He Didn’t Deserve to Live

Episode 1

SANDY — If Jordan Rasmussen hadn’t been murdered on March 5, 1982, it’s entirely possible that no one would have even remembered his last night alive. It felt like one of those days that ends with a sigh of relief, not a smile of gratitude. The 32-year-old accountant worked late, agreed to a last-minute, early-morning meeting with a man whose job he was taking and, then, after taking a babysitter home, he found himself locked out of the house on […]

Dead Men Speak No Lies

Episode 2

Carla Maas pulled to a stop in front of the Salt Lake laundry company where her husband worked. She turned off her car, and almost immediately, someone came out of the front door. But when she looked up, it wasn’t her husband, Buddy Booth. It was her husband’s boss. “And I used to work for Peerless so I thought he was just coming out to give me a hard time,” she said. But then she noticed […]

Chameleon

Episode 3

Carla Maas was lost in a haze of grief until she looked up from the witness stand and saw his face. “I remember seeing Michael Moore across from me,” she said of her husband’s killer. “And him just looking at me, and it kind of — it scared me. It made me very nervous. … I saw no remorse.” The austere, windowless room in Utah’s 3rd District Courthouse was packed. People sat on the floor in […]

Life Sentences

Episode 4

When a stranger with a gun left Carla Maas a widow at age 23, he had no idea how his violent decision robbed her family of the most stable thing in their lives. Buddy Booth’s murder on March 5, 1982, left Maas the sole support for their two daughters — ages 4 years and 4 months. She couldn’t bring herself to return to the apartment they’d shared, so the young mother who had no job, no high school diploma and […]

Our Brother

Episode 5

In the years after Jordan Rasmussen’s murder, his older sister was so unraveled by grief, that sometimes, she didn’t even recognize herself. “This is really embarrassing to say,” Leslie Rasmussen Moore said, pausing to consider whether she should confess this truth to a stranger, “maybe shows part of my character I don’t want to acknowledge, but sometimes as I was reading the newspaper, I would look at an obituary, and I think, ‘Oh, they’re hurting, too. I’m not just the […]