Sword and Scale Nightmares: No Good Deed

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In April 2020, Mormon couple Tony and Catherine Butterfield

were practicing the Golden Rule in West Jordan, Utah.

They were kind and generous and treated everyone the way they would want to be treated.

Their good works went above and beyond the church or even the mission trips expected of Mormon followers.

They hired the jobless to help them in their landscape company

and even gave the homeless a place to stay.

The couple mentored and taught skills to their hires so it was a win-win situation

until it became their undoing.

When the kindest two people in the community come face-to-face with evil, pure evil,

how on earth do they stand a chance?

Welcome to Sword and Scale Nightmares.

True crime for bedtime, where nightmare begins now.

The End

Jordan, Utah looks like a postcard with the majestic Wasatch Mountains in the background.

In this town, more than half the residents follow Mormonism.

Tony and Catherine were among the believers and also kind of look like they should be featured on such a postcard.

Pictures of them show genuine smiles and embraces pointing to the love between them.

In every picture, petite Catherine shows her huge grin,

the kind that scrunches her face because her smile overwhelms it.

Tony usually stands behind her, seeming happy but protective.

Their three young children also appear in many of the photos.

In the Mormon faith, family, unity, and altruism are important pillars.

The followers are exceptionally charitable and generous people who will go abroad to a mission trip for up to two years.

These missionaries often finance their own trips and when members aren't serving as missionaries,

they are usually raising families and helping out in their communities or neighborhoods.

No one was more helpful than Tony and Catherine.

Friends called them Christlike because they actually strove to help people that were less fortunate than they were.

Imagine that.

Tony and Catherine met and dated years before completing their mission trips.

So when they returned to the United States, they were married.

By April 2020, they had three children under four and a successful landscaping business that they started themselves.

They lived in a rather modest middle-class neighborhood in a humbling home despite their upper-scale income.

On an otherwise ordinary day in West Jordan, Tony and Catherine Butterfield were going about their lives.

That evening, the parents cuddled with their kids at bedtime while they read stories and said prayers.

The family was settled in, ready to sleep in their safe home in their safe neighborhood.

But in the early morning hours of April 18, tragedy struck the Butterfield family.

911 dispatch received a call from a neighbor who heard a disturbance next door.

Then the piercing screams of a woman shouting, oh my god, from the backyard.

Thank you, ma'am. Officers are on the way.

Police arrive and rush to the front door, knocking on it and ringing the doorbell incessantly.

No one responds.

One officer walks around a truck in the driveway to the back of the house and radios his partner, who's still at the front door.

He's shocked at what lies ahead of him and says to his coworker, we've got a body.

He steps over the first body and sees another one just inside the door.

So he makes another call for his buddy to join him now, saying, make that two bodies.

He approaches the closed gate behind the house and sees that it's locked and the latch is covered in blood.

Bloody boot prints lead the doorway where Tony and Catherine lie in what seems like too much blood for only two people.

They aren't breathing.

They both head on their religious clothing known as temple garments.

These were nothing more than a white t-shirt and briefs and a white gown to sleep in.

Now the white fabric was stained with bright red patches of blood spreading through its fibers.

He has to step over Catherine's dead body because what he sees in the next room is heartbreaking.

A small girl is cowering on the couch.

The officers convince her to trust them and one swoops her up in his arms, carrying her to a temporary guardian outside.

On his way he notices that the door frame has broken with the force of someone entering the house.

His coworkers are telling him there's another child in front of the house.

It's a little boy.

He returns and lifts the boy with one arm while covering his face with the other

before retracting his steps back over the deceased parents.

The little boy looks straight into the officer's eyes with a confused expression and asks why he's there.

Before he can answer, the officer is interrupted with a call.

There's blood on the west side of the driveway. Start tracking it.

When the boy hears the word blood, he asks whose blood it is.

The officer tells the little boy it will be okay, but he knows it won't be.

Next he learns that there is still another child in the house.

A six-month-old baby standing in the crib, mildly fussing.

The baby girl reaches out tiny arms and extended fingers and she's carried out of the home.

But she needs to eat and someone who knows the family mentions that the baby is breastfed and won't take formula.

Arrangements are made with the hospital and ICU to donate it and help with weaning the baby onto formula.

It was both gut-wrenching and horrifying to see that the toddler female

and the little boy were wearing bloodstained clothing and socks after they walked terrified

through the crime scene and saw mommy and daddy lying on the floor unresponsive.

