For Chad Rasmussen grief and forgiveness have always been two strands of the same rope.

He can’t remember the man everyone describes as “the best dad.”

But he also can’t remember a time before his family forgave the man who robbed him of a life with his father.

He accepted his family’s forgiveness of Michael Patrick Moore the same way he accepted their stories about his dad. They were just truths he grew up with.

“That was always just kind of the way that we were,” he said.

It did not mean he avoided grief. But it wasn’t infused with bitterness.

“Mine wasn’t pain and anger necessarily towards Mike,” Chad Rasmussen said. “It was just a pain and an anger that was from the void of not having my dad there.”

So when his family helped his father’s killer win a special parole hearing in 1999, then 18-year-old Chad desperately wanted to be part of it. But as he watched Michael Moore, the man who’d killed his dad and another young father Buddy Booth, walk into the hearing room at the Utah State prison the morning of Feb. 2, 1999, he was blindsided by emotions he’d never experienced.

“I did have a flood of emotion,” he said, tears filling his eyes decades later, “A whole mix of emotions, mostly the pain that I had been going through, and seeing for the first time this man that had caused that.”

He couldn’t stop the tears. 

Instead of feeling like he was part of something special, he began to question if his family’s forgiveness even belonged to him.

“I had experienced it in my life,” he said, “but I didn’t know if I was doing that (forgiving) and just following suit. Following like a little duckling (after) my aunts.”

He left the hearing conflicted.

And for months, he wrestled this new question about whether or not he could just follow his family into forgiveness – or if he needed to wrestle with that question on his own.

It was as he was preparing to leave for a two-year religious mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that he decided he needed to find his own answers. How could he preach about forgiveness if he didn’t even understand it?

So he decided to seek answers from the one person who had them: his father’s killer, Michael Patrick Moore. As his mom helped him make arrangements for a prison meeting with Moore, Chad asked his siblings if they’d go with him. His sister Lisa declined the invitation, but his brother, Dave, reluctantly agreed to go.

“I think my initial reaction was hesitation,” said Dave, who was the oldest of the three children. “It was not an idea I came up with. I just wanted to be a support for him. And I think maybe my intent was okay, I’ll go but I’ll be your co pilot. And if this is something you want to do, then you’re going to kind of be the voice.”

So just after Chad’s 19th birthday in November of 1999, Chad and Dave made the same trek to the prison his mother made five years earlier. They even met in the same room.

“I needed to hear what happened,” Chad said. “And I needed to understand the mind of the killer and what he went through and why he had to do it.”

They sat in three chairs that faced each other. This was Chad’s quest so he did the talking, while Dave sat quietly.

“He shared with me all the details and the rumors and the fear that he was experiencing himself,” Chad said. “And even up until where he was standing and where my dad was standing where when he …” 

Chad struggles to control his tears at the memory, but then he continues. “When he shot and killed him, and then when the next innocent person arrives on the scene and how and why he, he chose to kill them as well.”

But when Michael started to share how he’d come to feel remorse, and how he’d tried to do good things in prison, something unexpected happened.

“(Michael) talked about his time in prison, and his own personal change of heart and change of an understanding that what he had thought was right, really was wrong,” Chad said. “And then a healing process that he started going through.”

But instead of feeling comforted or impressed, it made Chad question the years of forgiveness.

“And that’s when my guard went back up against him,” Chad said, “where I felt he was being persuasive, or trying to take advantage of us as a family because we were his pathway out. Without our support, he was looking at a lifetime in prison behind bars.”

He started to feel rage as he considered all his family had done for Michael Moore. Did he even deserve it?

“Maybe our weakness or our vulnerability was his pathway (to freedom),” Chad said, “and (he) is a manipulating murderer, that he could trick us into siding with him so that he could be free. And that’s when I started reflecting on everything that I had heard the previous you know, my lifetime of my family and their healing process and I started thinking to myself, they’ve all been fooled.”

Maybe the man who’d stolen his father from him was stealing mercy from his family now. 

“We’re all falling for this guy’s trick,” Chad said, “and I didn’t want to fall for that trick.”

But even as Chad struggled silently, it seemed too late. Michael Moore had a parole date. It was in 2004, but he was going to get his second chance.

At least, that’s how it seemed when Chad and Dave met with Michael in November of 1999.

But not only would Chad have to wrestle with whether or not his family misjudged Michael Moore, something would happen a few months later that would make all of them – the Rasmussens, the Booths, and even the prison officials – question whether Michael Moore was truly reformed – or if he was what a prosecutor called him 18 years earlier – a chameleon – unrepentant and unchanged.

When Lisa Rasmussen Opfar hears any bell or sound that precedes an announcement, she is no longer a 47-year-old woman living a full, happy life in 2024.

She falls through time, back to a snowy Friday morning in 1982, when she was a carefree 5-year-old sitting in her kindergarten class. That intercom squawk interrupted whatever she was learning, and it taught her a different, darker lesson: life cannot be trusted.

That sound pulled her from class and sent her home to a completely different life. 

Instead of the life where she was a “Daddy’s girl” who could rattle off a long list of ways her father spoiled and adored her, she began to live a life laced with longing – and fear.

Because when she got home the morning of March 5, 1982, she learned her father, Jordan Rasmussen, had been murdered outside the Log Haven restaurant. Her world shattered.

Her family helped her piece together a new life. And it’s a great life.

But there is always a sense of loss, of pain, of longing.

And it all started with that sound.

“Whenever I would hear that beep and then an announcement, I would get nervous,” she said. 

That sound echoed through her life. It happened in high school.

“One time I was in high school, and I heard the beep, and my name,” she said. “I got called to the office and I thought, ‘Oh, no, what’s happened?’” 

As she walked to the office, her mind raced, her fear spiraled. Who was it? Her mom? Her little brother? Maybe her grandma?

“So I went to the office and checked in,” she said. “Hey, my name was just called over the intercom and (the school secretary) said, ‘Oh, that must have been a mistake.’”

But it wasn’t a mistake.

What Lisa didn’t know is that the anxiety that was just beginning to stalk her, was terrorizing her mother too. 

“My friend had picked me up,” Lisa said. “And shortly after, my mom heard sirens, and this was before cell phones. So my mom got nervous. So she called my school to see if I had made it okay.” The office staff called her from class to make sure she had arrived safely.

Neither of them knew how their fear affected the other.

“My mom didn’t know that I had anxieties about the intercom,” Lisa said. “And I didn’t know that she was having anxiety that she heard sirens after I left the house.” 

That sound still finds her.

Like when she and her husband went on a cruise with friends, leaving their children with family for the week.

“Whenever I would hear that bell on the cruise ship, I would get anxiety, because I thought ‘Oh, they’re going to call me and tell me something’s happened back home.’” 

The more she built a life that she loved, the more she risked losing.

“I’m pretty much affected by it every day,” Lisa buries her face in her hands and starts to sob. “My anxiety didn’t manifest itself until I was married. Not that it had anything to do with my husband at all, but I think it’s because I cared and loved someone so much that I didn’t want him to be taken away from me. And with every child that’s been born, my anxiety has just increased more and more. I know that the anxiety is because of that tragedy.”

Lisa wasn’t the only child left with remnants of a trauma she can barely remember. When Michael Moore killed Jordan Rasmussen and Buddy Booth, he left five children to grow up with ghosts; to wrestle with emotions they were too young to understand.

Her older brother, Dave, was the only one with his own memories of their dad. 

“I remember one time being in the backyard of our new home,” he said. “(We were) walking around the yard, and I remember some conversation about a hot air balloon, and one day he was going to take me up in a hot air balloon. I remember him talking about going to Disney World. I remember (him) just kind of filling me with all these wonderful opportunities and dreams.”

He stops to stifle a cry.

“It just kind of gave me a lot of excitement as a little kid,” Dave said.

Like his siblings, he grew up with stories about his dad. Stories that almost always illustrated one thing: that Jordan was the best dad.

“The stories they were trying to convey to me that he was a great man and how much he loved his kids and would do anything for them,” he said, choking back emotion. “Hearing the stories (from) aunts and uncles talking about how amazing he was in some ways, I guess I feel cheated. It didn’t feel fair.”

But even as a boy, he realized he had more than his younger siblings. He was eight when his dad was murdered. Lisa was just five and Chad was just 16-months-old.

“And so then I think okay, well, those experiences I do have, even though I may have blocked them out (due to trauma),” he said. “They’re experiences that my siblings didn’t have at all.”

Lisa said whenever the family got together, her aunts made sure her dad was a part of the gathering.

