Shortly after midnight on February 28, 1987, a customer walked into the Red Mini Barn, a convenience store in Blackfoot, Idaho, and could not find the clerk. Stacy Baldwin's coat was still in the store and her car was still outside. Two hundred and forty-nine dollars was missing from the register. Later that morning her body was found beside some garbage dumpsters on an isolated road leading to an archery range north of town.
Over the next three weeks two more people were shot in eastern Idaho: Nolan Haddon, a night clerk at a convenience store in Idaho Falls, and Susan Michelbacher, a special education teacher who had gone to school early to write lesson plans for a substitute. On March 25 Nevada officers arrested a thirty-year-old drywaller from Idaho Falls at a blackjack table in Wells, Nevada. His name was Paul Ezra Rhoades. "It just rattled this whole valley," Nolan Haddon's brother Clay said almost a quarter century later. Rhoades spent twenty-three years on Idaho's death row, fought every appeal open to him, and on November 18, 2011, became the first person Idaho had executed in seventeen years.
According to the sentencing findings quoted by the Idaho Supreme Court, Paul Ezra Rhoades was born on January 18, 1957, and was born and raised in Idaho Falls. He had two brothers and two sisters and lived with his parents until his arrest. At about age four he contracted polio. He spent long periods in the hospital and had many operations on his feet, and the illness left him poorly coordinated, with a balance problem he carried into adulthood. He liked grade school but dropped out in the ninth grade. He tried to enlist in the Army and the Marine Corps and was turned down because of the polio.
He started work at sixteen. An industrial accident cut off the tips of his fingers; a Rexburg police report from 1987 later described a partial amputation on his right hand. When he healed he went to work with his uncle, his father and later his brother in the drywall business, and the trial judge found he was regarded as an excellent craftsman with a good employment history. He told a presentence investigator that he liked fishing, boating and fantasy novels. His mother described him as easygoing and nonviolent, a man who "never went out looking for trouble," a father figure to neighborhood children and a trusted babysitter. Women who knew him called him compassionate and trustworthy.
There was another side to the record. The sentencing judge found that his home life was normal but that outside it he had been subject to abuse or rejection because he was a member of the Rhoades family. The state's presentence report recorded that he had used and abused drugs of all kinds for nineteen years. Amnesty International's 2011 clemency appeal, drawing on his clemency petition, said he started using drugs at thirteen or fourteen, had used methamphetamine for about a decade before the crimes and had sharply increased his use in the months leading up to them; a 2006 psychologist's report quoted in that appeal described a childhood "exposed repeatedly to violence, drug and alcohol abuse." The Ninth Circuit noted allegations, raised in federal proceedings, of incestuous relationships within his family. His prior criminal record before 1987 was minor: resisting and obstructing an officer, petit theft and traffic offenses.
Stacy Dawn Baldwin was twenty-one. She had met her husband, Myron Baldwin, in high school in 1981. They planned to marry after he finished a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada, and they married on August 1, 1986, four months after he came home. Both were active church members. She was athletic and kept fit by swimming and exercising. Her mother, Verna Taylor, told a presentence investigator that Stacy was one of eight children and that "Stacy did everything right in her life." Her mother-in-law, Evelyn Baldwin, remembered her in 2011 as a fine, sweet young woman devoted to her husband.
She worked nights at the Red Mini Barn in Blackfoot. On Friday nights Myron usually stayed at the store with her, but on February 27 he had influenza, and she told him to stay home and that she would be fine. She began her shift around 9:45 p.m. Her co-worker, Stephanie Cooper, left at 11:00, and Baldwin was alone.
Rhoades, who worked nearby as a drywaller and often came into the store, had been seen loitering around convenience stores in Blackfoot and Idaho Falls, watching the women who worked there. The trial judge found that he came in that evening, stayed only a short time and left, then returned near midnight. At gunpoint he took the money from the till, forced Baldwin into his pickup and drove her to a secluded spot near the Snake River off Rose Road in Bingham County. A customer, Carrie Baier, returned to the store around midnight and saw a man leave, get into a pickup that later proved to be one used by the Rhoades family, and drive recklessly toward her. The last recorded transaction at the register was at 12:15 a.m.
