Little is publicly available about his childhood, but at an early age, his stepfather moved the family to a pig farm in Salt Lake City, where the two boys worked hard.
After all other ideas, including sending him to California for additional treatment, failed, Arguelles was released on December 19, 1979, with the only condition being that he attend periodic meetings with a sociology graduate student from the University of Utah for therapy.
[2] This decision proved insufficient, as on March 3, 1980, Arguelles kidnapped a 15-year-old Granger High School student and drove her to an old shooting range, where he sodomized and raped her.
Three days later, he picked up a 14-year-old girl who was on her way to West Lake Junior High and drove her to a dirt road near his stepfather's farm, where he sodomized and raped her under the threat of a knife.
[6][7] On August 1, 1992, posing as a security guard, Arguelles approached two siblings (a 10-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy) in front of the Orchard Elementary School in West Valley City, claiming that he wanted help with finding some stolen goods.
At the sentencing, Justice Kenneth Rigtrup gave an explicit recommendation that the parole option hopefully should never be applied, citing Arguelles' history of recidivism and increasingly deviant sexual crimes.
[2] Over the next three years, Arguelles served in obscurity, occasionally bragging to cellmates about supposedly abusing and killing a few young girls and women in 1992, in addition to making ransom demands from their families.
[2] In the first interview, Arguelles confessed to the murders of 16-year-old Lisa Martinez and 15-year-old Tuesday Roberts, both of whom had vanished while walking towards the Valley Fair Mall on March 30, 1992.
[11] His claims were backed up by Pamela Milstein, a prison inmate who had lived with Arguelles and his mother at their trailer in Kearns, who said that he had shown her some of Blundell's jewelry following her murder.
[11] When brought to trial in May 1997, Arguelles almost instantly announced his intention to plead guilty and waive his right to appeal the upcoming convictions, stressing that he wished to be executed for his crimes.
[13] While his stand-in attorneys, who were chosen to act as advisers, suggested that their client suffered from blackouts and even possibly had a multiple personality disorder, Arguelles continued his attempts to give himself a death sentence, explicitly proclaiming that he wished the judge - not the jury - hand it down to him.