He Confessed to a Murder That Hadn’t Been Discovered Yet !
THE CALL
The Denton County Sheriff’s Office dispatch log for March 3rd, 2021, recorded an inbound call at 2:14 a.m. The caller identified himself immediately. He did not whisper. He did not hesitate.
DISPATCHER: 911, what is your emergency?
CALLER: My name is Earl Rasmussen. I live at 414 Birchwood Lane. I need to report a death. I killed a man tonight. His name is Kevin Dade. He’s at his property off Route 9 — 7 miles past the grain elevator, left on the dirt road, white house at the end. He’s in the living room.
DISPATCHER: Sir — sir, are you saying you’ve harmed someone?
CALLER: I’m saying I killed him. Kevin Dade. Write it down. I’ll be on my porch when your people get here. I’m not going anywhere.
Dispatch immediately contacted the on-call supervisor, who initially flagged the call for follow-up rather than emergency response — no crime had been reported at the Route 9 address, and no missing persons call had come in for anyone named Kevin Dade. A wellness check was ordered. Two deputies were sent.
What they found at the end of that dirt road erased any doubt.
Kevin Dade, 34, was found on the living room floor, deceased. A second unit was dispatched to Birchwood Lane. Earl “Buddy” Rasmussen, 61, was sitting in a lawn chair on his front porch in the cold, wearing a flannel shirt, drinking coffee. He set the mug down when the cruiser pulled up and extended both wrists without being asked.
A QUIET MAN WITH A QUIET LIFE
By every account, Buddy Rasmussen was not a man you would expect to find at the center of a homicide investigation. He had driven long-haul freight routes across the Southeast for 34 years before a back injury forced him into early retirement in 2017. He was known in his Denton County neighborhood as the man who shoveled elderly neighbors’ driveways without being asked and kept a ceramic frog planter by his mailbox that he swapped out seasonally.
He had one daughter, Lisa, 36. She had moved to a property outside town eight years earlier — shortly after marrying Kevin Dade.
EIGHT YEARS OF SILENCE
What investigators uncovered in the weeks following Buddy’s arrest painted a picture that prosecutors and defense attorneys alike found deeply uncomfortable.
Kevin Dade had a history. Lisa had called local law enforcement on six separate occasions between 2014 and 2020, reporting domestic incidents. Kevin was arrested twice. He was convicted once — of misdemeanor assault — and sentenced to 40 hours of community service and anger management classes he completed in a church gymnasium three towns over. He was never incarcerated.
Neighbors on Route 9 told investigators they had heard shouting from the property on many occasions. One woman said she had seen Lisa with bruising on her arms during a chance encounter at the grocery store in the summer of 2019. Lisa told her she had fallen from a ladder. The neighbor said she hadn’t believed it but hadn’t known what to do.
Buddy had known. He had driven to Lisa’s house on a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2020 and found her with two broken fingers she was telling people she had caught in a car door. He had taken her to the emergency room himself. He had sat across from his daughter under the fluorescent lights and asked her to leave. She said she was scared. She said she had nowhere to go. She said Kevin had told her if she ever tried to leave, he would make sure she never saw her kids again.
She had two children — ages five and seven — with Kevin Dade.
THE LAST STRAW
In February 2021, one month before the confession call, Lisa Rasmussen was admitted to Denton County Regional Medical Center with a fractured cheekbone, two cracked ribs, and a perforated eardrum. She told the attending physician she had slipped on ice on her back steps.
The physician, who had seen Lisa twice before under similar circumstances, noted in the chart that the injury pattern was inconsistent with a fall. He filed a report with the county. A social worker made a home visit. Kevin Dade was cordial and cooperative. The children appeared well cared for. The case was closed with no action taken.
Buddy visited his daughter in the hospital. She told him not to do anything. She told him she had it handled. She told him she was scared and that she loved him and she needed him to stay out of it.
He kissed her forehead, drove home, and spent the next two weeks thinking.
On the night of March 2nd, 2021, Buddy drove his truck to Route 9. He had a plan. He had thought it through completely. He knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what it would cost him.
At 2:14 a.m., after returning home, he called 911.
THE TRIAL
Buddy Rasmussen’s case divided Denton County in a way that made national headlines within two weeks of his arrest. A GoFundMe for his legal defense raised $340,000 in nine days — funded almost entirely by strangers. His attorney, a public defender named Cheryl Oats who had tried over 200 cases in 22 years, said it was unlike anything she had experienced in her career.
“People didn’t see a murderer,” she said in a post-trial interview. “They saw a father who tried every legal path and watched every door close in his daughter’s face.”
The prosecution argued that Buddy had committed premeditated first-degree murder and that regardless of the circumstances, the law did not permit vigilante justice. The defense did not dispute what Buddy had done. They argued instead for the jury to consider everything that led to that night — and what the system had failed to do eight separate times before Buddy picked up his keys.
It took the jury four hours to return a verdict of voluntary manslaughter — a significant reduction from the first-degree charge. Buddy was sentenced to seven years, with credit for time served and the possibility of parole after three.
He stood in the courtroom and thanked the jury quietly. He did not show visible emotion until he turned and saw his daughter in the gallery — her two children on either side of her, the youngest one asleep against her arm. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded once.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
Lisa Rasmussen was granted full custody of her children within four months of Kevin Dade’s death. She relocated to a town two hours away, where Buddy’s sister lives, and started over.
Buddy Rasmussen became eligible for parole in March 2024. His parole was approved at the first hearing. He walked out of the Denton County Correctional Facility on a Thursday morning. Lisa and both grandchildren were in the parking lot.
The ceramic frog planter was back by his mailbox the following Saturday. His neighbor said he had already shoveled her walkway before she woke up.
Some people break the law. Some people break because the law never protected the people they loved.
Sometimes it’s very, very hard to tell the difference.
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