The judge found that Baldwin fought back. She was trying to get away on her hands and knees when Rhoades fired. The first shots missed and left marks in the snow. She was hit three times, once in the elbow by a ricochet and once through the back and lungs. Footprints in the snow led toward her and then away. A pathologist testified that she may have lived for an hour or more after the fatal shot. Between 1:30 and 2:00 that morning Rhoades and another man were seen drinking coffee at Stan's Bar and Restaurant near the Mini Barn.
Police across southeastern Idaho were already on alert when, early on March 3, a Ricks College student in Rexburg reported that she had been robbed of $90 at gunpoint at an automated teller near Main Street, forced to drive her own car to a potato cellar in Madison County and raped there. She was released alive. According to a 2011 report in the Rexburg Standard Journal based on police records, her description of her attacker and his vehicle later matched leads other agencies were pursuing. Rexburg police regarded Rhoades as their only suspect, but no charge was ever filed. A police report of June 15, 1987, noted that the victim was reluctant to go to court and that, since Rhoades was already charged with three murders, "it is not likely that our case would be prosecuted even with further evidence." This case is a suspicion, not a conviction.
On March 14 a man named Keven Buchholz, arrested in Blackfoot after a drunken fight at his parents' home, told officers that he had "killed the girl at the mini barn" and had shot her twice in the back. He recanted once sober. His family confirmed he had been with them that night, and his fingerprints, hair and shoe prints matched nothing from the scene. Police concluded that what he had said could have come from public reports and local talk. His statement would come back in Rhoades's appeals for the next twenty years.
On the evening of March 16, two young women in Rexburg noticed a man standing beside a parked car with its hood up, as if he had engine trouble, staring at one of them as she jogged. The friend driving behind her picked her up, and the two gave police a description of the man and his car and its license plate number. Both later picked Rhoades out of a lineup. Rexburg police captain Randy Lewis called the information "instrumental" to the Idaho Falls investigation.
That night Nolan Haddon was working the night shift at Buck's convenience store in Idaho Falls. He was twenty, from Blackfoot, the son of Junior and Julie Haddon and the younger brother of Wes and Clay. His family remembered a likable young man who loved baseball, hunting, fishing and camping. "He was friendly and easy to be around," his mother said. Clay Haddon had never visited his brother at work before, but that night he drove across town to see him, and they joked together less than an hour before Nolan was shot. "I have no idea why I went to that store to go see him," he said in 2011.
The store's owner found Haddon the next morning. He had been shot five times and was still alive but unconscious; the Post Register later reported that he had lain overnight in the store's walk-in cooler and that his spinal cord had been severed. He died at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center on March 17. An inventory showed that $116 in cash, some Marlboro cigarettes and some BIC lighters were missing.
Susan Michelbacher taught special education at Eagle Rock Junior High School in Idaho Falls and had been a teacher for about eleven years. She was a member of the Christian Science church and was active in sports and community affairs. She lived in Idaho Falls with her husband, Bert, a project engineer, and their son, Christopher, who was two and a half. The court record gives her age as thirty-one; news reports in 2011 gave thirty-four.
She did not feel well on the morning of March 19, 1987. Around 6:30 she drove her 1984 Ford Econoline van to school to prepare lesson plans for a substitute, planning to go home and rest. She did the lesson plans. She never came home. Her husband found the house empty at noon and again at 5:30, and the school told him she had not been there during the day.
The court records trace her van through that morning. Around 7:30 a.m. a woman named Valerie Stapf nearly collided head-on with a van like hers in a parking lot and identified Rhoades as the passenger. When the First Interstate Bank opened at 8:30, Michelbacher drove to the drive-in window and cashed a check for $1,000; ten to fifteen minutes later she cashed another $1,000 check at a second branch. Around 10:00 a.m. a woman named Susan Browning saw the van pull into her driveway and stall while backing out, and identified Rhoades as the driver, with a man named Harry Burke and Rhoades's sister as passengers. Michelbacher's body was later found less than a mile from Browning's home. Two other people saw Rhoades, or a man who looked like him, in the van later that day. It turned up the next day in the bank's parking lot with fresh scratches, a smashed tailpipe and two hundred more miles on the odometer.
