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Two 23-year-old Vernal men were charged and later sentenced for the Nov. 16, 2009, killing of Kay Sherman Mortensen, a 70-year-old retired Brigham Young University engineering professor found with his throat cut at his Payson Canyon home.

A 911 call that night brought Utah County sheriff's deputies to the house. The callers were Mortensen's son and daughter-in-law, Roger and Pamela Mortensen, who had driven up for an evening visit. Pamela Mortensen told the dispatcher that two men had tied them up. "We came out to visit my husband's father and ... we were held hostage," she said, according to the Deseret News. Roger Mortensen said he had worked himself free and found his father leaning over an upstairs bathtub. The recording runs about 11 minutes.

Investigators doubted the account. Deputies said the couple had given inconsistent statements, and a grand jury indicted them both. Roger and Pamela Mortensen were booked into the Utah County jail on murder charges in early August 2010 and spent about four months there.

The case broke that December, when a tip led deputies to guns taken from Mortensen's collection. Prosecutors dismissed the charges against Roger and Pamela Mortensen on Dec. 7, 2010, and the same day charged Benjamin David Rettig and Martin Cameron Bond with aggravated murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery. Bail was set at $1 million each. Bond was the son of a friend of Mortensen's and knew about the guns, investigators said.

Prosecutors said Rettig held a handgun on Mortensen while Bond fetched a knife and cut his throat. They said the two then bound Roger and Pamela Mortensen with zip ties and threatened to kill them if they went to police. Mortensen and his wife, Darla, had returned three weeks earlier from an 18-month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at Cove Fort, according to his obituary.

Rettig pleaded guilty in 2011 to aggravated murder and aggravated kidnapping under an agreement that took the death penalty off the table, and was sentenced to 25 years to life. A jury convicted Bond on Jan. 18, 2013, after about five hours of deliberation, of aggravated murder, three counts of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery.

On March 5, 2013, 4th District Judge Thomas Low sentenced Bond to life in prison without parole, adding consecutive terms of 15 years to life for holding Roger and Pamela Mortensen hostage. "The life that you took was a good one," Low said, according to the Deseret News. "(Mortensen) spent his life making the world a better place." The Utah Supreme Court upheld Bond's convictions on Sept. 30, 2015, rejecting claims of prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective defense counsel. A federal lawsuit that Roger and Pamela Mortensen filed against Utah County sheriff's deputies and prosecutors over their arrests was dismissed in September 2012.