Thanks for your interest in this one guys its haunted me for years.Curious if anything has been found out on this case yet. Hopefully kline will post something new soon. I am waiting on pins and needles!!
I was hoping seeing some investigative documents would shed light on who was looked at and to what extent such as the students who gave him a ride though one wouldnt think High School kids in the early '50's would be capable of homosexual rape and murder but who know's?
Absolutely.our perceptions are certainly shaped by how movies and media choose to portray them.Such murders have always occurred, what's changed is media coverage of violent crime including sex crimes. Following the butchery of WW2 it was as if the media had opted to paint a rosy picture of reality by avoiding to focus on violence and that is probably the reason why that decade -the 1950's- is still being perceived as a safe and quiet era. But statistics tell a different story. Perverts, including teenage ones, have always existed but society's perception of the problem varies with the times.
Absolutely.our perceptions are certainly shaped by how movies and media choose to portray them.
Many people have a 'Happy Days' perception of the 1950's.
Certainly people back then werent bombarded with the rapacious type of information from every source like in 2010 but one doesnt have to dig any further then some of the forums right here on this site such as the 'Cold Case' Forum and the 'Missing' and 'Unidentified' forums to see there were attrocities being visited on innocent victims by the Sick and Evil that would rival the worst ones of today....Lonnie Jones 1951 murder being a prime example.
Me too Karlk.Exactly. And even in later decades one's perception of violent crime would depend a lot on where one lived, back when local media was the main source of information. Up to my early teens I was raised in a small New England town (pop 12,000) where violent crime was very rare, perhaps one or two homicides per decade. Kids were allowed to wander about the neighborhood unsupervised even after dark, our parents knowing we'd be reasonably safe.
That was the early 1970's. Nowadays in the same town parents keep a much closer eye on their children but not because violent crime is on the rise locally (it's not), it's just that expanded exposure to crime-oriented media such as specialty channels has created a different atmosphere. It's not always easy to tell the actual level of threat at one's location.
With regards to the case in point I have no doubt that such a crime was unusual in small-town Idaho, and hopefully still is. I sympathize with those who hope it will be solved. In my small town my great-grandfather was the victim of a murder in the 1930's which was never solved and even though I never knew him it's been bugging me for years. I hope this boy's death will be explained one day to those seeking closure.
Me too Karlk.
I wish I could print the contemporary news articles that reside in the morgue of our small local paper from 1951.
Its amazing how quickly the general consensus from locals and investigators formed that Lonnie's murder had to be the work of a 'transistory deviant'.
They could not concieve that it could be a local who was responsible.
(Its my firmly held opinion that it was.)
Their perception no doubt shaped the course of the investigation and of course contributed to it being an unsolved all these years.
The Lewiston Tribune just did an interesting article on an Orofino cold case dating from 1945 7 years before Lonnie Jones ( A man was killed in his rural home in front of his family by someone shooting him through the front window of his living room with a 22. caliber rifle.the murder remains unsolved.)
Sounds like an excellent idea. I, for one, would be greatly interested in such a story.Ive kicked around the idea of writing about Lonnie's case for years and one of the things I wanted to explore was the impact on a small town of such people being confronted with such a horrific and savage crime.
It had already reached spooky urban legend status by the time I was a small child.
I'm a little surprised as well, in my own experience with my g-grandfather's case I found that legend and fact often did not match. Even those family member I've spoken with who were alive at the time -all gone now- did not all have the same recollection of the event. But this may simply be because that murder was not as heinous as that of that boy in Idaho.What kind of surprised me was that when I actually got around to investigating the facts of the case was how close the legend and spooky stories about it id heard passed on decades later stayed to what actually happened.
I wasnt expecting that.I guess that might also speak to the impact it had on this town.
Yeah I really expected that a lot of dramatic licence would have occurred over the years by the time I heard the story (probably the late 60's my mother and my aunts knew Lonnie and saw him that day at the fair.)
I know how skewed stories can become,The other case Im involved in The Civic Theater Murders in Lewiston has also somewhat acheived local urban legend status alot of which divurges wildly from the facts depending on which person is telling it.
In the 1945 case it was determined that the killer used a post on the fence surrounding the Bonner's rural home to steady the rifle due to some foot prints left in a light dusting of snow.
The prints led up the hill (upper Ford's Creek is located on very steep hillside) but dissappeared according to contemporary reports.
and I agree a .22 is an unlikely weapon unless in that very rural enviroment that was the only rifle available.
Its hard to say.
Yeah that area of upper Ford's Creek is rough terrain,seriously most of it sits on a 45 degree slope with a few level areas that stick out before plunging downhill again toward the Clearwater River at the bottom of the canyon,much of it heavily forested with Ponderosa Pine.Yeah, it's a natural tendency we have to insert our own opinions into unsolved cases and then we forget what we have put into it and recall it like fact. I'm not immune to it myself
My first thought was indeed the squirrel rifle as a weapon of opportunity but one would think that if such had been the case it would have been solved eventually. From what you describe it appears to me that the shooter did not care about leaving tracks. Either he/she was careless, lucky or perhaps an outsider with no direct link to the victim.
At first I had pictured the event taking place on farmland but from what I gather Orofino is a logging town not unlike those we have upstate here. Such places do get pretty rough at times and many transients employed as casual labor pass through them. If a local had wanted to get at Mr Bonner I suppose it is possible he/she hired a transient to do the job for them. This would make it the more difficult to solve. Pure speculation on my part since I am not familiar with the details. I only read a snippet on the Lewiston Tribune's website but without a subscription I had no access to the article itself.
I honestly believe in my heart that a carney did this and not a local. Someone need to track the trail of that particular carnival and see if there were similar crimes or just crimes period committed wherever that carnival set up shop