Her body was found on March 21 in a field about five miles west of Idaho Falls. She had been raped and shot nine times. The sentencing judge found that Rhoades shot her as she tried to escape, reloaded his six-shot .38 revolver at least once, kept firing as she lay on the ground and fired a final shot into her chest at close range, and that he sexually assaulted her again as she was dying. The next day Rhoades showed an acquaintance a roll of cash, said he had "come into some money" and was going to the Jackpot casino in Nevada.
On March 22 or 23 Rhoades's mother, Pauline Rhoades, reported her green Ford LTD stolen. Rhoades was seen driving a similar car on March 22. On March 23 Idaho police obtained a warrant for his arrest for a burglary at Lavaunda's Lingerie. Detective Dennis Shaw, one of the officers on the case, knew him and had spoken with him earlier about that burglary.
On March 24 truck drivers saw the LTD wrecked in the median of a highway about twenty miles outside Wells, Nevada. One saw a man matching Rhoades's description get out, fumble with something brown and run into the sagebrush. The Nevada trooper who arrived about twenty minutes later found the plates came back to a car reported stolen by Pauline Rhoades. A .38 caliber revolver loaded with lead bullets lay on the ground by the open driver's door, with a holster about forty-five feet away. Rhoades's fingerprints were on the car. Ballistics testing later showed the gun had fired the bullets that killed Stacy Baldwin and Susan Michelbacher, and it was the gun the state said killed Nolan Haddon.
Idaho officers were told about the car and drove to Nevada. Rhoades turned up at a ranch about a mile and a half from the wreck around 11:00 the next morning, got a ride into Wells and was dropped at the 4 Way Casino around 9:00 p.m. on March 25. Wells officers arrested him at a blackjack table, handcuffed him and laid him across the trunk of a patrol car. He said he wanted the money that was on the game.
The statements Rhoades made over the next hour became central to all three prosecutions and to every appeal. According to the court records, as the Idaho officers walked up, Rhoades, who recognized one of them, said, "I did it," without being asked anything. Officer Victor Rodriguez read him his rights, and he said something like "I do, yes" when asked whether he understood. Shaw searched him and found a ten, a one and a hundred-dollar bill, two packs of Marlboros, five BIC lighters like those taken from Buck's, and a digital wristwatch like the one Stacy Baldwin had worn, which Rhoades said he had found in a borrow pit. To test how alert he was, Shaw told him he had found three dollars. "There'd better be a hundred and eleven dollars there," Rhoades said.
At the Highway Patrol substation in Wells, Shaw remarked that if he had arrested Rhoades earlier, the victim might still be alive. The appellate opinions record this exchange in slightly different words in different cases. In the Michelbacher record, Rhoades answered "I did it," and when Shaw added "the lady in Idaho Falls," said "I did it" again. In the Baldwin record, Shaw named Stacy Baldwin and then "the girl in Blackfoot," and got the same answer twice. Rhoades made no further statement.
The defense attacked these statements from the start. Officer Rodriguez testified that on the night of the arrest Rhoades acted as if he were high on narcotics, swaying and mumbling and needing help to walk. Several officers who later said they heard the statements did not put them in their reports until months afterward, and none was recorded. One officer testified that Rhoades shook his head after being read his rights, which the defense argued was an invocation of his right to silence. Years later, a report produced at a 1996 federal deposition showed that on the drive to the station Rhoades had told Shaw, "I don't want to talk about it." Every court that reviewed the statements, state and federal, held them admissible: the first because it was spontaneous, the second because the courts found he had not clearly invoked his rights.
Prosecutors charged the killings separately. The Michelbacher and Haddon charges were filed together in Bonneville County and then severed. Idaho had abolished the insanity defense in 1982, and in each case the defense asked the court to declare that unconstitutional before trial. The judges declined because the defense would not say whether it actually intended to raise insanity; a psychiatrist the defense hired, Dr. Kenneth Ash, had found no basis for it. Rhoades's lawyers, Stephen Hart, John Radin and Russell Webb, built their case on actual innocence.
