Paul's Story

Paul Rhoades was born in 1957, the first of four children in successive years to August and Pauline Rhoades. He descended from a long line of poverty, neglect, domestic violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness and suicide.

His father was illiterate and proved ill-equipped to handle his obligations as a husband and father. His mother struggled with her own limitations as she bore the full responsibility of caring for their four children and an older son she brought from another relationship.

Paul was paralyzed with polio when he was 4-years-old. He was hospitalized, sometimes left alone to be treated in facilities as far away as Salt Lake City while his mother returned home to tend to his brothers and sisters. Paul was sometimes bedridden for weeks and months at a time after doctors stuck pins in his toes and wrapped his foot in a cast to try to untwist the damage. While recovering at home, the cast developed a foul odor that was a mystery to the family until the cast came off and they realized it was the smell of his leg rotting away with a gangrene infection. Paul's surgeries continued until he was 12-years-old and he was in the seventh-grade. The operations failed, and he has walked with a distinct limp, and residual pain, ever since. He was not able to play sports or fully take part in other physical activities with his brothers, other boys in his neighborhood, or at school.

Life was chaotic in the small, crowded home on Sixth Street in Idaho Falls where Paul grew up. His father drank all day. He couldn't hold down a job for long. He was caught breaking-and-entering. He told his children more than once that he wanted to kill himself. He fought with their mom so many times that her domestic violence calls became routine to police. Paul witnessed many of these fights. He also pulled his dad out of brawls at the local bars.

Paul's other role models, his grandfather and many of his uncles, were just as bad. They taught him how to drink with them when he was about 10 or 11. Recreational drug use soon followed. Cocaine. LSD. Marijuana. Speed. Several of Paul's closest relatives attempted or committed suicide. Some lost their lives to alcohol or drugs. Others have done time for violent felonies.

Paul dropped out of high school at 16 and went to work for an uncle who ran a successful dry-walling business. He had steady work as a young man, both in Idaho Falls and in Washington State. He became a backbone to his family, particularly the women, watching their children after his day was through so they could work nights at a local restaurant.

Paul's life took a pivotal turn when methamphetamine, or crank, arrived in Idaho Falls as the new way to get high. And in the months leading up to the 1987 murders of Stacy Baldwin, Nolan Haddon and Susan Michelbacher, Paul became heavily addicted. He was staying awake for days at a time. His escalating use made him unrecognizable to his family and friends. Until then he had never been violent nor arrested for a violent crime.

No one knew when Paul started using methamphetamine what we now know: that the addiction rates and negative effects of methamphetamine are staggering. At the time, there were few, if any, programs designed specifically to treat such addictions. Recent research, however, shows that an inmate with a history of methamphetamine use, compared to one without, is nine times more likely to have committed murder. Other new studies show that methamphetamine alters brain chemistry in ways that often leads to serious aggression and psychosis. The court that sentenced Paul was not made aware of his methamphetamine problem, nor the family history and tumultuous upbringing that created a high risk that he would become an addict.

In prison, Paul Rhoades has been able to return to the person he was before methamphetamine damaged him. This is not surprising, since according to current science, recovering addicts can return to normal once they stop using and start getting proper rest and a normal diet. For Paul in particular, the prison system has provided the stability he lacked during his upbringing.