27. The Boys of Boise Scandal

​What happens when the justice system itself becomes the monster? In Episode 27, we are stepping away from our usual murder cases to uncover one of the most chilling examples of systemic corruption and moral panic in American history: the 1955 Boys of Boise scandal.

​At the height of the Cold War and the Lavender Scare, a single local incident in Boise, Idaho, was weaponized by police, politicians, and the Idaho Statesman newspaper into a massive, city-wide witch hunt. 

We explore how a community turned against its own citizens utilizing off-the-books interrogation rooms, FBI agents, and the threat of life in prison to purge the city's LGBTQ+ community. We also delve into the dark reality of how Boise’s wealthy elite were quietly shielded while working-class men were publicly ruined and handed draconian prison sentences.

​This is a ghost story of institutional corruption, a terrifying look at how media hysteria shapes the law, and a stark reminder of the history that echoes into our current political climate.

​Episode Highlights

• ​The Lavender Scare: How Cold War paranoia set the stage for the government to conflate homosexuality with national security threats.
• ​The Dragnet Begins: The hiring of an anti-communist private investigator to run off-site interrogations and coerce confessions from closeted citizens.
• ​Trial by Typewriter: How the Idaho Statesman newspaper bypassed the justice system to publicly ruin the accused on their front pages.
• ​The Midnight Exodus: The terrifying reality for the dozens of men who fled Idaho in the middle of the night to escape the witch hunt.
• ​Two Tiers of Justice: How Boise's elite escaped the dragnet by checking into private sanitariums while working-class men like Ralph Cooper were sentenced to life in the state penitentiary.
• ​The 10-Year Silence: Why the investigation suddenly collapsed, and how the city of Boise buried the trauma until journalist John Gerassi forced a reckoning.

​Sources & Further Reading

• ​The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an American City by John Gerassi (The definitive 1966 investigative book that broke the city's silence).
• ​The Fall of '55 (2006 Documentary directed by Seth Randal).
• ​"Idaho Underworld," Time Magazine (December 12, 1955).
• ​The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K. Johnson.

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• ​Follow for Visuals: See the historical photos, the Idaho Statesman newspaper clippings, and the Old Idaho State Penitentiary on our Instagram @HomocidalTendency

