From the earliest days of our research back in 2002, we’ve been looking for answers to two questions:
- Who was Emma Loring, Lou Blonger’s first wife?
- Who was Kitty Blonger, the prostitute who shot and killed a man in an Arizona brothel?
Today we present some new evidence and attempt to provide answers.
Emma Loring
We learned the name of Lou Blonger’s first wife early in our research, but until very recently we knew nothing more about Emma Loring except that she and Lou were married in San Francisco in the early 1880s, exact year unknown. Based only on that meager information, we proposed in 2019 that Lou’s wife might have been Emma Kaiser Loring, a rich and comically eccentric widow from the bay city. Her travails made good copy and were so off the wall that in retrospect we leaned a little too far into the notion that Lou had to be involved somehow. There were red flags—Lou’s name never came up in any of the news coverage, and Emma didn’t seem the type to hang around mining camps in the middle of nowhere—but we went ahead and published the story, because it was just too good to pass up.
Maybe Emma’s ghost read it, because on November 20, 2022, she reached out from the grave to introduce herself.
This index card shown below is a record of an inquiry she sent to the California State Library in 1938.
Emma K. Boies of Oakland, California, was curious about the marriage of Emma Kate Loring. Hmmm.
We have not publicized the name of Emma Boies until now because we could not find any information about her, and we weren’t sure of her relationship to Lou Blonger. Now we know.
Lou obtained a divorce from his first wife in 1889, claiming abandonment. He referred to her as Emma Loring in legal documents. But it appears that in daily life, she went by her middle name, Katherine, as in Emma K. Boies.
Emma/Katherine retained the Blonger surname for more than three decades before marrying again. Her marriage to James Claude Boies, who also went by his middle name, took place in San Francisco on March 6, 1923. On the marriage certificate, Katherine Blonger stated that it was her second marriage, and that her father’s name was John Loring. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1923 was also a big year in the life of Lou Blonger. Accounts of Lou’s trial (and his tribulations) appeared in the San Francisco papers, and I wonder whether Emma/Katherine, who never replied to the suit for divorce, even knew that she was free to marry until the news of Lou’s arrest broke.
There are indications that Katherine and Claude had lived as husband and wife without the benefit of marriage for some time. Claude listed Katherine as his wife on his draft registration card in 1918. And in a letter to the editor in 1907, James C. Boies wrote that his wife, “a theatrical performer,” had been harassed by a streetcar operator who threatened to hiss her off the stage for using the service while the carmen were on strike.
Soon after they were married, the couple moved to Martinez, a small city north of Oakland, where Claude worked on a pile driver crew. Eventually they moved into Oakland itself. There is a single city directory entry in 1927 that lists both their names; their address was 410 Webster St. In the 1930 census they were temporarily back in Martinez at 1135 Ferry St. But most importantly, Claude’s residence in the voter rolls from 1934 to 1944 is listed as 630 Ninth St. in Oakland. The off-by-one discrepancy from the address on the index card is duly noted, but is there any doubt at this point that Emma K. “Katherine” Boies was indeed Emma Loring?
What was Katherine looking for when she made the inquiry in 1938? She remembered the month and day of her marriage, so it seems that all she hoped to find was the year. Lou himself had a hard time remembering, using both 1882 and 1884 on documents he filed only a few years after the fact. But Katherine may have had another reason for her renewed interest in her former husband: She was dying. Although the date of her death has not yet been located, she apparently succumbed sometime before April 1940, when Claude was listed in the federal census as “widowed.”
Katherine had attempted to reconnect once before. In August 1923, just months after she remarried, the following item ran in the Rocky Mountain News:
Lou died a few months later in the state penitentiary. Whether Katherine got her message to Lou is unknown.
But why did Katherine rent a post office box and use “Katherine Russell” as an alias? For that matter, why did she list 631 Ninth St. as her address on the library inquiry, when it seems her address was actually 630? It could have been a transcription error, certainly. But if it was deliberate, if she asked a friend across the street to watch for the response, it might have been for the same reason she rented the P. O. Box: She wanted to hide her former relationship with Lou Blonger from her husband.
I have laid out this evidence, which clearly shows that Katherine Boies was Emma Loring, in order to forestall questions about a glaring discrepancy on Katherine’s marriage certificate. Her section of the document is shown below.
If Katherine was actually 44 years old when she married in 1923, having previously married Lou Blonger in either 1882 or 1884, it raises all sorts of questions about Lou’s judgment. Instead, we must conclude that Katherine stretched the truth almost to the breaking point when she gave her age on the license application. Claude Boies said he was 43, which appears to be accurate. Did he know how old his wife really was?
