It only took a month in 1987 for a home-grown serial killer to shatter Idaho Falls' self-image as a safe haven.
A high school dropout named Paul Ezra Rhoades shot to death a junior high school teacher and two convenience store night clerks between Feb. 28 and March 19.A month of increasing panic ended March 25, 1987 at about 9:30 p.m., when Rhoades was arrested at casino table 21 in the Four-Way Texaco in Wells, Nev.
The announcement of his arrest gave some relief to a community that had lived in fear. Gun sales had skyrocketed, women were afraid to go out at night and doors usually left unlocked were bolted.
A detective who worked on the case said it was one of his easiest to solve, but one of the hardest emotionally.
"It shocked this community," said Victor Rodriguez, a Bonneville County Sheriff's detective.
"Frightened, scared to death. Everybody was out buying guns," said Sheriff Byron Stommel, who at the time of the murders was an Idaho Falls police detective sergeant.
Stommel also was concerned enough to make his wife carry a gun.
Rhoades, 40, now spends his time on death row at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise while appealing his murder convictions.
Bob Nertney, Boise, a juror on the Susan Michelbacher murder trial, said he rarely thinks about the defendant he helped find guilty, and the caution that Rhoades inspired in him 10 years ago has faded.
After returning home from jury duty, he would warn his wife about jogging in the morning and to look in the back of her car before she got in.
"But even that has faded," Nertney said.
The killing spree started when 21-year-old Stacy Baldwin was abducted about midnight Feb. 28, 1987 from the Red Mini Barn convenience store in Blackfoot, where she worked the night shift.
Her body was found at 9:30 a.m. the next morning just off a rural road about five miles northwest of Blackfoot. She had been shot three times in what initially was considered a robbery.
Then on the night of March 16, Nolan Haddon, 20, Blackfoot, was shot five times at Buck's Gas and Grocery on Sunnyside Road. He was found in the walk-in freezer in the morning, close to death. He was taken to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, where he died hours later.
Rhoades was arrested less than a week after his last murder.
Susan Michelbacher, 34, was not feeling well on the morning of Thursday, March 19, 1987. The special education teacher called in sick but went into Eagle Rock Junior High School to drop off lesson plans. About 7 a.m., on her way home, she stopped at a supermarket to buy cocoa.
Two days later, after a citywide search, her body was found in a desolate sagebrush and lava field about seven miles west of Idaho Falls.
Police believe Rhoades had been staking out the parking lot since early that morning and followed Michelbacher into the store. As she was getting into her Ford van, he pushed his way into the vehicle with a gun.
In the time between the discovery of Michelbacher's body and Rhoades' arrest, other stories surfaced.
Women said they had found the hulking, 230-pound, 6-foot-2 Rhoades in their cars, but he had run away when they yelled at him. Police believed he shot at a woman standing at a street corner, and he was being investigated for the rape of a Ricks College student, Stom-mel said.
There also were witnesses to Michelbacher's abduction. They picked Rhoades, a sometime sheetrocker and snow shoveler, out of a lineup.
"This was a case that wanted to be solved," Rodriguez said.
Ballistics linked the three murders. He had used the same .38-caliber Smith and Wesson, and a box of bullets like those used in the murders was found in Rhoades' car, Rodriguez said.
Rhoades had dropped the gun about 20 miles outside Wells, Nev., where he had run his car off the road and got stuck in loose dirt. He fled on foot but left the gun by the driver's door.
The car was his mother's, and she had reported it stolen. A call from the Nevada Highway Patrol led Idaho Falls law officers to Rhoades. A day later he was behind bars.
When Rhoades went to trial on the Michelbacher case, people lined up for a chance at a seat in the courtroom, and jurors had to be brought in from Ada County because of the heavy local publicity.
Rhoades was sentenced to die for the murders of Stacy Baldwin and Susan Michelbacher. He agreed to a plea bargain in the Haddon case and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Prior to the murders, his past criminal record was full of petty crimes, with the most violent crime being resisting arrest.
Police and sheriffs' departments across the West still contact local law enforcement hoping Rhoades might be the key in their unsolved murders.
Those who worked on the case are rarely asked about the details anymore. And what tends to stick out in their minds are the odd things, the unexplained coincidences.
Bingham County Prosecutor Tom Moss, who tried both the Baldwin and Michelbacher cases, remembers a $5 bill.
After Baldwin was killed in Blackfoot, Nolan Haddon, who would be Rhoades' next victim, turned over to police a $5 bill that appeared to have blood on it. The substance did not turn out to be blood, but Haddon couldn't have guessed that he had tried to help catch the man who would soon be his own killer.
The Rhoades case, now fading into history, taught Idaho Falls a lesson about leaning on the illusion of small-town safety.