By Julie Sarasqueta

We first ran this story in October 2024. Since then, one of these mysteries has a new chapter.

On the afternoon of Halloween 1932, a 36-year-old immigrant Chinese herb doctor named Wing Lee rose up in the air for another flying lesson. He already had 50 hours under his belt, which meant it was time to try an aerial spin for the first time — a prospect that made Lee visibly nervous. It didn’t end well. Lee crashed into a junkyard at 24th and Fairview, right in my neighborhood, which was the edge of the city at the time. His body was sent home to China.

It seemed so strange that this traumatic event had happened just a few blocks away from me, yet I had never heard of it. It made me think of all the long-ago deaths in this city, deaths that once made headlines for weeks and months and years.

Here are three of the most notorious.

The Cat Man of Bella Street

In 1976, 77-year-old Enrico Flory was found dead inside his house on Bella Street in the North End. What first appeared to be a routine, natural death would soon be found to be anything but — and would upend the way Idaho treats its youngest criminals.

Flory grew up in Cambridge, Idaho, in an ultra-religious household where beatings were a common occurrence. By 1938, after a few stints in other locations, he moved to Bella Street in the North End. He did not live lavishly. He worked in a series of restaurants as a dishwasher or a busboy before retiring with a very modest Social Security pension, living a quiet life with his cats, which sometimes numbered in the double digits. In 1975, just a year before he died, he appeared in an Idaho Statesman article because Idaho Penitentiary inmates Flory had befriended bought him his first-ever refrigerator.

By September, four teenagers were charged with Flory’s murder — and the way they were found was distressing. Two of them had been involved in the abduction and rape of two girls from the Highlands area; during the crime, one of the boys let it slip that they had killed Flory. Prosecutors alleged the teens had smothered Flory with a pillow for his Social Security payment. The boys — Steven Wolf, Darin McLenna, Demetrio Esquivel, and Rory Brooks — ranged from 14 to 17. One of them, 15-year-old Wolf, whom prosecutors tagged as the ringleader, said they killed Flory for “$13 apiece, when it was all over.”

Flory knew all of the boys. “He was just a great man,” McLenna told the Statesman at the time. “The kids used to go over there all the time. We’d hang out there and listen to him tell his whole life story.”

Prosecutors charged two of the teenagers as adults, and despite the best efforts of defense attorneys, the Idaho court system agreed with them. The Idaho Supreme Court ruled juveniles do not have an unqualified right to rehabilitation and could be tried as adults.

Esquivel and McLenna testified against their co-conspirators and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. They were turned over to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. Brooks was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years. Wolf escaped from the Ada County Jail while he was awaiting trial on second-degree murder charges. He was sentenced to 30 years.

At least two of the murderers remained in the headlines for decades to come. Brooks was paroled in December 1984; by the next summer, he was back in jail for attempted grand theft. Wolf was paroled about five years after Brooks but placed back in custody when he tested positive for drugs. He was in and out of prison for drug charges, but surfaced again in Florida, where he was convicted of a 2018 rape and murder and sentenced to death in 2023. He was sentenced to death and remains on death row in the Sunshine State, 50 years after the Cat Man of Bella Street was found murdered in his own home.

The Body in Sacred Heart

In December 1982, parishioners at Sacred Heart Catholic Church were filtering in for weekly confession before evening Mass, just as they did every week. But when a parishioner found a man slumped over in one of the pews, one of the greatest mysteries in Boise history began taking shape.

According to initial accounts in the Statesman, a priest hurriedly performed the anointing of the sick (also known as last rites) on the man — but it was too late. He was tanned, clean-shaven and sandy-haired and appeared to be between 35 and 45. He was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and a bolo tie, and cowboy boots. In his pockets were $1,900 in an envelope and a typewritten suicide note:

“In the event of my death, the enclosed currency should give more than adequate compensation for my funeral or disposal (preferred to be cremated) expenditures. What is leftover, please take this as a contribution to this church. God will see to your honesty in this.”

The note was signed Wm. L. Toomey. When the coroner’s report came back, the cause of death was surprisingly timely: cyanide poisoning. Just months before, a series of still-unsolved poisonings broke out in Chicago when unsuspecting consumers took Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide (if you’ve ever wondered why the pills you buy over the counter have tight seals, now you know). “Cyanide” blazed across national headlines for months.

