A Web of Terror : Survivors of Seige at Utah Maternity Ward Try to Understand What Made Richard Worthington Do What He Did

SALT LAKE CITY —  Luella Worthington cannot hold back the tears. Speaking from the Cottonwood Cove Trailer Court in Murray, a town just minutes away from here, her voice chokes with emotion as she speaks of her 39-year-old son, Richard.

“He is very loving and sorry and remorseful,” she says. “I think that something just went, mentally.”

No one knows exactly what caused Richard Worthington, a devout Mormon and 39-year-old father of eight, to snap two weeks ago. Close to midnight on Friday, Sept. 20, police say, he stormed a hospital maternity ward with a handgun, a shotgun and a bomb powerful enough to blow up half a city block. He intended to kill the doctor who had performed a tubal ligation on his wife two years ago, because, he said, he had one more baby in heaven waiting to be born.

By the time the siege ended 18 hours later, a nurse lay dead, a baby had been born and two families were shattered.

The slain nurse, Karla Roth, was the mother of four children. Her husband, David, says they, too, wanted one more child and were planning to start trying later this fall.

Nineteen-year-old Christan Downey, in the hospital to deliver her first child, gave birth while a hostage. Nurse Susan Woolley, who had to help deliver the baby, also had to watch Roth die. Margie Wyler, another nurse, managed to gain Worthington’s trust enough to encourage him to surrender. And two mothers who were wrenched from their newborns waited for an unbearable amount of time to find out what had become of their babies.

But more than just the immediate players were consumed by the drama; the entire community reeled from the events. Sandy, 15 miles south of the Utah capital, is a town knit by common religious beliefs and strong family values. Its residents are trying to come to terms with how a man considered by many to be industrious, devout and kind could sacrifice everything he holds dear to enact an incomprehensible scheme of revenge. Could a father of eight really snap because he wanted one more child?

Margie Wyler, a 37-year-old labor and delivery nurse was certain she was a goner. Death wouldn’t be the worst thing, she thought. What terrified her was the thought of leaving her 11 children motherless. Her 6-month-old baby, Katie, would never remember her.

When Worthington came crashing into the hospital’s Women’s Center, with its private rooms and nursery radiating from the nursing station, Wyler was attending Downey, who was about to give birth. At Downey’s side were her boyfriend, Adam Cisneros, and her sister, Carre. Dr. Glade Curtis, the obstetrician whom Worthington had come to kill, had just left the room. Suddenly, a man was screaming obscenities in the hallway. His tone left no doubt: He had come intending mayhem.

Jae Lowder’s newborn, Bryan, had just been wheeled into the hallway by a nurse when she heard the commotion from her bed.

“I thought, ‘I gotta get my son,’ says Lowder, 35. “But the door to my room made noise when it was opened, so that would draw attention. . . . I heard him yell, ‘Get the baby in the room.’ And then I heard him shoot.”

Bryan stopped crying. Lowder felt certain her baby was dead.

In moments, it became clear that Worthington was looking for Curtis, the doctor who had tied his wife’s tubes after the birth of their seventh son. Nathan was the last of Karen Worthington’s eight surviving children who range in age from 2 to 17; two girls died shortly after birth.

The Worthingtons’ neighbors and friends say the tubal ligation was increasingly distressing for Richard. He threatened both divorce and suicide over it. He came to believe that Curtis had performed the operation on his wife without her knowledge or consent--after she had fallen asleep.

“Those doctors raped my wife!” Worthington yelled at the nurses. “Get Dr. Curtis in here! I’m gonna die and you’re all gonna die with me!” He had come to the hospital armed with a shotgun, a .357-caliber handgun and a bomb of 42 sticks of dynamite--big enough, authorities said later, to take out half a city block.

As Worthington rounded up hostages, Curtis managed to slip into an office and dial 911. He and a nurse were able to scoop several newborns into two bassinets and spirit them out of the Women’s Center.

