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Season Six: Holiday Episode Two (2026)
139 Plays3 days ago
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Transcript
Introduction and Series Context
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:50
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
Unveiling a Forgotten Hostage Crisis
00:00:59
Speaker
It's interesting when I go to do these holiday episodes, the hostage takings. You know, some of the most interesting hostage takings in our history end up being like a paragraph on the internet.
00:01:14
Speaker
And like, that's it. That's like all people talk about. This is one of those cases. But I found it to be a ah pretty fascinating story. This is from 1991. If you go online, I'm sure there's a wiki out there with a paragraph.
00:01:29
Speaker
Probably two of those paragraphs are about the fact that there was a ah movie about this. And i think the movie came out pretty quickly. Like, i think it popped up in, like, 1992.
00:01:42
Speaker
I don't remember the movie about this.
Background of AltaVue Hospital and Sandy, Utah
00:01:44
Speaker
um i don't remember seeing it. I don't know if it's still available. I want to say it was st straight to television, maybe. I definitely don't think it made it to the theater, but it I did like briefly look at it just to see like who all was on there. And it had some big names. But this case is one of those, like it' just so weird at the outset that I wasn't 100% sure like how to tell the story and like have people...
00:02:08
Speaker
understand how it unfolded in real time. But I did find a couple of sources from newspapers.com. The Deseret News covered this a lot. I think the Washington Post ran a short series on it. I didn't like that as much because it was sort of a like glancing overview. It was long, but it wasn't as good. I did read it, but it's not really a source for this particular episode. What I did end up using as a source comes from Robin Apcaria. They wrote a long-form article October 6, 1991. So like, sort of in the shadows of this having happened, and it was published in the Los Angeles Times.
00:02:47
Speaker
it is The title of it was A Web of Terror Survivors of Maternity Ward Siege Try to Understand. And this one is, it's it's pretty cool um from the article.
00:03:01
Speaker
But even though it's a pretty cool article, it is a terrible story. Have you ever heard this before? got ready to talk about it for the show.
00:03:13
Speaker
Okay. This takes place in Salt Lake City, Utah. And it is a very... unusual case of a hostage situation. It takes place in the hospital, which I already kind of gave away. That hospital is AltaVue Hospital in a ah town called Sandy, Utah.
00:03:34
Speaker
And just to kind of set up a little bit of the story, AltaVue Hospital is now part of the Intermountain Healthcare System, which is a not-for-profit healthcare system that has roughly 385 clinics and about 33 hospitals.
Richard Worthington's Motivation and Actions
00:03:54
Speaker
Its headquarters are in Salt Lake City, and and Much later, it ends up merging with a Colorado-based healthcare company, which happens a lot.
00:04:06
Speaker
ah Combined systems end up kind of coming together. It opened its doors in 1982. In December Hospital,
00:04:15
Speaker
this hospital al to view hospital gets an overhaul and it opens what's known as the AltaVue Clinic. And in February of 2019, they complete a $140 million expansion project. ah In 2019, the hospital was named ah by IBM's Watson as one of the top 100 hospitals in the United States.
00:04:39
Speaker
ah That renovation that it got resulted in a brand new emergency department a new inpatient physical therapy space and a rooftop helipad, which i always thought like all hospitals kind of had some way to get uh, a ah helicopter in. And I know that's like wrong to think that way, but I think TV and movies have made me think that way.
00:05:05
Speaker
um As for the town that it's located in, Sandy, Utah, um this is a city that is in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area.
00:05:18
Speaker
The population, according to the 2020 United States Census, was around 100,000 people. It has...
00:05:24
Speaker
it has a very like walkable area. um I thought it was cool. Kind of feels like a village. um There's some cool stories about Sandy, Utah. if If you're into towns and stuff, it's worth reading a little bit about. Salt Lake City is always interesting to me, but that's, that's not really why we're here.
00:05:44
Speaker
ah The reason that we're here is this incident in Outta View Hospital. Now this story, Web of Terror kicks it off for us. and This is how they open. Luella Worthington cannot hold back the tears.
00:05:58
Speaker
Speaking from the Cottonwood Cove trailer court in Murray, a town just minutes away, her voice chokes with emotion as she speaks of her 39-year-old son, Richard Worthington.
00:06:10
Speaker
um He's very loving and he's sorry and he's remorseful, she says. I think that something just went mentally. No one knows exactly what caused with Richard Worthington, a devout Mormon and a 39-year-old father of eight, to snap two weeks ago.
00:06:31
Speaker
Close to midnight on Friday, September 20th, police say that Richard stormed a hospital maternity ward with a handgun, a shotgun, and a bomb powerful enough to blow up half of a city block.
00:06:47
Speaker
Okay. Um... Walking into a hospital with a gun is beyond me. But this guy had strapped together sticks of dynamite and put fuses on them in order to blow up the hospital.
00:07:06
Speaker
So, obviously, he doesn't have great intentions if he's walking in with the shotgun and the revolver. I find it interesting. over and So, the beginning of what you just said, it There was no reason, there was no way to tell what the reason was or something to that effect. are they're They're just right doing it from the perspective of as it was happening, right?
