Long-ago deaths
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Hi! Guess what? I had my baby! It's a girl 💗 She arrived 4 weeks early! I guess she wanted to be here for Halloween haha. We are doing great and having a lot of fun getting the hang of life with a baby. Given baby's early arrival, the podcast is now on pause and I am now on maternity leave until December. I'll be checking my inbox every so often, but if you need anything Carly is your girl. You can reach her at carly@fromboise.com or just reply to this email. If you have an event to submit to the Thursday newsletter, use this form. Ok, onto the story! Next week is Halloween so our spooky story streak continues. Over the years, there have been deaths in Boise made news headlines for weeks and months and even years. Yet most of us don’t know about these stories or people anymore. Today’s story remembers three of the most notorious deaths that happened in Boise long ago. Long-ago deathsBy Julie Sarasqueta 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 StreetIn 1976, 76-year-old Enrico Flory was found dead inside his house on Bella Street in the North End. What first appeared 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 in 2018 he was charged with a woman’s rape and murder. He was sentenced to death and remains on death row in the Sunshine State, 48 years after the Cat Man of Bella Street was found murdered in his own home. The Body in Sacred HeartIn 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 the death in Boise appeared deliberate. No one came forward to collect the body. His fingerprints didn’t match anything on record. Efforts to locate a person named William Toomey failed, as well. In 1990, Toomey was featured on the wildly popular TV series “Unsolved Mysteries,” but the leads it produced fizzled into nothing. So if Toomey wasn’t Toomey, who was he? That question has stymied police and amateur sleuths for more than 40 years now. The name William Toomey was also the name of a Boston manufacturer of clothing for Catholic priests and nuns, but that seems to be the only link to Catholicism, if not to the dead man at Sacred Heart. Internet sleuths are still grasping at threads; Toomey is a frequent subject on sub-Reddits about missing people and cold cases. When no one claimed Toomey’s body in 1982, he was buried (not cremated, as requested) at Dry Creek Cemetery in Eagle — but not until the congregation of Sacred Heart held a funeral Mass dedicated to Toomey 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. The Murder That Roiled ChinatownOn 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 sprung 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 1935. 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. Julie is a writer and tarot reader who lives in Boise.
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​From Boise
Every Tuesday, read a story about a person, place, piece of Boise history, or local happening. Every Thursday, get a huge list of things to do over the weekend. No news, no politics - just the fun stuff.