Father convicted of murdering children

A Utah man who killed his two young children by slitting their throats after he came home drunk from a dance has been convicted of first-degree murder.

A lawyer for Anderson Black, 29, had argued that his client had not planned to kill the children and acted in a drunken fury.

But jurors agreed with prosecutors who said Black plotted the deaths of three-year-old Dokota and one-year-old Nicole at their home in Monument Valley on September 28, 2000.

Assistant US Attorney Barbara Bearnson said Black selected a long knife from a kitchen drawer, looked under a bed for them, then cut his teenage niece’s face as she tried to shelter Nicole.