The Michelbacher trial was held in Idaho Falls before District Judge Larry Boyle, with jurors brought from Boise. Former Bingham County prosecutor Tom Moss, who later became U.S. attorney for Idaho, was active in all the Rhoades cases. The jury heard the eyewitnesses who placed Rhoades in the van; the ballistics; testimony that a witness had seen him with a similar handgun and that he had bought .38 ammunition a few days earlier; hair consistent with his found in the van and on her body; the cash; and the "I did it" statements. The state's serologist testified that blood typing excluded Harry Burke and Bert Michelbacher as the source of semen recovered from her body but could not exclude Rhoades, placing him in about sixteen percent of the population. The jury convicted him on all counts: first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, robbery, rape, and a sodomy count charged under Idaho's crime-against-nature statute. Nolan Haddon's brother Clay sat through that trial. "I saw things I hope I never have to see again," he said.
At sentencing the state called no witnesses. The defense called twenty, including Rhoades's parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and eight jail officers, who spoke about his polio, his family's poverty, his work and his good conduct in jail; many insisted he could not have done it. Judge Boyle found three aggravating circumstances for the murder, including that the circumstances showed a propensity to commit murder that would probably constitute a continuing threat to society, and found that the mitigating evidence did not outweigh any of them. On March 24, 1988, he sentenced Rhoades to death for the murder and for the kidnapping, with fixed life terms for the other crimes. "It is with a heavy heart but a clear conscience that I sentence you to death," Boyle said. According to an Associated Press report from 1993, Rhoades threw a chair at the prosecutor when he heard the sentence.
The Baldwin trial followed in Bingham County. The jury heard that the footprints in the snow were consistent with the size and pattern of Rhoades's boots, that a hair consistent with his was on Baldwin's blouse, that the wristwatch in his pocket matched hers and that the gun from the median fired the fatal bullets. A jailhouse informant, David Holm, testified that Rhoades told him he had kidnapped Baldwin, taken her to the archery range intending to rape her, could not because she was hysterical, told her to pray and shot her in the back. The defense tried to put Buchholz's March 14 confession before the jury through the jailer who heard it; the judge excluded it as untrustworthy hearsay. The jury convicted Rhoades of first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping and robbery, and on May 13, 1988, the trial judge sentenced him to death again, writing that "if any situation ever warranted the death penalty, it is clearly manifest in this case."
The Haddon case never went to trial. The state's evidence would have included the gun, the cigarettes and lighters, the "I did it" statements, Rhoades's purchase of bullets of the right caliber, witnesses who saw a car like his at the store, and testimony from Holm and a second inmate, Cliff Jones, who said Rhoades had confessed to them. The trial judge allowed the informants but said openly that he doubted them. Rhoades then entered a conditional Alford plea to second-degree murder and robbery, maintaining his innocence while conceding that a jury could convict him, and reserving his right to appeal the rulings on his statements. He received two concurrent indeterminate life sentences.
The Idaho Supreme Court upheld the Haddon conviction on February 1, 1991, the Michelbacher conviction and death sentences on February 13, 1991, and the Baldwin conviction and death sentences on September 12, 1991. In both capital cases the court found that the trial judge had wrongly received victim impact statements, which the U.S. Supreme Court had barred in 1987 in Booth v. Maryland, but held the error harmless. It rejected arguments over a juror's alleged remark that "you can just look at him and tell that he's guilty," over the jailhouse informant and over a prosecutor's slip in closing argument. In the Michelbacher appeal it also rejected a challenge to the practice of bringing jurors from Boise to Idaho Falls. One prospective juror there had been excused after advocating public stoning at fifty cents a rock. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Michelbacher case in January 1993.
The federal habeas cases ran for nearly two decades. Rhoades raised the Buchholz confession; police reports about it that had not been turned over; his "I did it" statements; whether his lawyers should have investigated his drug use, childhood and mental health for sentencing; and a claim, built on a 2005 review of a 1987 FBI test, that the serology actually excluded him in the Michelbacher case. That claim is set out below. In March 2010 the Ninth Circuit affirmed the denial of relief on the Baldwin case, the Haddon case and the Michelbacher conviction, and in July 2010 on the Michelbacher death sentence. In between, the Idaho Supreme Court, after a remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in March 2010 that Ring v. Arizona, which requires juries rather than judges to find the facts that make a defendant eligible for death, did not apply retroactively to Rhoades and other Idaho prisoners sentenced by judges. On October 11, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his last appeal from those rulings.