00:07:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. That's why I was saying it's difficult because it turns out to be such a strange thing. um It's difficult to tell the story in an order that that like you understand what was happening.
00:07:44
Speaker
But you've got this guy. he he goes into the women's center at the Alta View Hospital. He's heavily armed. And immediately he starts taking hostages.
00:07:55
Speaker
um He grabs two nurses, a patient giving birth, her sister and the baby's father, and he grabs two newborn babies. So that's a lot. It is a lot, and it's not...
00:08:13
Speaker
it It goes back to you know what we talked about in some of the other episodes where you're grabbing like a woman in labor, really? And newborn babies, really? Because he wants somebody to listen to him, right?
00:08:27
Speaker
More than likely about something that like there's nothing nobody can do about.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, and not only that, like this ah this situation that he creates in 1991, it is going to spiral on for another 31 years.
00:08:47
Speaker
And he doesn't, he has no way of knowing that that's going to happen. This hostage taking is going to last 18
00:08:57
Speaker
Now, the the nurse, one of the nurses that he grabs is a woman named Carla Roth. She herself is the mother of four children. And according to ah the stories I was able to find, her husband, David Roth, and Carla, they were planning on having one more kid.
00:09:14
Speaker
So they were going to start trying um a little later on in the year having a kid. Now, Kristen Downey, she's 19 years old at the time. She's in the hospital to deliver her first baby, which I think we can all agree that a baby's birth is stressful.
00:09:35
Speaker
Whether it's stressful from the perspective of like just emotionally taxing, the changes it creates in people's lifestyle, let alone if there's some kind of physical thing going on that happens.
00:09:49
Speaker
But i would you agree that, like, birth is, like, kind topic? would. In fact, I am very surprised that somebody didn't take his dynamite and shove it.
00:10:02
Speaker
Like, really, that's how stressful it is. Like, you would literally push back against any sort of anything, right?
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah. The other nurse, we've got Carla Roth on the one hand, the other nurse is named Susan Woolley, and she is here with Kristen Downey to help deliver this baby during this ordeal.
00:10:24
Speaker
Another nurse, Margie Weiler, she manages to talk to Richard Worthington a little later on. So,
00:10:37
Speaker
these One of the things I mentioned was there's these two newborn babies that end up becoming part of this hostage situation. And I cannot imagine what they're...
00:10:48
Speaker
mothers and potentially fathers were feeling knowing that like we have this 18-hour siege happening and they cannot get their hands on their behalf. According to the LA Times article it said more than just the immediate players end up consumed by this drama, the entire community was reeling from the events.
00:11:06
Speaker
Sandy is 15 miles south of the Utah capital. It's a town knit by common religious beliefs and strong family values. Its residents were coming to terms with how a man, considered by many to be industrious, devout, and kind, could end up sacrificing everything that he held dear to enact an incomprehensible scheme of revenge.
00:11:32
Speaker
Could a father of eight really snap? Now, Margie Weiler, she's the 37-year-old labor and delivery nurse who, according to all the accounts afterwards, she thought that she was going to die.
00:11:45
Speaker
But death was not the worst thought that she had. and What terrified her was the thought of leaving her 11
Negotiations and Police Response
00:11:52
Speaker
children motherly. One of the things about this story that stands out to me is, like, I have one kid.
00:12:00
Speaker
All of these people involved in this story, for the most part, except for the very young people who are just starting on this path, have so many children. Like Richard Worthington has eight kids.
00:12:12
Speaker
You have multiple kids with ah Nurse Roth, and then you've Nurse Weiler, who has 11 children. That's not uncommon for Mormon families, right?
00:12:23
Speaker
ah you but From what I've read, that appears to be the case. Margie Weiler's youngest kid is a baby named Katie. At the time all this is happening, that little baby is six months old.
00:12:35
Speaker
Richard Worthington comes crashing into this woman's center. This woman's center is usually pretty quiet. It has private rooms. And then there's a nursery that is like tied to the nursing station.
00:12:49
Speaker
And according to Margie Weiler, she was attending to Krista, who was about to give birth. Now, in the room, and I don't know how to pronounce this, i'm going to say Carrie, but it's spelled C-A-R-R-E.
00:13:03
Speaker
Carrie is there, and that is young mom, the 19-year-old sister. um Also there is Adam Cisneros. By all accounts, he is her boyfriend and also the father to the baby that's being born.
00:13:20
Speaker
The man that is about to assist in this birth, his name is Dr. Glade Curtis. And at this point in time, he's not in the room. But from inside this room, Margie Weiler hears a man screaming obscenities coming down the hallway.
00:13:37
Speaker
And she says that the way he was talking and the volume of his voice didn't really leave any room for what was happening. She knew pretty instantly that someone was irate and that they were there to cause some level of mayhem.
00:13:56
Speaker
Now, Brian Louder is a newborn. His mom is Jay Louder. He had just been wheeled into the hallway by one of the nurses when she hears this commotion.
