Samantha Kaye Blomberg Maher, 22, female, White/Caucasian, left for a morning class at Boise State University on July 6, 2000, walking along the Boise Greenbelt through Julia Davis Park in Ada County. Around 10:15 a.m., she was confronted at gunpoint, forced into her own car, and abducted. The assailant carried a. 22 Ruger and had recently obtained handcuffs, latex gloves, and maps, items later noted in court records that reconstructed the premeditation behind the attack.
What followed was a series of assaults that ended in murder. After the abduction, Samantha was sexually assaulted and shot in the head. Her body was hidden in a concrete drainage tank, a discovery that turned a missing-student alert into a homicide investigation that stunned Boise in the heat of summer. The grim sequence of the kidnapping, rape, robbery, and killing was established at trial and detailed in the Idaho Supreme Court's review of the case.
Detectives identified and arrested Darrell Edward Payne, who was tried in Ada County and convicted by a jury of first-degree murder, kidnapping, rape, and robbery. In 2002, a judge imposed a death sentence. Six years later, the Idaho Supreme Court affirmed Payne's convictions but vacated the sentence in light of evolving capital-sentencing requirements, sending the case back for a new penalty phase before a jury rather than a judge. In March 2010, after hearing the evidence again, a new jury once more returned a death sentence.
The case never returned to a scheduled execution: on July 9, 2015, Payne died in custody at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution after a long illness. Public memorial records and contemporary news accounts continue to mark the date of Samantha's death as July 6, 2000, and place the crime squarely along the city's riverside corridor—an ordinary walk to class turned into a meticulously prepared ambush that ended with a single, devastating loss.