Emma Loring’s roots
The presence of Katherine’s birth place and parents’ names on the marriage certificate allows a look into her past, back to the time when she was still called Emma. Based on this information, there is only one good match in public records. This family was found in the 1870 federal census of Indianola, Iowa.
The parents are John L. and Carrie Loring (indexed on Ancestry as “Loving”), and Emma K. is their oldest child. She was born in Iowa and was nine years old; in 1882 she would definitely have been of marriageable age. Emma had three younger sisters, Ella B., Jennie, and Mary L.
John Lee Loring was a Civil War veteran. He died sometime before 1880, when his wife applied for a widow’s pension. According to other family trees, the three sisters all migrated to Eureka, California, before 1900 and married in that state.
If this is the correct family, the marriage record may have additional inaccuracies. John was apparently born in Kentucky, not Ohio as Katherine stated on the certificate, but he lived in Ohio for some time before moving to Iowa. Carrie’s facts are more problematic. She was born not in Ireland but Ohio, according to all available information. And Katherine gave Carrie’s surname as Kavnaugh [Kavanaugh?], which does not seem to be either her maiden name or the name of another husband. She was born Caroline Barnes.
The last two items are quite puzzling, but I’ve run into similar cases throughout my genealogical research. And despite these issues, there’s something else that makes me think this is the right family. At Ancestry there are 20 other people who have placed this family on their tree. The three sisters are all accounted for, with husbands, families, and a date and place of death. But Emma is a cipher. None of the trees offer any information about her except the facts given in the 1870 census. From a genealogical standpoint, she had vanished into thin air. Until now.
Based on all this evidence, I believe that this is the family of the first Mrs. Lou Blonger.
Some additional thoughts on this topic: I have ordered John Loring’s Civil War pension file from the National Archives (it could take a long while to get it) and I’ll be trying to hunt down Katherine’s death certificate, which is presumably in Alameda County.
Apropos of nothing, I got a chuckle out of the correction on the index card. It may be hard to read here. In pencil, someone altered the words “has no file of marriage licenses” to read “does not have a file of marriage licenses.” Well done, pedantic librarian! Someone has finally noticed your completely unnecessary correction.
Finally, thank goodness Emma K. Boies, for whatever reason, submitted her question to the library shortly before she died. Without that single index card, I don’t know if we would ever have been able to identify Lou Blonger’s first wife with any degree of confidence. In genealogy, even the smallest document can change the story.
Kitty Blonger
Moving on to the second question, where the answer is still murky.
You remember Kitty. Shortly after noon on February 22, 1888, while she was occupied in a room at the back of J. T. Somerset’s saloon in Peach Springs, Arizona, with her paramour, Dayton “Kid” Fay, a spurned suitor, Charles Hill, demanded entry. When the couple refused, Hill kicked in the door, and the two men ended up on the floor in a mad scramble. Kitty grabbed a pistol, stood up on the bed, and ended the melee with single shot to Hill’s head. “I don’t allow no son of a bitch to break my door,” she told horrified onlookers.
An account of the shooting was in newspapers by the evening. Three days later, they reported that L. Blonger from San Bernardino, California, had checked into a hotel in nearby Kingman, where Kitty was jailed and the trial would take place.
When Kitty was acquitted two months later, one reporter wrote that that she would immediately “return to her home in one of the Eastern States, where her parents are highly respected, and endeavor by a life of future rectitude to redeem the past.” But through the years, Kitty—or a woman or women using the same name—showed up in newspaper dispatches from various mining camps: Aspen in 1890, Lake City (Colorado) in 1892, Deadwood in 1893, and Pueblo in 1895, where she witnessed a murder at a theater.
From the beginning we were certain that Kitty was connected to the Blonger brothers in some way—maybe not legally, but there had to be some attachment. “L. Blonger of San Bernardino” was certainly Lou. We later learned that he had spent at least a year at the Calico mining camp in San Bernardino County. He was probably there on business when word of the shooting reached him.
And Kitty had a past, too. On a visit to Albuquerque, where Lou and Sam served as peace officers for a few months in 1882, Craig found a clipping from the time of Kitty’s trial that remembered her as “a sporting woman formerly of this city.” That immediately took us back to an item we had previously located: Lou’s assault of Park Van Tassel, Albuquerque’s pioneering balloonist. In that incident, the two men visited a bagnio “kept by Blonger’s woman.” While joking with her, Van Tassel made a remark that angered Blonger, who proceeded to redecorate his companion’s head with blows from his billy club and revolver, shouting, “You son of a bitch, you can’t talk to my woman that way.”
