Rise and Fall of Rock Island Gangster John Looney

John Looney

John Looney ran Rock Island like a man conducting an orchestra of crooks, cops, and terrified politicians who couldn’t tell whether to bribe him, arrest him, or beg for a job. He wasn’t one to hide in the shadows—he built his pulpit and screamed into the microphone. In 1912, the Rock Island Argus said, “Mr. Looney has taken leave of his senses,” but they were wrong. He hadn’t lost them. He’d sold them to the highest bidder.

He was born in 1865 or 1866, the son of Irish immigrants who believed America rewarded hard work. It didn’t. It rewarded nerve, and Looney had a surplus of that. He studied law, passed the bar, and by 1889 was prowling the Rock Island courthouse in a cheap suit that somehow made him look dangerous. People remembered the eyes—too bright, too still. You could tell he was thinking of angles, leverage, a thousand and one ways to make a buck.

The newspapers described him as “ambitious and fearless,” which was code for ruthless. He practiced law for a while, but law was just another racket. He wanted something bigger, something that could make or break reputations. So he created the Rock Island News, a scandal sheet dressed up as journalism. It was a blackmail factory disguised as a printing press. For a fee, your name stayed out of the paper. Refuse, and the next morning your sins were spread across the front page. “The people of this city are being held hostage by a madman with a printing press,” the Argus wrote, and they weren’t wrong.

Trading One Hell For Another St. Elizabeth's Hospital Fire Davenport

Firefighters responded at just after 2 a.m.

January 7, 1950, began quietly at Mercy Hospital’s St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric ward in Davenport, Iowa. One nurse was away in Des Moines, leaving Anna Neal in charge of nearly seventy patients. Another aide, Josephine O’Toole, was off duty and asleep upstairs.

Shortly after 2 a.m., Nurse Ellen Hildebrand spotted flames rising from St. Elizabeth’s and alerted her supervisor. Within minutes, smoke filled the halls.

Hospital worker Murray Francis, fifty-seven, saw the fire from the main building. He kicked in the door, carried patients to safety, and then helped firefighters man a hose. Merchant police officer Bill Stagen arrived as crews battled to break through barred windows. He saw women clinging to the iron bars, screaming for help, then disappearing into the smoke.

Patrolman Richard Fee was the first police officer on the scene. Flames poured from the upper windows. Firefighters doused him with water before he climbed into a bucket, ax in hand. Breaking through a window, he found six women huddled together “like bewildered animals.” He pulled them out, describing the bitter cold outside as “trading one hell for another.”

Mother Place Mitchelville Iowa Baby Farmer

A young woman handing her baby over to Mother Place

Back in 1895, Mother Place was just Mrs. Martha Place, a widow who looked exactly like every widow looked in rural Iowa—gray dress, gray bun, gray outlook on life. She lived on a little patch of land near Mitchellville, and kept to herself, which everyone said was respectable until it suddenly wasn’t.

Her business was simple, if you didn’t think too hard about it. Women from Des Moines or nearby towns would arrive, holding bundles they didn’t want to hold anymore. They’d hand them to Mrs. Place—and she’d take them in exchange for a few crumpled bills and the promise they’d be “well cared for.” Nobody used words like “adoption” or “surrender.” It was more like handing over a problem that couldn’t be fixed.

To the neighbors, it all looked perfectly ordinary. They’d see her hanging laundry, waving from her porch, or tending her garden. Maybe a baby’s cry drifted through the open window now and then, but it wasn’t anything you asked about. In 1895, if someone said they were running a “baby farm,” that was just what it was called. Nobody stopped to ask why it sounded so terrible.

Who's Haunting the Hotel Julien in Dubuque Iowa

Hotel Julien (circa 1930)

There’s something strange going on at the Hotel Julien in Dubuque, Iowa. It doesn’t look haunted at first glance, but if you spend the night—look out—because you just might meet Public Enemy No. 1.

Locals say it’s haunted by the ghost of Al Capone. He rolled into town in the 1920s, and took over the entire eighth floor. His men spread out like killer bees, patrolling the hallways, their jackets bulging where guns hid.

