It was cold and quiet when Officer Richard Wells arrived at the Moab City police station, shortly before 11 p.m. on Thursday, January 5, 1961. The holidays had come and gone and the small southern Utah community was settling down for the winter. The department's only graveyard shift officer, Wells expected a slow night. What he got was a nightmare. Wells had ample reason to expect an easy shift. Just before leaving home, he telephoned the swing shift officer, 21-year-old Lloyd Larsen. Larsen was in the station finishing up his paperwork. The two officers chatted for a few minutes, discussing the routine events of Larsen's shift. Larsen told him the town was quiet. It was still quiet when Wells walked through the front door of the police station less than fifteen minutes later. Normally, unless an officer was in the station, the door was kept locked. Because the door was unlocked, Wells knew Larsen was in the station. However, the young officer failed to respond when Wells called to him. Wells walked into the rear of the small building and froze. Larsen lay face down on the floor of the back office, the victim of multiple gunshot wounds. There was nothing Wells could do for Larsen. The young officer had been shot three times: once in the back of the neck near the skull, once through the elbow, and again in the upper torso under the right arm. Larsen was quite obviously dead before he hit the floor, his pistol still secure in its holster. Stunned, Wells quickly checked the rest of the station for signs of Larsen's killer. Except for the dead officer, the building was empty. He then called for help. Grand County Sheriff John Stocks and Moab Chief of Police Arthur Sutten arrived and began an investigation. Officers from all agencies swarmed into the small town to help. Larsen's murder stunned the law enforcement community of Grand County. It had been 32 years since a Grand County police officer had lost his life in the line of duty. Deputy Richard Westwood was shot to death in Moab in December, 1929. Ironically, Westwood also died while alone in a police facility. He was overpowered and shot by two prisoners who had smuggled a pistol into the old jail. It wasn't hard to figure out how Larsen died. Security at the station was poor. Inside, there was nothing separating the police work are from the waiting public. Virtually anyone who walked in off the street had access to nearly every part of the station. This in large part contributed to Larsen's death. Stocks and Sutten determined that Larsen was seated at a desk typing a report when he died. The unidentified assailant simply walked through the front door, slipped up behind the officer and opened fire with a .38-caliber weapon. All of the bullets were fired from behind or slightly to Larsen's right side. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing to indicate that Larsen was even aware of his assailant's presence until he was struck by the barrage. If Larsen had heard someone enter the station, he may have continued working on his report in the mistaken belief that the sound of the footsteps coming up behind him belonged to the graveyard officer. Why Larsen was killed was a little harder to answer. In the short amount of time Larsen had been with the police department, it seemed incomprehensible that he could have made an enemy desperate enought to murder him. Larsen joined the department in November,1960, just six months after completing a hitch in the navy. Investigators had to ask themselves if the homicide had been a random killing, committed by someone with a grudge against police officers in general, or if someone had intentionally singled Larsen out. Aside from the body, officers found no further evidence inside the station. Neighbors living in the area of the station told officers that they had heard nothing between 10:45 and 11 p.m., the time when Larsen died. Witnesses passing the station had seen nothing. Outside the station, however, Stocks and Sutten soon located a set of footprints that they suspected belonged to the killer. It was then that the entire picture started to come together. The tracks entered the police station lot on the southwest corner and proceeded to the back door of the station which was locked. Here the killer would have been able to look in through the window and observe Larsen working at the desk. From the window, the tracks continued around to the front door of the station. The tracks left the station by the front door and proceeded across the lot where the killer climbed a fence in the rear and moved through the block onto Second East. Here the tracks turned north. As officers followed the tracks in the direction of Legion Hill, suspicions about the identity Larsen's killer began to solidify. On the night he was killed, Larsen had been a member of the Moab Police Department less than six weeks, but long enough for him to make a deadly enemy. Testimony offered by Sutten at a later inquest revealed that Larsen had clashed repeatedly with the town's barber, 25-year-old Terrell Paulsen. The most notable confrontations occurred on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 when Larsen cited Paulsen for several traffic violations. It was then that a furious Paulsen told Larsen he would get him before the end of the week. Probably because threats against police officers are part and parcel of police work, no one paid much attention to Paulsen's threats. They didn't know Paulsen. Paulsen wasn't a native of Moab
either. He came to Moab from Idaho Falls, Idaho, in 1957. Unmarried and
a loner, Paulsen lived by himself in a trailer on Legion Hill and earned
a living operating a barber shop in Miller's Super Market. Before that,
Paulsen worked for the Esquire Barber Shop on Center Street. The barber's
troubles with the law weren't confined strictly to Larsen. Paulsen had
an affinity for alcohol and the company of minors, two factors that brought
him under the repeated scrunity of the entire Moab Police Department as
well as Grand County deputies. Before receiving the traffic tickets from
Larsen, Paulsen had been charged by other officers with selling liquor
to minors. He had also been questioned at length about his suspicious activities
involving minors. Then, as if that wasn't enough, Paulsen was forced to
post his car as security for bail on a grand larceny charge from Grand
County only days before.
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Officer
Lloyd Larsen