On October 19, 2011, Seventh District Judge Jon Shindurling signed death warrants in the Michelbacher and Baldwin cases, setting the execution for November 18. Rhoades was served that afternoon and moved to an isolation cell at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise, where he had been held since March 1988.
On October 21 he asked the Commission of Pardons and Parole for a clemency hearing. In it he accepted responsibility for all three deaths. "Three people are dead because of me. I needlessly caused their deaths. My actions, my crimes, my responsibility," he wrote. "I cannot erase their loss and the pain they suffered because of my crimes." Inmates and former inmates wrote to the commission about how he had helped them turn away from violence. His mother, Pauline Rhoades, issued a statement on behalf of the family that said, "We are very sorry for what happened," and that she still prayed his life would be spared. The commission declined to hold a hearing and recommended against clemency. Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter's office received appeals from abroad, including, Amnesty International reported, from the European Union, the Vatican and the Swiss government.
His lawyers from Federal Defender Services of Idaho also sued over Idaho's three-drug lethal injection protocol, arguing it risked severe pain and that a one-drug method would be safer. U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald Bush refused a stay on November 14; the Ninth Circuit affirmed on November 16, finding Idaho's protocol substantially similar to ones the Supreme Court and the circuit had already upheld; and on November 17 the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay. A last motion, filed by a Mountain Home attorney overnight on a claim that the federal lawyers were not qualified under Idaho's rules for capital cases, delayed the execution by about an hour before a state judge denied it.
Prison officials said Rhoades was "anxious and lucid" in his final days. His last meal included hot dogs, baked beans and strawberry ice cream. About forty-five people stood outside the prison complex before dawn in protest, and a smaller number came to support the execution, among them Brian Amaro of Blackfoot, who had grown up with Nolan Haddon. Julie and Junior Haddon had said they would attend. Evelyn Baldwin said she was sure Myron would not, and Bert Michelbacher was not in the room.
According to Associated Press reporter Rebecca Boone, one of four reporters who witnessed it, Rhoades lay on the gurney and addressed Bert Michelbacher, who was not in the room: "I'm sorry for the part I played in your wife's death." To the Baldwin and Haddon families he said, "I can't help you guys, sorry," and told them they would have to keep looking. He said, "Mom, goodbye," then turned to Warden Randy Blades and said, "You guys, I forgive you. I really do." A friend of the Michelbacher family said, "The devil has gone home." A relative of one of the victims said, "He's been lying the whole way through." Corrections Director Brent Reinke announced that death was pronounced at 9:15 a.m.
He was fifty-four. He was the first person executed in Idaho since Keith Eugene Wells in 1994, and Wells had given up his appeals and asked to die; Rhoades was the first person Idaho had executed without the prisoner's consent in more than half a century. The Department of Correction said he was the twenty-eighth person executed in Idaho since 1864. His body was cremated and the remains given to his attorney, Oliver Loewy.
Tom Moss watched the execution, he said, not to see a man die but to be with families he had grown close to in 1987. "Nothing brings total justice. They don't get their loved ones back. But it brings some satisfaction to them," he said. "These families don't have to read any more in the paper about there's something going on with Paul Rhoades. ... This case is closed." He said the families "were very dignified."
The Haddons spoke to the Post Register the week before. Julie Haddon said she wished her grandchildren could have known the uncle who died before they were born. She supported the death penalty, she said, though "it won't bring Nolan back." Clay Haddon said he did not need to watch someone die. After the execution Julie Haddon said she felt relieved, but was upset that Rhoades still would not take responsibility for the Baldwin killing. Evelyn Baldwin, Stacy's mother-in-law, said Rhoades had to pay for the hurt he had caused "the whole southeastern Idaho," and also that she could not help feeling sorry "that a human being could be in a state of mind that he was in." Her family, she said, had chosen to move on with their lives, not forgetting Stacy but forgetting "the horrible things that happened." In 1987 Bert Michelbacher had told a presentence investigator that by the time justice was done, if it ever was, no one would remember who Susan Michelbacher was or what Paul Rhoades did to her.
