When Boonville Was A Fightin’, Dyin’ Kinda Town

I was on my way to the Lodge one Saturday morning to pick up a six-pack for later that night when the bar’s door suddenly banged open and a small, wiry young man came flying out, running for his life down the middle of Highway 128, hellbent south for Cloverdale, or whatever sanctuary came first. Right behind him came a very large, muscular, shirtless man with a broken off pool cue stuck so deeply into his back it vibrated without coming loose, as a thin stream of deep red blood ran down into the big man’s Levis. No way the bull could catch his matador, and back into the Lodge the wounded beast went, the pool cue still quivering in his back like a picador’s lance. The Boonville Lodge might have been the most eventful bar in the United States in a town Slim Pickens said was the “roughest place I ever called a rodeo in.”

In the summer of 1984, there occurred a pivotal Lodge event with both real and symbolic implications for the greater community. It was a soft summer Saturday morning, but from inside the Boonville Lodge came raucous laughter as several would be Mexican patrons were being recreationally heaved through the Lodge door out into the street. The door would bang open and here came an airborne Mexican. The tough guys were Mexican-tossing. When a Mexican entered the bar, a few seconds later he came flying back out. Three or four Mexicans kept walking back in. These same determined individuals had already been heaved through the door several times. It was hard to tell if they enjoyed being Mexican-tossed or were simply determined to get their first beer of the day. 

The Mexicans were supposed to drink down the street at a place called Mary Jane’s or The Mexican Bar. That was the informal understanding at the time. Mary Jane was a formidable Spanish-speaking woman sympathetic to the area’s first immigrant laborers who suffered from extra-low wages, marginal housing, insults, and random humiliations including the Mex-Toss as it was being played out this day. 

Mary Jane had opened her business because she knew Mexicans weren’t safe at The Lodge. And she was married to a Mexican. Her roots went deep in the Anderson Valley, maybe as deep as the Feliz land grant ranchero at Hopland because Mary Jane was part Indian and her family went way back. She knew what it was like to be on persecution’s receiving end.

She was a tough one, too. One night at her Boonville home a few steps from her bar, Mary Jane shot her estranged husband to death, hitting him with one perfect round right between the eyes after he’d snuck into Mary Jane’s bedroom and she’d awakened, she said, to find him arrayed in the rafters above her bed, about to drop on her as she slept. Mary Jane told Deputy Squires that she’d “heard something moving around above her,” grabbed her bedside pistol and plugged her ex, making him a double ex with an exclamation point right there in the middle of his forehead. Down he’d come in a dead heap.

The Lodge could be unsafe for Mexicans, but Mary Jane’s “Mexican Bar” wasn’t always safe for Anglos either.

Arturo Flores might be Boonville’s least known serial killer. In 1987, Flores would tell his friends that “all anglos should be exterminated.” Then he exterminated one. Maybe he’d exterminated others, too, but we knew from the cold, dead fact of Gregory Evans, a 27-year-old softball player from Rohnert Park, that Flores had exterminated Evans because two men saw Flores do it. 

You'd see Flores around Boonville at all hours of the day and night. Couldn’t miss him. He was tall for a Mexican, lean, knotty lean, hard lean, and he stared a big-eyed stare right at you, unblinking, not hostile exactly but homicidally indifferent, a vacant-eyed psycho-stare, a pitiless panopticon. Vehicles, people, dogs, insects disappeared into those eyes. You got the feeling that Flores wanted to kill everything he saw.

Some people thought Flores was crazy. Others were merely unnerved by him. “That Mexican creeps me out big time,” someone would say. “Does he sleep standing up? He’s always here,” another person would say. There he was, a constant staring public presence, a brooding human surveillance camera, leaned up against the wall of the Lodge or Tom Cronquist’s cyclone fence or the Anderson Valley Market, never saying a word to any anglo body, not much to his countrymen, always staring that blank stare that somehow seemed to go blanker at the gringo visuals.

Of course it is more than likely that señor Flores had had unhappy encounters with gringos, some of whom, as described, amused themselves by heaving Mexicans out the door of the Boonville Lodge like so many bags of pinto beans. Mexican-tossing had finally ended one memorable afternoon when the Mexicans counter-attacked, beating down the locked door of the Lodge with half a telephone pole as the Mexican tossers barricaded themselves inside the bar when fed up Mexicans suddenly appeared outside the bar in seriously angry numbers.

