Details of Bennett’s last days revealed

Bill Gang

Wednesday, July 14, 1999 | 11:41 a.m.

In his final days, an agitated Arthur Bennett lashed out at those around him and the system that was prosecuting him until he finally chose to end it his way, according to Deputy Public Defender Drew Christensen.

Shortly before 11 p.m. Monday, the 45-year-old Marine, who was facing a court-martial today and a murder trial in February, looped a bed sheet around his neck and tied it to an air conditioning vent in his jail cell.

The vent wasn't high enough to hold Bennett's body off the ground, but by lifting his feet, he strangled himself into unconsciousness and eventually death, Christensen said.

Bennett left behind suicide notes denying all of the criminal charges against him, his defense attorney said. The charges include the allegations of sexual misconduct with young girls and the murder charges over the still unidentified body of a man who was burned beyond recognition in an explosion at the defendant's travel trailer at Lake Mead in 1994.

That body mistakenly was believed to have been Bennett's until he surfaced in Utah in 1997 amid new sex crime allegations.

The suicide apparently occurred during about a 10-minute span when Bennett's cellmate at the Clark County Detention Center left their cell.

The cellmate discovered the body and alerted corrections officers, who were unsuccessful in attempts to revive Bennett.

"It sounds like Arthur planned it and when he had private time, he took advantage of it," Christensen said.

"He started losing it during the last several days," the attorney said. "He was getting nervous, less coherent, and lashing out that no one cared about him and that the system he loved had failed him."

Christensen said that Bennett had been getting emotional support from his mother and siblings, but when they were charged criminally by federal authorities last year for taking life insurance money and other death benefits while knowing he was alive, "they cut him off."

Christensen said the pending court-martial weighed heavily on Bennett.

"I think the military was what he really respected -- duty, honor, country," he said. "It was hard for him that he was being prosecuted by his peers in the military."

The faked death in 1994 had let Bennett escape his original court-martial on sexual misconduct charges and provided funds for his family through his life insurance and military death benefits.

When he was arrested, nearly four years later, Bennett denied knowing the identity of the charred remains.

Bennett's sister, Linda Walker, told a military judge that her brother had come to her Cincinnati, Ohio home after the incident and admitted faking his death by using a body stolen from a morgue in San Diego.

But an autopsy on the remains showed soot in the lungs, indicating the person had been alive during the fire.

The remains were initially identified as Bennett from dental records, but the identification by a military dentist had to be made from memory because Bennett's medical records were missing from his file at the Yuma Marine Air Station.

The charred body was buried by the Marines at the Veteran's Cemetery in Boulder City and Walker said she attended services for the brother she knew actually was alive.

The family reunited and with his insurance proceeds moved to Hurricane, Utah, about 125 miles from Las Vegas.

Bennett took the name Joseph Benson and the family lived quietly with their secret.

But Bennett's sexual proclivities proved to be his undoing once again.

In November 1997 Bennett was arrested by Southern Utah authorities on charges he molested three teenage girls, including two of his daughters.

That arrest led Metro detectives and the Marines back to the man they had thought was dead.