Fatal Joyride in Sioux City 1930

 

Adelaide Anderson was dropped off at home shortly before the shooting. Leonard Bornholtz, 17, was shot and killed by the police while trying to stop the car.

A joyride in Sioux City ended with a dead teenager and a handful of shaken kids sitting in a police station.

 

Detectives Lou Miller and Roy Gillis knew the car was stolen when they spotted it. They tried to stop it, but the driver, Harry Dial, 22, kept going.

 

The car cut into an alley. Miller fired two shots into the air. Warnings.

 

The car didn’t stop.

 

He fired again.

 The Des Moines Register said: “Miller’s gun blazed in the alley… a third, fourth, and fifth time,” the bullets punching into the back of the car.

 

(right to left) John Rouch, Glenn Johnson, and Joe McDermott

Inside, 17-year-old Leonard Bornholtz took a bullet in the base of the neck. They got him to the hospital, but it didn’t matter. He died about an hour later.

  

Back at the station, the story came together fast. Dial admitted that the car had been stolen.

 

The others—Glenn Johnson, Joe McDermott, John Rouch—were questioned and released the same day. Two young women, Marie McFadden and Eddeth Olson, were let go earlier. Detectives said they did not know the car was stolen.

 

No charges stuck beyond that.

 

Police officials said Miller acted in the line of duty. Miller called it tragic. Bornholtz’s father had been a cop for twenty years, and one of his best friends.

(pictures from the Des Moines Register. March 30, 1930)

Stuff like this is what I always end up chasing—the little lines in old newspapers and magazines, the parts most books skip over.

I pulled a bunch of those stories together into Iowa Crime Time if you want more of it.

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