“Almost every time that we would get together and still do, one of the aunts will make it a point to talk to me,” she said smiling, “and they don’t coordinate this with each other, but they would always tell me how much he loved me. And what a great man he was.”

Lisa can’t tell you what his favorite ice cream flavor is, but she can tell you stories about his kindness, his honesty and how he adored his little girl. Lisa and her brothers have made their dad real with other people’s memories.

“I know he was tall because I’ve seen pictures of him standing next to my mom,” she said. “And I know that he was kind and a peacemaker.”

He belongs to her because of them.

Chad can’t remember his dad – or even the trauma of the day he was killed. But that didn’t mean he escaped the grief of the loss.

“I don’t have any of my own memories,” he said. “It’s all secondhand. And yeah, that that was probably what has been the hardest.”

It’s the stories, he said, that have helped him have something real, someone to look up to.

“I’m grateful that my family did,” he said, “that they did share all the good. Because it did, like, set that standard of, of how I wanted to be and then something to aim for.”

And all three of Jordan Rasmussen’s children are grateful for something else: their family’s forgiveness of the man who murdered their dad, Michael Patrick Moore.

“I know that I have issues in my life that remain from this trauma,” said Lisa. “But even with all the anxieties that I do have, I don’t ever blame that on him. I’m glad that I don’t have to have such negative feelings towards someone on top of dealing with my own anxieties and insecurities. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have that negative poison in my body, on top of the other things that I feel. For me, forgiveness is to free ourselves. It’s to free ourselves from that poison that negativity in us.”

And, like her brothers, she just accepted the forgiveness her mother and aunts struggled to find.

“I think that forgiveness was definitely (just part of my life),” she said. “I owe a huge part of that to my mom, and to my grandparents and my aunts, because they were such good examples to me. …I saw their love and their compassion and the love and light that they shared. That bled into me.”

The Rasmussen children accepted forgiveness so completely, that when their parents and grandparents helped Michael Moore win a special parole hearing in February of 1999, they wanted to be part of it. For Chad Rasmussen, who’d just turned 18, it was the first time he’d attended a hearing of any kind. It was also the first time he’d seen the man who murdered his dad.

And it would not be the uplifting experience he expected.

In fact, it would call into question everything he’d accepted about his family’s forgiveness.

“I remember sitting there in the courtroom at the prison and they walked Mike Moore into the room and that was the first time I’d seen him,” he said, choking back tears. “I did have a flood of emotion mostly the pain that I had been going through and seeing for the first time this man that had caused that.”

Chad struggled in silence with pain, anger and confusion.

“I had a lot of conflict,” he said, “Because, again, I’m in the throes of my pain and I just wept through the entire trial.”
And then he had a darker thought, one that wouldn’t let go of him.

“I started thinking to myself, ‘They’ve all been fooled. We’re all falling for this guy’s trick’,” Chad said. “And I didn’t want to fall for that trick.”

He wrestled those questions for months, eventually confiding in his mother. He thought there was only one way for him to resolve his struggle. He needed to meet with the man who caused this pain, the man who shot his dad to death when he was a toddler. He needed to sit with him, look him in the eye, and ask him questions. 

He needed to decide if his family’s forgiveness could even belong to him. He needed to decide if Michael Patrick Moore deserved his forgiveness. 

Whatever his family had given him, it was just a start. And meeting with his dad’s killer was how he needed to decide what came next for him. 

“I realized,” he said. “That I needed to complete that for myself.”

No doubt he’d benefited from his family’s decision to forgive.

“I had experienced it in my life,” he said. “But I didn’t know if I was doing that and just following, like a little duckling, (what) my aunt’s (were) going through or if I needed to do this for myself.”

As Diane Rasmussen Duckworth waited for her turn to pass through a metal detector, questions she had struggled to answer for more than a decade marched through her mind.

She stood with her mother, her sisters, and her sister-in-law in a gray-walled security building at the entrance of the Utah State Prison. An emotional mix of anticipation and anxiety churned in her stomach.

She was finally going to get answers.

That’s because 12 years after her big brother was murdered, they were going to sit down with the man who killed him.

“I really want to ask him these questions,” she said, listing a few of them. “And I went in just thinking, ‘OK, buddy, … why would you take the life of this sweet man and leave (his) three children (without a father)?'”

When Jordan Rasmussen was killed by co-worker Michael Patrick Moore on March 5, 1982, outside Log Haven restaurant, his family was stunned. How could someone who knew the quiet, kind 32-year-old accountant want him dead? And why had Moore also killed a 24-year-old delivery driver who had nothing to do with the business?

Duckworth and her family had forgiven Moore in a letter written by her older sister, Leslie Rasmussen Moore (no relation to Michael Moore), a few months before this meeting on Jan. 26, 1994. It was arranged by Jordan Rasmussen’s widow — DeAnn Rasmussen Kilgore — and only one member of their immediate family declined to go: their father, Elden Rasmussen.

“He said, ‘I know I have forgiven him, the Lord knows I have forgiven him, and he knows I have forgiven him, but I don’t need to see the man that took my only son,'” Duckworth said of her father.

But for the women, it felt like something they had to do. Kilgore remembers how bleak it was walking through security to the visiting room where Michael Moore waited for them with a prison caseworker.

“I remember walking into that dismal place,” Kilgore said, “Nothing other than gloom and doom in a prison.”

As they walked through the security doors leading to the room, Leslie Moore turned to her sisters and issued a warning.

“I said, ‘You know, I’m here because we need to be here,” she said. “But if he says one negative thing about Jordan … I’m gonna have to just go wait in my car, because I cannot hear that.”

They walked into the undecorated room where Michael Moore was already waiting. One wall of the room had large windows, but the view was a barren prison yard framed by fences topped with razor wire. In the distance, above the guard towers, the snow-capped Wasatch Mountains, where Jordan was killed, were visible.

Conversation with a killer

Michael Moore stood up and invited them to sit on the couches that faced each other. He sat in a chair between them.

“Obviously, everybody was uncomfortable,” Kilgore recalled. “And he sat down on a chair, and we were in our seats. And we just did small talk to begin with.”

Kilgore showed him a picture of her family — of Jordan Rasmussen with his children.

“He addressed me personally, apologized over and over again about what he had done to the family, and what he had done to my children,” she said. “He said there wasn’t a day go by that he did not think about my children and what he had done to them. He especially mentioned David’s name saying, ‘I think of David every day. And I can’t imagine what it must be like for him to have somebody take his father.’

“And it was just a really good, peaceful, calm feeling.”

It was a wide-ranging conversation and nothing was off-limits.

“It wasn’t all ‘Kumbaya,'” Kilgore said. “Feelings of the last years were expressed and the hurt and the pain and the suffering, that was all expressed.”

Kilgore was feeling more at ease as the conversation progressed.

“I remember everything was really good,” she said. “We got our questions answered. … But then I remember looking over at Leslie.”

And she knew immediately, something wasn’t right.

“Leslie has become flushed,” Kilgore said. “She’d become agitated, and she just said, ‘OK, this isn’t right. I’m not feeling good. We shouldn’t have come.'”

Kilgore was stunned.

Leslie Moore said that she was just listening, and then, without warning, she was overcome with a darkness she still struggles to describe.

“There was the blackest feeling you could ever feel,” she remembers. “You could have cut that feeling in there. It was so — it was just a bizarre feeling. And I finally said to (Kilgore), I said, ‘You know, I’m afraid I’ve got to go.’ Because it was just almost engulfing. I mean, I think I was even having a hard time breathing.”

Kilgore said her sister-in-law’s struggle wasn’t just emotional.

“It was physical. … You could tell physically, that … she was struggling,” she said.

Kilgore said the feeling in the room wasn’t just off. It felt truly evil.

And she has a theory about why. She believes it was the devil — or as she they call him, “the adversary.”

“When the bad feelings came, I liken that to the adversary,” Kilgore said. “He did not want this forgiveness to take place, he would much rather see hate and contention. He would much rather see that happen to the family. And that we live with that.”

Leslie Moore agrees. In fact, all of the women in that room feel the same way about what happened.

And Leslie Moore said that almost as suddenly as the darkness engulfed her, it receded.

“Honestly, I have to testify there was like a light of Christ that came into that room,” she said. “And I know personally, the adversary did not want us to forgive him. And when we had that exuberant feeling that we did, that’s when everything was a transition. And we were able to embrace him, and we were able to just release everything that we had as hostility. So that was a real blessing.”

After two hours, prison officials said their time together was over. They started to say their goodbyes, when middle sister Duckworth walked over to Moore and wrapped him in an embrace.

“It pretty much even shocked me to know that I was hugging him when we left,” Duckworth said. “And that I felt compassion for him, and I just continued to feel sorry for what he had gone through.”

