Murder in Calhoun County, Iowa - Cyrus Pratt

Jennie Pratt

June 1905. Calhoun County, Iowa. Cornfields stretch for miles; the air is heavy and still. Inside a small farmhouse near Yetter, Cyrus Pratt is dying — twisting in agony from an illness no doctor can explain. The neighbors hear the screams. Then, silence.

By morning, the funeral plans are set. But just before the service begins, Coroner Newton shows up at the door with a warrant and a grim look. On the county attorney’s orders, he halts the funeral, seizes the body, and calls for an inquest.

Rumors already fill the air. Folks in town say Jennie Pratt, the grieving widow, has been “altogether too intimate” with the hired man, William Persing. He’s young, broad-shouldered, and already engaged to a girl in Fonda. It doesn’t stop the whispers.

At the inquest, things start to stick. A Yetter druggist testifies Jennie bought poison — twice — in the days before her husband’s death. She said it was for mice. Then word leaked that Persing had quietly checked Pratt’s bank balance and life-insurance policy.

The real shock comes when the coroner sends Pratt’s stomach to Professor Kennedy in Des Moines. The results come back thick with strychnine and arsenic.

Jennie faces the press head-on. “Persing gave my husband medicine during the early part of his sickness,” she says, calm and steady. “But I don’t attach any significance to this. Why should he desire to kill my husband?” She insists she never cared for him.

Cyrus Pratt

No one buys it. By early July, Jennie Pratt and William Persing are both behind bars, charged with murder. The story spreads through Iowa like a prairie fire — a poisoned farmer, a cheating wife, a wife-stealing hired hand.

Then, the smoke clears. In March 1906, the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. Pratt and Persing walk free.

Cyrus Pratt stays in the ground, his death marked only as “strychnine poisoning.” Out in Calhoun County, folks still say justice never made it down that dirt road.