Book Review: True Crime in Lee County, Iowa

 

Lee County looks like the place where nothing much happens. River towns. Brick streets. People who wave when they pass you. Then True Crime in Lee County, Iowa by Robert Turek steps in and says, “Look closer.”

 

This book doesn’t shout. It leans in.

 

You get brothers turning on each other. Bank jobs that shake whole towns. Murders that don’t sit right, even years later. The cases that never really end—they just go quiet for a while.

 

What works here is the feeling. These aren’t distant stories. They’re close. Familiar. You can picture the streets. The houses. The neighbors who suddenly have something to hide.

 

There’s a steady shadow running through it all—the Iowa State Penitentiary. Old, heavy, unavoidable. You can feel its presence in the background, like it’s part of every story, whether or not it’s mentioned.

 

The writing keeps things moving. Clean. Direct. No wasted space. It gives you just enough detail to pull you in, then lets your mind do the rest. Some stories hit fast. Others linger, especially the ones without answers.

 

That’s the hook. Not everything gets wrapped up. Some of these cases stay open. Stay uneasy.

 

By the end, you start looking at small towns a little differently.

 

Quiet doesn’t mean safe.

William B. Allison Iowa Senator

William B. Allison took his Senate seat in 1873 and settled in like a man who knew he wasn’t leaving anytime soon.

Presidents cycled through. The country lurched forward. Crashes. Booms. Wars. Allison just kept showing up, year after year, doing the same thing—watching, listening, waiting for his moment.

He wasn’t built for speeches. No table pounding. No grandstanding. While other senators filled the room with noise, Allison leaned back, counted votes in his head, and worked people one at a time. Quiet conversations. Closed doors. That’s where things actually got decided.

If you wanted to know where the actual power sat, you followed the money. And Allison had his fingerprints all over it. As head of Appropriations, he helped steer federal spending wherever it needed to go—or wherever he decided it should go. Rail lines, river projects, the military—nothing moved without passing across his desk.

Elton (Sam) Langford Des Moines Demons Baseball

 

Des Moines Tribune. August 29, 1925

Elton (Sam) Langford, a center fielder for the Des Moines Demons, was scheduled to move up the ranks in the Western League at the start of the 1925 baseball season.

Langford, age 22, had a batting average of .350 and was the leading scorer in the league. The Des Moines Tribune said he was a long-distance hitter and averaged a home run in every games as well as several doubles and triples.

Herman A. Breithaupt Des Moines Expert Zither Soloist and Chef

 

(colorized photo from the Des Moines Register. April 15, 1928)

Herman A. Breithaupt, an expert Zither Soloist, was featured in the Des Moines Register in April 1928. Born in Germany in 1896, he began playing the zither when he was ten. 

Breithaupt's other passion was cooking. He worked in the kitchen at the Hotel Savery III in Des Moines, where he cooked and trained new chefs in the culinary arts. He told his students, "A meal correctly combined, scientifically prepared, and properly masticated is necessary for a healthy body."

In his spare time, he lectured at schools and clubs on food preperation, recipes, and health.

He was fifty years ahead of his time in his belief that one day, high schools would train young men to be chefs and food scientists.