00:14:11
Speaker
So Jay Louder, like her first instincts were, I've got to go get my son. ah Jay Louder was 35 years old. She said, the door to my room ah made a lot of noise when it was opened. And she thought,
00:14:25
Speaker
like that would draw attention, but I heard the man yell, get the baby in the room, and then I heard him shoot. Now, Brian Lauder stopped crying at this time, and Jay felt certain that her baby was dead.
00:14:42
Speaker
In just a few moments, Richard Worthington makes it abundantly clear to everyone in earshot that he is looking for Glade Curtis. Glade Curtis was the doctor who had tended to Richard Worthington's wife after the birth of their seventh son.
00:15:05
Speaker
They have us so eight surviving children from two 17 at this time, but they had two girls who had died shortly after their birth.
00:15:18
Speaker
And one of the things that happens when you have a very traumatic experience giving birth is sometimes a tubal ligation is recommended in order to save the mom's life.
00:15:35
Speaker
Are you familiar with the concept of tubal ligation? Yes, it's keep them from bleeding to death.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah. So ah the tube ligation, for those of you at home, this you know if you're squeamish, this is your warning. um It's commonly known as having one's tubes tied. It is frequently referred to as female sterilization.
00:15:57
Speaker
It is primarily used to prevent a patient from having a spontaneous pregnancy. So a spontaneous pregnancy is a pregnancy where people have sex and a baby comes from it.
00:16:11
Speaker
as opposed to a pregnancy where you're going through in vitro fertilization and you have ah embryos implanted in your womb. So there are multiple ways to get to this. You could have a hysterectomy, you could have an oophorectomy. So hysterectomy is when the womb is removed or the uterus. um An oophorectomy Depending on if it's bilateral or not, it's when an ovary or both ovaries are removed.
00:16:42
Speaker
um But all of these things are much more stressful on a woman's body and carry much greater health risk than just doing a tuba ligation.
00:16:54
Speaker
um It's thought to be one of those things that's 99% effective at preventing pregnancy. So in this instance, it basically meant that Karen Worthington would not be having any more children.
00:17:10
Speaker
So... It's believed now that this was Richard Worthington's motive, that Glade Curtis, the doctor involved, had had performed this tubal ligation on Karen Worthington, and it was distressing to him.
00:17:27
Speaker
According to neighbors, family, friends, they say that it caused Richard Worthington to threaten divorce and also to threaten suicide. He came to believe, based on conversations with his wife, which I cannot imagine the conversations she was having to have with her husband, that Dr. Glade Curtis had performed this operation on her while she was asleep. And he somehow got the impression that it had been performed without her knowledge and without her thesis. It would have had to have been an extreme emergency that was addressed beforehand.
00:18:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm pretty sure. i trying to think of a scenario where he would have had have been the one to make the call and maybe he didn't understand it. But for the most part, when you go in to give birth, there are a lot of disclaimers. And today that comes to us in the form of paperwork But it usually comes from like a communicative. Well, a doctor, a nurse, somebody. Yeah.
00:18:32
Speaker
You have an idea of what's going to happen. And I remember being in the hospital for the birth of my child, which you were also there. um it was a relatively stressful situation because of some things that went on, but people were finally talking. Like they had talked to us beforehand.
00:18:53
Speaker
The birth happened. um The kid's mom wasn't doing great, but she was okay. It was actually my kid who ended up having to go into ah the intensive care unit or the knee cue.
00:19:08
Speaker
And they did start talking again, but in the moment, I don't remember them saying anything specific, and it was kind of scary. But I don't think they would have performed any procedures without informing that. I don't think that it was done without somebody's knowledge unless it was an extreme emergency. The doctor didn't do it for fun. The other thing would be, you know, and I'm not saying it happened in this case, but sometimes when you have a lot of babies and you might need a break, you ask for it.
00:19:45
Speaker
ah um Yeah, I mean, like, i can imagine that seven or eight kids and having lost a couple of kids would be a situation where that would be kind of appropriate. and you know, like from my understanding, ah people who are Mormons, their religious beliefs are,
00:20:11
Speaker
ah children weigh heavily into how much they are blessed by God. And so okay in effect, the doctor had committed a an action that would indirectly affect his ability to please God and to receive blessings, right?
00:20:38
Speaker
Yeah, i you know I get a little confused by that, and i it's i'm I'm loosely familiar with what you are saying, but I do not understand the basis for it, and I don't think it would spill over into a threat to a woman's health or bodily well autonomy.
00:20:59
Speaker
It shouldn't, or but i can absolutely see. I completely knew exactly what the problem was um because he should have been. i have i it Now, it's possible he didn't know, but she knew probably.
00:21:19
Speaker
Well, i I would hope that she knew. It wouldn't be the first time a woman has asked for something like that without her husband's consent. You know, men aren't the ones who have to go through labor and be pregnant for nine months, you know.
00:21:37
Speaker
And it can, I cannot, I have one child, okay? I cannot imagine going through that. Oh my gosh, no. i Never. i would never go through that. I would die before I went through that 10 times.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, and so I think there's probably a relative amount of stress being put on this woman. They're also 39 years old, um or he's 39 years old. So I'm guessing she's somewhere close in age to him. And she could be younger.