But no one came forward to claim the body. His fingerprints didn’t match anything on record, and no William Toomey turned up missing. He was buried (not cremated, as requested) at Dry Creek Cemetery in Eagle, but not before Sacred Heart held a funeral Mass dedicated to him and all others who die of despair during the holidays. The priest who officiated was Thomas Faucher, who decades later would be convicted in a brutal child pornography case involving allegations of Satanism. He died in prison. In 2018, an exorcist and a team of local worshippers spiritually “cleaned” his house on Hill Road and put the home on the market.

In 1990, the case was featured on “Unsolved Mysteries,” and thousands of tips poured in from across the country. None of them panned out. For more than four decades, the man in the pew was known only as the Unknown Wanderer.

Then, last month, we found out his real name.

On September 23, 2026, the Ada County Sheriff’s Office announced that the Unknown Wanderer was Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski, an organic chemist from Jacksonville, Florida.

The case had come back to life in 2018, when a Sacred Heart parishioner reached out to the sheriff’s office. Cold case detective Tim Cooper reopened it the next year and checked it against more than 17,000 missing-person records. Nothing. Turns out Betkouski had never been reported missing. The break came from something that had been sitting in evidence since 1982: one of the keys on the man’s key rings had an address etched into it. Cooper traced it to Jacksonville, where he found a property owner who vanished in 1982 and was later declared dead in absentia. A brother living in Los Angeles gave a DNA sample showing the two men shared a father, and photo comparisons sealed it.

Sheriff Matt Clifford was quick to credit former Boise police detective Frank Richardson, who worked the original case, saying he “did everything right with the case he had in 1982.”

People who knew Betkouski described a man who struggled with mental illness most of his life, with a history of volatility and a fascination with explosives. In writings his family kept, he mused about cyanide as a way to commit the perfect crime. He’d worked at two drugstores in college and was later fired from a chemistry lab after allegedly talking with a coworker about injecting poison into medicine capsules. When he walked away from his Florida home in 1982, he left behind a map of Chicago and a bottle of cyanide with a handwritten label (a different form than the one used in the Tylenol killings). Photos uncovered in 2024 show he visited Chicago in December 1981.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, who consulted with the FBI on the Tylenol murders back in 1982, says that by the end of 2021, Cooper’s findings had convinced him the detective had found a viable suspect.

Still, nobody is officially calling Betkouski the Tylenol Killer. The sheriff’s office was careful to say he isn’t being named a suspect, in part because those crimes happened outside Idaho. Police in Arlington Heights, Illinois, who lead the Tylenol investigation, say they vetted the Ada County detective’s information years ago and found no evidence linking him to the case. And investigators haven’t been able to place him in Chicago in 1982.

So the mystery isn’t solved so much as it’s changed shape. The whole story is laid out in a new documentary, “​Unsolved Mysteries: Unmasking the Tylenol Killer​.”

The Murder That Roiled Chinatown

On December 12, 1933, two men walked into an apothecary at 618 Front Street in search of its proprietor, Louie Gar Lan, who had not opened the shop at his customary 10 a.m. time. They found Gar Lan’s bloodied body in the back room of his shop, his corpse laced with stab wounds, his jugular vein severed, his head smashed with a hammer. His face was covered in cotton aprons. One thousand dollars was missing, but a nearby safe was open and still contained $1,300.

The story was front-page news in the Idaho Statesman — not to mention papers in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana and California. Gar Lan was a longtime and beloved resident of Boise, a Chinese immigrant known for his philanthropy, his generosity to impoverished Chinese immigrants, and for his skill as an herbal doctor.

“To most Boiseans, Louie Gar Lan was a familiar figure along the streets of the business district as he shuffled about daily, taking presents here and there, leaving medicine with a sick countryman, carrying China tea to his American friends,” the Statesman reported.

Police quickly arrested a 35-year-old Black man for the crime, but the Chinese community knew police had the wrong guy. Almost immediately, according to the Statesman, the tight-knit Chinese community blamed a “China boy” for Gar Lan’s death. Gar Lan was not a member of a tong, or fraternal organization, that was known in Boise for ties to criminal activity. But he was a private banker to his fellow immigrants, and he was a member of the Fong and Louie family society, which immediately sprang into action. Just hours after his death, the society had raised $1,000 as a reward for the killer’s capture and began their own private investigation.