When the officer asked the tiny blonde girl what happened, she rested her head on his shoulder and clung to him.

All she was able to say amongst her tears was that someone was fighting with mommy and daddy.

This description seemed accurate because next to Catherine and Tony were two knives, one for each of them.

Now these knives were useless implements showing the outcome of the fight and Tony and Catherine had lost.

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Detective stood at the intersection closest to the Butterfield home.

The kids had been taken and cared for and the crime scene was being detailed.

As the two officers kept watch, a silver car approached fast and, to their amazement,

sped right through the crime tape.

The cops rushed in front of the car with enough distance not to get hit.

They raised their arms with hands in the air, signalling,

Stop.

As they came closer to the now stationary car,

they could see a very distraught couple inside.

It was Catherine's parents urgently wanting to know what was happening.

Unfortunately, they received the message that their daughter had been shot dead along her husband.

The children were in the care of neighbors as they now had no parents.

While detectives were following up with leads about the bloody boot prints,

Catherine's perplexed and despondent parents tried their best to answer questions at the station.

They explained they had no idea who would want to hurt their daughter.

Catherine's and Tony's business was called Blue Electric Landscaping

and their daughter was the business manager.

When it came to employees, they recently had to fire a man for being too slow.

They tried to work with him, but he just wasn't coming along.

Then they remembered two brothers living with Tony and Catherine until about a year and a half ago.

The pair were so kind and generous that they took in the new employees who had no place to stay.

One of the brothers was a hard worker, but the other was a bad influence.

When he started using drugs, so did his brother, and it was starting to interfere with job performance.

Even though the brothers were fired, they didn't seem to harbor any grudge that Tony and Catherine knew of, at least.

But it was starting to look like the door was opening to more and more suspicious people, people who may have had a motive.

This included an individual who was very recently living with the Butterfields.

Catherine's sister-in-law remembered that just one month prior, Catherine visited her in Idaho and told her they had a man living with them.

Besides that, Tony and Catherine owned an Airbnb in Ogden, and their family recalled that a renter had caused damage to the property.

After Tony attempted to collect reimbursement, the renter made threats.

Due to the deceased couple's magnanimous outlook on life, it looked like detectives would need to sift through a lot of potential suspects.

A good place to start was the neighborhood surveillance cameras and the security camera inside the Butterfield home.

One segment showed a car pulling up and stopping near the home, followed by an individual walking toward the house.

Inside, lights came on and then went off.

When the lights flicked on again, the same individual was running from the home and towards the parked car.

Another neighbor said he saw noises and got out of bed to see what was going on.

He noticed a person walking by his house, and about eight minutes later, the police were arriving.

All the neighbors easily volunteered their camera footage, but even the shadier leads led nowhere.

Of course, detectives would want to interview anyone who ever worked for the landscaping business.

But only two days after the murder, one of Tony and Catherine's employees voluntarily contacted the police with valuable information.

This person had only worked for them for one day, but he did live with them for almost a year.

That was because he and his wife were living with his cousin, Albert Johnson, until Albert Johnson's wife, a woman by the name of Sina, kicked them out.

Before being evicted, Tony almost hired Albert, but Albert failed to show more than once.

Tony was prepared to give him numerous chances to improve, but Albert's negative attitude just got in the way.

Now needing a place to stay, the evicted couple moved into the home of Tony and Catherine, who generously allowed them to live there beginning in the spring of 2018.

The couple contacted police when they heard about the murder and realized that, on the morning of the murders, when he was at his brother's place at around 10 a.m.,

he noticed a trail of blood leading from the stairwell inside the house to the sidewalk that was speckled with blood splotches.

He was also told by his brothers that Albert had shown up with a severe cut on his arm.

On the day following the murders, detectives learned where Albert and Sina lived and began tailing the red Chevy Malibu

that left the apartment with Sina in it.

They could already see the blood spatter on the sidewalk, which hadn't been cleaned yet.

After years of experience, they quickly knew what Sina was up to.

She was driving in a pattern known as cleaning, that is, driving like a suspect being followed in the movies.

The suspect never takes a direct route and frequently makes turns onto side roads and back streets to throw off anyone who may be following behind.

When she returned, police pulled up behind her in an unmarked car.

Sina was on the cell phone, so they ordered her out of the car and took the phone so she couldn't alert Albert or anyone of their presence.

