Lee was then tried a second time, and it was proved that the Mormon Church had nothing to do with the massacre; that Lee, in fact, had acted in direct opposition to the officers of the Church.  It was shown that he was a villain and a murderer of the deepest dye; that with his own hands, after inducing the emigrants to surrender and give up their arms, he had shot two women and brained a third with the butt-end of his musket, and had cut the throat of a wounded man whom he had dragged from one of the wagons; that he had gathered the property of the emigrants and disposed of it for his own benefit.  It was further proved that Lee shot two or three of the wounded, and that when two girls, who had been hiding in the brush, were brought into his presence by an Indian after the massacre, the latter asked what was to be done with them, to which Lee replied, “They are too old to be spared.”  “They are too pretty to be killed,” answered the chief.  “Such are my orders,” said Lee, whereupon the Indian shot one, and Lee, dragging the other to the ground, cut her throat.

Lee was convicted of murder in the first degree, and, having been allowed to select his own method of execution, was sentenced to be shot.  The case was appealed to the supreme court of the territory, but the judgment was sustained, and it was ordered that the sentence be carried into effect on the 23d of March, 1877.  The others who had been tried were discharged from custody.

A short time before his execution Lee made a confession in which he attempted to palliate his guilt by throwing the burden of the crime on his accomplices, especially on Haight and Higbee, and to show that the massacre was committed by order of Brigham Young and the High Council, all of which was absolutely false.

On the 13th of March he wrote: 
        I feel as composed and as calm as a summer morning.  I hope
        to meet my fate with manly courage.  I declare my innocence. 
        I have done nothing designedly wrong in that unfortunate and
        lamentable affair with which I have been implicated.  I used
        my utmost endeavours to save them from their sad fate. 
        I freely would have given worlds, were they at my command,
        to have averted that evil.  Death to me has no terror.  It is
        but a struggle, and all is over.  I know that I have a reward
        in heaven, and my conscience does not accuse me.

Ten days later he was led to execution at the Mountain Meadows.  Over that spot the curse of the Almighty seemed to have fallen.  The luxuriant herbage that had clothed it twenty years before had disappeared; the springs were dry and wasted, and now there was neither grass nor any green thing, save here and there a copse of sage-brush or scrub-oak, that served but to make its desolation still more desolate.  It is said that the phantoms of the murdered emigrants still flit around the cairn that marks their grave, and nightly re-enact in ghastly pantomime the scene of this hideous tragedy.