Some say he owned the place, or had a stake in it. The hotel had been struggling for years. Then overnight, it was transformed into the finest joint in town. Suspicions, yes—but people understood, curiosity could buy you a case of lead poisoning.

Then, as quickly as he came, Al Capone disappeared—back to Chicago, and a fast-growing empire of booze, women, and bullets. But something stayed behind.

Murder of the Huber Brothers in Carroll County Iowa

The sheriff gave it one more look before removing the bodies

There’s something foul in the soil of Carroll County. You can feel it even now — that twitch behind the eyes of the people who still talk about “the Huber boys.” Two brothers, Henry and John, farmers, hard cases by every account. Dead in their own kitchen in 1874 — skulls split like kindling, blood on the stove door, an axe standing proud in the corner like it had just finished its shift.

 No robbery. No fire. Just two men beaten to a pulp on a weekday morning, and a county that couldn’t decide whether to pray or sharpen its knives.

 

The papers called it “the Carroll County Horror.” What they meant was: somebody ended a family with a tool meant for chopping wood. The sheriff rode out with one deputy, two cigars, and no idea what he was walking into. The neighbors had already turned the place into a sideshow—poking at footprints, whispering about money, jealousy, the usual frontier rot.

They Caught Him With His Pants Falling Down

Whynak Johann

Every murder story starts with a question. This one has three: Where does love end? Where does insanity begin? And why do they always live in a rented room above someone named Bessie?

 In 1910, Whynak Johann married Marie in Vienna, Austria. He was built like a bull—five-nine, 190 pounds, all muscle. She was tiny, ninety-five pounds soaking wet, with a face that said, I could survive anything except this marriage.

 

Two weeks in, he marched off with the Austrian Army. Marie got sick and went home to her parents. When Whynak returned, she was living with her ex-boyfriend, Franzl Hervieu. Most people would take the hint. Whynak didn’t.

 

In 1913, moved to Davenport, Iowa, and got a job at Kohl’s Packing Company, making $2.50 a day turning animals into dinner. He sent for Marie. To his shock—she came.

 

They rented a two-room apartment at 1226½ Harrison Street for a dollar a month from Bessie Estess. Marie took in boarders; Whynack brought home paychecks. Love in the immigrant slums—cheap beer, sausage smells, and dreams of not freezing to death.

 

Then Franzl showed up. Again.

A Short History of the Savery House Des Moines Iowa

 

Savery House (circa 1930s)

The Savery has been part of Des Moines since the 1870s, when the first Savery House opened downtown. It was a gas-lit affair where businessmen in stovepipe hats struck deals and ladies in bustled skirts watched from behind their fans. James C. Savery built it with his wife Annie, a suffragist and reformer.

The early Savery burned down, was rebuilt, and burned again—twice. Each time, Des Moines rebuilt it. Every city needs a place where strangers cross paths and stories linger, and the Savery refused to vanish.

In 1919, the current Savery rose eleven stories on Locust Street, a mix of brick and limestone. The Chicago firm H.L. Stevens & Co. gave it Georgian lines and symmetry that suggested order in a world still recovering from war. Each of its 233 rooms had a private bath, which was a small miracle at the time.

Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt stayed there. Carol Channing demanded a window she could open before agreeing to spend the night. In the 1980s, Tiny Tim made the Savery his home, strolling the halls in his trademark tuxedo, humming to himself.

Burlington County Poor House

It stood like a castle or medieval fortress on the edge of town, except no one went there willingly.

The Burlington county poorhouse served as Des Moines County’s refuge for the poor, sick, and elderly. Locals called it the “county home” or “poor farm.” Every county had one back then.

It was a working farm where residents, if able, helped raise crops, tend animals, and kept the place running. The steward and matron lived on-site, managing the chores and caring for dozens of “inmates,” as census records coldly described them.

County funds kept the operation going, with a doctor visiting regularly and local officials inspecting the grounds. Life there was simple and sometimes harsh, but it offered shelter to those with nowhere else to go.