“I feel very strongly that if Dr. Curtis had come into the room, we all would have died,” Margie Wyler says. “The very best thing he could have done was stay out of it.”

Soon after, Worthington grabbed two nurses, Roth and Susan Woolley, and shepherded them at gunpoint down a stairwell and onto a sidewalk in front of the Women’s Center. There was a struggle, police say, during which the 37-year-old Roth tried to grab Worthington’s gun. He shot her, and the bullet pierced her aorta, a fatal wound.

“She had to be a Rambo,” Worthington told Wyler after he forced Woolley back into the Women’s Center. “She had to push it.”

“Karla was a very strong person, headstrong, you might call her stubborn,” says her husband, David. “I just knew that she had tried to stop him or to jump him. She could not have lived with herself if she had not tried.”

“I don’t really have any feelings toward him,” David says. “But I feel deeply sorry for his family.”

‘I Am So Sorry’

By the time Roth died, police had secured the main hospital and set up a command center. The Women’s Center is connected to the hospital by a second-story sky walk. Eventually, 10 law enforcement agencies were involved, including SWAT teams, negotiators and bomb experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Early on, Worthington instructed Wyler to call his wife.

“I said, ‘Karen, this is Margie down at Alta View and your husband is here and he is holding us with a gun.’ ‘I am so sorry,’ she said, ‘I knew 45 minutes ago. I should have called the police then.’ I heard later that he had threatened so many other times before and it had just died down. I think she was hoping nothing would come of it.”

(Karen and Richard Worthington declined to be interviewed, as did Curtis.)

At some point, Worthington sent Adam Cisneros outside to retrieve the bomb from some bushes where he had stashed it. As Cisneros left, Worthington pointed his gun at Downey’s swollen stomach and threated to shoot if Cisneros did not return immediately. Police cried out to Cisneros not to go back, but he did, believing he had no choice.

When police realized there was a bomb, hospital officials decided to evacuate the main building. About 30 patients, none in critical condition, were taken to nearby hospitals. But some patients were trapped in the Women’s Center, cowering in their rooms.

Cindy Adamson, 28, had given birth to daughter Chelsea by Cesarean section that day. When she heard the initial tumult, she called home. Her parents told her they could hear sirens screaming toward the hospital. About 2 a.m., Adamson had been on the phone for an hour and a half when suddenly she said, “Oh my God” and hung up. A man had burst into her room and pointed a gun at her face. He was a member of the SWAT team, come to her rescue. Chelsea had already been moved to safety.

When several men burst into Lowder’s room, pistols drawn, she ran into her bathroom and pressed herself against the wall, waiting to die. One of them pointed a gun at her and said, “Let’s go.”

“It wasn’t until he grabbed my hand that I realized who he was. My legs collapsed at that point.” But the worst was not over. Lowder would spend another seven harrowing hours waiting for news of Bryan. It was not until 9 a.m. Saturday that the hostages would confirm that Bryan was alive.

Douglas R. Fonnesbeck, administrator at Cottonwood Hospital in Murray, a sister hospital Alta View, was in charge of receiving some of the evacuated patients.

“I chose to operate in a form of love and concern and it was the same thing with the hostages,” Fonnesbeck says. “They used the same strategy and that was, ‘Let’s not overreact, let’s deal with it.’ . . . It was that way for everyone. They were concerned about the Roth family, but they were also concerned about the Worthington family, because everybody is a victim in this sort of thing.”

Worthington certainly felt victimized--by the doctor, by the hospital, by circumstance. He told Wyler’s husband on the telephone that if anything were to happen to Margie, he should sue the hospital.

“He spent a lot of time kind of defending why he was behaving so irrationally,” Wyler says.

“ ‘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 fault.’ ”

Fonnesbeck says Curtis had never heard from Worthington after his wife’s surgery.

Worthington did, however, make a scene at the time.

Wyler says her colleague, Woolley, who will not speak to reporters, remembered that incident vividly.

