The first person to be hung at the Old Idaho Penitentiary happened as a result of a horrifying murder in 1956.
When Raymond Allen Snowden viciously murdered a lady in Garden City, he earned the title “the American Jack the Ripper.” Cora Dean, a local woman and mother of two, was stabbed 35 times by him.
Snowden testified at his trial that the two had an argument following a night of drinking. He said that after backhanding Dean, she kicked him. He broke down at this point.
He sliced her throat with his one and a quarter inch pocketknife before driving his blade into the back of her skull and severing her spinal cord.
He hid his knife in front of the Boise cigar shop and went inside to use the toilet. Employees with suspicions phoned the police. Snowden was detained once his knife was discovered.
Later, Snowden boasted that he had murdered two additional women. However, the murder of Cora Dean was sufficient. He received a hanging verdict and murder conviction.
Family members of the victim and other witnesses gathered on the prison’s second floor in October 1957 to see Snowden’s death.
Between them and where Snowden was standing on the trapdoors that would end his life, there was a glass pane. These massive doors were opened by an officer using a lever, and their weight crashed into the glass, breaking it.
Snowden fell, but the rope did not cause his neck to break. Instead, he hung for more than 15 minutes while twisting and turning and gasping for oxygen. Later, witnesses claimed that the tone of his gasps and groans just before he suffocated was nightmare-like.
For many years, the former Idaho Penitentiary has been shuttered. It is currently operated as a museum and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
trapdoors of the prison.
Both employees and guests have heard noises that they believe to be those of Snowden. They could all hear someone gasping for air as they stood at the base of the gallows. Day and night, one may hear these noises.
Witnesses have also come forward to describe sensing and seeing a shadowy presence in the vicinity of the detainees’ “Siberia”-dubbed solitary confinement cell. The area around the gallows has also witnessed this monster.