As they walked back through the prison’s gauntlet of security, they thought about what had been happening to all of them. They considered how much had changed in just the last few months. But how could they ever explain it all to someone else?

Even some of their spouses didn’t understand what happened after that 1993 parole hearing and Leslie Moore’s letter to Michael Moore.

“In our own family,” Leslie said, “I think there were skeptics that are going, ‘Are we sure that he’s not pulling a ploy or something, you know?'”

And if their husbands struggled with it, imagine how strangers might react. So they decided, almost without discussion, to keep it safe in their little circle.

“We didn’t dare share with the public,” Duckworth said. “Because they would have thought we were nuts.”

Leslie Moore said that concern about what others might think only grew when they learned her parents were considering something totally unexpected.

“They said he’ll need someplace to go” if he was ever released from prison, Leslie Moore said. “And so they said, ‘Why don’t we just have him come and stay with us until he can get everything arranged?’ … And then I remember my mom saying, ‘Well, now, that’s not going to work because people are going to think we’re insane.'”

But that’s how completely things had shifted for Jordan Rasmussen’s family. A man they’d once hoped would face a firing squad was now a man they wrote to, confided in and prayed for.

But there were people who understood how they felt — people who’d worked or volunteered with Michael Moore inside the prison. Not only did they believe Moore had sincerely changed, they thought he deserved a second chance at freedom. And some of them even took up the fight on his behalf.

Life behind bars

Among those was the man who ran Utah Correctional Industries — Dick Clasby.

“I first noticed him in our print shop,” said Clasby, who retired after nearly four decades with the Utah Department of Corrections. He said Moore worked his way up from a job as a janitor to essentially running the print shop.

“The (staff) shop supervisor … would talk about how good he was,” Clasby said. “He was a brilliant kid, and he could carry on a good conversation. He worked hard in the print ship. Everybody he worked with was pleased with what he was doing.”

Clasby said Moore was creative, ambitious and never content with the status quo. Not only did he avoid disciplinary write-ups, he helped officers with some situations that threatened to turn violent between inmates because of his language and negotiation skills.

“There was a problem in the print shop several years ago, where there was some racial tension in there,” Clasby said. “And he used his Spanish, and he calmed them down. Now I didn’t see it, but that’s what I heard.”

Moore quickly climbed the ranks thanks to his aptitude for computer programing and accounting. His skills eventually made him indispensable to Utah Correctional Industries because he could do things for prison officials that would have cost them thousands of dollars if they had to pay market prices.

“He would earn the highest that we would pay a nonprivate sector inmate,” Clasby said. “So it would be $1.75, $2 an hour. And then he would work a lot of hours.”

Moore wrote letters to the Rasmussens where he told them how a volunteer encouraged him to invest whatever money he made in the stock market. He followed that advice and ended up with thousands of dollars in savings.

Clasby said Moore innovated job opportunities for himself and others, but sometimes his emotions — and his ego — tripped him up.

“He was so smart, just so smart,” Clasby said. “And he knew it. And he was emotional. He would get down if somebody questioned his intelligence or, or something happened to him.”

Jack Ford was the spokesman for the corrections department and said Moore was “a model inmate.”

“I’d go over and talk to him,” said Ford, who actually covered Moore’s murder trial in 1982 for KSL. The two never discussed the killings — or his trial. They became quite friendly.

“He had a small little tiny cubicle, where he managed the books for all of Utah Correctional Industries, which was making money for inmates and for the prison,” Ford said. “It wasn’t like he had free run of anything, but he made more than most inmates. And that made some inmates jealous.”

That jealousy would show up a few years later in some false allegations against Moore. And while he’d eventually be cleared, Moore was so stung by how he was treated, that he mentioned it in letters and a subsequent parole hearing.

But that situation was the exception. Moore had an impeccable disciplinary record.

That fact alone was rare. But the support he garnered from staff, volunteers, and now the families of his victims was almost unheard of. And Moore seemed determined to use all of that to win a second chance at a life outside the prison walls.

In 1995, he got an unexpected parole hearing thanks to a lawsuit filed by other inmates regarding the Board of Pardons’ policies. He was among those inmates who received a hearing based on those new rules.

And even though the board denied his parole after a 1993 hearing, he had a new reason to believe things might be different this time.

Unlikely advocate

Elden Rasmussen never wanted to meet with Michael Moore. But on June 2, 1995, he asked the Board of Pardons if he could speak on behalf of the man who had murdered his only son.

“I have been to this hearing before,” he said. “My daughter in-law DeAnn and my daughter Leslie gave beautiful descriptions of the feelings we have at the loss of Jordan. … The day that this happened was the most painful day of my life. I first wanted his life, and I was upset when his attorney got him off the death penalty … to a life sentence.”

But he said he’d learned of Moore’s remorse and of the changes he’d made in his life. He said he believed his son wanted him to extend mercy to the man who shot and killed him.

“Jordan has forgiven Mike for doing this,” Elden Rasmussen said, adding that he’d struggled to follow what he believes is his son’s example. “(Moore’s) father has wanted to talk to me on several occasions. Once we met accidentally in a grocery store. And he wanted to talk and … tell me what Mike was doing. And I did not give him a decent time of day.”

He said Michael Moore’s apology in the 1993 hearing touched his heart.

“I can’t be as big as my son, but I too have this feeling,” Rasmussen said. “And I felt sorry for Mike, as I’ve heard him bear testimony and go through this story. And I know what he’s lived with. … I forgive him. My wife forgives him and I think all my daughters do.”

He said he didn’t think Moore was dangerous or that he’d commit new crimes if released.

“I do know that Mike has not committed other crimes other than this one,” Rasmussen said, his voice catching momentarily. “It was a horrible one. I … feel that he would not do this again, that he has learned his lesson on that score. I would trust him; I know he would not hurt my family. … And I have confidence that he would be a worthy citizen again. … It’s just unfortunate that this happened.”

Board of Pardons member Don Blanchard praised Elden Rasmussen for his generosity in forgiving Moore. He thanked him for sharing his feelings.

Blanchard asked Moore if he’d read the case files they shared with him. He said yes.

“I read everything in that packet,” he said. “And then I started to read my confession, and it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever read.”

He said he couldn’t even finish reading it.

“​​The Rasmussen family is the neatest family I’ve ever met,” Moore said. “My efforts were to be repentant in here and they offered me forgiveness. … It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever experienced — to be able to apologize to the family, and to have them accept my apology and forgive me. It’s a testimony I’ll bear forever.”

Even though the family of Buddy Booth wasn’t at the hearing, they’d made their opposition to early release known to the board. Moore said he’d been trying to get in touch with Booth’s family, and he hoped someday to be able to apologize directly to them, as well.

And then, for the first time, he said he was an alcoholic starting at age 18. He said he’d had a difficult, even violent, relationship with his father. He said he’d been trying to address it in therapy, and he discussed it in psychological evaluations prepared for the parole hearing.

This was the first time he’d mentioned any issue with his father, who was one of his most vocal advocates, pleading with the jury at his trial to spare his life, and asking the Board of Pardons to consider him for parole in those earlier hearings.

But in this hearing, Moore told Blanchard his father has disowned him, an assertion that Blanchard challenged.

“I don’t think that he has cast you out, nor totally set you aside,” Blanchard said. “He appeared at your initial hearing, pleaded on your behalf. He’s written in on your behalf, expressed some concerns about some miscommunications. Maybe there were some real tragedies in your life before. Maybe there was abuse at his hands. I don’t know that. … But I don’t know that he’s disowned you.”

Moore responded, “That’s been my impression. He hasn’t spoken to me since my last board hearing. And the comment was that I had embarrassed him. And that was the end of it. And he wanted nothing more to do with me.”

Blanchard and Moore discussed why he killed Booth, and he returned, at least in part, to the conspiracy theories that he seemed to abandon in his 1993 parole hearing.

After his discussion with Moore, Blanchard ended the hearing. Two weeks later, Moore was informed that he’d been denied parole — for a third time. Another hearing was scheduled for 2004.

He was deeply disappointed, and he shared that in letters to the Rasmussens. But he didn’t give up. Instead, he wrote letters to the Booth family, and asked the Board of Pardons if they’d forward them on his behalf.

They did that. And Buddy Booth’s widow, Carla Maas, wrote him back.

What Leslie Moore’s letter put into motion continued to ripple through lives in ways none of them expected — or even knew about. And it would lead to an unexpected advocate — and Moore’s best chance at actually earning parole.

After her only brother’s murder, Leslie Rasmussen Moore was so unraveled by grief, there were times she didn’t even recognize herself.