They asked for Albert, but Sina stated she didn't know where he was and that they had been fighting.

Police could also see blood on the back seat of the car.

Sina casually admitted its presence and brushed it off, saying,

Yeah, I called him about it, but it went to voicemail.

With mounting evidence against Albert and maybe Sina as well,

police took her in for questioning and pounded the Chevy for processing and took evidence from the apartment.

Then they had a little visit with Sina's mother after discovering Sina had been there in the wee hours of the morning.

Sina had a big announcement for her mother.

The announcement was that Albert told her he killed a couple in West Jordan and that his life was now over.

Sina wanted her mom to hear it directly from her and not see it in the news first.

Initially, when Sina was questioned, she pretended like she knew nothing,

but she admitted there was blood in the car and the apartment and that he'd cut himself.

But she played it off, saying that Albert was always getting into fights and it's true he had a violent history.

With pieces of evidence coming together, it was patently clear that Albert was the guy.

DNA evidence came back as a match and so much more.

Sina suggested they find Albert at his sister's place nearby,

but she still wasn't coming forward with everything she knew.

In the meantime, detectives had already reviewed footage from the cameras inside the Butterfield home.

What they see and hear on this footage is devastating.

Two loud noises resound as if someone's kicking the door in.

Tony shouts, what are you doing? Leave, get out of here now. Screams take over.

A door to one of the kids' bedrooms is pushed open and a struggle takes place in the hallway,

but the cameras position too high to catch it all.

Albert demands in a pleading tone, get down, get down please.

The legs of a person without pants, presumably Tony, appear along with someone who has on red shoes and black exercise shorts.

Albert. Tony responds desperately, telling the perpetrator he doesn't keep money in the house.

Albert gets serious, demanding angrily that Tony hand over a cell phone and not move.

The two-year-old Butterfield daughter then climbs out of her crib,

walks out of her room and goes toward the master bedroom,

but realizes something is wrong and immediately comes back to hide behind the door.

Albert's harsh voice continues, asking how much money Tony has, what else he has,

telling him not to fucking move again, telling him that times are hard and that he's struggling right now,

asking for any more valuables.

At that point, the two sets of bare legs walk down the hallway.

Now the little girl leaves the room and stands in the hallway before pacing in and out of her room.

Approximately five minutes of silence occur before the toddler hides under some blankets,

next to the bed where her four-year-old brother is sleeping.

Bare legs come to the doorway, pause and then go to the right.

Another unknown noise happens before the legs run past the doorway.

The little girl is still under blankets and there's a noise like someone is kicking in the door.

Two gunshots can be heard followed by screaming and a third shot.

Everything now is dead quiet.

The toddler girl makes baby sounds and leaves the room.

The man with the red shoes walks through the hallway as the little girl is indiscernible speaking to him.

The red shoes man stands in the doorway and is holding something looking like a towel before leaving.

Back to Sina in the interrogation room, her time was running out and the walls were closing in.

Police informed her that they had evidence showing she's complicit in the cover-up.

They asked her why she didn't tell anyone else what she knew and pointed out that she's told several different stories.

After a long silence, she cries out in frustration.

Is this my last chance? She says.

The officer replies sternly.

Yes, this is your last chance because Albert killed two people and the children no longer have parents to raise them.

You'll go to prison if you don't come clean.

Sina's perspective is that they were at the home of Albert's sister and were arguing.

Albert was drinking and Sina left because she was tired of arguing.

But instead of going straight there, she drove around hoping her son would fall asleep.

A little later, as she was still driving, Albert facetimed her and told her he did something bad.

He shot someone and got stabbed.

She picked him up at the apartment complex and drove him back to their place.

Albert was freaking out, saying the world was going to end.

He wrapped his wounds, got clothes, walked to his Toyota Corolla and never came back.

She woke the next morning and saw that the butter fields were murdered.

She started cleaning up and thought maybe Albert did it.

So she threw his bloody clothes in a dumpster where they would later be found.

Detectives were sure he did it.

They began processing Sina for his whereabouts and after a lot of hedging,

she finally burst out saying he's at his sister's in Sacramento.

That's the only place you're going to find him.

And they did.

Police interviewed him from the San Joaquin Jail in California on April 23rd of 2020.

He admitted to everything and the reality was far worse than anyone could have imagined.