A small cemetery nearby held the graves of those who died without family. Like other poorhouses across Iowa, Burlington’s stood as both a symbol of compassion and a reminder of hard times.

Goodrich Hotel Council Bluffs Iowa

The Goodrich Hotel stood at 8th and Broadway in Council Bluffs, built by local businessman Walter S. Goodrich. For years, it was one of the city’s best places to stay—solid, respectable, and busy with travelers coming off the trains.

A fire in March 1922 lit up the downtown skyline. Firefighters saved the building, though the damage left scars that never fully healed. The hotel reopened but never quite regained its old polish.

By the 1970s, the Goodrich had shifted from hotel to low-rent apartments. The building was sold in the early 1980s, and talk of demolition followed, possibly to make way for a parking lot.

Hanging of William Barger Jackson County Iowa

William Barger was hung in June 1857 by a group known as the Iron Hill Vigilance Committee. Barger had killed his wife in 1854 at Bellevue in Jackson County, Iowa. He had accused her of infidelity. She sued for divorce. At the time of her murder, Mrs. Barger lived with a relative in Bellevue. Barger bored a hole in a fence near the house. Then he waited for her to open the door. When she did, he shot her dead.  

He pleaded insanity and was tried for murder twice. The first jury was hung, and the second found him guilty. After that, Barger’s lawyer didn’t think his client could get a fair trial in Bellevue, so he got a change of venue to De Witt in Clinton County for his third trial.  

The Tipton Advertiser justified the hanging, saying, “That the law was sluggish is evidenced in the time Barger has been suffered to lay in the jail at the expense of the county, even when it was judged and positively known that he was guilty.” In effect, they said, if the law doesn’t do it, the people will.

Wartburg College Clinton Iowa

Wartburg College (circa 1900)

Wartburg College was built by German immigrants who thought knowledge should serve both God and common sense. They weren’t wrong. In 1894 they planted their red-brick fortress on a hill in Clinton, Iowa — a solid slab of faith and discipline staring down the Mississippi like it owned the view.

It wasn’t fancy. It was tough. Classrooms, chapel, dorms, dining hall, library — all jammed into one building like the world’s most righteous machine. It smelled of chalk dust, coal smoke, and boiled potatoes. The professors ran a tight ship. Latin for the mind. Math for the soul. Theology to keep you honest. They preached that the world might hold together if everyone just studied a little harder.

The students learned, prayed, shoveled snow until their fingers cracked. They lived by the bell and the book. The streetcar clanged up from downtown, packed with frozen kids in heavy coats. They studied Scripture, philosophy, bookkeeping — whatever would keep them from going under.

Highland Park College Des Moines Iowa

Highland Park College (circa 1906)

Highland Park College in Des Moines was basically Hogwarts for sensible Midwesterners who didn’t have time for wizard nonsense.

Students rode the streetcar up from downtown. They studied — literature, science, bookkeeping — basically all the things your great-grandparents did before Wi-Fi and television. The professors were serious types who believed learning could save civilization, which seems unlikely in retrospect.

The college didn’t last. It got taken over by Des Moines University, and later Drake University. But for a few good years, Highland Park College was buzzing — full of earnest kids and big ideas and maybe a couple of disastrous romances that still haunt Des Moines.

Downtown Clinton Iowa (circa 1930)

 

Downtown Clinton, Iowa. (Circa 1930s, pencil drawing after a vintage postcard)

John Looney Rock Island Gangster

John Looney and Lawrence Pedigo
outside of his Rock Island home

Homegrown Rock Island gangster John Looney might have lived in Illinois, but his influence extended into the underworld in Western Illinois and Eastern Iowa. This is a drawing of Looney and Lawrence Pedigo outside the Looney Mansion at 1635 20th  Street in Rock Island, Illinois.

Moses Keokuk Son of Chief Keokuk

In 1852, Wunagisa went to Washington to meet the people who decided who would be considered chiefs and such things. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs told him his father had been made a chief because he was “a good man and a true friend to the whites.” He said General Winfield Scott had approved it, and that if Wunagisa was as good as his father, he could remain chief.

That was the rule. Keep the peace. Be the kind of man who didn’t cause trouble.

