He Killed His Wife To Marry His Girlfriend

Walter "Dusty" Rhodes

Walter “Dusty” Rhodes wasn’t a stranger drifting through Iowa City. Everyone knew him. He could joke with a hardware clerk, nod at a neighbor, and blend into the daily noise of town. “Dusty” sounded harmless, like a nickname earned from farm roads and old work boots. Nothing about him said danger.

He had a wife, a steady job, and a home. People like that don’t get whispered about or watched. They move through life under a blanket of normal, and normal is the best hiding place.

 

The morning his wife died, he leaned on normal like it could hold him up.

 

Down in the basement, the shotgun went off with the force of a bomb.

 

Dusty ran upstairs and told the maid to call a doctor and the sheriff. It was an accident. His voice was fast, controlled, almost businesslike. Myrtle remembered that calm later.

 

When the officers arrived, Dusty said he was preparing to go hunting. His wife handed him the shotgun, and it accidentally discharged. It was tragic, but nobody’s fault.

At first, the deputies accepted his story. Accidents happened. A hunting trip was believable enough. Dusty looked like a man caught in shock, and for a little while, that was enough.

 

Then they learned about the insurance policy.

 

Dusty had recently taken out a double indemnity policy on his wife for $1,000. The kind that paid extra if death was sudden and violent. The policy didn’t prove it was murder, but it changed the narrative. The timing was off—$2,000 was a lot of money.

 

So they went back through the house and started reading the basement like a crime scene instead of a tragedy.

 

A normal shotgun blast leaves a signature. Pellets slam into walls and stick in the ceiling. Shot scatters across plaster like angry hail. The entire room becomes evidence. But Dusty’s basement didn’t have that signature. There were no pellets lodged in the walls or peppered into the ceiling. The blast should’ve painted the room, but it hadn’t. It was a problem.

 

The break came from a place no one expected—the toilet.

 

Detectives found shotgun pellets in the downstairs toilet bowl. They counted them, then dumped the shot from another shell into the water as a test. When they flushed, the same number of pellets stayed behind.

 

That's what told them Dusty’s story was just that. The pellets hadn’t been fired into the room. They’d been removed beforehand. Someone had cut the shell open, emptied it, and tried to wash the evidence away.

 

But that raised a bigger question. If the shell wasn’t packed with shot, what caused the explosion?

 

They sent the shotgun to Des Moines where investigators found traces of dynamite on the barrel. The shotgun hadn’t simply “gone off.” It had been turned into a bomb.

 

They picked Dusty up in Tama, Iowa, on Saturday, February 13. They took him back to Iowa City, then to Des Moines for questioning at the Bureau of Investigation.

 

County attorney Harold Vestermark said Dusty stayed “cool as a cucumber.” He acted like he could outlast them.

 

So they stopped trying to wear him down with words and showed him photos of his wife’s decapitated body. They laid the pellets from the toilet bowl in front of him and waited. Sheriff McComas leaned in. “You know we’ve got the goods on you, don’t you, Dusty?”

 

Dusty mouth tightened like he were swallowing glass. “I’ll tell. I’ll tell,” he said.

 

His confession came out cold and plain. “I cut the shell off and put shot in the stool on January 30, and put about two or three spoons of dynamite in the gun, just poured it down the barrel.” 

 

His first plan was to make the explosion look messy, not deliberate. He wanted to shoot bottles at Art Brown’s place with his wife standing nearby. He figured the blast would tear the barrel apart and send the wreckage crashing into her. The important thing was to make it look like an accident so he could collect on the insurance.

 

Then, he hesitated and pulled the dynamite shells out. He wrapped the dynamite in paper and tossed it in the garage. Days passed. His mind circled back. He put it in again.

 

State agent Joe Burke explained Dusty believed he could hold the gun just right so the blast would kill his wife while sparing him. It was a fantasy. Dynamite doesn’t aim. Shrapnel doesn’t negotiate. One wrong angle and Dusty would’ve blown himself apart, too.

 

The final plan was quieter, and that’s what tripped him up.

 

Dusty carried the gun to the basement around 11:30 and laid it on the bed. He told his wife he thought the firing pin was loose. Could she pull the hammer back and fire it to test the mechanism? It sounded harmless. Just a casual request.

 

She cocked the gun and  pulled the trigger.

 

Dusty knew it would kill her. He didn’t expect the explosion to be so extreme, but he knew it would “probably result” in her death.

 

After the blast, he ran upstairs and told the maid it was an accident. Myrtle said everything turned to chaos. Smoke poured up from the basement. The lights didn’t work. Dusty lit a match and called for his wife like a worried husband.

 

But something that stuck with her. He didn’t rush downstairs to check on his wife. He managed the situation like he was handling a mess. Later, she asked him if he’d killed his wife. He said no, but didn’t believe him.

 

Dusty’s motive wasn’t a mystery once the truth surfaced. He wanted to marry Mabel Skriver, the owner of the Skriver Tavern. He loved her, and he owed her money. Killing his wife solved both problems.

 

His attorney, Will Hayek, challenged the state to prove it was murder. He had little choice. The evidence against his client was stacked like bricks. So the state laid it out, piece by piece, until the wall was too high for any doubt to climb.

 

An Army Engineering Corps expert testified a normal shell couldn’t have caused that damage. Only dynamite, dynamite caps, or nitroglycerin could blow the barrel apart like that. A clerk from Lenoch and Cilek’s Hardware Store said Dusty ordered two sticks of dynamite the week of January 22 and picked them up a few days later.

 

Then came the money trail. A Prudential representative testified Dusty bought a $1,000 double indemnity policy on his wife on January 4. Another agent said Dusty bought one on himself first, then said, “Now, my wife wants one.” The couple flipped a coin to decide whether her policy would be $800 or $1,000. It sounded playful, but it landed like a warning.

 

Sheriff McComas testified Dusty said at arraignment, “I am guilty of the crime and am going to have to pay the penalty.” Later, Dusty claimed he didn’t know why he did it. He insisted that he was sane. It wasn’t madness, just something he couldn’t explain. The jury didn’t buy that.

 

The last witnesses sealed it by proving the murder had been planned well before the basement exploded.

 

Harold Hands, a jeweler in Iowa City, testified that Dusty bought a lady’s diamond engagement ring on December 19 for $135. Then Mabel Skriver took the stand and said she was engaged to him. They’d seen each other nearly every day in December. Dusty gave her the ring the Saturday before Christmas.

 

He told Mabel he was completing his divorce. On January 29, he called a friend in St. Louis and asked them to get a marriage license, saying they’d be there soon. On the day his wife died, Dusty called Mabel and said he couldn’t see her. He was at the hospital because his wife had been in a terrible accident.

 

The jury deliberated for eighteen hours before finding Dusty guilty of first-degree murder, and directing that his punishment should be death.

 

The judge sentenced Dusty to hang on April 29, 1938. His attorneys tried to overturn the conviction or reduce the sentence, but the truth didn’t bend. Walter “Dusty” Rhodes died on the gallows in early May 1940. The Des Moines Tribune said the drop was so violent it severed an artery in his neck, and his blood ran down his blue suit in a scarlet stream.