From that point on, we suspected from that Kitty Blonger may have been Lou Blonger’s moll. We didn’t know if she came by the Blonger name legitimately, as a wife or daughter, or if she had adopted it as an alias. Whatever the relationship, Kitty’s arrest elicited immediate action from Lou.
We knew all this from early on, but as hard as we tried, we could not identify her.
Then, in June 2022, I noticed that additional years of the Denver Post were available on the GenealogyBank.com website. During a systematic search of the Blonger families we found several clippings about Sam Blonger’s second wife, Sadie. She had divorced Sam and subsequently married a man named Henry Domedion, whom she also divorced. And then she made the news in October 1903.
As Craig wrote after the find:
Two US Deputy Marshals were in hot water; charged with transporting a prisoner from Denver to Philadelphia, the suspect’s wife had boarded in Chicago, and the couple had gone AWOL upon arriving in Pennsylvania. The assumption was that the wife had boarded with a satchel full of cash, and the cops had looked the other way at an opportune moment.
Of more interest to us was the assertion that one of the marshals, [Edwin] Davis by name, had taken along a companion, a woman by the name of Kate Blonger. Interesting. And she was known around town by other names as well. In fact, it was as Mrs. Hank Domedion that she reportedly ran a “rooming house” on Curtis.
So Sadie used “Kate Blonger” as an alias?! As far as we were concerned, we had found Kitty.
And that’s where things stood until a few days ago when we received an inquiry from David Grassé, who’s writing a chapter about the Kitty Blonger murder trial for an upcoming book. He had uncovered newspaper clippings that placed Sadie with her hitherto unidentified parents, Henry and Phebe Cooper, in Table Rock, Nebraska. That set off a review of Sadie’s dossier, which eventually expanded to include Emma Loring’s background as well.
Here is Sarah J. “Sadie” Cooper at six years old in the 1870 census.
Sadie married her first husband, John Wilson, in Denver on April 22, 1884. Over the next years, Sadie, sometimes accompanied by her husband of the moment, traveled from Denver to visit her family in Table Rock. She was there, for instance, on January 6, 1888, just six weeks before Kitty Blonger disposed of Charles Hill. In all of the clippings we’ve found that mention Sadie, she was never anywhere but Denver and Table Rock.
And unlike in Table Rock, where Sadie was portrayed as a faithful daughter, in Denver Sadie made salacious, headline-grabbing news. Well before her escapade with Marshal Edwin Davis, her divorce from Sam carried sensational charges of wife-beating. And in 1925, near the end of her life, she was arrested for petty theft and spilled her guts about her former days living the high life to sob sister Frances Wayne. But a newly unearthed clipping may be the best. It’s from 1910 and has Sadie and her fifth and final husband, the recently widowed John Redmon, in a very public row. Sadie charged John with freeloading at her house with his three young children and never lifting a hand to help out; John claimed Sadie squandered the remains of his wife’s estate on furniture and drunken benders with her lady friends while he had to work as a chambermaid at the rooming house she owned a few blocks away. And the article includes photos.
“Rooming house” was sometimes used as a polite term for a bordello, and Sadie’s place at 1105 Fifteenth St. in downtown Denver was not too far from Lou and Sam’s criminal enterprises. But a rooming house could also be just that, and if the 1910 census is any indication, it doesn’t seem like there was much happening at “The Bryan,” as it was called. Newspaper references to the address during the time Sadie owned it don’t turn up any references to illicit activity.
The problem with Sadie as Kitty Blonger is that it seems unlikely she would have found herself in Peach Springs in 1888. Sadie was a drunk with terrible taste in men, perhaps just out for their money. None of her five marriages lasted five years. But in reading the articles that shed light on her life story, I don’t see her as a “theatrical performer”, madam or prostitute.
In my opinion, Sam Blonger’s second wife, Sadie, was not Kitty. You can see where this is headed.
Could Lou Blonger’s first wife, Emma Loring, have been Kitty instead? There is one obvious, enormous reason to suspect that she was. From the 1880s until 1923, Emma Loring was, literally and legally, Katherine Blonger.
