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| Harry Carey (aka Walter Baum) |
Police
barely had time to process the scene before the rumors started: Rocha had been
sleeping with his friend Harry Carey’s wife, Margaret. In that part of
Davenport, an affair was a fast way to end up dead.
Margaret
wasn’t hard to track down. Detectives found her half out of her mind at Evelyn
Locke’s brothel on Warren Street—drugged up, covered in blood, and rambling.
Locke said she’d shown up around ten the night before, screaming, “The Mexican
has killed Harry. My poor Harry. He will never have to go to jail no more.”
That statement turned out to be useless. Margaret was too doped up to tell a clear story. First, she said the men argued while she sat on her husband’s knee. Then she said Rocha came at Harry with an iron bar. Then she remembered nothing. Or claimed she didn’t. The detectives didn’t believe a word of it.
Two
days later, everything collapsed.
The
man everyone thought had killed Rocha—Harry Carey—wasn’t missing.
He
was the one lying dead on the slab.
Margaret
had said it from the start. Nobody listened until Captain Frank Lew and County
Attorney John McSwiggen finally took her to identify the body at Ebert’s
Undertaking Parlor. She took one look and broke down. “I told you it was my
husband,” she cried, kissing the dead man’s mouth.
The
police hadn’t examined the body closely. They just assumed the drugged-out
woman was confused. They also assumed Rodriguez had correctly identified his
“pal.” Wrong on both counts. Fingerprints taken by R. J. Jones confirmed it:
the dead man was Harry Carey.
Four
days after the murder—two days after discovering the wrong corpse—they had to
start over.
Margaret
finally managed a coherent explanation. Harry wanted to go to Bettendorf around
4 p.m. She didn’t. They argued near Washington Park. Split up. Hours later, she
wandered down to Rocha’s shack with a bottle of hooch. Harry and Rocha were
eating supper. She sat on Harry’s knee. They all drank. Then Rocha walked out
one door and back through another, holding an iron bar.
“Look
out, Maggie,” he yelled.
Harry
reached for the ax. Rocha hit him first—hard—then grabbed the ax and kept
swinging until Harry went down. Margaret didn’t bother counting the blows.
Rocha ran. She stayed with the body for an hour. Maybe longer.
Then
she walked to Locke’s and called the police. Told Sergeant Thompson the body
was “by the cars.” He guessed Fifth and Warren. Officers searched the wrong
spot, found nothing, and chalked it up as a crank call. Margaret didn’t call
back. She assumed they’d handled it.
“I
was telling the truth when I said it was Harry that was killed,” she said
later. “I know my own husband.”
Police
hauled Rodriguez in next. Maybe he lied to protect Rocha. Maybe he panicked.
Detectives took him to the morgue. He stared at the body and shrugged, like he
was trying to solve a riddle he’d never heard before. “I dunno,” he said.
Back
at the station, he insisted again that the dead man was Rocha.
It
wasn’t.
The
records made it clear. Harry Carey—real name Walter Baum—had a narcotics rap
sheet from Kansas City to Omaha. Rocha had lived in Davenport for seven years,
working the railroad, keeping to himself.
Now
he was gone.
Long
before police realized they were looking for him, he’d vanished—no money trail,
no sightings, nothing.
Thirty-five
years later, a brief note in The Daily Times confirmed what
everyone already knew: the case was still open. County Attorney Edward Wehr
said it probably always would be. The killer—Manuel Rocha—most likely crossed
the border and disappeared into Mexico.
One
man dead. One man vanished. One investigation that never recovered from its
first mistake.
A
botched ID. A broken chain of facts. A murder that got swallowed by time.
Another Davenport cold case.
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