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Transcript

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Boise, Idaho, October 1955. By all outward appearances, it is the picture of mid-century American innocence. A quiet, conservative city of 35,000 people nestled in the foothills of the Rockies. But beneath the polite smiles and manicured lawns, America is on edge. It's the height of the Cold War. The government is hunting communists. A senator named Joseph McCarthy has convinced the nation that homosexuals are a contagion, a direct threat to national security. The country is terrified of an invisible enemy hiding in plain sight. It starts quietly. Police arrest three men for offenses involving teenage boys. It's a genuine, disturbing local crime. But the Voisey police and the prosecutors, swimming in the paranora of the era, don't see an isolated incident. They assume they've stumbled upon a massive, organized underworld. Almost overnight, the investigation stops being about protecting minors, it morphs into a citywide purge. Police begin rounding up dozens of closeted gay men, using the threat of a life sentence to force them to name other gay men. The local newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, splashes the addresses and workplaces of the accused across the front page, calling them fiends and a cancerous growth. Panic grips the city. Men pack their bags and flee across state lines in the dead of the night, leaving behind careers, homes, and families. Before it's over, investigators will interrogate over 1,500 citizens. 16 men will be arrested, 10 will be sent to state penitentiary, some for up to 15 years, simply for engaging in a private consensual relationship. This isn't just a story about a crime. It's a story about what happens when a community weaponizes the law against its own people. A story about the devastating power of moral panic? I'm your host, Matt. So, first off, since we're winding down the month of June, I want to say that I hope everyone out there has been having an incredibly safe, joyous, and unapologetic Pride Month. Given the history we're gonna cover today, taking a moment to celebrate how far we've come and remember the fights it took to get here feels incredibly important. Before we dive into today's case, let's do our regular housekeeping and get it out of the way. If you haven't already, please take two seconds to hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now. Leave us a five-star rating and review. It's the absolute best way to help the show grow, and I read every review you leave. And as always, you can find photos and source materials for today's episode on our socials, most of which are at Homicidal Tendency. You can find me on Instagram, Blue Sky, Twitter slash X, and TikTok. Alright, so let's talk about today's episode. If you've been with me for a while, you know our bread and butter is usually murder, murder, murder, serial killers, unsolved disappearances, and darkened bloody corners. Today, we're shifting gears. Nobody gets murdered in this episode, but make no mistake, this is absolutely a true crime story. Instead of a killer in the shadows, today we're going to look at a different kind of monster, the systematic corruption. We're looking at what happens when the justice system itself commits the crime, when the local government, law enforcement, and the media conclude to manufacture a witch hunt, turning a community against its own citizens and destroying their lives through sheer force and moral panic. It's a chilling reminder that sometimes the most dangerous threat isn't the criminal hiding in the dark, it's the institutions operating in broad daylight. So let's get into it. This is the story of the boys of Boise. To understand how the city of Boise completely lost its collective mind in the fall of 1955, we have to zoom out. We have to look at the water everyone in America was swimming in at the time. If you know your history, you know about the Red Scare. Following World War II, the United States was locked in a bitter, paranoid standoff with the Soviet Union. Senator Joseph McCarthy was standing in front of microphones, waving lists of alleged communists who had supposedly infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. But McCarthy and his allies weren't just hunting communists, they were hunting anyone that they deemed a security risk. And in the eyes of the mid-century American government, there's no greater security risk than uh homosexual. This parallel witch hunt became known as the Lavender Scare. The logic, flawed and cruel as it was, it went like this. Because being gay was heavily stigmatized and illegal in most places, closeted government employees were living a massive secret. The government argued that Soviet spies could easily uncover this secret and use it to blackmail the employees into handing over state secrets. Therefore, the mere existence of a gay person in government job was considered a direct threat to the safety of the free world. They were conflated with subversives. The rhetoric of the day painted them as a contagious moral rot that made the nation vulnerable. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made it official. He signed Executive Order 10450. The order officially banned gay men and lesbians from working in the federal government. It didn't matter if you were a low-level clerk, a post office worker, or a decorated military veteran, if you were even suspected of sexual perversion, in their words, not mine, you were investigated, interrogated, and purged. It was a brutal, systematic dismantling of human lives. Government investigators acted like the secret police. They staked out gay bars, they tracked license plates. If you were pulled into an interrogation room, the tactic was always the same. Confess, resign quietly, and give us the names of your friends, or we'll publicly ruin you. Between the late 40s and the 60s, thousands of federal employees lost their jobs. Countless more resigned in sheer terror before the witch hunters could get to them. Careers were destroyed, families were shattered, many people stripped of their livelihoods and their dignity, they took their own lives. In this next bit, it pisses me off. Historically speaking, the government fired vastly more people for being