When a contingent of riot-geared deputies arrived from Ukiah, the Mexican assault force was inside the bar where a rural replay of the Alamo was underway. A small group of Mexican-tossers was backed up in a corner where they were beating back their attackers with pool cues and bar stools. Another gringo — a fat, strong one — was on all-fours on the floor with a determined Mexican riding his bucking back, sawing away at the big man’s enlarded throat with a knife not quite sharp enough to penetrate the suet. “His fat and his arm strength saved him,” a deputy commented later.

Boonville was a hard place for Mexicans in the late 1970s. Arturo Flores, he with the murderous stare, didn’t bother making distinctions between gringos. He hated them all.

The night Flores launched his local gringo eradication program, assuming he hadn’t already notched one or two before he touched down in the “bucolic Anderson Valley,” as it’s inevitably described in the wine and food pages of contemporary newspapers and magazines, Anastacio Yanez and Luis Orozco had met Greg Evans in the Boonville Mexican bar. Yanez and Orozco had watched Evans drive in the winning run in a Boonville slo-pitch softball tournament across the street at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds. It was the first tournament of the year, and the weather was in and out; it rained a little, the sun came out, it rained a little more, the sun came out. That night it rained steady and hard.

Yanez and Orozco said Evans was drinking a lot of beer before he left Mary Jane’s Cantina. They said they next saw him outside the bar trying to flag down cars for a ride somewhere. When Evans saw Yanez and Orozco walk out of the Cantina he asked them for a ride to Ukiah. Evans said he’d pay them for the ride. Yanez said he was going to Ukiah anyway so Evans didn’t have to pay him.

Yanez said later that “Evans was a very good person.”

Yanez invited Orozco and, fatally, Flores to drive with him to Ukiah in his Ford Pinto. Yanez said he was headed to Ukiah for a dance. Flores and Orozco climbed in the back. Yanez got behind the wheel, Greg Evans rode in the front passenger seat, which Flores may have seen as an undeserved concession to the gringo or, worse perhaps to Flores, gringo-hood’s assumed front seat privilege.

Yanez said Evans was “friendly” during the trip over the hill. He said that he and Evans hit it off so well that Evans offered to introduce Yanez to some bimbitos in Ukiah. (Bimbito, n. 1. Spanish for bimbo. 2. Loose woman short in stature. 3. Bi-lingual welcome wagon specializing in intimate trans-national relations.)

Yanez said that Evans gave him a card with Evans’ name and address and telephone number on it. Evans and Yanez chatted as best they could in mutually unintelligible languages all the way up and over the Ukiah hill until the carload of merrymakers was about five miles from Highway 101 and Ukiah’s sedate night life.

Gregory Evans suddenly threw up his hands and exclaimed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Whatever Evans thought he’d done to be sorry about, it was neither audible nor visible to either Yanez or Orozco. Flores, seated directly behind Evans had suddenly reached over the seat and driven a knife blade deep into Evans’ heart. Evans said he was sorry and then he was gone.

Orozco asked Flores why he’d done it. “This is nothing,” Flores said. “These guys we have to exterminate.”

Yanez and Orozco couldn’t have been too upset about the murder of the Rohnert Park softball player because the three amigos dumped Evans’ body about a foot off the pavement of Stipp Lane just south of the Ukiah city limits. Then they drove the short distance to a Mexican bar on North State Street to re-commence their Saturday night festivities. 

In the men’s room of the bar on North State, Yanez said he saw Flores wash the blood off the folding knife he’d murdered Evans with.

Evans’ body was discovered by a passing motorist at about 11 p.m., maybe two hours after his final apology. Evans hadn’t even been dragged into the bushes, merely dumped on the side of the road.

Flores, Yanez and Orozco saw the cluster of police and police vehicles as they drove back to Boonville.

Yanez and Orozco said their fear of Flores prevented them from voluntarily turning themselves into police. They didn’t say that Flores had threatened them — he didn’t have to. After all, Yanez and Orozco were fresh off a first-hand demonstration of Señor Flores’ apparent lack of impulse control.

There being few secrets in the Anderson Valley, and the few secrets that aren’t in general circulation being fully known by Deputy Squires, the three Mexicans were arrested three days after Gregory Evans had said his last sorry. Orozco and Yanez quickly agreed to tell all in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Their stories matched, and Yanez and Orozco were released from custody. Flores was arrested and more or less confined to the County Jail to await trial.

The Mendocino County Jail was rather loosely administered in the middle 1980s. An inmate was caught boffing a female jailer in a broom closet, and tennis balls stuffed with marijuana frequently sailed into the prisoner’s outdoor commons by dope missionaries passing by on Low Gap Road. The day before he was scheduled to be arraigned for exterminating Gregory Evans, perhaps while inmates scrambled for a pot ball, Flores vaulted the jail fence out onto Low Gap and hasn’t been seen since.