Convicted killer Erick Hall dies on Idaho’s death row at 54, never facing execution. A lead detective reflects on the Henneman and Hanlon murders that changed Boise.
BOISE, Idaho — For three years, retired Boise Police Detective Dave Smith carried a photo of Lynn Henneman and her ring in his working notebook. Every day.
He had promised her mother in 2000 he would find her killer.
On Monday night, the man Smith eventually caught, Erick Virgil Hall, died of natural causes at a local hospital at the age of 54, the Idaho Department of Correction announced Tuesday. Hall had spent more than 20 years on death row for the rapes and murders of Henneman and Cheryl Ann Hanlon, two women killed in separate attacks in the Boise area in the early 2000s.
“I don’t think there was justice,” Smith said in an interview Tuesday. “He still didn’t pay for what he did.”
Hall’s death marks the end of two significant criminal cases in Boise’s history that shattered the city’s sense of safety on the Greenbelt and in the Boise Foothills. It also led to the first jury-imposed death sentence in the state of Idaho.
Henneman, 38, was a United Airlines flight attendant from Sag Harbor, New York, on a layover in Boise on Sept. 24, 2000. She had married her husband, Walter Us, less than a month earlier. The couple had not yet taken their honeymoon.
Henneman had eaten at a downtown Boise restaurant, then took a walk along the Boise River Greenbelt. She never returned to her hotel.
“I knew something was bad because I started talking to family, friends, her mom and dad, and her mother’s birthday was coming up, and she spoke to her mother every single day,” Smith said. “Every day.”
For days, search teams combed the Greenbelt and the Boise River. Henneman’s parents, Ron and Micki Huisenga, flew from Bozeman, Montana, to Boise. They walked the Greenbelt searching for clues, held press conferences and pleaded for the public’s help.
Henneman’s body was found in the river on Oct. 7, 2000, about two weeks after she disappeared.
“We found her in that Boise River, beaten about the head with an unknown object and tied with her hands behind her back with her own clothes,” Smith said.
A rape kit confirmed Henneman had been sexually assaulted. Investigators had DNA evidence, but no suspect.
Smith, who joined the Boise Police Department in 1977 and spent his last 20 years working robbery and homicide, was assigned as lead detective. He threw everything at the case. The department logged more than 5,000 hours, followed more than 600 tips and tested 156 DNA samples, then-Boise Police Chief Don Pierce said at the time. At the time that was more than any tests and DNA samples for any other case in Boise history.
Months turned into years. Henneman’s mother continued calling Smith regularly.
“I did something that a seasoned homicide detective should not do,” Smith said. “I promised her mom I would find him.”
The violence shook a city that had long considered its Greenbelt a crown jewel.
“I got a call from the mayor saying the checkbook’s open, just solve it,” Smith said.
In the wake of the attacks, the city added lighting along the Greenbelt, cut back brush that created hiding spots, installed emergency call boxes and established a volunteer patrol program that continues to operate today.
On March 1, 2003, a 16-year-old boy walking his dog in the Boise foothills near 5th and Alturas streets, just above the North End neighborhood, found a body partially buried in brush and debris.
It was Cheryl Ann Hanlon, 42, a Boise resident. She had been beaten, raped and strangled.
Smith happened to be the detective on call.
“My heart sank because she was tied with her own clothing,” Smith said. “Looked like she was strangled. She was beaten the same way. And I thought, oh my God, we got Lynn Henneman part two.”
A witness had seen Hanlon with a man outside a downtown Boise bar the night before her body was found, and a composite sketch was circulated. Then came the break.
“I got a call from Erick’s girlfriend,” Smith said. “She said he was acting real weird, going out and getting the paper every morning, reading up on this murder.”
Police brought Hall in for questioning as a suspect in the Hanlon murder.
After hours of interviews, Smith said Hall confessed to killing Hanlon, blaming drug use. Smith caught him just five days after Hanlon’s murder.
But the most significant moment came when Hall’s DNA was run through evidence from the Henneman case three years earlier. It matched.
“I think everybody in the detective division heard me when I got that call,” Smith said, becoming emotional.
Hall was convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering Henneman in October 2004. A jury sentenced him to death, the first time in Idaho history that a jury, not a judge, handed down a death sentence, following a 2003 change in state law prompted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Ring v. Arizona.
He was convicted and sentenced to death again in 2007 for the murder of Hanlon.
Hall spent years appealing his sentences. In 2018, the Idaho Supreme Court rejected his appeal, with a majority of justices ruling he had received a fair trial and adequate representation.
Idaho has not carried out an execution since 2012. A botched attempt to execute death row inmate Thomas Creech in February 2024, in which medical staff failed to establish an IV line after eight attempts, drew national attention. The Idaho Legislature subsequently passed a law making the firing squad the state’s primary method of execution, set to take effect in July 2026.
Hall died before any of it mattered.
Ada County Prosecutor Jan Bennetts, who prosecuted Hall in the Hanlon case, shared a statement Tuesday: “His murder cases involved heinous crimes that profoundly impacted the victims’ families and our community. My thoughts remain with those families.”
Smith, who retired from the Boise Police Department in 2007 after 30 years and later returned for 18 years doing background investigations before retiring again last year, said the outcome offered no closure.
“I know how it’s affected Lynn’s family,” Smith said.
Smith said he still visits Henneman’s memorial on the Greenbelt a large stone with a bronze relief of her image and a poem she wrote: “All things have a reason. At a point in time, we return whence we came.” The memorial was created by her husband, Walter Us, and unveiled after Hall’s conviction.
And every time he drives over the Boise River, Smith said, the cases come back to him.
“Can I put it behind me?” Smith said. “I do, until every time I drive over the river.”
Asked what he wants people to remember; Smith did not hesitate.
“Very good people who were tragically taken, who shouldn’t have been, by someone who is so evil that he has no respect for human life,” he said.
“I’ll never forget,” he said.
date: 2026-02-11 11:52:00
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