“She remembers how irrational he was then, at the time, and how badly Karen wanted this tubal, how Dr. Curtis had said, ‘Look, if there is this much discussion about this, I don’t feel comfortable about this,’ ” Wyler says.

“And Susan said Karen about came off that bed, epidural and all and said, ‘ I will have this done! You cannot deny me this! ‘

“But that’s not the way Rick remembers it, and I think it’s because he can’t be angry at his wife. He perceives it that she fell asleep and that Dr. Curtis did this without her knowledge. It just doesn’t happen that way.”

Fonnesbeck says that, recently, Worthington had been calling around to physicians, offering to trade landscaping for a reversal of his wife’s operation.

“Even his wife called one of the doctors and said, ‘I want to reverse it.’ She was coming in the next week (last week). She was scheduled for a meeting with this physician, to ‘save her marriage,’ she said. Sometimes the process can be reversed.”

‘On a Roller Coaster’

About 70% of the population of Utah is Mormon, and the Mormon church encourages strong families--which many interpret as large families. The Utah birthrate is about 25% higher than the national average.

“Spiritually, (Worthington) felt like he had had a dream that there was another little girl up there in heaven for his family,” Wyler says. “It did make sense in terms of church doctrine. I could see where he could feel like that.”

But Judy Mills, wife of the bishop of Worthington’s ward (a unit of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), says it doesn’t sound like doctrine to her.

“The only thing I can think of is that every family is entitled to find out from their heavenly father what is right for his own family,” she says. “He was the head of his family and he was entitled to his own revelation.”

Karen Kadleck, who lives across the street from the Worthingtons, told the Salt Lake Tribune that Worthington had told her he felt his authority as the family patriarch had been overridden by his wife’s decision.

“He’s just gone overboard and berserk since Karen got her tubes tied,” Kadleck told the Tribune. “That was the catalyst for it all. They’ve been on a roller coaster for the last two years.”

After her comments appeared, Kadleck was called by Debbie Worthington, Karen’s sister, who is married to Richard’s younger brother, Craig. Kadleck was gently reprimanded for talking to the press.

“One of the things that is most depressing,” Kadleck says, “is that he was a normal person, not a monster. He was a loving, caring, hard-working father.”

The Worthingtons live in Sandy in a two-story house of beige brick on a big piece of property landscaped with boulders and pines.

Richard and Karen grew up in the Salt Lake Valley, and were high school sweethearts who never really dated anyone else, says Craig Worthington. “He lettered in football; she was in the pep club. They didn’t drink or smoke. Both of them grew up in the church and learned high values. Rick spent some time in college.”

After high school, Richard went on a Mormon mission to Southeast Australia, his mother says.

He owns a landscaping business and specializes in rock retaining walls--which requires knowledge of dynamite.

Outside of work, says Craig, his brother is very sports-minded: softball, horseshoes, windsurfing and hang gliding.

And he is devoted to his family.

“He took his little children to work and he just loved them dearly,” his mother says. “He would take them on his tractor and they would just cry to be with their daddy.”

But there were some real pressures in his life. Friends and neighbors describe him as a “control freak.”

Says a hostage negotiator: “I think he was losing control over what he could force his wife to do, over how to handle the kids, over what he could force this hospital and this doctor to do, and I think he just became fixated with that.”

And, over the last two years, there were a series of incidents sparked by what Worthington is known for: a nuclear temper.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Worthington and his older boys had been asked to leave several sports leagues after his confrontations with coaches.

Despite his need for control and his temper, neither family nor neighbors can fathom what has happened.

His mother thinks anguish over not being able to have more children contributed to the explosion, but “why it happened that night we don’t know. He had friends in and bought the kids ice cream and was socializing, and then he told them goodby and left.”

Says Craig Worthington: “Someone who does this kind of thing, it’s a buildup of tensions, and unfortunately, we got someone involved who felt like playing hero and it ended up that a life was taken. It might not have come down to that. Everyone might just have walked away.”