gay than they ever did for being communist sympathizers. The Lavender Scare wasn't just a government policy, it was a national broadcast. The message should not to the American public was loud and clear. These people are dangerous. They are a network. They're recruiting your children, and they're hiding in your neighborhoods. And that all sounds way too familiar, even today, in 2026. But let's go back to Idaho. In October 1955, when Boise police arrest three men for offenses involving local teenagers, they don't look at an isolated tragic crime. Their brains are wired by the years of the lavender scare. They see the tip of the iceberg. They assume a vast, insidious, homosexual underground that's operating right at their feet. And then they decide it's their patriotic duty to burn it to the ground. Every massive fire starts with a single spark. And boise, that spark didn't actually start with a grand police sting. It started with the teenager getting in trouble. In late September 1955, local police picked up a teenage boy on a routine juvenile charge. Some sources say it was for curfew violation, others say it was petty theft. But while sitting in the interrogation room, trying to talk his way out of trouble, the boy offered the police a piece of information. He told them that he, along with a few other teenagers, had been paid for sex by a handful of older men in town. Now let's be absolutely clear. The sexual abuse of a minor is a severe, devastating crime. Law enforcement had a clear, undeniable obligation to investigate this, arrest the perpetrators and protect the kids. And initially they did. Based on the boys' statements, police quietly arrested three men in early October. Ralph Cooper, Charles Gordon, and Arthur Heard. If the story had stopped here, it would have been a tragic but standard local crime report. But remember, the Lavender Scare. The authorities in Boise, specifically prosecuting attorney Blaine Evans and police chief RG Haskin were convinced that homosexuality wasn't a personal orientation, but an organized predatory network. They didn't see three isolated criminals, they saw a syndicate. The city decided that the local police force wasn't equipped to handle an underworld of this magnitude, so they brought in a hired gun. Boise officials authorized the hiring of out-of-state private investigator named Joe McFadden. McFadden was brought in from California specifically to root out the homosexual ring operating in the city. With McFadden leading the charge, the police began a systematic dragnet, but they didn't have evidence. They didn't have a crime scene. What they had was an interrogation room and a terrifying piece of leverage. In 1955, under Idaho state law, the crime of sodomy, often referred to in the statues as an infamous crime against nature, carried a staggering maximum penalty of life in prison. Let that sink in. Life behind bars. The investigators took the initial suspects, put them in a room, and laid out that thread on the table. They essentially said, You're looking at spending the rest of your life in the Idaho State Penitentiary. We can make sure that happens. Or you can help us. The deal was simple, ruthless and highly effective. Give us names, tell us who else is in Boise is part of your network. Forced for the prospect of dying in a concrete cell, the men broke. They started naming names. But here's where the investigation took a really insidious turn. The names being given weren't just men involved with the teenagers. The suspects, desperate to appease the police and save themselves, started naming every gay man they knew in Boise. They named men that they had seen at private parties, men that they had consensual adult relationships with, men who were deeply closeted, living quiet lives, working as clerks, bankers, or state employees. Of course, the police didn't care about the distinction. To them, it was all the same crime. A consenting adult relationship in a private bedroom was viewed with the same exact disgust and legal severity as the abuse of a minor. The draghead exploded. The police took those new names, brought these men in, threatened them with life in prison, and demanded even more names. With over 1,500 men on their radar, the police realized they couldn't just march hundreds of citizens into the downtown precinct without causing a spectacle. So they went off books. Investigators set up a clandestine interrogation center in a separate safe house. They brought in endless spinning reel-to-reel tape recorders to capture every coerced confession. And because the local force was overwhelmed, it's been documented that they brought in moonlining FBI agents to help run the interrogations. Just think about that. A local vice investigation had morphed into a Cold World spy thriller. The authorities were using federal agents and black site safe houses right in the middle of Idaho, treating local gay men not just as criminals, but as active enemies of the state. The investigation was no longer about protecting children. It had become a self-sustaining machine, fueled by coercion and terror, designed to purge the city of its queer community. And the local newspaper was about to throw a can of gasoline on that fire. In 1955, before the internet, before 24-hour cable news, the local newspaper was the absolute authority in a town like Boise. If it was printed in black and white on the front page, it was gospel. And the Idaho statesman was about to use that power to turn a police dragnet into a public execution. As the police brought men in under the threat of life in prison, the statesman decided to act as the public enforcement arm of the investigation. Starting in late October, the paper didn't just report the arrests were happening, they published the names, the exact home addresses, the ages, and the occupations of the accused. So they just straight up doxed them. They blasted this information on the front page day after day. Let me be clear about what that meant. In the mid-50s, being outed as gay didn't just mean you faced social stigma. It meant immediate catastrophic ruin. You were fired from your job before lunch, your bank could call in your mortgage, you could be evicted from your home. By printing those names, the newspaper bypassed the entire justice system. They convicted and ruined