“This is really embarrassing, and 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’d think, ‘Oh, they’re hurting, too. I’m not just the only one that’s hurting,'” she said.

Instead of healing her wounds, it seemed like time was turning that hurt into something darker. Her heartbreak was evolving into anger. The mother of five studied sociology, and she understood that these feelings were a normal part of grief.

But that didn’t mitigate the shame.

“That was something that I didn’t want to admit at all,” she said. “I was furious at myself for thinking that I was looking at someone else being miserable.”

Leslie desperately wanted to move on. But she felt bound to her brother’s killer in ways she just couldn’t seem to escape. Like her married surname, Moore. It was the same as her brother’s killer — Michael Moore — even though there was no familial relationship.

But when she struggled with the violence of her brother’s death, or the way he maligned Jordan Rasmussen’s character, even blaming him for his own murder, she found comfort in one thing.

Michael Moore was suffering, too. He had to be, she thought, locked away in that maze of misery.

Most of the time, she kept this toxic stew on a back burner, hidden from even herself. But there were times when it boiled over. LIke the time she was driving to Provo for an event at BYU.

She was thinking about the upcoming conference, about meeting her husband for dinner, and then she saw it. Just off the west side of I-15, the network of prison buildings behind razor wire where Michael Moore was serving two life sentences for killing her brother and another man, Buddy Booth, on March 5, 1982.

“I saw the prison,” she said, “and I thought, ‘I need to drive into that parking lot. And I need to see that ice-cold building. And I need to see the miserable circumstance.’ Because … I am miserable. I have no sympathy. I have no Christlike love. I am just empty.”

She veered onto the off-ramp, and headed toward the guard station at the main gate. Leslie was 25 miles from her destination. Her husband was waiting at a restaurant for her. Stopping didn’t make any sense.

She didn’t have a plan, only pain.

She parked and walked into the main security building.

“I said to the guard there, ‘Is there any way I can just kind of look in here and see the coldness in here? … The person that took my brother’s life is in here, I just want to see how miserable he is.'”

The officer gently explained that people weren’t allowed to just walk into the prison. Awash in disappointment and shame, Leslie Moore left and walked back to her car.

Before she pulled away, she surveyed the bleak rows of buildings, the fences topped with razor wire, the looming guard towers on each corner. There was no way he could be happy here. And she felt some measure of comfort mixed with her pain and shame.

“I just wanted,” she said, “to see him suffering.”

What she didn’t know as she drove away from the prison was that eventually she’d get her wish. She’d get to go inside the prison and see just how miserable Michael Moore really was.

It wouldn’t be for nearly a decade — and it would change her life.

Although none of it would be what she expected.

Life doesn’t mean life

For Jordan Rasmussen’s widow, moving on meant focusing on her family.

She tried to banish any thought of the man who shattered her life, the lives of her three young children, from her mind. Like her sister-in-law Leslie Moore, she took comfort in knowing Michael Moore would likely never get out of prison.

“Just keep him there,” DeAnn Rasmussen Kilgore remembers thinking. “Keep him out of my life, out of my children’s lives.”

But in the fall of 1993, the family got a letter from the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole informing them that Michael Moore had a parole hearing in October of 1993 — just 11 years after he’d killed two young fathers.

The entire family was stunned.

“I just could not see any way possible that he should ever be out of prison,” said Kilgore, who’d remarried and was focused on blending two young families.

Jordan Rasmussen’s youngest sister, Ann Marie Rasmussen Herpich, said they had no idea that life sentences didn’t necessarily mean an actual lifetime.

“Are you kidding me?” Herpich said. “I thought it’s too short. … A life sentence, I just thought it meant what it said.”

And then there was the oldest sister, Leslie Moore. She was furious.

“This is totally unjust, that he is even being considered for this,” she said. “He has ruined our lives. And there’s no way that he should ever see the light of day.”

So the family made a plan to fight any effort at parole.

Jordan Rasmussen’s big sister and his widow would speak on behalf of the family. Their job was singular — make sure Michael Moore would never get a chance at life outside those prison walls.

Leslie Moore felt tremendous pressure to convey how her brother’s murder had devastated their family.

“I was absolutely just filled with anxiety,” she said. “The whole experience was going to be very, very frightening, and never having been through anything like this in any of our lives.”

She drove to the hearing the morning of Oct. 8, 1993, with three of her children. She prepared for a fight she felt she had to win. So she summoned the darkest parts of her pain. She revisited the worst moments of losing her brother, and she let that toxic stew boil over. She opened her heart to all the rage, all the hatred she could muster.

“I felt in a lot of ways that I owed it to Jordan,” she said. “Just in honor of his name … to make sure justice was being done. … I needed to express to them the seriousness of what had happened with our family, to look at those three little children … and I just felt that day … just desperate, desperate for justice.”

Leslie Moore walked into the hearing room at the prison with her family. Michael Moore was already there, sitting in a row of chairs along one side of the room. He wore a white prison jumpsuit, glasses and he looked older.

Leslie Moore said she tried not to look at him. She focused on her fight, on the reason for this fight.

“I thought sweet David, and sweet Lisa, and sweet Chad,” she said of Jordan’s children. “Those thoughts just kept coming to me about these little children. And it’s not fair for him to ever get out when they can’t get out of their circumstance. … There is no way you know, there’s just no way he should ever see the light of day. And that was my feeling when I went in there. I just, I was adamant.”

A monster or a man

After an introduction, board member Curtis Garner invited her to sit at a table in the center of the room.

Adrenaline coursed through her body. She sat down and picked up the mantle of big sister. She forced her eyes to blur when she caught sight of him.

“I really didn’t want to look at him,” she recalled. “I’m sure I looked through him or around him — anything but in front of him.”

He wasn’t a person, she told herself. He was just a blob.

“I did not want to engage with him in any way,” she said.

She cleared her throat, leaned into the microphone and let that toxic stew boil.

“My name is Lesley Rasmussen Moore. I am the sister of Jordan Q. Rasmussen. Jordan’s life was taken in premeditated, cold-blooded murder. He is totally without guile and a perfectly exemplary person. We have never known of anyone having an argument or a fight with him ever in his life.”

She addressed every aspect of her brother’s murder that haunted her — how he was essentially executed, how Michael Moore tried to throw his body down a sewer sump, how he killed another man to cover his crime, how he lied about her brother to justify the violence.

“After the men were wounded on the ground, Moore walked over and continued to shoot them in the head as they lay in the snow,” she said, noting he wasn’t emotionally distraught. He was a remorseless killer on a rampage. “If 10 more people had driven up that canyon (to) Log Haven … they would have also been victims that day of Michael Patrick Moore.”

Then Kilgore walked to the table and offered her view of the devastation Moore caused.

“Today is a very significant day in my life,” she said. “It was on this very day, 24 years ago that Jordan and I were married. We had many hopes and dreams of growing together in love and happiness, of having children, raising our little family together, watching them grow through infancy, childhood, the teen years and eventually, grandchildren. Little did we know that after a very short 12 years of marriage, our dreams would be shattered because of the selfish acts of Michael Moore. … I was left a widow to raise our three small children alone as a single parent.”

It was unfair, she said, that Moore could earn parole and maybe have a chance to get married, have children and see them grow up.

“Michael could be at his son’s football, soccer and baseball games,” Kilgore said. “He could attend a daughter’s dance recital, or even play a simple game of catch with his son. Why should he be given this privilege when he so selfishly took it away from Jordan.”

As she talked about all the moments Jordan Rasmussen had missed.

“Just this summer, tears streamed down my face as I watched our youngest son, Chad, step up to the plate and hit a home run in the state all-star tournament,” she said. “How I wished he could have looked up in the stands at his dad and been given the thumbs-up signal. Jordan would have been so proud.”

But Jordan Rasmussen wasn’t there to help his children with challenges either. His loss was incalculable. They would feel it forever.

“There are some things in this life that can never be compensated for,” she said. “(Jordan) did not deserve to die. He deserved to live. Michael must pay for the two lives he has taken. Justice has not yet been served.”

After both women spoke, Garner invited Michael Moore to take a seat at the table and respond to what the family had shared.

“There hasn’t been a day in these last 12 years that I haven’t grieved every day for exactly what they’ve said,” Moore said. “I knew little David Rasmussen; David adored his dad. Jordan was a good man and everything that Mrs. Rasmussen said — and … his sister — is true. … And part of the punishment that I’ve gone through has been every day I think of those things. I think of the pain that I put father and mother Rasmussen through and the children growing up without parents, that’s my fault. There’s nothing I can do to change that, but I understand everything they say. And I live with that every day.”

