ST. GEORGE — Despite his pleas of innocence, the man found guilty of murdering two Eureka teens and dumping their bodies into an open mine shaft will spend the rest of his life in prison for his crimes.

On Friday, 46-year-old Jerrod William Baum appeared in court in Provo for sentencing on two counts of aggravated murder, two counts of aggravated kidnapping, two counts of abuse or desecration of a dead human body, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of possession of a weapon by a restricted person.

The defendant was found guilty of all eight charges filed in connection with the deaths of two teens: 17-year-old Brelynne Otteson and 18-year-old Riley Powell, by a jury following a multi-week trial that began in March.

Baum pleaded “not guilty” to the charges in June 2019. The case then went through more than two years of legal wrangling as a series of motions and pleading were filed with the courts.

During the hearing, Fourth District Judge Derek P. Pullan sentenced Baum to serve four terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole, each to run consecutively.

The 2018 crime 

Baum was arrested on March 27, 2018, just hours after police recovered the bodies of Otteson and Powell on a shallow ledge 100 feet down a 1,500-foot mine shaft. The two were reported missing in January 2018, after the pair left Tooele in a 1999 blue Jeep Grand Cherokee to return home to Eureka on the morning of Dec. 30. They were never seen or heard from again.

The Juab County Sheriff’s Office then issued an Emergency Missing Adult Alert to all law enforcement nationwide.

The Jeep was recovered two weeks later after searchers flying near Cherry Creek spotted the vehicle “out of sight of the roadway” in a rural area of Juab County during an aerial search of the area.

Despite a search of Cherry Creek Reservoir, there were no signs of the missing teens. Combined with the suspicious placement of the vehicle, and the lack of any banking, cell phone or social media activity since the pair went missing, authorities were left to suspect foul play.

The bodies were not located until the end of March, which is also when Baum was identified as the suspect responsible during an interview with the suspect’s girlfriend, Morgan Lewis Henderson, who was interviewed following an arrest on drug and weapons charges.

Henderson told police that Baum killed the teens and she led officers to the Tintic Standard mine, where, with the aid of a camera, two bodies were located about 100 feet down the mine shaft. The victims had their hands tied and appeared to have stab wounds.

Henderson testified that on Dec. 30, 2017, she invited Powell to the residence she and Baum shared at the time, even though Baum had warned her on previous occasions not to have male visitors at the house without him being present.

Both Otteson and Powell left the home after 40 minutes, which is when they were spotted by Baum, and shortly thereafter, the defendant went into the house and ordered Henderson to leave with him, and it wasn’t until she walked outside that she saw Powell’s Jeep, and in the back of the vehicle she saw both teens with duct tape over their mouths and bound with rope.

Baum then drove them to the Tintic Standard No. 2 mine near Mammoth where he cut the ropes from the teens’ legs and ordered them to start walking toward the mine where they found an open mine shaft that was 10 feet in diameter. Henderson said she and Otteson were ordered to kneel down, and then Baum began to hit and stab Powell repeatedly until he fell to the ground.

Next, Baum got behind Otteson and “took her in his arms” before she told him, “I promise, I won’t tell anyone,” to which he replied, “It’s OK darlin’. Shh,” Henderson said during her testimony, and Baum then killed Otteson by cutting her throat, which severed her airway, right carotid artery and both jugular veins before she was dropped down the mine shaft.

Meanwhile, a search for the teens that began on Jan. 2, 2018 continued, one that involved family members of both teens, multiple law enforcement agencies, search and rescue officers and members of the community that spanned hundreds of miles and involved thousands of hours over the course of nearly three months.

The jury’s findings 

Following the trial in April, Baum was found guilty of all charges, including both aggravated murder charges, based on the fact that Powell and Otteson were nearly decapitated when their throats were cut.

Additionally, considering that both teens were killed within minutes of each other and within hours of being kidnapped, the jury supported the aggravated kidnapping charges.

Baum was also found guilty of two counts of desecration of a corpse, based on the evidence that Baum mutilated and disfigured Riley’s body before death,” causing injuries to his neck and chest “permanently destroyed his airway, spinal cord and aorta,” as well as his genitals. Baum then threw the bodies down into the mine shaft where they fell more than 100 feet and came to rest on a ledge, causing “blunt force trauma to them.”

Arguments made during sentencing 

During the hearing on Friday, Amanda Davis, Otteson’s aunt, addressed the court by saying from the very beginning, when they did not hear from the teens, she said she “knew something wasn’t right,” and both families immediately filed missing person reports with police.

At the same time, she said, they started putting up missing posters, hundreds of them, and over the course of the next few months, they traveled thousands of miles in search of the pair – efforts that would end tragically when their remains were found.

