'A deep, deep tragedy': San Juan County man gets life in prison for beating, drowning girlfriend

SALT LAKE CITY — A San Juan County man was sentenced to life in prison Thursday, almost a year after a federal jury found him guilty of murdering his girlfriend in front of her children.

Despite the gravity of the occasion, there was no one in the sparsely populated galley there to make a victim impact statement or to speak on behalf of the convicted man, Randy Lansing, 41.

Tammy Clark and her two daughters, ages 2 and 10, were driving with Lansing and another woman down to the bank of McElmo Creek in April 2022, around a mile from the house where they lived together and an hour east of Monument Valley in the Four Corners area.

Prosecutors says Lansing, of Aneth, grew angry and began attacking Clark as the others watched helplessly. The man slammed Clark's head in a car door, bludgeoned her with fists, rocks, and a baseball bat, dragged her by her hair to the shallow creek and beat her before leaving her to drown, according to Trina Higgins, U.S. attorney for the district of Utah.

Medical examiners say Clark's cause of death was a combination of drowning and blunt force trauma.

Prosecutors, in a sentencing memorandum, wrote that Clark's death "comes as part of an epidemic of violence against Native American women," citing a recent report to the Utah Legislature which says, "Although they make up just 1.5% of the (Utah) population, American Indian and Alaska Native(s) account for over 5% of all murder victims."

An employee from the office told KSL.com that it is incredibly rare for an acting U.S. attorney to personally try a case, showing the dedication of Higgins to violence against Indigenous women.

By the time attorneys took their chairs, Lansing was already seated. He was wearing an orange short-sleeved jumpsuit marked "Salt Lake County Jail" and orange shoes. The court stood for the entrance of Judge David Nuffer. Lansing's long black hair was fastened in a pony tail and fell down his back. Chains wrapped across his waist and down, shackling his hands and ankles.

The man, convicted of second-degree murder in Indian Country, rotated slowly, back and forth, in his office chair, as the prosecution showed images of Clark's body on a computer monitor in front of him. A close-up image of Clark's face showed her eyes swollen shut, her face varying shades of purples and reds from abrasions, cuts and hemorrhaging.

"All of this happened while she was still alive," Higgins said. "He tortured Ms. Clark."

In another photo, the woman's body lies on a stainless steel examiner's table — her skin is marked by dozens of wounds. It was difficult to see if Lansing looked at these graphic images, hunched on the armrests of his chair, his head crooked forward and neck sunk into his shoulders.

Lansing's recently assigned defense attorney, Adam Bridge, said he has seen the convicted man "shed tears over the photos" and argued they were being used to try and "enflame the emotions of the court against (Lansing)." Bridge's team was asking for a sentence of just under 24 years, which he said was "more than sufficient."

The defense was offered a plea bargain before trial, recommending 18 to 22 years, Bridge said, which is "hard to square" with prosecutors pushing for upward sentencing deviations on Thursday. "Life in prison," Bridge said, "is not an appropriate trial tax."

Request for new trial denied

Lansing's elderly father retained defense attorney Brian Morris for $25,000 in August 2022, court records show, signing over the title to his three cars and making occasional payments. The lawyer, however, did "nothing that a competent lawyer would do to protect his client," according to Bridge, who is a federal public defender and was assigned after the conviction upon Lansing's request.

In a motion filed in December, Bridge asked for a new trial, arguing that Morris provided ineffective assistance representing Lansing. "There is reason to believe trial counsel failed to conduct a meaningful investigation, failed to file pretrial motions, failed to respond to government motions, failed to propose jury instructions, and failed to propose voir dire questions," he argued in court documents.

Lansing, who has never admitted guilt in the case, had little communication with counsel before trial, Bridge said. Visit logs from Tooele County Jail and Salt Lake County Jail show that despite being retained in August 2022, Morris did not visit in 2022 and only visited once in 2023.

The defense lawyer said that Lansing was "left unchecked" in the jails by the previous attorney, which helped foster a lack of accountability. "Denial is a powerful thing," Bridge said.

Lansing's father said despite paying Morris, the man "never visited the reservation or conducted any type of investigation in Randy's case," according to a sworn affidavit.

If more was done to investigate, Bridge says, the defense may have found what his investigations found after the conviction — "new evidence that an eyewitness lied to the FBI, prosecutors and the jury," which "raises the potential guilt of a third party and creates reasonable doubt that did not previously exist."

"We now know we don't know what really happened at the creek," Bridge writes.

At trial, Bridge says Morris did not did not offer any exhibits, compared to over 100 shared by the government. He did not call any witnesses, though the government called 16.

The motion for a new trial was denied. There is a window of 14 days for an appeal to the sentencing Thursday if the defense chooses to pursue one.

'A deep, deep tragedy'

When asked if he wanted to make a statement, Lansing shook his head.

Nuffer said, "This was an attempt, from top to bottom, to destroy the victim," calling this "the most egregious second-degree murder case I've tried, and in fact, probably the most egregious murder I've sentenced," given the extreme violence in the presence of the children.

The judge said, "I believe a life sentence is the just sentence ... incapacitation by incarceration," and said "a deep, deep tragedy was inflicted that day." He agreed to recommend Lansing be placed at the high-security penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, to serve his sentence.

A jury trial is scheduled to begin in March for a 2022 federal charge of failing to register as a sex offender.

Related topics