He said his own mother died, in part, because his crimes and his imprisonment broke her heart. He said he’d inflicted torment on his own father, and he acknowledged the pain he’d caused Buddy Booth’s family.

This was not the Michael Moore they’d listened to in their heads for 11 years.

Kilgore said she began to feel a strange sympathy, while Leslie Moore was confused and sad.

“As I sat there, it was like layers of an onion being peeled off,” Leslie Moore said. “At first, there was so much anger on my part. And then there was the next step of listening. … Then, the next layer was, ‘Wow, this person is really, really remorseful.’ And as I sat there and watched the pain he was suffering, I could feel that. And I also had just strong, intense feelings inside of me.”

Michael Moore told Garner he’d liked to justify his actions. And then, he added, “For what I’ve done, there is no justification.”

Leslie Moore wanted him to suffer, but now she was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings.

“I was very surprised by the whole situation,” she said. “I was very surprised. That was one of the most emotional things I’ve ever been through.”

She fixed her gaze on him as he spoke to the board member. She tried to see him. She struggled to understand how this man could be the monster who’d robbed her of her only brother. She hadn’t realized until this moment how badly she just wanted Moore to acknowledge that her brother had done nothing wrong.

“That was important to me,” she said, “because I knew that my brother could never have done anything to have instigated anything.”

As the Rasmussens listened, Moore discussed what he’d been doing in prison, how he’d tried to change, tried to help other inmates, tried to make amends for what he’d done.

Garner acknowledged his good works, and how he had many champions among the prison staff. It was unusual — and commendable.

“You appear to have developed quite a fan club since you’ve come here to the prison, Mr. Moore,” he said. “Over 11 1/2 years you’ve not received a single disciplinary write-up. In a place where many inmates receive a write-up a week, that’s an accomplishment and is certainly to your credit. … You’ve done volunteer programs that are too numerous to mention.”

He said Michael Moore’s work as the supervisor for the prison’s print shop was of particular note.

“It sounds to me from the reports I get … you basically run the place,” he said. “Or at least they couldn’t run it without you. … I guess the bottom line is, it appears to me, Mr. Moore, that you’ve done basically everything possible that a person could do once committed to prison to try and rehabilitate himself.”

After offering this long list of what looked like a very good argument in favor of Moore’s release, he offered a view of his life behind bars through a different lens, a skeptical lens.

“You are a person of extraordinary intelligence,” he said. “And so there is always the possibility that somebody is doing that as a manipulation. That’s always a difficult thing for us to assess. But it goes on a lot in here. … On the other hand, when somebody is able to sustain it for a very long period of time, that certainly weighs in favor of sincerity.”

Michael Moore made a final plea for mercy.

“I’ve stayed away from violence in here,” he said. “I’ve stayed away from anger, have learned how to control that. I’ve been involved in extensive therapy to address those issues. And I want to do that for me so that I don’t create such hurt in other people’s lives again. And that’s not here as a manipulation or to make a showing. It’s an honest concern to make a difference in somebody’s life. … I can’t change what I did to the Rasmussen family. I have to live with that for the rest of my life. But hopefully I can make a difference in other lives.”

A shift

Leslie Moore and Kilgore said they felt something in them shift as he spoke. They heard him suffering, but it wasn’t satisfying. Somehow it was even more painful.

“I felt that he had had a lot of help while he was in prison,” she said. “He had been on drugs and alcohol, his mind was distorted. And there was clarity when he spoke. And I really felt that strongly. I felt deep, deep, deep remorse. … Michael did not do this out of hate for Jordan. He did it out of desperation for his own circumstances.”

The rage she’d channeled to fight Moore’s parole was slipping away.

“As I sat there, it was like something was just draining out of me,” she said. “Any anger, any hate, any of those emotions … were just … being drained right out of my system.”

The Rasmussens gathered their things to leave. An officer approached them and said, “Don’t worry. He’s not going anywhere.”

None of them knew how to respond.

“We were extremely numb,” Leslie Moore said. “And we all left, and went out to our cars.”

They gathered in the parking lot and tried to process what they’d just heard, how it made them feel, and what, if anything, had changed.

“All of us just huddled around before we got in our cars,” Kilgore said, “and we were all just crying. And Leslie especially was crying. … Leslie was just really, really emotional.”

Kilgore said they felt a mix of pity, relief and sadness. They went to lunch to try and put into words what happened. But nothing seemed to adequately capture what they’d experienced.

The letter

Leslie Moore left her family and drove home.

When she arrived home, she went straight into her bedroom, shut the door, found a piece of plain white paper and a pen and started writing.

“I wrote a letter to Mike,” she said. “I remember just saying, ‘I felt today, that you are a very remorseful person. And I felt sympathy for your circumstance, and that you had made a decision that will forever change your life and all of our lives.'”

She said she felt the sentiment, but the words came from somewhere else.

“I just remember writing this letter, and it wasn’t me writing it,” she said. “I remember that. I remember, I am not writing these words, I don’t know where these words are coming from. But I am penning something that I am not engaged with. It just came out, it just flowed.”

Even as she wrote, she was confused by what she wrote. These were words she couldn’t have imagined even thinking, let alone sharing, when she woke up that morning.

She called him Mike because she wanted to see him differently, as differently as she now felt.

“I just want you to know our family has forgiven you,” she wrote. “And we want you to do the very best you can do with your life. … You are literally our brother.”

Leslie Moore thinks about that now, and it surprises even her. Is there a more sacred title she could bestow on anyone?

“When you realize that the person that you are looking at, that you have had such hate and anger for, now you’re looking at them as a literal brother,” she said. “That is an interesting concept. When you can look at them and say, ‘This is … one of my literal brothers.’ And then you look at it completely differently. You think, ‘What have you done to be in this position? What can I do to help you?’ And that was such a change from the feelings I had, as I wanted to drive down and see how miserable he was at the prison. … And that was a day of awakening.”

Leslie Moore mailed the letter a few days later.

“I remember having a completely, completely different feeling,” she said.

The letter was written by one person, but it would affect them all. That letter set off a chain reaction, a different kind of wave. And it would crash through lives she never even considered as she wrote those words.

The first wave would hit two weeks later when Michael Moore wrote back. And Leslie Moore had to tell her family what she had done.

All of them were stunned.

“Oh, my goodness,” Ann Marie Rasmussen Herpich told her. “What have you done?”

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 now no home, found herself confronting questions that felt impossible to answer.

But the most heartbreaking question came from her 4-year-old daughter Norma.

“She always wondered where her dad was, why he wasn’t coming home,” Maas said, breaking into sobs. “And it took me a long time … before I even said anything to her.”

Maas didn’t know how to answer her daughter’s questions. So, she didn’t.

But about a year after Buddy’s murder, she succumbed to the pressure from her parents to take Norma to her daddy’s grave. It was a trip she hoped would help her find a way to explain death to the now 5-year-old little girl who’d been the center of her dad’s life.

Maas and Norma drove to the Salt Lake cemetery where he was buried. They parked and walked a short distance to the headstone where Buddy’s name was engraved. And then, she tried to explain that this was where her daddy lives now.

But the little girl was confused.

“And she kept looking around,” Maas recalled, wiping away tears. “She was … looking for him is what she was doing. And I sat by the grave for a little bit. She wouldn’t sit down. She just kept looking, waiting for him to come.”

Norma grew more distressed, so Maas decided it was time to leave. She took her daughter by the hand, but she tried to pull her hand away.

“And she goes, ‘Mama, wait, wait. Mama, wait. I want to see my dad’,” Maas sobbed. “And I told her that her dad lives here. … And he … he’s in the ground.”

She covers her face, crying at the memory.

“And that broke her heart,” Maas said. “And she just cried and cried. … I felt it was a mistake to bring her because I knew then she wasn’t ready for it and …”

Sobs interrupt her again.

“She was angry with me for a while — thinking I took her away from her dad again.”

Carla Maas wasn’t the only young widow trying to navigate grief and motherhood. Because the morning of March 5, 1982, Michael Moore killed two young fathers — Jordan Rasmussen, 30, and Buddy Booth, 24. Moore knew Rasmussen and laid out an elaborate series of lies that police, prosecutors, and eventually a jury rejected. But he didn’t know Booth.

Booth arrived at the restaurant just minutes after Moore shot Rasmussen in the head. Moore, 25, ran into the restaurant to look for a way to dispose of Rasmussen’s body when Booth drove up in his delivery van planning to pick up a load of dirty linens for his employer, Peerless Laundry.

When he saw Rasmussen’s body in the driveway, he parked the van and walked over to where he laid in the snow. Moore came out of the restaurant, and after a brief exchange, he shot Booth as the man ran from him.

