Murder of Mrytle Cooke in Vinton Iowa 1925

Myrtle Cook

Myrtle Cook’s murder had everything police hate—politics, booze, the Klan, and an estranged husband whose alibi kept springing leaks. On September 7, 1925, someone walked up to the living-room window of her Vinton, Iowa home at 703 Third Avenue, confirmed she was sitting at her desk writing a speech for the next day’s W.C.T.U. meeting, and put a bullet straight through her heart.

She stayed alive long enough to whisper a name to her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Cook—a name the town didn’t expect. A man the local police practically trusted with the keys to the city. Detectives didn’t buy it. They chalked it up to shock, pain, and wishful thinking.

Her husband, Clifford B. Cook, wasn’t so dismissive. He said the family reenacted the shooting angle. If Myrtle saw the shooter, she could have identified him. That made everything messier.

Investigators first chased the obvious suspects: rumrunners. Myrtle was one of the loudest prohibition activists in Iowa. She harassed mayors, sheriffs, and state officials. She wrote down license plates and took notes on her neighbors. She treated Prohibition like a personal crusade and made enemies the way some people collect stamps.

She’d gotten people arrested. Merlin Swartzbaugh, for one—picked up for running liquor. He fingered Wayne Snader, a cabaret owner. Snader ended up charged with bootlegging and selling alcohol to minors. Then there was S.A. Ullom, a local druggist who thought he could sell liquor under the counter until Myrtle tipped off the authorities. She wasn’t just a problem for criminals; she was a problem for anyone who liked a drink.

A week after Myrtle’s murder, state agents tore after escaped convict Harold Ponder, who’d busted out of Fort Madison in August and vanished with a stolen Buick. He was tied to a major booze ring. He’d been in Vinton before and after the murder. Detectives thought he might’ve killed Myrtle to frame a rival gang. When they caught him the following October in Wyoming, he had nothing useful to offer.

Then came the next misfire: four Vinton teenagers arrested for egging Myrtle’s house two months before the shooting, after she’d publicly trashed local drinkers. One boy was the son of State Senator White. Detectives hoped the kids knew something. They didn’t. Another dead end.

The primary suspect eventually became the man who should’ve been easiest to eliminate—Clifford Cook. He’d been in Sioux City when Myrtle was shot. But he’d done something odd: drawn a diagram of his home and shared it with boarders at his boardinghouse. He brushed it off as nothing. The detectives weren’t convinced. He wasn’t guilty, but he wasn’t clean either.

Clifford Cook

His marriage didn’t help. Clifford hadn’t lived with Myrtle in five years. He worked odd jobs on the road—trucking, selling—coming home every few weeks. She sometimes drove to Waverly to see him. They exchanged letters regularly. They weren’t separated, but they weren’t a functioning couple either.

At the time of the murder, Clifford was employed by the American Monument Company in Sioux City, but he’d recently lost his job. On September 6, he headed back to Vinton. “The roads were slippery,” he told police. “I stayed the night in Grundy Center.” When he rolled up to the house the next day, he saw flowers and crepe on the door and assumed his elderly mother-in-law had died.

Then his daughter ran out sobbing: “Oh daddy, mama is gone.”

Detectives cleared him—until three weeks later, when they learned he’d lied to the coroner’s jury. He’d testified he didn’t know any women in Sioux City. Now he admitted he spent the day of the murder with Hester Sieling, who lived in the same boardinghouse. His lawyer called it “indiscretion,” not motive. Investigators couldn’t tie the affair to the murder. Myrtle wasn’t insured, so there  was no money to gain from her death.

The coroner’s jury couldn’t name a killer but said authorities should take another look at Clifford anyway.

Clifford insisted Myrtle was killed by enemies she’d made fighting booze. Prohibition had split the town. Iowa had gone dry in 1916. The rest of the country followed in 1920. Clifford said the church lost its grip once alcohol hit the black market again. “Our young people left the churches and went to cafes and dance pavilions,” he said. Then the bootleggers came. Then the violence.

To the “drys,” Myrtle was a hero. To the “wets,” she was a nosy gossip who needed to mind her own business.

There were other angles. She was president of the local W.C.T.U. chapter and head of the women’s division of the Benton County Ku Klux Klan. Either side of that résumé could get a woman killed.

Sheriff Ruhl’s wife, Marie, said Myrtle showed her a commendation letter the morning she died, then added, “I believe this work will be the end of me yet.” She’d told her before, “I’m a marked woman.”

Some believed the shooting had nothing to do with booze or the Klan. Myrtle’s home sat near the railroad passenger station, a magnet for drunks, drug users, and people who drifted into town and quickly made trouble. It could have been a random, sloppy killing by someone who didn’t even know who she was.

The aftermath only fueled the town’s paranoia. Reverend Blain Hyten from Cedar Rapids blamed the country’s “crime wave” on lawyers who bent over backward to protect criminals, railing against the Clarence Darrow types who “whitewash their guilt.” It was one man’s rant, but it hit a nerve. People felt killers were getting away with everything.

In Myrtle’s case, they were right.

Her killer was never found. No motive ever stuck. No confession ever surfaced.

But her murder shook Vinton hard enough that the W.C.T.U. sent a message to Governor John Hammill blaming the killing on a bootlegger and calling out the city for ignoring her warnings. “They were lenient with lawbreakers,” the letter said. “This town needs cleaning up.”

The governor responded by promising a crackdown. No leniency. No mercy. Full enforcement.

It didn’t bring Myrtle back. It didn’t solve the case.

It just reminded Iowa that someone had pulled a trigger, walked away, and disappeared into the noise.