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

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 […]

Whisperings

Episode 6

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, […]

Inheritance

Episode 7

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 […]

The Tether

Episode 8

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 […]