This is a story about a long-forgotten murder, but it is not a whodunit. George Wood admitted that he killed Olivia Coombs.1 He did it in an old house in Cedar City, Utah, on July 28, 1862. At trial he pled guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. That might have been the end of the story. But less than three years later, Utah's governor, responding to a petition signed by two hundred of the territory's male citizens, granted Wood a full and complete pardon. Wood returned to his previous life as a pioneering ironworker, farmer, and merchant. He died in Cedar City in 1908 at the age of eighty-five. Today his log cabin, memorialized in 1928 by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, holds a place of honor in Cedar City's Frontier Homestead State Park as the “fifth oldest structure still standing in Utah.”2...

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