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Retiring prosecutor recalls years of legal fights at home and abroad

By John Hollenhorst | Posted - Feb 2nd, 2014 @ 11:13pm

SALT LAKE CITY — A veteran prosecutor just retired after a career that spanned some of the most violent crimes in Utah history.

Over the years, Dave Schwendiman also went international, prosecuting war criminals and working to protect the Olympics from terrorists.

In 1976, a murderer named Gary Gilmore became world famous for demanding to be executed.

“He was a manipulator. He was a person that had a frightening sort of aspect to him,” Schwendiman said in a recent interview with KSL News.

Schwendiman was fresh out of law school back then, part of a team of state lawyers that battled through the courts to make sure Gilmore got what he wanted in front of a firing squad.

“I’m not sure we didn’t do him a favor, and us a disservice, by playing that role under the circumstances,” he said

Years later, Schwendiman helped ensure the involuntary execution of infamous Ogden Hi-Fi killer Pierre Dale Selby.

“I went home a bit sick — partly because we’d been up for so long and we’d been working so hard, but partly because I didn’t really take great satisfaction in being one of the people with my finger on the trigger that did him in,” he said.

But he knew he was doing his job as a state prosecutor, and later as a federal one. That job, he said, was “trying to right things that were terribly wrong.”

Schwendiman helped send many members of Ervil Lebaron's polygamy cult to prison. Lebaron's killer wives and children terrorized the fundamentalist underground for two decades, two generations, murdering at least 28 people.

“It’s probably over, but I wouldn’t count on it,” Schwendiman said of the Lebaron underground.

Later, Schwendiman changed gears completely, investigating mass graves in the aftermath of the brutal civil war in Bosnia.

He helped prosecute more than 100 war criminals for horrendous cases of mass murder, rape and torture.

“Being able to be involved in that sort of thing and make some difference in it, even if it might be small, even if it’s just with an individual, is worth every minute,” he said.

Europe has no death penalty, even for mass murderers, so the experience deepened Schwendiman's ambivalence about the death penalty.

“I’m ambivalent about it because I’m not sure it accomplishes a great deal,” Schwendiman said. “You might be satisfied as a person that is entitled to some real revenge or retribution, but I’m not sure it doesn’t demean us in the end.”

From 1998 to 2004, Schwendiman was part of the Olympic counter-terrorism team. In the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympic Games, he has no involvement. But he thinks the Russian security apparatus under President Vladimir Putin has a higher ability to deal with the threat.

“The risk associated with the Sochi Games is probably much higher than it has been in other games,” he said. “(Russian security personnel) can be more aggressive than we’d be allowed to be, or want to be.”

Although he just retired, Schwendiman is not going out to pasture. He's heading off to Afghanistan for at least a year to lead a team that will investigate to make sure that a trillion dollars the United States spent on the war was spent properly.