00:22:11
Speaker
But that's a lot of kids. That is no break. All you've really been doing is being pregnant and then caring for children ah for the last 20 years.
00:22:24
Speaker
um According to the nurses, Richard Worthington yelled at the at them that, quote, those doctors raped my wife.
00:22:35
Speaker
Get Dr. Curtis in here. I'm going to die and you're all going to die with me. So again, this guy has a shotgun. He has handgun and he has a bomb that is made out of 42 sticks of dynamite.
00:22:55
Speaker
And he doesn't have a good grasp on reality.
00:23:00
Speaker
yeah Yeah, he's right. He's not in an emotionally sound place. And like you said, it does not seem to have a very good grasp on reality. But 42 sticks of dynamite is a huge amount of dynamite.
00:23:16
Speaker
I've read... ah like a kind a anecdotal reference to this being able to take out half a city block in one of these articles. I'm just going to go ahead and throw out, I think it's more than that.
00:23:28
Speaker
And I know it would definitely destroy the hospital for 42 sticks of dynamite to go off. I'm just not sure how the placement of it all, like in like one guy having one bomb, i'm not sure the effect it would have, but it would leave a giant. don't want that to happen at all.
00:23:46
Speaker
Now, right. So for Dr. Glade Curtis's part, he managed to slip into one of the offices in the ward. And while Richard Worthington is distracted trying to get all the hostages together and screaming and yelling and making threats, he calls 911.
00:24:06
Speaker
He and another nurse, so that's Dr. Curtis and another nurse, they're able to scoop up several newborns and to put them into bassinets, like the rolling bassinets, and they get those newborns out of the way of harm and out of the women's center.
00:24:25
Speaker
So according to Nurse Weiler, she said she felt very strongly that if Dr. Curtis had come into the room at that time, everyone would have died. And she felt like the very best thing that he could do was to stay out of it, which he did.
00:24:42
Speaker
So we have Richard Worthington grabbing these nurses. He ends up with Carla Roth often and Susan Woolley. He takes them down a stairwell at gunpoint and out onto a sidewalk in front of the Women's Center.
00:24:56
Speaker
This is going to be a little later on. At this point, Carla Roth goes to grab the.357 Magnum. And there's a struggle over this gun. This is according to the police reports after the fact.
00:25:09
Speaker
And he shoots her. And the bullet ah goes into her chest and pierces her aorta and is a fatal wound. At this point, Richard Worthington pulls Susan Woolley back into the building.
00:25:25
Speaker
And according to Margie Weiler, he blames Carla Roth's death on Carla Roth, saying she had to push it and she had to be a, quote, Rambo. So according to Carla Roth, um her husband, David, says that she was a very strong person and she was stubborn. And I think he mentioned her as being headstrong.
00:25:47
Speaker
But he says, I just knew that she would have tried to stop him or to jump him. She could not have lived with herself. If she had not tried. And that's interesting to me because I think of nurses that way quite a bit. i don't know what you think of. like Yeah, they're feisty. I don't know. Like, I feel like it, I don't know if it was desperation. I don't know if she thought, I don't know. The gun was the only thing between them being hostages and not being hostages. Right. Right.
00:26:16
Speaker
And so i don't know that I would have gone for the gun, but whatever. i mean, that's what happened. And she was probably, you know, especially when there's other people involved too, right? Because then you, I think it would be in the nurse's inclination to try and protect the other people, right? Yeah.
00:26:36
Speaker
I think she was trying to put a stop to it and she had more confidence than she was able to carry out, but it was a valiant effort. it She unfortunately died though.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah, she did. And it it is an incredibly tragic death um in the middle of circumstances that are quite bizarre. um By the time she had died, Police had already secured the primary hospital, which is, it is connected to the Women's Center, but it is a separate place. So you have to walk across a second story skywalk to get from the main hospital into the Women's Center if you don't come in at the ground level.
00:27:16
Speaker
And police had set up a command center that by the time all of this is over, it's going to have about 10 law enforcement agencies involved. um They have SWAT teams that are there, they have apparently brought in some negotiators, and they've brought in some version of a bomb squad that seems to be made up of locals and at least a couple of people from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or the ATF.
00:27:40
Speaker
Now, very early on, Richard Worthington instructs Nurse Weiler to call home, to call his wife. And according to her, she she said she called and she said, Karen, this is Margie down at Altaview. Your husband's here and he is holding us with a gun.
00:27:57
Speaker
And the other side of the conversation, according to the nurse, i Karen says, I'm so sorry. i knew 45 minutes ago and I should have called the police then.
00:28:10
Speaker
Now we're going to hear later on that he had been threatening to do this and threatening to do this, but he had finally just died down each time. That's according to nurse Weiler. And that's according to Karen.
00:28:23
Speaker
And Nurse Weiler says that she believes Karen Worthington was just hoping nothing would come out of her husband and that it was all going to be kind of blown over. It's like him blowing smoke to get his frustration at this situation out.