Years later, Wunagisa became a Baptist. He took the name Moses Keokuk and began trying to live in a way the white men would approve. He gave up one of his wives, stopped drinking, stopped gambling. He moved out of his wigwam, stopped painting his face, and gave up the ceremonies his father had led.

Many in his tribe couldn’t understand it. The old Moses had been a man of color and noise—his hair shaved in bright stripes, his clothes loud, his laugh louder. He raced horses, made bets, and stood at the center of things. “He wore the most gaudy apparel he could find,” said Jacob Carter, the government agent.

Artist George Catlin on the Iowa Frontier

George Catlin

George Catlin moved upriver in the summer of 1832, chasing something he couldn’t name. The steamboat thumped against the current, smoke rolling over the deck, the air thick with mosquitoes and gunpowder residue. The Black Hawk War was over. The army said peace had returned to the frontier. Catlin didn’t see peace. He saw silence—the kind that comes after something irreversible.

He was heading for Fort Armstrong, a log-and-stone post on Rock Island, Illinois. Across the river lay the territory that would become Iowa. The Army held it now, but the land still belonged to the people who had lived and died there.

 

Catlin was an unlikely witness. He was a painter—a thin, restless man who believed he could record an entire world before it disappeared. “I have flown to the rescue of their looks, manners, and customs,” he wrote, “from the grasp of civilization, which will destroy them.”

Hanging of Bennett Warren Scott County

Bennett Warren had a small farm in Liberty Township in Scott County, Iowa. Not much farming got done there. Instead, his house served as a meeting place for the more unsavory element—horse thieves, counterfeiters, occasional burglars, and other frontier badasses. 

Warren never stole horses or counterfeited money, but he helped the banditti by letting them keep the stolen horses on his property. In return, he took and passed counterfeit currency. Each time the authorities arrested Warren, no one would testify against him, so he got off with little more than a slap on the wrist.

On June 24, 1857, two hundred vigilantes crossed into Clinton County from their rendezvous spot at Big Rock. They marched to Warren’s house and took him to a nearby grove.   

Abraham Lincoln Frontier Ranger Black Hawk War

Abraham  Lincoln. Lincoln laughed it off when he described his experiences during the Black Hawk War and compared it to  swatting flies. 

"Did you know I am a war hero?” asked Lincoln. “Yes,  sir. In the days of the Black Hawk War, I fought, bled, and  came away... I had a good many bloody struggles with  mosquitos, and although I never fainted from loss of blood,  I can truly I say was often very hungry.”

Even though he never fought a battle in his short stint  as a warrior, Lincoln saw the aftermath. He helped bury five  men killed and scalped in the battle of Kellogg’s Grove.

Black Hawk Sauk War Chief

Born in 1767, Black Hawk was older than the United States. His father was a war  chief, and though it was never certain, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-Kia-kiak, or Black  Sparrow Hawk, became the best-known chief of the Sacs. After the Black Hawk  War, he met President Andrew Jackson in Washington and told him, “I am one  man. You are another.”

Johnny Lujack Notre Dame & Chicago Bears Football Star

Johnny Lujack

Notre Dame, 1943. The war’s taken half the roster, and the star quarterback’s off in uniform. The Irish need someone who won’t flinch. Johnny Lujack is nineteen, straight out of a Pennsylvania coal town, quiet, steady, built from hard work and wintry mornings.

 They hand him the ball. He doesn’t say much—just looks downfield and gets to work. He runs like he means it and throws like he’s trying to prove something, every play tight and clean, no wasted motion, no fear.

 

That fall, he rips through Army like a hot knife through arrogance, and the Irish take the national title. The papers call him “the most complete player ever to wear a Notre Dame uniform.” One writer says, “Lujack doesn’t play the game so much as control it — like he’s got the whistle in his own mouth.”

 

The word Heisman floats around, but before anyone can engrave a trophy, the Navy snaps him up. He swaps the gridiron for a steel deck and spends two years hunting German submarines in the Atlantic. One of his crewmates said, “He never blinked. We could’ve been staring into hell, and he’d just adjust the periscope.”

