Weird Idaho

The Asotin County Fair comes to the town of Lewiston every spring, bringing with it the Hells Canyon Rodeo and the start of the planting season.  But some residents still remember the spring of 1979, when a 12 year old girl named Christina White disappeared and the Snake River Killer began his reign of terror. On the day of the fair Christina visited a friends house complaining of a headache, and was offered a cool cloth and use of the telephone to call her mother for a ride.  The home belonged to Patricia Brennen, who asked Christina to wait for her ride out on the porch.  They had thought her already picked up and home when her mother arrived over an hour later to retrieve her, and she could not be located.  At the time, Patrica was dating a man named Lance Voss, who would soon enough become her husband, and a suspect in the case. For two years parents locked their doors and children were kept inside, but as the fear began to ease tragedy struck aga...

In August,1979 a family outing to Craters of the Moon, a volcanic field and national park in southern Idaho, took a turn for the macabre as the family dug for arrowheads in Buffalo Cave, one of over 500 caves discovered so far within the park.  While excavating the cave floor they found not artifacts but the remains of a adult man, his head, arms, and legs severed and missing and resting in a shallow grave. The torso was shrouded in burlap and wearing a pink shirt with a maroon sweater.  Authorities had difficulty identifying the man, though he was suspected to be an alcoholic shepherd named 'John', who had gone missing.  With no leads or way to identify the body, the case went cold. Over a decade later a young girl exploring the same cave made another gruesome discovery; human limbs wrapped in burlap, buried shallowly in the floor of the cave.  This time the cave is searched thoroughly in hopes for finding the head, but all that is uncovered are the ...

Lyda Southard (aka Lyda Trueblood, Lady Bluebeard) was America's second known female serial killer, a woman who called Twin Falls, Idaho her home and there committed her heinous deeds.  Lyda was born in the flatlands of central Missouri in 1892, where she grew and met one Robert Dooley, a local boy, and easily took his heart.  When she moved to Twin Falls, Idaho he followed after her, and the pair was married in 1912, Robert blissfully unaware of the fate that awaited him.  They settled on a ranch with her brother in law, Edward Dooley, and eventually Lyda gave birth to a daughter they called Lorraine.  In 1915, Lyda began collecting insurance policies.  In August her brother in law sickened and died, supposedly from ptomaine poisoning, and she shared the insurance payout with the brother's widow and her husband.  Only two months later her own husband came down with Typhoid fever and passed.  Lyda collected a total of $2,000 from both deat...