Something Wicked Is Hiding Behind the Doors of this Boise Home

Forget Violet Harmon, Tate Langdon, the old restored mansion and well...pretty much everything about the first season of American Horror Story.  There's a REAL murder house in Boise and it gives me the heebie jeebies every time I drive by it! 

Yes, the infamous "Chop-Chop" house is in my neighborhood. Located at 805 W Linden in Southeast Boise, there have been so many rumors surrounding what was likely a beautiful home when it was built in 1910.  Some people say that the house was once a Boise Stat frat house where brothers saw blood running down the walls of the basement on more than one occasion. Others claim that they've seen a female ghost wearing clothes from the time period during which the home was built thru the front window.

Let's set the record straight about the home...it has never been a BSU Frat and there's no real documented proof of the female ghost.  But about that murder? Oh, there's certainly some truth to that!

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A man by the name of Preston Murr was murdered at the two story home on June 30th, 1987. Earlier that afternoon, Murr attended a funeral where he was intoxicated and ended up getting in a fight. Police responded and cited all three men for disorderly conduct. Murr would have a second interaction with police that evening, when he called them to report that someone had threatened to kill him during a phone call.

Murr then met up with Daniel Rodgers, a known acquaintance, and Daron Cox at a convivence store on Boise Ave in an attempt to track down who was behind the phone call. The trio went back to the apartment Murr was staying at to discuss the call and where guns that had been stolen from Rodgers may have ended up.

The trio went back to the Linden Street home so that Rodgers could get a gun and then drove around the neighborhood trying to locate an apartment where the stolen guns ended up at. At some point during the evening, things when south. The men got in an argument, resulting in Murr being shot in the shoulder.

He ended up escaping the home long enough to bang on the doors of homes in the neighborhood looking for help. No one answered their doors that evening, but one neighbor did call the police after finding what appeared to be blood smeared on the door. He told the dispatcher that there was a commotion happening on the lawn of 805 W Linden and it appeared that someone was washing down the porch with a garden hose. The police didn't respond to that call.

Court documents reveal that Murr was dragged back to the basement where he was fatally shot him in the head. Following his death, Rodgers and Cox cut his body into pieces using an axe and knives, packaged each of them in plastic bags and threw them into the Brownlee Reservoir. Rodgers and Cox were eventually found and arrested for the murder. At age 71, Rodgers continues to serve a life sentence for first degree murder.  Cox served six years for his role as an accomplice in the murder.

Many people believe that Murr's soul will forever haunt the Murder House, while people who lived in the house don't necessarily believe that. You can see Deann Davis's account of living in the house with her two daughters in this Channel 2 story from 2012.

I'm dying to see what the inside of the home looks like, but alas there are no real estate photos of the home. According to the Ada County Assessor's website, it's been owned by the same man since at least 1999 and the property was most recently assessed at a value of $388,900. Based on the owner's last name, it's possible that the current owner is related to Rodger's former brother-in-law.