A jury didn’t buy Moore’s lies, but they did offer him mercy. Instead of sending him to death row, they sent him to prison to serve two consecutive life sentences.

But after just a year, Moore would make his first appearance before the Utah State Board of Pardons and Parole. And while no one believed he would be eligible for early release after just a year behind bars, Moore made a sincere and impassioned plea for a parole date.

“I feel for the families and the wrong I’ve done,” Moore told the parole board in a hearing in September of 1983. “I would hope that there’s some way I can make that up to society. I don’t know what I can do, I wish we could go back and redo it. I would never put myself in a position that would ever do what I’ve done.”

The young widows didn’t know about the hearing.

While the man who killed their husbands fought for his freedom, they fought for a way out of the pain that saturated everything.

“I remember the day I woke up after the funeral,” said Jordan Rasmussen’s widow, DeAnn Rasmussen. “That was when it really hit me — to wake up in the morning and the first thing you notice is your heart is racing. And you think, ‘Did I dream that? Or is it real?’ And then reality would hit and I didn’t want to get out of bed.”

She hoped that if she could find a way to face every lonely morning, she could find her way back to a happy life.

“I just knew that time would heal this open wound that was in my heart and I just so badly wanted time to go by fast because my heart was broken,” she said. “It wasn’t just emotionally; it was a physical pain. I literally felt my heart was broken.”

But even on her worst days, she found three reasons not to succumb to grief.

“I just remember,” she said, crying, “life just seems so empty. I thought I just don’t want to go on living. What’s there to live for? But then I’d think of David, Lisa and Chad, and I thought, ‘I have to be here for them.'”

Like Booth, Jordan Rasmussen left a 5-year-old confused and longing for the daddy she adored. DeAnn Rasmussen and Jordan Rasmussen’s sisters tried to explain to little Lisa what it meant to die. In an effort to ease the pain they anticipated she’d feel, they reminded her of their faith. They said she would see her daddy again in the afterlife.

“Your daddy’s going to be gone for a long, long time,” Diane Rasmussen Duckworth told her young niece. “It’ll be a long time until you see him, and she says, ‘Well, not very long, because he will come home for Christmas. Because he loves Christmas.'”

Duckworth can’t suppress sobs as she remembers her niece’s words.

“And I remember thinking, ‘No, it’ll be longer than Christmas’,” she said. “You know … you can’t explain the hereafter to a 5- or 6-year-old.”

That would become evident nine months later as they gathered for their first Christmas without Jordan Rasmussen. As their mother encouraged them to get ready for bed on Christmas Eve, Lisa made it clear just how mean grief could be.

“That December, DeAnn was saying, ‘You gotta go to bed’,” Duckworth remembered. “You know, ‘Santa can’t come until you go to sleep.’ … Lisa said, ‘I don’t care about Santa. I’m waiting for Dada to come back.’ … Those words ring clear. ‘He’ll be back, he’ll come home for Christmas, because he loves Christmas.'”

When Buddy Booth and Jordan Rasmussen were murdered, their wives were banished to an isolating new reality. They were women who’d lost the men they loved, the partners they’d relied on. Rasmussen and Maas wandered through remnants of their old lives desperate for the comfort of something familiar. And they found it scattered in the debris left by the violence.

But often, without warning, those same things taunted them, shifting into painful reminders of what they’d lost to a gunman’s rampage.

One of the loneliest aspects of this new life was that there wasn’t time to stumble through the darkness alone. They were mothers. Everything they did — and didn’t do — impacted the road their children had to travel.

They both had devastated children who couldn’t understand why their dads were hugging them on Thursday, and gone from their lives completely on Friday.

“Sometimes I would get angry,” Rasmussen said of the months after the murders. “If the kids did something — got an award at school or did something that the parents should be there — I would just be angry that … they couldn’t have their dad there. …It was hard not feeling sorry for them. And so you just wanted to give them things.”

Rasmussen sought counseling. She wanted to be whole for her children. And while she assumed they were grieving too, she wasn’t sure how to talk about their pain. So they didn’t.

“They just kind of kept it in,” she said. “I think I failed them. I probably should have brought it out.”

There would be endless tears, enduring sorrow, and eventually a return to joyful lives. But the full impact of what it meant to lose their fathers at such young ages wouldn’t become clear for many years.

Especially for Norma and Dana Booth. Losing their father set in motion a series of events that triggered an avalanche of compounding trauma. Some of those events were set in motion that first year. That same year the man who robbed these children of their fathers was working hard to convince prison officials that he didn’t deserve to live behind bars. Michael Moore was preparing to plead for a second chance at freedom. And that led to a hearing where he had to answer one critical question: Did he understand the damage he’d done?

And Moore would have answers for the parole board, but he’d have an ally in his fight that those widows could relate to — his father.

Edward Moore had pleaded with a jury to spare his son’s life. And in September of 1983, he pleaded with the parole board to let his son live that life outside the prison’s walls.

“Michael’s not a criminal,” Edward Moore said. “Michael must have been brainwashed, under tremendous mental strain to do something like that. I just can’t understand it. I didn’t even know he could shoot a gun. We don’t have guns in our house.”

He even appealed to an authority higher than the parole board.

“We’re all being judged by a higher board of pardons than this,” Edward Moore said. “And I’m sure the main upstairs will say, ‘Let there be peace and goodness that follows. For it is in the forgiving that we are pardoned, and in the pardoning that we are forgiven. We humbly beseech … that you grant Mike favorable rehearing that will offer him hope instead of despair.”

But hope would not come in the form Michael Moore requested. After a brief deliberation, the board decided to give Moore the maximum rehearing date available at that time — 10 years. He was devastated and openly wondered if there was anything he could do, any changes he could make that would bring him release from the hopelessness of prison.

He asked them what might happen if he continued to stay out of trouble in prison, if he kept volunteering, attending therapy and trying to improve himself.

“What can we anticipate after that, if I maintain my present course,” he asked. “Can you give me some ray of hope is what I’m asking? Should I anticipate a five-year rehearing date when I return in 10 (years)?”

But board members refused to give him anything but advice.

“Mike, I won’t commit to that,” the chairman said, advising him to continue to stay out of trouble and make good use of his time behind bars. “I think it would be best for you … to prepare for that rehearing, look forward to that as a goal. … But the options at that time, I don’t know. And I wouldn’t want to comment on that, because me commenting would set some expectations.”

And with that, Michael went back to the life he was trying to rebuild within the confines of the prison walls. That hearing set a decade into the future would bring Moore back into the lives of his victims. But not in a way that any of them expected.

SALT LAKE CITY — 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 the aisles and stood along the back wall. Maas had huddled in the center of her extended family, hoping to avoid the swarm of media that threatened to pull her from the safe obscurity of her now shattered life.

“I felt like I was being closed in on,” she said of walking to the witness stand during Moore’s capital murder case. “I don’t like to be in front of crowds. I don’t like to be the center of attraction. I like to hide in the back of the room.”

But on this particular morning, Sept. 8, 1982, Maas left the safety bubble her family created for her to do one thing — make sure the jury saw her husband as more than the body of a delivery man in the back of a van.

“I remember the bag that they brought out with all the evidence in it — my husband’s clothing,” Maas said. “And it was bloody.”

The prosecutor asked if she recognized the brown, blood-soaked shirt. She saw the name “Bud” stitched on the chest and she felt sick.

“I was shocked,” Maas recalled. “I was devastated. I put my head down, and that’s when I started feeling light-headed, dizzy. … It was really tough. And all I could do was cry.”

She said Moore just stared at her as she sobbed.

Moore was manager of the iconic Log Haven restaurant when he confessed to killing 32-year-old Jordan Rasmussen, alleging he was being forced to embezzle by a network of organized crime associated with one of two men who bought the restaurant in 1979. Buddy Booth was killed simply because he happened on the murder scene while Moore was trying to decide how to dispose of Rasmussen’s body.

Moore’s defense attorney, Bob Van Sciver, told the media, “It’s an awful, brutal crime. I think (there’s) little that can be said in justification for having committed that much carnage.”

But Van Sciver, who died in 1997, was also convinced this wasn’t a death penalty case. And, using the same facts that prosecutors hoped would convince jurors to send Moore to the firing squad, the defense painted a completely different picture.

It all began with two young widows — Maas and 30-year-old DeAnn Rasmussen — trying to make their dead husbands real for a jury who could only see 25-year-old Michael Moore.

Both women cried as they talked about Booth and Rasmussen. They were devoted fathers who valued their families above all else.

As tears streamed down Maas’ face, her sadness slowly hardened into something else.