‘A Perfect Delivery’

No one was walking away at Alta View Hospital. Feeling unsafe in Christan Downey’s room, Worthington decided to move his seven hostages--five adults and two babies--up to Curtis’ third-floor office suite. The pregnant Downey was wheeled up on a gurney, but it was too wide to fit through the door.

Nurses Wyler and Woolley grabbed the sheets and used them as a sling to carry Downey into the waiting room. But the big window in the waiting room unsettled Worthington, and he had them move into another office.

Downey had an epidural but at 3 a.m., running out of drugs, the nurses decided to deliver the baby.

There was no equipment. No cord clamp. No bowl syringe.

“We just found some scissors and a basin to catch the placenta, and it was a perfect delivery.”

At 3:23 a.m., baby Caitlin debuted under circumstances that will certainly be the stuff of family legends.

“You know, it almost sounds silly,” said Wyler. “But it was a beautiful birth.”

The hours passed with phone calls between negotiators and hostages and Worthington, who made repeated death threats.

Outside, the area was swarming with police, media and onlookers. Homes across the street had been evacuated.

Inside, something curious was happening. A bond of sorts was developing between Worthington and his hostages. They were exchanging information about families. The fact that Wyler has 11 children and one foster child seemed to warm him up.

“It’s incredible,” says Wyler. “I remember one time when it was calmer and quieter, the other people were all asking him questions about his family and his children and he said to somebody, ‘If you think getting me to talk about my family is gonna help, it’s not.’ And yet, he would still talk about his family a lot and they would try to carry on normal conversations. In the end, we all hugged him. We told him, ‘Thank you for letting us free.’ ”

But the end was hours away.

‘A Real Crazy Turn’

Sgt. Don Bell of the Salt Lake City Police Department, took over negotiations about 10 a.m. Saturday.

One of the complications Bell faced was that Worthington knew he had killed someone.

“There was a death and he knew that he was responsible for it, and that is a very hard thing to negotiate out of. . . . By 1 or 1:30 p.m., he was no longer happy with me, and that is when the negotiations transferred to the hostages.” Worthington put the two nurses and Downey’s sister, Carre, on the phone and had them relay messages.

Bell doesn’t remember exactly when, but police and gunman reached a compromise on how he was going to surrender.

“That was the first time I felt OK,” he says. “For hours, I had a terrible foreboding that it was going to go down bad. It took a real crazy turn at the end, too.”

Toward the end, Wyler was sitting with Worthington at the secretary’s station in the doctor’s suite. The others were in a doctor’s office.

“Margie,” he said, “do you feel like you can talk to me honestly?”

“Rick, I am very frightened, but yes, I feel like I can talk to you.”

So Worthington talked and Wyler listened.

“He talked about how he didn’t mean for it to happen this way. ‘What is this gonna do to my kids, their self-esteem? They will never be able to overcome this.’ He talked about his wife and that she was gonna be financially devastated. He talked about his religious feelings and how he had blown it and how he was gonna go to hell. And he called home and talked to his sister-in-law and one of his sons.

“He was just sobbing: ‘Do you still love me? Am I still your bud?’ It was so sad. Then he hung up the phone and said, ‘Margie do you want to walk out of here now?’ ”

He asked her to cut off his little finger and give it to his wife. It seemed to her to be part of a grand gesture he was making, passing out mementos from the doctors’ offices to his hostages: a crystal whale for one, an urn or potpourri for another.

Wyler told him she couldn’t 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 Bell.

There was no answer.

‘Someone We Know’

What had happened? “Someone decided they wanted to do something with the phones we were using,” Bell says. “They wanted to change them or to put speakers in the command center, and at some point in doing that they cut the lines.”

Without phones, the only way to communicate was by bullhorn, but to use a bullhorn you have to be close, and though Bell was dubious, he was assured that if the bomb went off, he wouldn’t be hurt.