But so far, all the other evidence is circumstantial. Let’s summarize and make it sound like AI wrote it:
- 1860-70, Iowa roots: According to a news report, Kitty Blonger was from “one of the Eastern States”. Emma Loring is presumed to be from a family from Indianola, Iowa. This family also lived in Missouri for a few years before returning to Indianola by 1870.
- 1880, Emma is missing: There is no record of Emma in the 1880 census, when she would have been about 19. There is no record of her presumed mother or sisters, either. Her father was dead by this time. This suggests that the family may have been on the move to the West, perhaps to Eureka, California, where all three sisters are known to have settled before 1900.
- 1883, from Phoenix to San Francisco: Lou Blonger was the proprietor of Stroud’s Theater in downtown Phoenix between March 9 and May 3, 1883, based on advertisements in the Phoenix Weekly Herald. On June 1, a Mrs. K. Blonger of Phoenix, Arizona, reportedly traveled through Newhall, California, on her way to San Francisco. This suggests that Lou had married Emma/Katherine in 1882 (not 1884), and that she might have been a performer in his theater. (For what it’s worth, Lou Blonger had also been a theater proprietor in Georgetown, Colorado, in 1879.)
- 1882, a news blackout: Lou Blonger assigned two different years to his marriage to Emma Loring in San Francisco, citing 1882 in one document and 1884 in another. Emma K. Boies seems to have recalled that the date of her marriage as June 14, but she could not remember the year. The previous item makes the case that the marriage occurred in 1882. Lou Blonger and his brother Sam were prominent lawmen in Albuquerque in that year and Lou’s name appears frequently in the clippings, but there are no such references between May 23 to July 10 (link). This suggests that he was out of town for some time, certainly long enough for the couple to travel to San Francisco to get married. While there was no mention of a marriage in the Albuquerque papers, the timing of the news blackout is suspicious.
- 1884-85, living in Calico, California: Lou Blonger registered to vote at the Calico mining camp in San Bernardino County on September 1, 1884. Kitty Blonger had unclaimed mail in the same place on June 7, 1885. This suggests that sometime between those two dates both Lou and Kitty lived in Calico.
- 1888, Lou’s immediate response: Kitty Blonger was arrested and jailed on Wednesday, February 22, 1888. Lou Blonger arrived at the courthouse in Kingman, Arizona, by Saturday, February 25. Lou’s prompt reaction to the crisis suggests that he had an intense interest in the case and an urgency that seems more likely if the person in trouble was his wife, rather than a prostitute who was using his name.
- 1889, living in a mining camp? When Lou Blonger filed his suit for divorce, he listed Emma’s last known address as Kelley Camp, New Mexico. Better known as Kelly, it’s now a ghost town, but in those days it was still a bustling mining camp, not unlike several other places that Kitty Blonger apparently lived, if notices of unclaimed mail were accurate. Lou Blonger claimed to have lived in several other places in southwestern New Mexico during this period, so this may be where he and Emma lived when she allegedly abandoned him.
- 1907, still in the business? A letter to the editor that appears to have been written by Claude Boies in 1907 described his wife as a “theatrical performer” in San Francisco. Since the term was a common euphemism for a sex worker in the old West, this suggests that if Katherine Boies (Emma) was Kitty, she may have continued in the same trade long after her acquittal.
Pushing back on this evidence slightly is Lou Blonger’s divorce suit in 1889, in which he claimed that Emma abandoned him in 1887. One might reasonably assume that he meant he had not seen her since then, in which case his appearance in Kingman would seem to run counter his statement. But it could also be argued that the period of abandonment was interrupted only by a brief reunion after Lou got word of Kitty’s predicament (and her exact location), and that they returned to their separate ways immediately after she was released from custody.
Some might also question why Lou Blonger’s name did not come up in the limited trial coverage that has been found. I can’t imagine a reporter not wanting to write “Kitty Blonger, wife of former Albuquerque deputy marshal Lou Blonger. . . .” Perhaps the editor of the Albuquerque Evening Citizen was hinting at this connection when he wrote, “Kitty Blonger, a sporting woman formerly of this city. . . .”, five days after Kitty’s arrest. But that is a minor point.
Summing up, I believe that Emma Loring/Katherine Boies and Kitty Blonger were probably the same person, but we need more evidence to be sure. We’ll see what the next round of research brings.
Finally, thanks again to David Grassé for setting in motion the recent flurry of research that resulted in this post. His chapter will be included in Arizona Homicides: Women, Minorities and the Territorial Justice System, 1870-1912, published by McFarland & Co., which should be out in 2026.
— SJ 10/15/2025