these men before they even saw the inside of a courtroom. But it wasn't just the names, it was the language that the paper used. The statesmen ran a series of editorials that read like they were written during the Salem Witch trials. They urged the city to, quote, crush the monster. They referred to the city's queer community as a cancerous growth, a filthy canker, and repeatedly labeled the arrested men as fiends and perverts. They painted a picture of a highly organized predatory syndicate operating in the shadows of Boise. They actively blurred the lines between the initial crimes involving the teenagers and the private lives of the gay men who were caught in the dragnet, the ones that weren't involved with the teenagers. In the eyes of the statesmen, they were all the same monster. If you're wondering how the public bought into the whole danger to children narrative so easily, it's because the prosecutors handed them their perfect scapegoat. One of the men caught in the dragnet was named Jimmy Sliss, and Jimmy wasn't just a shadowy figure in the dark alley. He was the piano player on a local children's television show broadcasting right out of Boise on Channel 7. He was a familiar face in living rooms across the city. The media weaponized his job instantly. They pointed to him and essentially told the public, Look, the monsters aren't hiding. They're on your television screens. They're actively infiltrating your daily lives and your children's. It was a masterclass in fear mongering, and it worked flawlessly. And then they stoked the fire even more. To keep the public enraged, the statesmen and prosecutors had to hide some of the twisted facts. They pushed the terrifying narrative that the underground syndicate was actively hunting down innocent teenagers, corrupting the wholesome youth of Boise. That was a calculated lie. Historical accounts and oral histories from the era reveal a much more complex, tragic reality. Many of the teenagers involved in the initial incident weren't naive kids being kidnapped off the street. They were teenage street hustlers operating out of the local YMCA, actively exchanging sex for money. But a nuanced conversation about poverty and teenage prostitution didn't sell newspapers. A story about organized monsters stealing Boise's children did. So the media erased the reality, printed the myth, and watched the panic spread. You can imagine the paranoia this created in a town of 35,000 people. Everyone read the statesman. People would wake up, walk to the end of the driveways, unfold the paper, and look to see if their neighbor, their banker, or their son's teacher were on the list today. The city turned on itself, but gossip became a weapon. If a man was unmarried or dressed a certain way, or spent too much time with a particular friend, the whisper started. And then the local hysteria caught fire nationally. In December 1955, Time magazine published a piece about the Boise scandal. The headline was simple Idaho Underworld. Time parodied the police and the statesman's narrative, broadcasting to the entire country that a widespread homosexual underground had been operating in Ohio for a decade. The magazine described Boise as a city under siege by an organized ring of vice. Suddenly, quiet conservative Boise was a national punchline. Across the American Midwest, people were mocking it, calling it Boise. The city leaders were mortified. The media frenzy that helped create was now destroying Boise's wholesome reputation on a national stage. But for the men actually caught in the crosshairs, embarrassment wasn't the issue. It was survival. As the daily front pages continued to print their names, Boise's underground gay community realized they couldn't fight the police and they couldn't fight the press. They only had one option left. They had to run. Imagine you're a gay man living in Boise in November 1955. You haven't committed a crime, you haven't hurt anyone. You go to work, you pay your taxes, you try to build a quiet life in a society that already forces you to hide who you are. But suddenly, the rules change. You wake up, look at the front page of the Idaho Statesman, and realize that there's a systematic hunt underway. The police are pulling your friends into interrogation rooms and threatening them with life in prison unless they give up names. And you know with absolute certainty, it's only a matter of time before someone gives up your name. For the queer community in Boise, the dragnet wasn't a criminal investigation, it was a natural disaster bearing down on the city, and the only way to survive was to evacuate. The panic triggered a mass exodus. We don't have exact numbers because people running for their lives don't leave a paper trail, but historians agree that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of men fled Boise in the span of a few weeks. This wasn't a planned relocation. This was pure unadulterated flight. Men were packing whatever they could fit into a single suitcase in the dead of night. They abandoned their apartments, leaving their furniture and their belongings behind. They didn't put their two weeks' notice in at work, they simply didn't show up the next morning. They got into their cars, pointed the headlights towards Oregon and Nevada, and simply drove into the dark. One of the most documented stories of the exodus is that of Morris Foot. Morris was a well-liked working class guy. He operated the elevator at the Idaho State Capitol building. He knew the politicians, he knew the reporters, and because of where he worked, he had a front row seat to the hysteria consuming the city's power center. Morris read the headlines. He saw the police cars idling outside of homes, he heard the whispers in the Capitol hallways about who was gonna be arrested next. He didn't wait for the knock on his door. Morris packed his bags, left his job at the Capitol, and fled the state of Idaho entirely. And he didn't come back for twenty years. When we talk about the victims of the Boys of Boise scandal, we usually focus on the men who were arrested and sent to prison, as we should. But we have to remember the invisible victims, the men like Morris. The men who had their homes, their career, and their sense of safety stolen from them overnight. The community that was effectively erased from