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Albert Johnson murdered two of the kindest, probably most altruistic people in Utah.

The Butterfields.

He insisted he wasn't targeting Tony, whom he thought of as a good guy.

He didn't want sympathy.

He just wanted to know that the family he destroyed is okay.

Well, they weren't Albert.

Albert cried and cried and lamented that it was never supposed to go down like that.

Albert was depressed and worried about money like we all do.

He was having personal issues.

Again, like we all do.

He only wanted money and figured from everything he knew that Tony and Catherine had what he wanted.

So maybe he could just go take it.

On the morning of the homicide, Albert goes to the Butterfield House wearing a mask.

He easily kicks in the door, enters the house, and Tony gets out of bed wearing his religious bedclothes.

He's afraid Tony recognizes him because of his tattoos.

Tony is standing on the stairs while Albert is pointing the gun at him, telling him not to make any sudden moves.

But Albert says he's never shot a gun before.

He doesn't really know how they work.

He takes their clothes and all the money he can get, which only amounts to about 20 bucks.

He rushes out the back door and gets rid of the phones in a neighbor's yard before returning to his car.

When he gets there, he realizes he left his keys in the house.

He has to go back and get them now.

He's in a huge rush and his mask, which is really a shirt tied around his face, is coming off.

So he carries it with him.

But when he comes back, the inside door is locked.

Before Albert can put in another kick to open it, the door magically opens on its own.

Tony is right there in front of him, seeing his face and asking,

Why Albert? Why?

Albert is considering his answer as Tony lunges forward with a knife and stabs him with visceral force.

Tony tackles him and Albert tells him to stop and assures him there's no way he can overpower him.

Albert tries to back up and gets stabbed in the knee and arm.

Albert's body is reeling in pain and his mind is in shock.

He did not expect this.

The pain from the stabbings is making him feel crazy.

It hurts so much.

He feels he has no choice but to shoot.

He only meant to shoot Tony in the leg and incapacitate him, you know, like on TV.

But he's never shot a gun before.

So he misses and shoots Tony in the top of the head with a fatal blow.

As Tony is falling to the floor, he sees Catherine behind the fallen body and she starts screaming in horror.

Albert is sure a neighbor will hear so he impulsively shoots Catherine on the spot in mid-scream.

The knife slips from her hand and she sinks to the floor to rest in her own puddle of blood.

All of this in the presence of the Butterfield's two-year-old daughter.

She asks Albert when he rushes upstairs to find his keys.

Where's my daddy?

Albert tells her to go back into her room.

He then flies down the steps, finds his keys and exits.

He maintains this was never his intention to hurt Tony that badly.

And like he's a third party, watching through a window innocently exclaims,

I know him, I've eaten dinner with him.

Albert admits he knows he will be caught because he's a felon and his blood is on file.

Since he's been stabbed, it's just a matter of time.

When asked if there was anything else he wanted to say to the officer, he responded that

he wanted the family to know and wasn't supposed to go down like that.

He wanted to apologize to Tony and Catherine's parents for leaving the children without any parents.

He was sobbing and appeared remorseful.

And maybe he was.

He'd already admitted to everything, so it wasn't as if crying would be very fruitful, or would it?

Albert Enoch Johnson, age 31, took a plea agreement from prosecutors to avoid the death penalty

in exchange for guilty pleas to two counts of aggravated murder.

Christina Johnson pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of attempting to obstruct justice, a third degree felony.

As part of a plea deal, prosecutors agreed to her immediate release from the Salt Lake County Jail,

where she'd been held for more than three months.

According to his attorney, Albert wanted to resolve this case as fast as possible.

He just wasn't himself that night and was extremely impulsive, because he was drinking and was in turmoil

over his so-called personal issues.

When it happened, he couldn't even believe what he had done.

Albert was given life without parole.

The family was grief-stricken, of course, saying,

we didn't just lose two loved ones.

The world lost two bright souls that day.

The Butterfields were Mormon, but so was Albert.

Maybe this is why he still had a sliver of self-reproach.

But the Butterfields, who lost Tony and Catherine, their daughter, their son,

their brother or sister, their mommy and daddy,

those are the ones who showed the most forgiveness and grace.

Their simple statement only read the words,

I know Tony and Catherine would offer you love and compassion and forgiveness.

They lived with radiance in their hearts.

I only ask you to do the same now.

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Sweet dreams and good night.

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