Who Killed Edward Kriz at the Hamburg Inn in Iowa City

 

Sometimes the difference between life and death can be as simple as who walks out the door first. That was the case for Edward Kriz, 43, the owner of George’s Buffet, a tavern on Market Street in Iowa City. Kriz closed the tavern shortly after 1 a.m. on November 10, 1962, and headed next door to the Hamburg Inn for a late-night bite with his wife, Bernice, and employee Ralph Thomason.

After finishing their meal, the group left through the back door at around 1:45 a.m. Edward Kriz barely made it two steps out the door before a man wearing a Halloween mask opened fire. Kriz lurched forward, wrestling the man for the gun. Two more shots were fired before he crumpled to the ground.

The shooter fled north toward Bloomington and Gilbert Streets. A witness heard the shots, then saw a man running across Linn Street. He got into what looked like a foreign sports car and sped away.

Kriz was rushed to University Hospital, where he died less than an hour later.

A Different Look At The Founding of Iowa

I had some fun today, and asked ai to make illustrations of Iowa's founding by three visionary artists--Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso.

Joan Miró’s Iowa mural looks like history after chugging three Super Big Gulps and no sleep. Indians, pioneers, forts, riverboats — all bouncing around in bright colors and weird floating shapes. The Mississippi River twists through the whole thing like a giant blue snake that escaped from a Looney-Tunes cartoon.

Nothing makes sense. That’s the fun of it. Miró painted feelings more than reality, so Iowa history turns into this wild, happy dream filled with stars, squiggles, moons, and shapes.

Salvador Dalí’s version looks like the frontier wandered into somebody’s fever dream. Wagons melt. Faces droop. The river stretches forever while creepy skies hang over everything. Even the clocks look exhausted.

The painting feels strange, dramatic, and a little unhinged. Dalí loved taking normal scenes and twisting them into something bizarre. His Iowa looks like Lewis and Clark got lost inside a nightmare and marched west, anyway.

The Murder of Roy Wertz. An Open And Shut Case, Except ...

 

Roy Wertz

Roy Wertz’s murder seemed like an open and shut case. He got into a heated argument with his wife and daughter and began slapping them around. His wife wrestled the gun away from him. It went off, sending two slugs into Wertz’s head, killing him.

Mrs. Wertz admitted, pulling the trigger, so there was no question who fired the fatal shot, or why. Her husband attacked her, then tried to choke her daughter.

Bang. He was dead. They weren’t.

A few days later, the coroner’s jury seemed to agree with her. They determined Mimi Wertz shot her husband with a .32 caliber pistol, adding they believed the “shots were fired in self-defense.”

Case closed. Except.

An hour before the coroner’s jury released its verdict, the police arrested Roy Wertz’s son-in-law, Robert Leeper, 22, on a charge of murder in the first degree.

What was the disconnect? Why did the police suspect Robert Leeper killed his father-in-law? And why didn’t they wait for the verdict of the coroner’s jury before arresting Leeper?

Mormon Trek Across Iowa

 

The Burlington Hawkeye didn’t have a high opinion of the Mormons. They wrote, “Wherever they go and grow strong, there springs up dissensions and violence between them and other citizens. The crimes charged upon them are without number.”

As examples, they pointed to the Hodges brothers, who were involved in the murders of John Miller and Henry Leisi, and to the murderers of Colonel Davenport who took shelter with the Reddens, who were also Mormons.

 

It is easy to understand why they felt the way they did. The main troublemakers in Lee County, and elsewhere in Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois had up to that time been Mormons. 

 

“The Mormons caused bitter rivalries and discord wherever they went,” observed Jacob Van Der Zee. Before being expelled from Illinois, they were thrown out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri. Their home base in Illinois centered on the temple in Nauvoo and some other property they owned in Keokuk and Montrose in Iowa.

 

Benjamin Gue, in his landmark History of Iowa, said the Mormons had to go because “their religion and peculiar social practices were so obnoxious to their neighbors.” Unlike Jacob Van Der Zee, he didn’t talk about the crimes or depredations committed by the Mormons, but more about their religion and polygamy. That’s what he thought other citizens found peculiar about the Mormons.

Things came to a head after the murder of Joseph Smith. In the late fall of 1845, Brigham Young promised his neighbors that the Mormons would leave Illinois, “so soon as the grass would grow, and the water run.” All he asked in return was that the persecution and house burnings would end.

A Double Murder in Low Moor

 

By the time the sun came up over the Lincoln Highway on November 14, 1922, Homer (47) and Rose Brownfield (38) were dead on the floor of their roadside store and the killer was gone.

 

No witnesses. No arrest. No suspect.

 

Just two bodies beside one of the busiest roads in America and a murderer who vanished into the darkness somewhere west of Low Moor, Iowa.

 

People around Clinton County still talk about it more than a hundred years later. A husband and wife running a little highway store. A cold November night. Then gunshots followed by silence.

 

The Lincoln Highway brought strangers through eastern Iowa at all hours.

 

That was part of the problem.

 

By 1922, it had become one of the busiest roads in the country. Cars rattled through Clinton County day and night carrying salesmen, drifters, farm families, tourists, and men nobody knew anything about. Most just passed through.

 

Some didn’t.

 

Homer and Rose Brownfield ran a little roadside store near Low Moor. It sat out in the open country where the road cut through fields and darkness. Travelers stopped for gas, cigarettes, sandwiches, coffee, or directions before moving on.

 

The Brownfields worked long days.

Who Poisoned Ross Ashbaugh in Maynard Iowa?

By the time they dug Ross Ashbaugh out of the ground for the third time, people around Maynard had stopped asking whether he’d been poisoned.

They were asking who had done it.

The Ashbaugh farm sat outside Maynard, Iowa, surrounded by fields that rolled flat into the summer heat. Neighbors noticed everything. Who came by? Who stayed too long? Which marriages looked strained at church on Sunday morning.

Ross Ashbaugh was 44 and built like a man who’d spent his life outdoors. He farmed, raised livestock, and kept the operation running through the endless cycle of planting, feeding, fixing, and harvesting. He and his wife, Effie, were raising two children, Lucile and Edward. By most accounts, Ross wasn’t flashy or loud. Just another hardworking Iowa farmer trying to get by.

Arthur Cahoe had been around the farm for four years.

He was 38, hired help, and close enough to the family that people didn’t think twice about seeing him there. He worked alongside Ross during the day and spent evenings in the house. Over time, neighbors noticed the way Cahoe and Effie acted around each other.

The Chilling 1972 Mystery of Lynn Schuller and the Alligator Named Pogo

 

Lynn Schuller was a 25-year-old mother living the suburban dream in Cedar Rapids with her husband, Keith, and their three-year-old son, Eric. On the surface, the couple enjoyed a picture-perfect life. They’d tied the knot in 1967 and welcomed their first child in 1969. Life was good, right? But as often happens, appearances can be deceiving.

Keith dropped a bombshell on Lynn in 1971. He wanted a divorce. But Lynn wasn’t ready to give up on her marriage and refused. He kept pushing, but she wouldn’t sign the papers.

Things went sideways. Fast. Lynn wrote a letter to her mother, Eloise Tickner, in 1972, confiding Keith had threatened to kill her. But she quickly dismissed it, saying, “He would never do anything like that.” Was it denial? Or wishful thinking?

Fast forward a few months.

It’s August 6, 1972. Keith told authorities: He woke up early, left the house with their son around 7:30 a.m. to take his son fishing, and let Lynn sleep in. When they returned just after noon, Lynn and her bicycle were gone. No note. No trace—just gone.