“I was angry,” she said. “I was furious … because why would he kill an innocent man? … I could see that he was quite cold.”

Through her tears, she met his stare. And then she made it clear what punishment she felt he deserved for robbing her children of their father.

“And I did say an eye for an eye,” she said. “I didn’t think he deserved to be on this earth for killing two people. I just felt that he deserved to die, as well.”

A tragic case

Mike Carter was a crime reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune in 1982 and he remembers his phone ringing on that frigid winter morning.

“I remember this particular morning because it all happened really early,” he said. “I actually got a call at home … from one of the detectives telling me that there had been a double homicide up Millcreek Canyon. So I drove from home up there.”

The road was blocked, but that didn’t deter Carter. He parked his car on the side of the narrow canyon road and hiked through the freshly fallen snow to get a look at the gruesome scene in the driveway at Log Haven. He was only there a few minutes before the homicide sergeant yelled at him, so he went to the detectives’ offices and that’s where he began to learn what happened.

“They didn’t really know what was going on yet, other than it looked like an employee had killed his boss,” Carter recalled. “And that Buddy Booth was unfortunate in that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. … They were able to put that much together that quick.”

By the end of the day, Moore confessed to the killings. A few days later, prosecutors filed capital murder charges against the 25-year-old, and his family hired one of the state’s most effective and flamboyant defense attorneys.

Carter said there were a number of great attorneys in Salt Lake City in the ’80s, and Van Sciver was one of the best.

“He had the greatest comb-over of all time,” Carter said laughing. “He had this big head of shocking white hair, which was thinning a little on top, and it was combed back in this bouffant kind of thing. He was tall and talked faster than anybody you’ve ever met in your life. But he was a terrific attorney.”

Van Sciver made his mark on the legal system by taking some of the toughest cases with a fearlessness that made him a champion — and a challenge. The one thing no one ever accused him of was being boring.

In his opening statement, Van Sciver conceded the basic facts of the case were undisputed. But, he said, there was an explanation for what Moore had done — and it meant he wasn’t guilty of premeditated, cold-blooded murder.

“This particular trial … I remember it being very dramatic,” Carter said. “There were a lot of surprises. … And juries weren’t tentative about handing down the death penalty in those days.”

Van Sciver said what happened the morning of March 5 was the horrific crash of an emotional spiral. Moore essentially operated in an alternative reality where he was losing the thing he loved most — the restaurant he managed.

The weeks leading up to the shooting were littered with evidence of Moore’s emotional deterioration. He told friends, co-workers and employees at other businesses that the “Chinese mafia” was out to get him, or wanted to set him up.

And it all began when the two businessmen who owned the high-end restaurants decided their partnership had devolved into acrimony. They decided the only solution was a business divorce.

The split was scheduled to be finalized that very day — March 5, 1982. And Rasmussen was supposed to take over Moore’s job as manager. But it’s unclear if that was ever officially revealed to the staff — until one of the owners told police after the murders the new owners planned to replace most of the staff.

Van Sciver said Moore had “no sleep, no food, some alcohol (the night before)” and he was losing a job that “appears to have been his entire life.”

Moore told friends he was afraid he was going to be set up for the thefts by the mafia. He said his phones were tapped, and he’d been told “hatchet boys” were coming for him.

Prosecutor TJ Tsakalos said investigators never bought Moore’s twisted version of events. And neither did he.

“I couldn’t get into his head as to why he was thinking the way he was thinking,” Tsakalos said. “Over the course of the trial, people talked about him and how bright he was and how accomplished he was. … I came up with the term chameleon. I thought he could change colors to manipulate you. … So my theory was, he made it up to try to justify what he did.”

The confession

The centerpiece of proving Moore deserved the death penalty was his confession given to police the afternoon of the murders. Prosecutors decided to play the entire 60-minute recording during the trial.

For the families, it was the first time they heard a detailed breakdown of the brutality of the killings. He methodically walked through how Jordan yelled, “No, Mike!” as he shot him in the head, and then how he frantically searched for chains so he could sink Rasmussen’s body in the sump, where they disposed of grease, garbage and sewage.

It was the first time they heard how Booth was leaning over Rasmussen’s body when Moore came running out of the restaurant, and how he turned to run just as Moore shot him twice, hitting him in the arm and the back. He fell face-down in the snow.

And then “he gave them the coup de gras,” Tsakalos said. “He shot them in the head after they were down.”

When asked why he shot Booth, a man he didn’t even know, Moore told police, “Dead men tell no lies.”

Listening to the details was too much for DeAnn Rasmussen.

“I was crying,” she said. “And I think it was at that point that they stopped the trial. And I went out of the room.”

Van Sciver moved for a mistrial, but the judge denied his motion. Rasmussen said every day of the trial was excruciating, but that day was almost unbearable.

“That was one of the hardest things of the trial when they (the defense) tried to say that Jordan had put himself in this spot that made it seem that he deserved it,” she said. “In fact, (Moore’s) words were, ‘He didn’t deserve to live.'”

Jordan’s three sisters left with her, all of them crying, trying to comfort each other.

“It was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through,” she said. “To go every day and listen to cold hearted Mike, his defense attorneys, defending him and trying to make Jordan look bad. It was gut wrenching. I remember coming home every night and just feeling so emotionally spent. I mean, it was hard for me to even think about getting up and going the next day, but you knew you had to.”

It was a Monday when the jury delivered a guilty verdict. And it was Wednesday morning when Van Sciver presented his case to spare Moore’s life.

The most emotional appeal came from Moore’s father, Edward Moore.

“I appreciate you giving me this opportunity to come and plead for my son’s life,” he said. “I want to also express Mike’s mother’s and my sorrow for the families, the Booths, the Rasmussens. … I say to the people in the jury, Mike’s a good boy. Don’t send us home today, Roseann and me, we have been suffering for six months not knowing whether we have a son or not. … I beg you, spare our son for one indiscretion or one transgression he did with his life.”

And then Michael Moore asked the jury to spare his life, promising that he’d do what he could in prison to improve the lives of those around him.

In his final plea to jurors, Van Sciver, living up to his colorful reputation, gave a graphic description of what imposing capital punishment meant. In 1982, Utah’s preferred method of execution was death by firing squad. Bob told jurors that if they sentenced Mike to death, he’d be “dragged from his cell one morning, his bowels will turn to jelly and his hands will be like clay. … We’ll strap him into a chair so we don’t miss, we’ll cut out a red heart and pin it over his heart … and on the command of ‘Fire!’ the life of Michael Patrick Moore will be removed.”

He told the jury no punishment was going to change what happened. “When this trial started, Jordan Rasmussen and Buddy Booth were dead. When this trial ends, they will still be dead. If you want to perpetuate the carnage of March 5, 1982, you can impose the death penalty.”

The jury took just 90 minutes to decide Moore wouldn’t face a firing squad. Instead, he was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in prison.

Van Sciver was asked if his client felt any remorse for what he’d done.

“He does regret it,” Van Sciver told reporters after the jury’s verdict. “He can’t express it. Remorse is difficult for him to show.”

Ed Moore must have known this about his son because he tried to apologize to both widows. Neither of them said much, and both of them said it brought them no comfort. After the jury decided to let Moore live, Maas said she cried.

“I just remember how upset I was,” she said. “Because I wanted more. … Oh, I was glad that they said he was guilty. But then when they read the sentencing, that’s when I was upset. … I just didn’t think justice was done.”

Prosecutor John T. Nielsen, Tsakalos’ boss, said he was stunned. But he also thought, with two life sentences, Moore would never live free again.

“I thought, good for him,” Nielsen said. “Now, he can’t hurt anybody. I’ll go on to the next one.”

Nielsen, like the families, thought this was the end of their connection to Michael Moore. But they were wrong — all of them.

SALT LAKE CITY — 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 there was something odd about his demeanor. She rolled down her window.

“And I said, ‘What do you want?'” she said looking down. “That’s when he told me that Buddy had been shot.”

Without thinking, Maas fumbled for her keys, still hanging from the ignition. She needed to get to her husband.

“I tried to start the car, because I was gonna go … where he was,” she said. “I was quite hysterical. … His boss reached in and grabbed my hand and took the keys. He said, ‘Carla, it won’t do you any good. He’s dead.'”

Maas said she thinks she went into shock. She remembers screaming and crying, but she’s not sure how much time passed before her brother-in-law pulled up next to her car.

“They opened the door for me to get out, and I couldn’t move,” she recalled. “I couldn’t feel my legs. … I could feel my hands, my arms, but I couldn’t move. So they had to help me out of the car. Wow. … I was numb. I was just totally numb.”