SWAT scouts took Bell onto the second floor of the Women’s Center, directly below Worthington.

“He didn’t answer, but I knew he could hear, because it was only one floor away.”

Bell found a cellular phone lying on a couch in one of the empty hospital rooms.

“I just grabbed it and punched another office number I knew. . . . Margie picked it up and that’s when she told me, ‘I have been trying to get you.’

Bell left the Women’s Center but stayed on the phone with Wyler till the end.

Police agreed to allow Worthington to hand his gun to his bishop, Wayne Mills, who had kept a vigil with Karen Worthington. He was to have a moment with his wife after that, and then give himself up.

But when the doors swung open for the bishop to come in, Worthington saw the SWAT team and started to come unglued.

Susan Woolley stepped in, yelling at the police to get back, and Wyler was frantically telling Bell that the cops were blowing it.

Somehow, though, Worthington handed his gun to either Woolley or Wyler--both remember getting it--and the siege ended. It was about 5:45 p.m. Saturday.

Two hours later, the bomb was defused and evacuated residents were allowed to return home.

Worthington was taken to Salt Lake County Jail. The hostages were taken to Cottonwood Hospital, where they were given checkups and counseling support. Parents were reunited with their babies

But the tragedy for the Worthingtons was about to take another devastating turn. About 10 o’clock Saturday night, their 16-year-old son, Aaron, broadsided a car on his motorcycle blocks from home. Considered a careful driver by neighbors and family, he was not wearing a helmet and it appears his headlight was either off or not functioning.

As of press time, Aaron was listed in critical condition, in a coma at LDS Hospital here. In addition to a brain hemorrhage, he has a pelvic fracture and his left femur is broken. His family has been at his side.

Sunday, the day after the siege ended, a distraught Richard Worthington stood on a desk in his jail cell, stiffened his body and fell backwards, in what authorities described as a suicide attempt. He is in the mental health facility of the Salt Lake County Jail.

Tuesday, Worthington was arraigned on one count of aggravated murder, a capital offense; attempted criminal homicide (for threatening Curtis’s life); nine counts of aggravated kidnapping and one count of delivery of an infernal machine (the bomb). Prosecutor Bud Ellett plans to ask a jury to consider the death penalty.

That evening, the hostages were reunited for a counseling session at Cottonwood, and a support group has been organized for the mothers involved in the siege.

The Worthington family has received an outpouring of support from neighbors and friends.

But the community is struggling to come to terms with the events.

“This is a neighbor we are used to seeing every day,” says Judy Mills, the bishop’s wife. “This is someone we know and trust and love, who only the day before, had brought us a basket of fruit that he had picked from his own yard.”

Margie Wyler has coped by talking. She has been interviewed by Bryant Gumbel on the “Today” show, and has received requests for interviews from People, Redbook and other publications. She has even received offers from movie companies to buy the rights to her story.

On the Thursday after the siege, Karen Worthington watched her 15-year-old son Matthew in a football game, that was dedicated to his brother, Aaron.

“Karen has to hold the family together now,” says longtime neighbor Alice Whitmore. “She has good coping skills.”

Craig Worthington plans to take a check to the Roth family, a donation to the trust fund established for Karla Roth’s survivors.

“They live not more than half a mile from me,” he says. “Their grief is our grief.” And both, he says, have lost part of their families.

Likewise, David Roth has wanted to reach out to Karen Worthington.

“I don’t know what I would say. Probably that I don’t hold her responsible, I guess, because I don’t, I really don’t.”

Glen Steenblik, director of counseling services for Cottonwood Hospital, says it will be a long haul for both families.

“For the Roth family, their mom was caught in a horrible out-of-control situation. But I think it is easier to understand on their part that somebody lost control and took a life unnecessarily, easier than for the Worthingtons to figure out what happened here. The Worthingtons need a lot of time, a lot of discussion. I don’t know that they will ever have the answers.”