July 14, 1999
By Robert Macy
LAS VEGAS -- Arthur Bennett faked his death in 1994 when charged with sexually assaulting daughters of fellow Marines, authorities claimed, then attempted suicide in 1997 when accused of molesting his own girls.
Facing a possible death sentence, the 45-year-old Marine committed suicide Monday and left unsolved the mystery of who died in his place five years ago. Bennett hanged himself with a bedsheet in his cell at the Clark County Detention Center, two days before he was to face a court-martial on sexual-assault charges.
Bennett, already serving time in Utah for assaulting his two teen-age daughters and one of their friends, also faced murder charges here in connection with the February 1994 trailer fire authorities said he set to fake his own death.
The severely burned body found in the trailer, initially believed to be that of Bennett, may now never be identified.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Homicide Lt. Wayne Petersen said authorities are certain the body found in the jail cell was Bennett's.
"He has been positively identified based on numerous tattoos and fingerprints," Petersen said.
The Salt Lake Tribune last week in a three-part series reported on the Bennett story with previously undisclosed grand-jury testimony. Bennett had been brought to Las Vegas this week from Yuma, Ariz., where he was being held pending court-martial on charges of assaulting the daughters of fellow Marines in Yuma and Okinawa, Japan.
Prosecutors here had said they would seek the death penalty for Bennett in the pending murder charge from the trailer fire.
Authorities contend Bennett's family collected $200,000 in military insurance at the time of the fire, and that payments continued until the ruse was uncovered.
After the fire, Bennett and his family moved to Hurricane, in southern Utah, where he assumed the name Joseph Benson, dyed his hair red, and bragged of a past life as a Navy SEAL.
His identity was discovered when his two older daughters, both in their midteens, went to Hurricane police with stories of ongoing sexual assaults. His arrest, on Halloween 1997, led to a fingerprint check and discovery that the affable Benson was really Bennett, the man authorities thought had died in the Las Vegas trailer fire.
Bennett left a legacy of young women who claimed he sexually assaulted them during the past decade in Yuma, Okinawa, Hurricane and Las Vegas.
One of them -- his niece -- spoke Tuesday with The Associated Press. "The military says that now he's dead, the case is done," said the 16-year-old girl. "I have to live with this the rest of my life. He takes the [expletive] way out."
The Las Vegas girl testified earlier this year at an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of preliminary hearing, that Bennett sexually assaulted her repeatedly when she spent the summer of 1995 at his family's home in Hurricane.
At the military hearing earlier this year, several young girls and fellow Marines testified to attacks by Bennett on females as young as 12.
His ex-wife, Amelia, who continued to live with him in Hurricane, said in the February hearing that he denied having sex with his daughters.
"I'm going to kill myself first before I touch my children," she quoted Bennett as saying.
Fake SEAL Arthur Bennett Commits Suicide In Las Vegas Jail
Associated Press
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