Davis also said the manner in which their bodies were found made it clear that Baum had “discarded them like trash at the bottom of the mineshaft that they were found in,” she said, adding that the brutal murders, as well as the four years they had waited for the case to go to trial, have left both families devastated.

She also said Baum should receive the death penalty, and if any case warranted such a sentence, it was this case, adding that even the defendant’s family members said Baum was “born evil.” She also said the defendant should have been sentenced to death.

Initially, Utah County Attorney David Leavitt said he would seek the death penalty for Baum, but two years later the death penalty was taken off the table when Leavitt announced he would no longer seek the death penalty in any case he prosecuted.

Nikka Powell, Riley Powell’s sister, also spoke during the hearing saying the last day she saw him was on Christmas day in 2017. The deaths and the years the family has spent fighting for justice have had an effect on the family that is indescribable, she added.

She also said that as the searches continued for Otteson and Powell, she watched as her parents would go days without eating or sleeping – and the losses have not gotten any easier to endure.

“Because of that monster that took their lives,” Nikka Powell said.

Heidi Nestel, with Utah Crime Victim’s Legal Clinic, told the court that Baum’s objective during the crime was to cause fear in the two teens before he murdered them, in what she described as an offense that could not “be any more gruesome.”

The defendant “takes not a morsel of accountability, no shred of remorse or feelings for these victims or the family,” said Nestel adding, “It’s almost unfathomable.”

Deputy Utah County Attorney Ryan McBride opened by saying that Baum’s entire life has been violent – even as a child.

He said Baum stole a gun from his aunt when he was still a minor and took the gun to a nearby pond to shoot ducks. When an 8-year-old boy told the defendant to stop, McBride said, the defendant “turned the gun on the little boy and shot him.”

The prosecutor went on to outline the findings of an assessment conducted on the defendant in 1998, which found that Baum enjoyed the excitement and thrill of criminal activity “above all else,” and that he “had no conscience,” or any feelings of guilt or remorse and posed a danger to others both in and out of custody. Evaluators also noted there were no treatment options available that could help the defendant’s condition.

McBride said the murder of two teens was not an isolated crime for Baum, nor was the crime out of character for the defendant.

“It is who he is,” the prosecutor said, and then he argued that Baum receive the maximum sentence in the case – four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Defense attorney Dallas Young addressed the court by describing the case as “a textbook in tragedy – there’s tragedy everywhere you look in this case,” he said.

The attorney also said the way in which his client was described during the hearing was unfair, adding that Baum was born to teenage parents who were not ready to be parents, and he endured severe abuse from the time he was 18 months old. Then, Young said, when his client was 3 years old, his mother abandoned him.

Young also said his client was a product of the adult correctional system, an environment Baum was placed in at the age of 15.

The defense attorney asked the court to show the defendant mercy and argued for a sentence of 25 to life on all charges, adding his client would have to serve at least 37 years before he would be eligible for release. At which point, he would be in his 80s.

During his 20-minute address to the court, Baum said he did not kill the teens. He then outlined the case as a quest to “bury Jerrod,” adding his criminal history made him an “easy mark” for the crime.

The defendant closed by saying, “I’m not a monster. I don’t kill people. I did not kill these people.”

The ruling

The judge opened by saying the murders of the “children” were committed “in an especially heinous, atrocious, or exceptionally depraved manner,” adding that Baum physically tortured Powell before killing him.

The murders also showed the defendant’s “depravity of mind,” adding that Baum also took the life of a child – Otteson – who was 17 at the time.

As a mitigating factor, Pullan said, the defendant was sexually abused as a child and relentlessly bullied. He went on to say it was unknown whether Baum had criminal intent in the shooting that took place when the defendant was 8 years old, or whether he could have understood the irreparable harm that a shooting would cause.

Even so, the diagnostic assessment that revealed the defendant had no conscience or feelings of guilt still holds true today, the judge said, based on Baum’s extensive criminal history and violence.

Pullan outlined the crime by saying Baum “restrained both children, binding their hands and feet with rope, and placing duct tape over their mouths,” he said, and then he slaughtered the two teenagers to “avenge his wounded ego,” after his girlfriend, Henderson, disobeyed his orders by having over a male visitor the night the teens were killed.

The judge continued by saying he has presided over many cases during his 20 years on the bench, including many violent cases – but the murders of Powell and Otteson were “the most violent, the most selfish, the most senseless, the most disturbing that I have ever witnessed.”

The judge also said the sentence of life without parole should ensure that Baum takes his last breath in a prison cell, adding the defendant’s body would “literally be transported from the prison to the funeral home for burial.”

He then told Baum to remember that he still has the simple privileges of waking and sleeping and waking again, which are privileges that Otteson and Powell will “no longer experience because you murdered them.”

The sentence was to serve as “an act of penance,” the judge added, “acted out day after day, month after month and year after year,” in the Utah State Penitentiary.

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