Execution Gone Wrong

Old Idaho Penitentiary

A gruesome murder in 1956 resulted in the first person being hanged indoors at the Old Idaho Penitentiary.

Raymond Allen Snowden was nicknamed an American version of Jack the Ripper when he brutally murdered a woman in Garden City. He stabbed Cora Dean, a local woman, and mother of two, 35 times.

During his trial, Snowden claimed the two got into an argument after a night of drinking. He said he backhanded Dean and then she kicked him. At this point, he lost it.

He took his one and a quarter inch pocketknife and slashed her throat first then thrust his blade into the back of her skull, severing her spinal cord.

He stashed his knife in front of a cigar store in Boise and then entered the building to use the restroom. Suspicious employees called the police. His knife was found, and Snowden was arrested.

Raymond Allen Snowden

Snowden later bragged he had killed two other women. But the murder of Cora Dean was enough. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.

In October of 1957, witnesses, including family members of the victim, gathered on the second floor of the penitentiary to watch Snowden's execution.

There was a glass window between them and where Snowden stood on the trapdoors that would end his life. When an officer released these heavy doors with a lever, their weight smashed into the window shattering it.

Snowden dropped, but the rope did not snap his neck. Instead, he hung twisting and turning for over 15 minutes gasping for air. Witnesses later stated his gasps and grunts before he suffocated were nightmarish in tone.

The old Idaho penitentiary has been closed for years. Today it is on the National Register of Historic Places and is run as a museum.

Penitentiary's trapdoors.

Workers and visitors have heard sounds they feel must be Snowden. All state as they stood at the bottom of the gallows, they heard someone struggling for breath. These sounds can be heard both day and night.

Witnesses have also come forward to report feeling and seeing a dark entity in the area near the solitary confinement cell—nicknamed by the inmates “Siberia.” This entity has also been seen near the gallows.