Riverview Stadium Clinton Iowa

The baseball stadium on Clinton’s riverfront from a 1940s postcard. The WPA finished building it in 1937. The Clinton Owls were the first team to play there.

Clyde Sukeforth, the man who would later scout Jackie Robinson, managed the team. His star player was Sam Nahem—an Arab-Jewish boy from Brooklyn. The reporters couldn’t figure him out. One of them said, “Nahem wears spectacles and talks less like a ballplayer than any diamond star this reporter knows.”

The Owls tore through the Three-I League that summer. Clinton beat Peoria, Springfield, and Davenport. Seventy-five wins. Thirty-six losses. It was a record that made old men start believing in luck again.

Clinton baseball fans wouldn’t soon forget that magic season in 1937.

Colonel Henry Dodge Frontier Ranger Black Hawk War

Henry Dodge

Henry Dodge stood on a ridge overlooking the Wisconsin River, coat streaked with mud and gunpowder, watching his men reload. The air smelled like wet leaves and blood. Below them, the Sauk lay scattered through the brush. It was July 21, 1832. Nobody said the words, but everyone knew it—the war was dying.

 Two months earlier, everything had gone to hell. Black Hawk had crossed the Mississippi with his people—warriors, mothers, old men, kids—all of them walking straight back into the land they used to call home. The settlers panicked like prairie chickens in a thunderstorm. Militias sprang up overnight. Dodge didn’t wait for anyone to tell him what to do. He just saddled his horse and rode toward the smoke.

 

His men came from the lead mines—farmers, drifters, gamblers, men who smelled like sweat and whiskey and knew how to shoot by instinct. They didn’t have uniforms. Some didn’t even have boots. They slept in the mud and ate whatever didn’t crawl away first. Orders came slowly; rumors came fast. Every campfire burned with the same stories—raids, burned cabins, families gone missing. Dodge rode into it like a man chasing lightning.

Davenport Writers Group

 

Members of the Davenport Writers Group engaged in a heated literary discussion. left to right: Arthur Davison Ficke, Floyd Dell, Suasan Glaspell, and George Cram Cook.

Des Moines Baseball Team 1906

Des Moines baseball team, 1906..

Top row, left to right: Ben Caffyn, M. E. Cantillion, Louis Mauske.

Second row: Babe Towne, Andreas, George Hogreiver, Mike Welday, Roscoe Miller.

Lower Row: Charles Dexter, George Magoon, Frank O’Leary, Bill Shipke, Eddie Cicotte, Grover Gillen.

Upper right corner.: John J. Doyle, captain and manager.

(From the Des Moines Register. September 2, 1906)

Lillian Russell The Iowa Girl Who Took the World By Storm

Lillian Russell was born Helen Louise Leonard in Clinton, Iowa, in the early 1860s . Her father ran a newspaper, her mother scared the local men by speaking her mind, and the baby came out howling like she already had headlines to make.

 She grew up in Chicago, where sin had a better rhythm. Helen sang too loudly, laughed too big, and drove her mother half mad. She got kicked out of a church choir for “indecorous behavior,” which is Victorian code for being interesting. Someone told her nice girls didn’t go onstage. Helen said, “Then I guess I’m not nice.”

 

She was eighteen when she ran away to New York — the filthy, electric carnival of the Gilded Age. Tony Pastor looked her over, saw the cheekbones, the mouth, the trouble. He said, “Helen Leonard sounds like someone who does laundry. You’ll be Lillian Russell.” It was a name made for scandal and silk sheets.

 

By 1881 she was onstage in The Pirates of Penzance, and America lost its collective mind. The New York World called her “the prettiest girl in America.” Another paper called her “a soprano who makes an entrance like a cavalry charge.” A Boston critic said she was “more bosom than brilliance.” She framed that one, saying, “At least he noticed.”

Murder in Davenport's Fairmount Cemetery

Kate Ryan

They found her at dawn in Fairmount Cemetery. A workman on his way to the gate saw a horse first—head down, reins slack. Then a buggy smashed against a tree. Then, farther down a ravine, a woman in black.