Rhoades's own account changed. He maintained his innocence at both trials and in his Alford plea, admitted all three killings in his 2011 clemency petition, and on the gurney accepted a part only in Susan Michelbacher's death. The convictions do not depend on any of these statements.
The Michelbacher serology. Before trial an FBI laboratory test of the swabs found one sample with a PGM enzyme subtype that did not match Rhoades's subtype but did match Susan Michelbacher's own. Neither side raised it at trial. In 2005 a forensic biologist, Dr. Greg Hampikian, said in affidavits for the defense that the report excluded Rhoades. The courts noted that the result could reflect the victim's own tissue on the swab, that Hampikian's first affidavit had misstated the subtype, and that the remaining evidence against Rhoades was strong. The Idaho Supreme Court held the claim untimely and found the report inconclusive. A 2002 petition for new DNA testing was stayed for testing; the published opinions do not say what any new testing showed, and Rhoades withdrew that claim.
The Buchholz confession. A drunken March 14, 1987, confession to the Baldwin killing was recanted and, the courts found, contradicted by an alibi and by the physical evidence. Courts at every level held that its exclusion did not deny Rhoades a fair trial.
The jailhouse informants. David Holm had a history of offering testimony in exchange for leniency and shared a cell, for a day, with Rhoades's case files. The trial judge in the Haddon case said he was skeptical of the informants' testimony. Holm later said he had been promised nothing.
The Rexburg rape. Rhoades was never charged, and the attack has never been tested in court. It is a police suspicion.
Rhoades was executed on November 18, 2011, and his three convictions stand. Checked in October 2026, the Idaho Department of Correction's death row page reports three executions since Idaho's 1977 death penalty statute and eight people under sentence of death. It also says that firing squad became Idaho's primary method of execution on July 1, 2026.
January 18, 1957: Paul Ezra Rhoades born; raised in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
About 1961: contracts polio.
August 1, 1986: Stacy and Myron Baldwin marry.
February 27-28, 1987: Stacy Baldwin abducted from the Red Mini Barn in Blackfoot and shot near Rose Road.
March 3, 1987: Ricks College student robbed, abducted and raped in Rexburg; Rhoades later named as the only suspect, never charged.
March 14, 1987: Keven Buchholz's drunken false confession to the Baldwin killing.
March 16, 1987: two women in Rexburg report a suspicious man and his license plate; that night Nolan Haddon is shot at Buck's in Idaho Falls.
March 17, 1987: Nolan Haddon dies.
March 19, 1987: Susan Michelbacher abducted in Idaho Falls and killed.
March 21, 1987: her body is found west of Idaho Falls.
March 23, 1987: burglary warrant issued for Rhoades.
March 24, 1987: his mother's LTD found in a highway median near Wells, Nevada, with the .38 revolver beside it.
March 25, 1987: arrested at the 4 Way Casino, Wells.
March 24, 1988: sentenced to death for the Michelbacher murder and kidnapping by Judge Larry Boyle.
May 13, 1988: sentenced to death in the Baldwin case.
February 1 and 13, and September 12, 1991: Idaho Supreme Court affirms the Haddon, Michelbacher and Baldwin cases.
January 11, 1993: U.S. Supreme Court declines the Michelbacher appeal.
2002-2009: post-conviction DNA petitions; Idaho Supreme Court rejects the serology claims in October 2009.
March 17, 2010: Idaho Supreme Court holds Ring v. Arizona not retroactive.
March 8 and July 15, 2010: Ninth Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas relief in all three cases.
October 11, 2011: U.S. Supreme Court declines his final sentencing appeal.
October 19, 2011: Judge Jon Shindurling signs death warrants.
October 21, 2011: clemency request; later denied a hearing.
November 14-17, 2011: federal magistrate, Ninth Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court refuse stays.
November 18, 2011: executed by lethal injection near Boise; pronounced dead at 9:15 a.m.