the city's map because the alternative was a concrete cell. And while the working class men were fleeing into the night and abandoning everything they owned, a very different story was unfolding for the wealthy men caught in the same exact dragnet. Because in Poise, justice wasn't just blind, it had a price tag. In any moral panic, the rules of justice are rarely applied equally. And in Poisey, the line between who went to prison and who went on vacation was drawn entirely by a bank account. When the police were in those interrogation rooms threatening men with the life in prison, the terrified suspects didn't just curate their list by tax bracket, they just gave up names. And because the gay committee was naturally crossed by all social boundaries, the names began to include some of the most powerful, wealthy, and prominent citizens in Boise. We're talking about executives, bankers, high end professionals. And the sons of the political elite. Suddenly, police chief R. G. Haskins and prosecutor Blaine Evans had a massive problem on their hands. It was one thing to prosecute a clerk, an elevator operator, or a traveling salesman. The city was fine throwing working classmen to the wolves, but prosecuting the men who funded the city, the men who sat on the same boards, attended the same gallas, and ran the local government, that was a bridge too far. The investigation was effectively split into two parallel tracks. If you were a working classman, your name was handed over to the Idaho statesman to be blasted on the front page. You were publicly ruined, arrested, and processed through the criminal justice system. If you remember of the Boise's Elite, you didn't get a front page headline, you got a quiet private phone call. According to historian John Grassi, who later wrote the defendant book on the scandal, there was an active coordinate effort to shield the wealthy from the dragnet. The names of the prominent citizens were quietly scrubbed from official documents. Instead of being dragged out of their homes in handcuffs, these men were discreetly advised to leave town for a while. There were also a convenient legal loophole available, but only if you could afford it. During the 1950s, homosexuality was officially classified by the medical establishment as a psychiatric disorder. In Boise, the courts allowed certain defendants to avoid prison if they agreed to seek psychiatric quote unquote treatment to be quote unquote cured. For the wealthy, this meant quietly checking themselves into a private, expensive sanitarium out of state. They would spend a few months in a comfortable, discreet facility, and their legal troubles would miraculously vanish. The working classmen couldn't afford the private out-of-state sanitariums. They couldn't afford the high power lawyers to negotiate those deals. They were left to face the full, unmitigated wrath of justice. But this double standard stripped away the entire facade of the Boise investigation. The police and the press had claimed that they were on the righteous moral crusade to rid the city of the dangerous cancer. But the reality was far more cynical. The crusaders stopped the exact second it was threatened by the city's power structure. The poor were sent to the penitentiary, the rich were sent to a waiting room. And as the trials officially began, the devastating reality of those prison sons were about to tear families apart. While the wealthy elite were quietly ushered out the back door to private sanitariums or long vacations, the working class men of Boise were marched straight through the front doors of the Attack County Courthouse. The public trials began in late 1955, and the atmosphere was nothing short of a circus. The courtroom was packed every day. People treated it like a spectator sport, rubbernecking to see which of their neighbors was going to be dragged before the judge next. To understand the sheer scale of this witch hunt, you have to look at the numbers. In a city of just 35,000 people, investigators interrogated over 1,500 citizens. They demanded names, cross-reference lists, and tore through the private lives of nearly 5% of the entire population. From those 1,500 interrogations, hundreds of men were named as suspected homosexuals. Ultimately, 16 men were formally arrested and charged. And when it came time for sentencing, the justice system threw the book at them with a level of cruelty that is hard to comprehend today. Ten men were sentenced to severe time in the Hidaho State Penitentiary. So we need to talk about the sentences handed down here because disproportionate doesn't even begin to cover it. It was draconian. The very first man to plead guilty was a 33-year-old shoe repairman named Ralph Cooper. Cooper was terrified, completely overwhelmed by the justice system, and believed that he if he cooperated and pleaded guilty to the infamous crime against nature, the judge would show him some mercy. So he was wrong. The judge sentenced Ralph Cooper to life in prison. A life sentence for a morals charge, while men committing armed robbery or manslaughter were serving fractions of that time. A 33-year-old shoe repairman was condemned to die behind stone walls of the state penitentiary to satisfy a city's moral panic. Nine other men would follow him to prison, receiving sentences up to 15 years. And remember, the majority of these men going to prison had absolutely nothing to do with the initial crime involving the teenage sex workers. The dragnet had evolved so far past that. These men were being handed 15 year sentences for engaging in private consensual relationships with other adult men. They weren't predators. They were just gay. The psychological toll of these trials were catastrophic. These men were completely stripped of their humanity in open court. The prosecution paraded details of their private lives before a gawking public. Judges delivered sanctimonious lectures from the bench, telling these men that they were a danger to society, a moral failure, and a sickness that needed to be locked away. For the families left behind, the devastation was permanent. Wives discovered their husbands' secrets on the front page of the Idaho Statesman. Children were ostracized at school, businesses collapsed because no one in Boise would patronize a shop owned by a pervert. The