It Has Been 35 Years Since One of Boise’s Most Gruesome Murders
If you’ve lived in Boise for quite some time, you have a name for this home on Linden Street.
Murder House. Chop Chop House. Macabre Manor. All of those sinister nicknames can be traced back to one of Boise’s most gruesome and twisted murders on June 30, 1987. The victim’s name was Preston Murr. According to court documents, it had been an eventful day for Murr. One that began with him being cited for disorderly conduct after getting in a drunk fight following a funeral. The fight wasn’t Murr’s only interaction with law enforcement that day. He called them several hours later, saying that someone had threatened to kill him.
Murr reached out to an acquaintance named Daniel Rodgers, hoping he may have information on who threatened him. He met up with Rodgers and another man, Daron Cox, at a Circle K to discuss the threat. During that discussion, Murr said that he may know where some guns that were stolen from Rodgers were being kept. The three men went back to the home on Linden to grab a different gun before driving around Boise to locate the apartment.
We don’t know if they ever found the guns, but we do know that upon returning to the Linden home a second time there was an altercation during which Murr was shot in the shoulder. He escaped the house and tried to get the attention of a neighbor. Before the neighbor could answer the door, Murr was dragged back to the house. The neighbor was startled by the blood smeared on his door and droplets sprinkled across his stoop and called the police. That call can be heard in a Channel 2 package asking if the home was haunted or not.
When the neighbor looked out his window again, he noticed one of the men hosing down the front porch. At this point, Murr had been fatally shot in the head. His body had been taken to the basement where it was cut into pieces with an ax, packaged into plastic bags, and eventually dumped into the Brownlee Reservoir.
It would be several days before the body parts started to wash up. Rodgers and Cox were eventually charged with murder. During the trial, Rodgers claimed that Cox was the one who fired the fatal shot and came up with a gruesome plan to dispose of the body. However, it was Rodgers that would be sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder. Cox only spent six years in jail for his role in the incident.
The four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom home was built in 1910. It continues to sit in a state of disrepair today. Public records seem to indicate that the home is owned by a relative of Rodgers’s former brother-in-law and has been for a long time.
There are many urban legends about the home, including rumors that it’s haunted by Murr or possibly a female ghost wearing 1800s-style clothing. Some claim that it was home to a Boise State University fraternity and while the brothers occupied the home, they would see blood running down the walls. We can’t find any documented proof about the frat or the female ghost. We can’t find any record of the frat or the female ghost, but our listeners did share these experiences about their encounters with the “murder house.”