Vigilante Justice!
1920-Santa Rosa, CA
A local guy named Terry Fitts, recently paroled from prison and hanging around with friends "Spanish" Charley Valento and George Boyd at Valento's home on San Francisco's Howard Street (Valento and Boyd were members of S.F.'s notorious "Howard Street Gang") became suspects in a violent kidnapping and sexual assault on a young woman said to have taken place at the Howard Street residence. The three needed to go on the lamb, and Fitts suggested Santa Rosa as a good spot to hide out.
An acquaintance of Fitts, a man named Pete Guidotti, lived with his wife on 7th Street in a home situated just behind the Hotel Toscano. The renegade trio made their way to Guidotti's home in the hopes of getting him to lend them money. Guidotti refused, for unknown reasons, to give them cash, but his wife made them some soup to tide them over. It's uncertain whether or not Guidotti and his wife knew of the three men's deeds, but since they were not involved in the later happenings, it appears they were unaware of what the three had done. It was known, however, by the San Francisco and Santa Rosa Police who were tracking them, after rummaging around Santa Rosa's seedier neighborhoods, that Fitts knew Guidotti and was likely to be hiding there. On the night of December 5th, the officers surrounded the Guidotti home. In the group were San Francisco's detective Lester Dohrman and sergeant Miles Jackson and Sonoma County Sheriff Jim Petray. The three lawmen crashed through the front door in an attempt at capturing the fugitives. That was when it all went terribly wrong.
Boyd was able to grab a gun that Fitts had laid on a table and fired it at the approaching officers, emptying it into them. All three were hit, with Jackson and Petray being killed in the exchange (but not before Jackson was able to get a shot into Boyd). Detective Dohrman died a few hours later from his wounds. The trio of criminals tried to escape out the back door, but the others in the dragnet were able to capture them and they were taken to the Santa Rosa jailhouse.
In the early 1900's, there was still a lingering love for vigilante justice left over from California's Wild West Days, and folks weren't too keen on lowlife criminals, especially cop killers, filling jails and costing taxpayers good money during long trials and incarcerations. After five days of heated debate over what should be done about the three, a group of men descended upon the little jail (which, while somewhat small was actually built like a big mausoleum) and were able to take the prisoners without any trouble from the guards on duty. Often in those years, vigilantes were helped by those holding prisoners in jails due to sympathetic police and guards. Sometimes it came down to those on duty not wanting to become the target of the angry mob. Whatever the case, the three men were spirited away from the jail and taken to Santa Rosa's Rural Cemetery on Franklin Street. Near the Veteran's Memorial there, ropes were thrown over the lowest heavy branch of a locust tree and the three men were summarily hoisted, clad only in their long johns, into Santa Rosa history. The official verdict on the hangings was "death by persons unknown", and the case was closed.
The rumors at the time speculated on the crowd size (some said up to 200 men) and the makeup of the mob itself. Some supposed it was wayward San Francisco police who did the lynching, others thought it might have been angry Santa Rosa cops, or a mixture of both. The mystery may have finally been somewhat solved when a man named Clarence H. Barnard read a story in Santa Rosa's Press Democrat newspaper retelling the old story and again getting people wondering just who was responsible for the lynching on that cold night. Barnard came forward, anonymously, and admitted that he, then 20 years old (the youngest member of the lynch mob) and his father both took part that December night, helped by other friends of sheriff Jim "Sunny" Petray's from nearby Healdsburg, where the officer was well known and very popular. The group, according to Barnard, numbered thirty men. Although Barnard questioned the righteousness of his involvement at times, ultimately he stood by his decision, saying, "...I just can't believe it was wrong". There survives today a photo of Boyd taken after he was removed from the tree and dressed in his burial clothes.
The hanging tree was eventually cut down by the city because souvenir hunters kept cutting bark from it's trunk as keepsakes. The monument behind the tree in the linked photo, still at the cemetery, currently hosts a side part of Moozer's "Santa Rosa Walking Tour #1-SRJC neighborhood" cache (GC2MW4X) on geocaching.com.
The Hotel Toscano, at the corner of 7th and Adams, eventually became Guidotti's, then spent many years as the popular Michelle's, and has recently been reopened and is currently in business as Stark's Steakhouse. When you get to GZ, turn and look at the nearest house, right next to the parking lot at Stark's. That is the Guidotti home where, on a cold and dark December evening in 1920, three of Santa Rosa's most infamous visitors killed three officers of the law and secured their place in Santa Rosa history. When you arrive at GZ and have identified the house, remember the address number of the house itself. Email me that number and claim the find. This cache is a historic piece of Santa Rosa and, after having the physical cache stolen many times, I am going to make "signing" the log a simple process of emailing me the address. No need to wait for confirmation of the address, but it must be correct or log will be deleted.
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