The Chinese community in Boise was incredibly tight-knit — for good reason. Chinese immigrants played a major role in the development of the city and the state, building railroad lines, working as miners and laborers and farmers and shop owners. From the 19th century into the 20th, Chinese immigrants faced intense scrutiny and were the targets of discriminatory laws and practices. They were barred from owning property in town, which led to the wholesale moving of the Chinatown section of the city. Gar Lan’s shop was in Boise’s second, forcibly relocated Chinatown.

So it wasn’t exactly surprising that Boise police handed the investigation over to the Chinese community. “It was agreed among them, and the police as well, that their committee would be better able to ferret out the mystery than the officers,” a Statesman story read.

The murdered apothecary had played a key role in brokering peace between the battling Hip Sing and Hop Sing tongs more than a decade before, and now their members turned out in force in the hunt for the apothecary’s killer. “Neither the Hip Sing tong nor the Hop Sing tong in Boise wants trouble to grow out of this,” said Henry Fong of the Hip Sings. “We want to catch the killers of the doctor and we want to see justice done in accordance with provisions of American law.”

The Chinese community wasn’t alone in mourning the loss of Gar Lan and seeking justice. More than 500 people, both white and Chinese, attended Gar Lan’s funeral and joined the colorful, musical funeral procession to the Chinese section of Morris Hill Cemetery.

For days, the Statesman ran headlines featuring the painfully incremental leads in the case. Efforts to find the killer were stymied by disagreements among the Chinese community, and representatives from Chinese societies in Seattle and San Francisco were brought in to settle disputes.

But it wasn’t just infighting among the Chinese community that delayed a solution to the question of who murdered Gar Lan. In late December, in the middle of one of the most high-profile murder investigations in the city, the Boise police chief quit in scandal. Shortly after the New Year, a newly appointed grand jury began exploring charges of corruption and to investigate Gar Lan’s death.

Four Chinese suspects had been in jail since early December awaiting charges or release. They were finally indicted and went to trial February 13, only to have charges against three of the four dropped that same day. Only one person, the fifty-something Louie See Bow, was rearrested and recharged. The motive, police said, was robbery.

On April 2, after days of hearing the case against him through an interpreter, See Bow was convicted of the much-lesser charge of manslaughter and sentenced to up to 10 years in the Idaho State Penitentiary (now known as the Old Pen). He was immediately assigned to the garden staff, where the warden hoped See Bow’s expertise in raising vegetables would be useful to the prison.

But the murder of Louie Gar Lan continued to reverberate through the Chinese community even after See Bow’s conviction, with unrest among the Hop Sing and Hip Sing tongs becoming so rancorous that negotiations had to be brokered at the societies’ headquarters in San Francisco. “Chinatown Bars Doors As Armed Cops Pace Beat,” a Statesman headline blared in late April 1934. Chinese farmers in Garden City left their homes to stay with friends and relatives in Boise to escape the violence threatening the community.

What was the infighting about? Details in the Statesman made vague references to “financial affairs.” After intense negotiations and the blessing of Hop Sing headquarters in San Francisco, Boise Police reported a peace settlement and wound down the stepped-up patrols in Chinatown.

Meanwhile, See Bow was a peaceful inmate at the Pen and earned his release in 1939. “His hands, crippled, are useless to him,” the Statesman reported prison officials saying at the time. “He told them they were broken by Japanese soldiers who, instead of slaying babies, broke their fingers so they would be unable to handle a gun when they grew up.”

See Bow was given shelter at Ada County Hospital and died sometime after; the last reference to him in the Statesman was a Christmas appeal for new house slippers, size 7 ½ or 8.

Just a decade later, Boise’s tongs — long a staple of Statesman headlines — hardly made news. By the late 1960s, the life and death of Louie Gar Lan was something to be mentioned in “remember when?” columns written by longtime reporters. And now, over 90 years after Gar Lan’s death, the vibrant Chinatown that for decades loomed so large in the daily life of Boise is no more. The site of his apothecary is now a Trader Joe’s.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

This story was written by Julie Sarasqueta.

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