Murderer. His 1911 slaying of pioneer film director Francis Boggs became Hollywood's first celebrity scandal. The unjustly forgotten Boggs was the man who brought moviemaking to California. In 1909 he built the first permanent film studio in Los Angeles as a Pacific Coast branch of Chicago's Selig Polyscope Co. Minnimatsu, a Japanese immigrant in his late 20s, was hired to landscape the grounds. He spoke fluent English and was known around the lot as "the gentleman gardener". But his seemingly passive demeanor belied a troubled mind. In June of 1911, Minnimatsu was dismissed for getting drunk on the job and shooting a pistol at the parked car of a Selig employee. Four months later he returned and begged Boggs to be reinstated; the mild-mannered director relented against the advice of colleagues, assuring them, "It'll be alright". On the morning of October 27, 1911, company president William N. Selig, visiting from Chicago, arrived at the studio for a business meeting. Minnimatsu loitered outside Boggs' office for two hours, surreptitiously drinking while pretending to work, before he burst in firing an old army revolver. Boggs was shot through the heart and died instantly; Selig was wounded in the arm. Actor Tom Santschi and others overpowered Minnimatsu as he tried to flee the scene. He admitted his guilt, telling investigators he had waited six months for the opportunity to kill Boggs. "He was always a good friend to me, but an old man told me he was a bad man, so I killed him", he explained. Friends later reported that Minnimatsu suffered from a delusion that he "needed to kill three bad men so he could get into heaven". He was convicted of first-degree murder on December 16; because of his mental state the jury recommended life imprisonment at San Quentin over the death penalty. While there he worked as the prison gardener and rejected parole twice because he feared being deported to Japan. At the time of his death Minnimatsu was San Quentin's longest-serving inmate, having spent 25 years, 7 months behind its bars.