00:28:40
Speaker
ah The LA Times does point out that Karen and Richard Worthington ah declined to be interviewed for this particular article, and Glade Curtis did not have anything to do this article. So they're developing this from the other folks.
00:28:53
Speaker
Now, at some point, Richard Worthington sends the boyfriend, Adam Sisterrose, outside to retrieve the bomb, the 42 sticks of dynamite, from some bushes where he had stashed it.
00:29:08
Speaker
So he's in here, and I guess he's not carried the bomb in with him. He's carried these guns in there. But he's pointing at Adam Cisneros' girlfriend's swollen stomach because she's about to have a baby.
00:29:24
Speaker
And he's threatening to shoot her if Adam does not come back in immediately. Adam goes down. he gets the bomb. And police are trying to stop him from going back in.
00:29:37
Speaker
But he picks up this bomb and he goes back in believing he really has no choice. So at some point in here, police realize that there is an explosive device, these dynamite sticks, involved.
00:29:51
Speaker
And the hospital officials decide that they're going to evacuate the main portion of the hospital. So they move 30 patients out, none of them are in critical condition, um to be taken to nearby hospitals.
00:30:06
Speaker
But there are patients in the women's center who are basically trapped inside of their rooms. One of those patients is Cindy Adamson. She's 28 years old, and she had given birth to her daughter, Chelsea, by cesarean section.
00:30:21
Speaker
She had just given birth earlier that day, and when she heard what was happening, she called home. um She talked to her parents, and her parents told her they could hear sirens rushing towards the hospital. Over the course of this, um about two in the morning, Cindy Adamson had been on the phone for an hour and a half when suddenly she said, oh my God, and she hung up the phone.
00:30:43
Speaker
Now, She does this because a man with a gun had burst into her room, but it wasn't Richard Worthington. It was a member of one of the SWAT teams who were trying to assist with clearing the women's center.
00:30:56
Speaker
um They had figured out Richard Worthington's position by this point, and they were essentially coming to Cindy Adamson's and her daughter ah rescue. Now,
00:31:09
Speaker
Multiple men were bursting into different rooms. ah They had their pistols drawn. And when they get into the room where Mrs. Louder is, that's going to be ah Brian's mother, ah she panics.
00:31:28
Speaker
And... She doesn't realize who they are Seeing them there, she presses herself against the wall, and she thinks they're going to shoot them. But instead, one of them looks at her and says, let's go.
00:31:41
Speaker
he grabs her hand, and then she realizes that these are like law enforcement. She said her legs collapsed, and she was going to spend a another seven hours wondering what had happened to her son, Brian.
00:31:57
Speaker
And she does end up finding out early Saturday morning, about seven hours after these SWAT team clearances, that the hostages are going to confirm that Brian's alive.
Surrender and Aftermath
00:32:09
Speaker
Now, there is another hospital nearby called Cottonwood Hospital. It's in Murray, Utah. And it's part of the same network of hospitals as AltaVue. And they're going to be in charge of taking in some of the patients who are being evacuated.
00:32:23
Speaker
And Douglas Fonsbach, he comments for the article. He says, I chose at this point to operate in a form of love and concern. It was the same thing with the the hostages. They used the same strategy, and that was, let's not overreact. Let's not panic. Let's just deal with what's happening in front of us. which is a pretty good strategy in most situations.
00:32:43
Speaker
And I'm sure that a woman's center where women come to, in 1991, after nine years of being open, give birth, the staff is used to dealing with a lot of emotional things that happen.
00:32:58
Speaker
um Because I would say,
00:33:02
Speaker
depending on the percentage of mortality in the hospital, they've probably seen their fair share of emergency situations that didn't turn out so great and the reactions that families potentially have. So everyone is concerned about the different families here. They're they're also, they're they're concerned about the hostage taker.
00:33:21
Speaker
And that was interesting to me because Richard Worthington has set himself up to be kind of a victim in this situation, at least from his perspective. From his perspective, yes. But it's, I believe, I don't know how much everybody knows, except he did make some exclamations with regard to what they had done to his wife, right?
00:33:42
Speaker
I'm pretty sure like nobody was really—I don't know if they were getting it all, but he's a victim in his our own mind. But he is sort of missing—well, he's missing a lot of points.
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah. According to the LA Times article, he spoke at length with Margie Weiler. even cut into Margie Weiler talking to her husband on the telephone and said to Margie Weiler's husband that if anything happens to Margie, he should sue the hospital.
00:34:15
Speaker
And according to Margie Weiler's quote that continues in this article, says that Richard Worthington spent a lot of time kind of defending why he was behaving so irrationally.
00:34:25
Speaker
saying things like, if only Dr. Curtis had returned my calls, it's their fault, and nobody said they were sorry, it's not my fault, and you guys are all going to die tonight, and it's their That sounds like a child having a temper tantrum.
00:34:39
Speaker
Right. and Well, according to the administrators that are involved in all of this, Glade Curtis had never heard anything about Richard Worthington or Richard Worthington's wife's surgery after the surgery happened.