They drove her to their house, and they insisted she and the girls stay with them. She was reeling, heartbroken, terrified.

She was 23 and now a widow.

How could she pick up the pieces of a life that already felt so fragile?

A rough start

For Maas, life had always been a challenge, something she needed to wrestle into submission.

The 12th of 13 children in a blended family, her parents divorced when she was so young, she has no memories of their marriage. She had almost no relationship with her biological father … until she went to live with him at age 12.

“I was kind of a brat and didn’t want to live at my mom and stepdad’s house anymore,” she said. “And so they sent me to my dad’s. And I was thinking it would be better there, but it was worse.”

Her parents’ attempts to discipline or care for her felt like a cage she had to escape. She skipped school, ran away from home oftentimes with boys, until eventually, it landed her in juvenile lockup.

“They call it ungovernable,” she said of what she was like as a child. “I didn’t want to listen. I wanted to basically be on my own. … I didn’t want to feel like my parents owned me.”

Childhood held no allure for her. So when her caseworker suggested she get permission from the juvenile courts to be considered an adult, she agreed.

“It continued until I was 16,” she said. “And then I was emancipated from my parents.”

She dropped out of high school, moved in with a friend, and started to live life on her terms. But that turned out to be a lot tougher than she had anticipated.

She was just 17 when Buddy Booth and his cousin walked into the all-night diner where she was eking out a living. He was 19, hardworking, and he seemed smitten right away.

“They chose to sit at the counter,” she said. “And I was waiting on him. … Buddy was talking to me. And I just felt flattered because not too many people, you know, guys, said a word to me. They didn’t even notice me, a lot of them. And so I got talking to Buddy. … He was really sweet, and two weeks later, we moved in together.”

She said Booth was handsome but not in the traditional sense.

“Buddy had red curly hair — really thick, red curly hair,” she said. “He had freckles. And, he was a little bit taller than me (about 5 feet 3 inches).”

Oh, and one more thing, she said. He was missing all his front teeth.

“He had been hit in the mouth with brass knuckles,” she said, giggling. “It didn’t matter to me; it didn’t bother me a bit.”

She liked his unconventional looks. But more than that, she liked who he was.

“I don’t fall for someone who’s perfect and glamorous and all that stuff,” she said. “I fell for the kindness, the caring.”

The two had a lot in common. He also grew up in a blended family. He was the fifth of eight children — 14 if you count half-siblings. And he offered Maas the same thing he’d given his mom and siblings growing up — someone they could rely on.

Booth’s younger sister, Tamie Pipes, said he was the one they all relied on, especially after their mother remarried an alcoholic when he was a teen. Despite losing his childhood to other people’s decisions, he was a happy, playful big brother. Pipes said he played cards, loved music, and made sure his siblings did what they were supposed to do.

Oh, and those teeth he was missing, Pipes said he lost those to an infection when he was a child. But in his defense, it did sound more impressive to lose them in a fight than to an inability to get health care.

A great dad

Maas found out she was pregnant just a few months after they moved in together. She was only 18, and he was 19, but Booth wanted to get married right away. She refused.

“I didn’t want a child to be the reason we got married,” Maas said.

But after the birth of their daughter, Norma, she agreed to get married. Booth wore all white, and she wore her sister’s yellow dress adorned with small flowers.

“It was so pretty,” she said. “We were happy.”

But even their best days were hard. Baby Norma was born with a heart defect, so she spent the first few weeks of her life at the hospital. Booth couldn’t take time off work, but he spent every minute he could at her bedside.

“We were young parents, and it was so scary,” she said. “And it was tough on him because he always worried about her. … She became his everything.”

Despite the fear and worry of those first weeks, which included an open-heart surgery, Booth embraced fatherhood.

“When he’d come home from work, he’d play with her on the floor,” Maas said. “They would just have fun with each other. … I loved seeing the two of them interact with each other. It was beautiful.”

She pauses to wipe her eyes.

“Buddy was a great dad.”

Stormy marriage

When it came to their marriage, however, there was more turmoil. They fought often, and it only got worse after Norma’s birth. Eventually, Maas decided they needed to separate.

“I left him and took Norma,” she said. “And he was not happy with that one. … He wanted Norma.”

Their arguments shifted to his access to his daughter. And eventually, it escalated to a fight in a parking lot. A stranger called the police, and Norma ended up in foster care while they had to take classes on parenting and see a family counselor. Their daughter was in state custody for around eight months.

“It was terrifying,” Maas said.

But they took the classes and rekindled their desire to make their marriage work. She moved back to their apartment, and they learned they were expecting a second child. About a month after little Dana was born, Norma came home.

They were, once again, a family. But they’d only have three months together before that snowy March morning in 1982.

When Maas woke up, she saw the snow, and the sense of dread she’d been feeling exploded into panic.

“I just had a feeling something was gonna happen,” she said. “I just had this feeling several days before, and it just kept getting stronger and stronger.”

She begged her husband to stay home, but he was already dressed and running a comb through his thick, unruly curls. The 24-year-old father of two sleeping little girls shrugged off her worries.

“But I knew something’s wrong,” she said.

Still, she also knew that if there was one thing Booth was, it was reliable. He never missed work. So she pulled on her coat and drove him downtown to Peerless Laundry.

As she dropped him off, she thought about the fear she felt in her gut. But she was also hopeful. Their problems weren’t solved; but they felt a new sense of commitment, not just to each other, but to their daughters.

They were young — just 23 and 24 — and if there was one thing they thought they had in abundance, it was time.

A man with a gun

Booth climbed into his Chevrolet delivery van undaunted by the weather, with 27 cents and his favorite comb in his pocket. He enjoyed his job and the people he met along the way. The sun was just rising as he turned onto Millcreek Canyon Road.

As he eased the van up the snow-covered driveway at Log Haven restaurant, he noticed another car already outside. It was a Jeep, and the doors were still open. As he got closer, he could see something in the snow.

Then he realized it wasn’t a thing, it was a person.

According to police reports, he stepped out of the van, his boots sinking into the unplowed snow. He approached the person and realized it was a man laying face down in the snow. There was blood everywhere, but just as he leaned over the body, someone came rushing out of the restaurant. Booth spun around and came face to face with a man about his age.

“What happened here?” Booth asked.

The man said something, but Booth wasn’t looking at the man anymore. He was looking at the gun that the man was pointing at him.

Booth turned to run just as shots rang out.

‘Looks like murder’

“They are both dead.”

That’s the first thing a Salt Lake County paramedic told deputy Mike Wilkinson when he arrived at Log Haven around 8:15 a.m. on March 5, 1982. Before Wilkinson could react, the paramedic added: “Looks like murder. They are shot.”

The rescue crew stood near a laundry van that was parked on the side of the canyon road in front of the restaurant. The back doors of the van were open, and Wilkinson could see two bodies lying face down. One dressed in black suit pants, a gray jacket and black oxford shoes. The other wore brown pants, brown hunting boots, and a blue jacket — a blue comb stuck out of his left rear pocket.

And then the paramedics pointed at a man standing near them. It was him, they told Wilkinson, who’d found the bodies and called the police.

The man was the restaurant’s manager, Michael Moore. He was young, thin, his curly dark hair cut short, and he wore a plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans.

“Mr. Moore appeared quite shaken, and I had him sit in my patrol car,” Wilkinson wrote in his report in 1982. “I asked him if he knew the victims, and he said he thought one was Jordan Rasmussen, the auditor for the owners of Log Haven. He said Jordan’s auto was parked at the mouth of the canyon, that he had passed it coming up. He also said he had a meeting scheduled with Jordan at 8:00. He then stated he needed a drink of water, could he go up to the restaurant. He exited the car and walked up to the driveway going up to the restaurant.”

As he got out of the car, a firefighter approached him.

“One of the firemen asked me if I had noticed the blood on that guy’s face,” the report said.

Wilkinson had not noticed any blood.

He headed toward the restaurant. When he got inside, he asked Moore, who was holding a napkin, to sit at a table with him. As he sat down, Wilkinson saw blood stains on both knees of his jeans. But there wasn’t blood on his face.

He said Moore was agitated, rambling.

“He was talking about business problems,” the report said. “It’s all crazy. … They set up people. … They’re going to fire us all.”

Wilkinson said he wasn’t sure what happened, but he was certain of one thing. He needed to keep this young man with him until detectives arrived.

Once homicide detectives came, they decided to take Moore downtown to their offices. It would take two interviews, but by 5:30 p.m. that evening, Moore confessed to killing both men.

But his story baffled investigators. And they wouldn’t be alone. Even Moore’s defense team would find his story confusing.

As one prosecutor put it, “It just didn’t add up.”