She was face-down, her hat in the grass. A hatpin was still in her hand. When the police rolled her over, they found a bullet hole between her eyes.

Her name was Kate Ryan, though in Bucktown she went by Rose Earl. She worked at Babe Foreman’s house, one of the licensed brothels in Davenport’s red-light district.

Since 1893, the city had made vice official business. The police collected monthly fines from the madams, and the girls worked without fear of raids. It was cleaner that way, they said. Predictable. Kate’s boss paid twenty-five dollars for the house license and ten more for each girl. Kate Ryan was legal. Until she wasn’t.

The man everyone blamed was Peter Shardis, known to the streets as Pete Sardine. He was thirty-five, short, with a limp and a bottle habit. He’d come from Greece eight years earlier, drifted between Moline and Davenport, working in foundries until he drank his way out of them.

Grace McDaniels The Mule Faced Lady

Grace McDaniels and her son, Elmer

They say every carnival needs a monster. Iowa built one on a farm.

Grace McDaniels was born near Villisca in 1888— a cold little dot of America where even the cows look bored. She came into the world with a red mark running down her face, the kind of thing that makes old women cross themselves and whisper about God’s unfinished business. The doctors didn’t have a clue. They called it a “port-wine stain” because it sounded classier than “weird, red mistake.”

 

Grace grew up hiding behind scarves and hand-me-down shame. She tried powder, veils, anything short of duct tape. Iowa is an awful place to look different — too flat, nowhere to hide. She probably spent half her childhood dreaming about disappearing into the corn.

 

At some point, she stopped fighting it. That’s the thing about humiliation — it either kills you or makes you bulletproof. Grace figured if the entire world was going to gawk, she might as well sell tickets.

 

So she packed up her pain and took it to Chicago in 1933. The World’s Fair — a temple of progress powered by electricity, gasoline, and cruelty. For a dime, you could see the future, or a human being in a cage. Grace joined the sideshow under a hand-painted banner: THE MULE-FACED WOMAN.

Edward Bonney Frontier Thief Turned Detective

Edward Bonney at Mother Long's (unfortunately Bonney
never posed for a portrait. This image is from his book.)

Edward Bonney came to Nauvoo in the spring of 1844 with a half-smile and a forged past. He’d been a miller, a hotel keeper, and a counterfeiter. Now he was playing saint among saints. The city was busy building heaven on earth, but under the hymns and handshakes was a different congregation—men who printed money at night and buried bodies by day. Bonney recognized the smell. He’d once reeked of it himself.

 The Hodges were the first cracks in the holy façade. William and Stephen—farm-boy faces, dead eyes. They’d killed a man during a robbery gone wrong, then tried to hide behind the good name of the Saints. Iowa wanted blood. Burlington got it. 

 

The gallows went up behind the courthouse. The crowd pressed close, hungry for justice or entertainment—it was hard to tell. One brother prayed aloud; the other cursed the sheriff. When the trap fell, the sound was short and heavy, like a door slamming on the frontier’s soul. 

She Killed Her Baby And Got Away With It

Nellie Taylor

Des Moines, 1909. Everyone was dying dramatically. Fifteen murders. Twenty-five suicides. Five people flattened by streetcars. Ten by trains. It was like the Grim Reaper had a summer home there.

 And then,  Nellie Taylor came into the mix.

 

She was twenty-three, pretty, well-dressed, and apparently powered by poor decisions and unresolved trauma. Her husband, Glen, got himself killed while working on the railroad. Then she fell for one of his friends, Everett Humble—which is a terrible name for a man who absolutely wasn’t. They planned to get married until she got pregnant and he did what men named Everett Humble apparently do and ghosted her like a coward with a mustache.

 

So, Nellie had a baby. Then she panicked. The children’s homes wouldn’t take it, her parents didn’t know about it, and her mental health was circling the drain. So she decided that murder was her “only course.”

 

She told the police that calmly, like she was reading a weather report. “I undressed it, took the string from its shirt, and tied it tight around its neck.” That’s what she said. Straight face. No tears. No tremble. Just… logistics.