00:34:52
Speaker
And... It was said that Richard Worthington made a scene, but not to him. um According to Margie Weiler, she says that Nurse Wooley, who doesn't end up, I don't think she ends up talking to the reporters after all this, but that Nurse Wooley recalled, Susan Wooley recalled, like what had happened afterwards was...
00:35:15
Speaker
Also, like, frightening. um She said that she remembered how irrational he had been at the time, and how badly Karen wanted this tubal ligation, and how Dr. Glade Curtis had said, look, if there's this much discussion about this, I don't feel comfortable doing this.
00:35:32
Speaker
Now, according to Susan, Susan said that Karen came off of the bed, epidural and all, and said, I will have this done. You will not deny me this. Which paints this in a little bit different light for us, doesn't it? It does, but um this is what I kind of figured was happening all along.
00:35:51
Speaker
Right. And so friends and family called Richard Worthington Rick. And according to to everybody involved here, this happening was not the way, quote, Rick remembered it, end quote.
00:36:04
Speaker
And they thought that, like, one of the problems he was having was he just couldn't be angry at his wife. So in her mind, she fell asleep Dr. Curtis did this without her knowledge and her consent, and he doesn't understand that that's just not how medical procedures work, which kind of ties into what we're seeing here because he's clearly irrational. I have no idea idea why she wouldn't want to have any more children with him. Do you?
00:36:35
Speaker
that's that's very That's a very astute observation. So according to the hospital administrators, the comment for this is Worthington had been calling around to physicians, and he had decided that he was going to start to offer his landscaping services for anyone who would reverse his wife's tubal ligation.
00:36:56
Speaker
And even according to them, even if his wife had called one of the doctors and said, I want to reverse it, like she's coming in right away, like to save her marriage, like sometimes this process could be reversed, but like, it's, it's not a thing. Like, it's not a thing that like they're going to do under duress. It's not a thing they're going to trade for landscaping. There's a lot of irrationality and what's happening here.
00:37:24
Speaker
According to a neighbor who lived across the street from them, she tells the Salt Lake Tribune and that gets carried over to the LA times article that Richard Worthington felt that His authority as a family patriarch had been overridden by his wife making this decision.
00:37:41
Speaker
And I say this to say he's aware that his wife did this. He's just not sure how live this. Well, the smart if he wants to play that role, would be to say that he had her do it.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that neighbor even says that later on different people, including Debbie Worthington, who is, if I'm understanding all of this correctly from what I've read on these articles.
00:38:11
Speaker
So Debbie Worthington is Karen's sister, but she's married to Richard's brother, Craig. Yeah, that makes sense sense to me. So they start calling her. Debbie Worthington reprimands her for having talked to the Salt Lake Tribune. She said this was like one of the most depressing situations she'd ever seen unfolding. And she understood the chaos of all of it. But she said the thing was...
00:38:37
Speaker
Rick Worthington was not a monster. He's just a normal person put into a situation that he didn't understand, and for some reason, his mind could not wrap around it. So the landscaping part of all this reveals to us how he gets the dynamite. Because in Utah, if you're a landscaper and you're building rock retaining walls, there's a strong possibility that you could be detonating small amounts of explosives here and there in order to complete your work.
00:39:04
Speaker
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, They report that Richard Worthington and his older children, who were male, to the older boys, had been asked to leave multiple sports leagues because Rick Worthington did not have a good handle on his temper.
00:39:24
Speaker
Even though he's trying to be very controlling over his family, he can't control his own temper. He gets into these confrontations with coaches and officials that ultimately gets him kicked out, which fits this scenario since we have him in here already.
00:39:40
Speaker
With a shotgun, ah a revolver, and ultimately with a bomb. So Kristen Downey, throughout this process, as Richard Worthington is moving his hostages around, he has five adults, he has two babies. He's lost one of his hostages by shooting her.
00:39:59
Speaker
But he moves everybody upstairs to Glade Curtis's third floor office suite. And they wheel up Kristen Downey in a gurney, but the gurney won't fit through the door.
00:40:10
Speaker
So Margie Weiler and Susan Woolley, they grab the sheets on the gurney and they use them as a sling to carry Kristen Downey into the waiting room area. But the big window...
00:40:21
Speaker
Like, so his office is split into portions and there's a big window that sees out into the hallway and it's bothering Richard Worthington. So at three o'clock in the morning, Kristen Downey's epidural is running out.
00:40:36
Speaker
They don't have a way to successfully keep this going for her. She's going to start feeling the pain of labor. So the nurses decide to deliver this baby. There's no equipment. There's no cord clamp. They have none of the things that they would use to deliver the baby.
00:40:51
Speaker
So they just found some scissors. They found a basin to catch the placenta. And according to these nurses, they have the perfect delivery of this baby for the circumstances. so baby Caitlin is born under circumstances that I can only imagine are probably still talked about today.
00:41:13
Speaker
And according to Margie Weiler, she says it was almost silly, but it was a beautiful birth. So hours are passing with phone calls coming in from negotiators speaking to hostages on different phones around the hospital that are connected to this area these areas that they're in. And Richard Worthington won't stop making death threats and neutralize the situation. He doesn't seem to be capable of doing it.
