How A Salt Lake City Pharmacy Played A Key Role In The Execution Of An Idaho Serial Killer

By Rone Tempest, Idaho Capital Sun

April 26, 2021

“He said, ‘We have a scheduled date, and we’ve spent all this money getting it ready, and we’re under the gun because we don’t have any way to do it,’” Rasmuson recalled in one of several interviews with The Utah Investigative Journalism Project.

Rasmuson said the prison official offered a large amount of cash upfront and promised that no one would ever reveal who had provided the drug.

In a decision he said he instantly regretted, the 74-year-old Rasmuson, owner and chief pharmacist of University Compounding Drug Pharmacy, agreed to sell Idaho 240 milliliters (a little over 8 ounces) of pentobarbital sodium, a potent central nervous system depressant commonly used in state executions (and, in different forms not approved for humans, pet euthanasia). Since major drug manufacturers stopped supplying execution drugs a decade ago, states have increasingly turned to specialty, or “compounding drug” pharmacies for made-to-order supplies.

On Nov. 18, 2011, at 8:53 a.m., the pentobarbital from University Pharmacy was injected into Paul Ezra Rhoades, a 54-year-old serial killer who had been on death row since 1988. He was pronounced dead 22 minutes later.

“It appeared to go according to protocol, witnesses said,” according to The Oregonian.

A TV reporter who witnessed the execution described it as “incredibly sterile,” reported The Spokesman-Review.

Rhoades was well known to Utah police. He had for several years been the leading suspect in the serial murders of three young women along the Wasatch Front not long before he went on a four-week killing spree in Idaho that left two women and one man dead.

Details of his execution, including the role of the Salt Lake City pharmacy, have only recently emerged because of a public records lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho filed on behalf of University of Idaho law professor Aliza Cover. In a decision that has national implications in capital punishment cases, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled Nov. 20 that the public has a right to know both the source of the drugs used in state executions and the money used to pay for them.

“It is significant to have the recognition of public interest here,” Cover said in a recent interview. “Even people who may support the death penalty might still think it is really important to know what the government is doing in order to carry it out.”

Currently, capital punishment remains legal in 27 states, including Utah, and is authorized by the federal government and U.S. military.

Rhoades’ execution was the first in Idaho in 17 years.

Documents obtained under the ACLU lawsuit and through public document requests by the federal public defenders’ office in Boise provide rare details of the desperate and potentially dangerous measures that capital punishment states sometimes undertake to get their hands on the drug — primarily pentobarbital sodium and sodium thiopental — used in lethal injection executions.

For the Rhoades execution, email strings show that Idaho prison officials began their quest for drugs nearly a year before the execution itself, at one point even negotiating with a notorious supplier in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India, who also purveyed sexual enhancement potions. They ended up looking elsewhere because the department insisted they come from an American source.

The Idaho Capital Sun, the Gem State’s newest nonprofit news organization, delivers accountability reporting on state government, politics and policy.