police recording device and captured Lovell confessing to the crime in 1991. Aggravated murder charges were filed against him the following year.

Despite Lovell's efforts to prevent Yost from testifying against him in the rape case, he was convicted by a jury of aggravated kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault in December 1985, with the help of a transcript from Yost's preliminary hearing testimony. Lovell has since been serving a 15-years-to-life term at the Utah State Prison.

Lovell's was the first death penalty case to go to trial in Utah since 2008, when Floyd Eugene Maestas, now 59, was sentenced to die for stomping 72-year-old Donna Lou Bott to death during a 2004 break-in and robbery at her Salt Lake City home.

The next Utah death penalty trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 28 for Brandon Perry Smith, who is accused of killing Jerrica Christensen in a St. George apartment in 2010 to prevent her from testifying about the fatal shooting of another woman moments earlier.

jmiller@sltrib.com