00:41:41
Speaker
But he does start to develop a bond of sort between himself and the people that he has taken hostage. They start talking about their families, and it warms him up when he starts talking to Margie, who talks about her 11 children. and according to her, she said it was incredible. She said, I remember one time it got calmer and quieter, and the other people were asking him questions about his family and his children. And he said, if you think getting me to talk about my family is going to help, it's not.
00:42:11
Speaker
And yet he would still talk about his family and try to carry on normal conversations during all of this. Remember, this is taking place over 18 hours. Sergeant Don Bell of the Salt Lake City Police Department, he takes over negotiations around 10 o'clock in the morning on Saturday.
00:42:26
Speaker
And one of the complications that he faced was knowing that Carla Roth had been killed. So there's been a death, and we know that Richard Worthington is responsible for that death.
00:42:40
Speaker
And you can't negotiate someone out of that kind of death. Yeah, they're going to prison. Yeah, you have now committed a murder on top of the hostage-taking, and you can't you know use all the tools of ah a negotiator when that happens that early into this 18 hours.
00:43:00
Speaker
Right. So... Richard Worthington, around 1 or 1.15 p.m., he stops talking to Sergeant Bell and starts putting ah Carrie and the nurses on the phone to relay messages.
00:43:15
Speaker
And according to Sergeant Bell, he doesn't remember exactly when or how, but they reached a compromise on how he could surrender. And Sergeant Bell says he started to feel okay when this happened, but he had had a terrible foreboding for what was going to go down.
00:43:32
Speaker
And he says at the very end of things, there was still a crazy turn for all of this to take. He said that Margie Weiler was sitting with Richard Worthington at the waiting room slash secretary station in Dr. Glade Curtis's suite.
00:43:47
Speaker
Everyone else was in the doctor's office. And Richard Worthington said, Margie, do you feel like you can talk to me honestly? And Margie said, Rick, I'm very frightened, but yes, I feel like I can talk to you.
00:44:00
Speaker
So Rick Worthington talked to her, and Margie listened. According to her, she says that he talked about how he didn't mean for it to happen this way. that what is this going to do to my kids, their self-esteem? They will never be able to overcome this.
00:44:17
Speaker
He talked about his wife and the fact that now she was going to be financially devastated. He talked about his religion. He talked about how he had blown ah some of the major tenets of his religion, and now he felt like he was going to go to hell.
00:44:33
Speaker
um He called home. He ended up talking to his sister-in-law. He talked to one of his sons. And according to her, Margie, she said he was just sobbing. um he said you used to love me and my still your bud to his sons and he said it was so sad and then he hung up the phone and he said margie you want to walk out of here now he asked her to cut off his little finger and give it to his wife some kind of grand gesture that he was thinking he was making here and margie said that she could not do that she was not gonna
00:45:05
Speaker
cut off his finger and he said, oh hell, let's just get out of here. So the nurse picked up the phone to notify the Sergeant that they were coming out. And guess what happened?
00:45:18
Speaker
They came out. No one answered the phone. Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. So according to bell, He knew something had happened. He said someone had decided they wanted to do something with the phones we were using. So they wanted to change them up and put speakers in the command center. And at some point in doing that, they had accidentally cut the phone line.
00:45:42
Speaker
So without having this phone, ah the only way to communicate was by bullhorn. And communicating two-way with a bullhorn, you had to be close to each other. And he assumed that if the bomb went off, that whoever had the bullhorn and was with him would be hurt. He finally was assured that he wouldn't be hurt. So SWAT scouts on the team, like the reconnaissance guys and the Overwatch guys, they'd take Sergeant Bell up into the second floor of the Women's Center directly below where Rick Worthington would be.
00:46:13
Speaker
and Sergeant Bell says he knew that Rick Worthington should be able to hear him because he's only one floor away. And Bell found a cell phone lying on a couch in one of the empty hospital rooms. He says he just grabbed it and he punched in the office number and Margie picked up.
00:46:31
Speaker
And that's when Margie says to Sergeant Bell, I have been trying to get you on the phone. So... Bell leaves, but he stays on the phone with Margie Weiler.
00:46:42
Speaker
And police have agreed to allow Richard Worthington to disarm. And that's going to be, he's going to hand his guns over to the bishop who is there, this guy named Wayne Mills.
00:46:54
Speaker
And he had been ah with Karen Worthington. And ah Richard was going to be allowed to have a last moment with his wife. And then he was going to give himself up.
00:47:07
Speaker
So the doors swing open, the bishop comes out and Rick Worthington sees the SWAT team outside and loses his mind.
00:47:19
Speaker
So Susan Woolley, one of the other nurses who has that spunk of a nurse, she steps in, Margie Weiler steps in, and and Margie takes Richard, Susan Woolley approaches the police, and Margie is yelling at Bell on the phone, like, to get back, to get back.
00:47:41
Speaker
So somehow, in all of this, Rick Worthington hands the gun back to either Susan Woolley or to Margie Weiler. Both of them remember touching it at some point.
00:47:52
Speaker
It's 5.45 p.m. now on Saturday night, and just like that, the siege is over. About two hours later, they finally get the bomb defused and make it safe.