men who went to the state penitentiary faced a nightmare, and 1950 prisons hierarchy, being convicted of a sodomy, put a massive target on your back. They endured brutal conditions, isolated from a world that collectively decided they were monsters. The Boise justice system had gotten exactly what it wanted. They had successfully purged the city's quote unquote underworld, they had flexed their moral authority, ruined dozens of lives, and sent ten men to rot behind stone walls. But witch hunts are incredibly difficult to control once they start. And just as the panic reached its absolute peak, the entire investigation just suddenly collapsed on itself. Moral panics usually burn until there's absolutely nothing left to consume. But the Boise Dragnet didn't burn out. It was deliberately and abruptly smothered. By early 1956, the investigation was spiraling out of control of the men who started it. Two major things happened that slammed the brakes on the entire operation. First, the prosecutor star witness, a young man who had been providing investigators with a massive list of names, was suddenly arrested for an unrelated violent crime, often cited in historical records as a robbery and manslaughter charge. Overnight, his credibility vanished. The entire foundation of the quote-unquote underworld narrative rested on his testimony, and suddenly he was a massive liability. Secondly, the dragnet was getting too close to the sun. The working classmen had already been purged, and the interrogations were now threatening to expose the absolute highest echelons of Boise society. The city's power brokers realized that if the investigation continued, it was going to take down the people who owned the banks, ran the law firms, and funded the local government. Add to that, like we said, the fact that Boise had become a national laughing stock nicknamed Boise by the rest of the country, and the city's elite decided they had had enough. They packed up the files, they dismissed the out-of-state private investigator Joe McFadden, and they shut the fucking operation down. But what followed wasn't just a cessation of arrest, it was a complete localized blackout. The Ohio statesman, the paper that had gleefully ruined the lives on its own front pages for months, had simply stopped reporting about it. The local government stopped talking about it. The city of Boise made an unspoken collective pact to pretend that the fall of 1955, it just never happened. It was a profound, suffocating silence that would last for a decade. To understand how long it took for this wound to even be acknowledged, we have to look at the timeline and break down the aftermath. So let's talk about the imposed silence, 1956 to 1965. Boise actively buries the scandal. The convicted men serve their sentences in the state penitentiary, while the families of the men who fled the state are left to process the trauma completely alone. And the history is erased from the local conversation. Then we have the Expose, 1966. Journalist John Garassi publishes The Boys of Boise. During his research, he faces intense intimidation. His motel is ransacked, he receives death threats, and officials try to get him fired. When the book is published, Boise's public library immediately pulls it from their shelves. Then there's the modern reckoning, 1989 to present. Decades later, a resilient queer community re-established itself in Boise, culminating in the city's first pride parade in 1989. The scandal is gradually reclaimed not as local shame, but as a crucial cautionary tale of civil rights history. When we look back at the Boise of Boise, it's easy to distance ourselves. It was 1955. It was an era of black and white television, McCarthyism, and a deeply flawed legal system. We like to tell ourselves that society has evolved, that we're too smart and too connected to ever fall for that kind of manufactured hysteria again. But as we look at the current political climate, the story of Boise doesn't feel like a distant history. It feels like a blaring siren. Because right now, we're watching politicians and media outlets dust off this same exact playbook from 70 plus years ago. We're watching a massive moral panic being weaponized all over again. Only this time, the primary targets are our trans brothers and sisters. Listen to the rhetoric being used today. It's the exact same language printed on the front pages of the Idaho statesman in 1955, framing an entire marginalized community as a danger to children, passing sweeping draconian laws designed to force people out of the public life, out of their jobs, and out of their home states. Using the machinery of government to try and legislate it at a demographic completely out of existence. In 1955, their cruelty was the point, and today, their cruelty is still the point. The Boise of Boise isn't just a ghost story about what happened when a city turns on its own citizens. It's a mirror reflecting exactly what happens when we allow fear and bigotry to disguise themselves as protecting the community. History is echoing, loud and clear. The only question left is, are we going to stand by and let them write the same tragic ending? And there's a bitter irony to how this story was recorded. In 1955, the Idaho statesman was the primary architect of the panic. They demanded the city crush the monster and gleefully printed the names of the accused. But history is rarely kind to the architects of a witch hunt. Forty years later, in 1995, the exact same newspaper published a massive retrospective on the Boys of Boise scandal. Only this time they weren't printing the names to destroy lives. They were publishing a tragic, sobering account of the human cost, focusing heavily on the victims they helped prosecute, including the tragic suicide of Frank Jones. The very printing presses that fueled the destruction in 1955 were eventually forced to print the apologies 40 years later. It's a stark reminder that moral panics always age horribly, and in the end, history always vindicates the victims. Thank you for joining me today for a slightly less morbid episode of Homicidal Tendency. Remember to take care of each other, stand fiercely behind your community, and remember, the loudest moral panic is always hiding the darkest political agenda. I'm Matt, and I'll see you next time.