00:48:06
Speaker
Richard Worthington is taken to the county jail. The hostages are taken over to Cottonwood Hospital where everyone is checked up on and they're given resources to be able to get counseling if they need it.
00:48:22
Speaker
but
00:48:25
Speaker
It doesn't really end there. The tragedy that is happening in the Worthington family is going to take one more turn. 10 o'clock Saturday night, their 16-year-old son, Aaron, is on his motorcycle, blocks from home, not wearing a helmet.
00:48:41
Speaker
And he was either having trouble with his headlight or had not remembered to turn it on. And he broadsides a car. And...
00:48:52
Speaker
He goes into a coma from his injuries. So he has a brain hemorrhage. He has a pelvic fracture. And his left femur ends up broken. Now Sunday, the day after this is all over, Richard Worthington stands on a desk in his jail cell He stiffens his body and he falls backwards attempting to commit suicide. So he's taken off to the mental health facility that is available to detainees. He ends up arraigned on one count of aggravated murder. This is a capital offense, by the way, so he could potentially face a death penalty for this. He also...
00:49:31
Speaker
also hit with attempted criminal homicide charges for his threats on Dr. Glade Curtis, nine counts of aggravated kidnapping, and one count of delivery of an infernal machine.
00:49:44
Speaker
ah The prosecutor at the time, which is several days after the incident, um he announced that he was going to ask the jury to consider the death penalty.
00:49:56
Speaker
So this is sort of a disaster. um Most of the articles that I pulled from kind of stopped covering this case after this happened. They just basically end up being this TV movie and and a paragraph on the internet.
00:50:10
Speaker
um But I will say that he does go to trial. He ends up sentenced to 35 years in prison for the murder of Carlo Roth. And on November 1993, he's
00:50:25
Speaker
Richard Worthington commits suicide in his prison cell. It's ah just a little over two years after this 18-hour siege.
Reflections on Impact and Conclusion
00:50:36
Speaker
In November of 2022, there's a hostage and incident happening in Harriman, Utah, that according to police officers called to the scene, involves a suicidal ban.
00:50:49
Speaker
SWAT are called to the scene. There's an hours-long standoff until the man is identified as Alma Worthington, a Utah National Guard veteran and also the son of Richard Worthington.
00:51:05
Speaker
So they had something wrong with them. Yeah, something going on there. he opened Possibly genetic. Yeah, he opens fire on authorities that are trying to evacuate the neighbors. The SWAT team takes action, and they shoot and kill Alma Worthington.
00:51:21
Speaker
So, you know, it's the holiday season. I don't think this a very good holiday story, but the theme is, like,
00:51:34
Speaker
hostage takings. They do not always have positive endings. No, but you know, what's interesting about this is Karen Worthington knew what she was doing when she asked for that tool ligation.
00:51:46
Speaker
Yeah. I wonder if she had started to see things that had made her wonder how what she'd gotten herself into. Well, based on all of the circumstances, I would say that's highly likely.
00:51:59
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, this is this is absolutely a fascinating story for me. um Like I said, there's a TV movie out there. Harry Hamlin ends up in the TV movie. And I think Terry Quinn or Oakland, the guy from Lost, I can never remember um his last name exactly.
00:52:20
Speaker
ah and Somebody else is in it. playing, think one of the people from MASH is playing the um one of the nurses, probably Margie.
00:52:31
Speaker
But that's out there. I'm sure somebody has put it on YouTube at this point, or you could find it. What did you think of this particular hostage-taking story? Well, all I see is...
00:52:45
Speaker
is How ridiculous it is. It's like this guy took the long way around just to basically commit suicide. Yeah. He took out like a good nurse, right? Well, I i don't actually know much about the victim, but I mean, she didn't deserve what happened to her. Absolutely.
00:53:04
Speaker
And in the meantime, he's mad about... issues that he should have gotten over right he should have appreciated the family he had and you know been happy with whatever life had dealt him or at least deal with it he was trying to get people to do something that like they couldn't do yeah was insane i i feel like it's insane that it was so far-fetched um that I would just have, I don't know. I don't know that I could have taken this seriously if I had been involved in it.
00:53:39
Speaker
Yeah. Like you're going to hold us hostage until what? Your wife's tubal ligation is magically reversed. Like go, go on dude. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's how I would feel about it. So it is a little bit fantastical. Like when you think of it that way, but it really happened. Yeah.
00:54:01
Speaker
Yeah, so this is this you know this is early in our a hostage series for the holidays. ah But you know I hope that people are getting something out of these stories. And i would say my one takeaway was it was interesting that like people were pointing out how they were trying to help Richard Worthington in spite of the fact that he...
00:54:24
Speaker
had a gun and a bomb on them. I mean, that's interesting to me. And that is a, trying to handle somebody with grace under those circumstances is, is fascinating. Yeah, it is. And good for them for doing it. And of course, I'm sure once the nurse had been shot, they were all scared to death. oh yeah.
00:54:46
Speaker
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00:54:58
Speaker
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00:57:02
Speaker
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00:57:20
Speaker
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