Who Killed Edward Kriz at the Hamburg Inn in Iowa City

 

Sometimes the difference between life and death can be as simple as who walks out the door first. That was the case for Edward Kriz, 43, the owner of George’s Buffet, a tavern on Market Street in Iowa City. Kriz closed the tavern shortly after 1 a.m. on November 10, 1962, and headed next door to the Hamburg Inn for a late-night bite with his wife, Bernice, and employee Ralph Thomason.

After finishing their meal, the group left through the back door at around 1:45 a.m. Edward Kriz barely made it two steps out the door before a man wearing a Halloween mask opened fire. Kriz lurched forward, wrestling the man for the gun. Two more shots were fired before he crumpled to the ground.

The shooter fled north toward Bloomington and Gilbert Streets. A witness heard the shots, then saw a man running across Linn Street. He got into what looked like a foreign sports car and sped away.

Kriz was rushed to University Hospital, where he died less than an hour later.

A Different Look At The Founding of Iowa

I had some fun today, and asked ai to make illustrations of Iowa's founding by three visionary artists--Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso.

Joan Miró’s Iowa mural looks like history after chugging three Super Big Gulps and no sleep. Indians, pioneers, forts, riverboats — all bouncing around in bright colors and weird floating shapes. The Mississippi River twists through the whole thing like a giant blue snake that escaped from a Looney-Tunes cartoon.

Nothing makes sense. That’s the fun of it. Miró painted feelings more than reality, so Iowa history turns into this wild, happy dream filled with stars, squiggles, moons, and shapes.

Salvador Dalí’s version looks like the frontier wandered into somebody’s fever dream. Wagons melt. Faces droop. The river stretches forever while creepy skies hang over everything. Even the clocks look exhausted.

The painting feels strange, dramatic, and a little unhinged. Dalí loved taking normal scenes and twisting them into something bizarre. His Iowa looks like Lewis and Clark got lost inside a nightmare and marched west, anyway.

The Murder of Roy Wertz. An Open And Shut Case, Except ...

 

Roy Wertz

Roy Wertz’s murder seemed like an open and shut case. He got into a heated argument with his wife and daughter and began slapping them around. His wife wrestled the gun away from him. It went off, sending two slugs into Wertz’s head, killing him.

Mrs. Wertz admitted, pulling the trigger, so there was no question who fired the fatal shot, or why. Her husband attacked her, then tried to choke her daughter.

Bang. He was dead. They weren’t.

A few days later, the coroner’s jury seemed to agree with her. They determined Mimi Wertz shot her husband with a .32 caliber pistol, adding they believed the “shots were fired in self-defense.”

Case closed. Except.

An hour before the coroner’s jury released its verdict, the police arrested Roy Wertz’s son-in-law, Robert Leeper, 22, on a charge of murder in the first degree.

What was the disconnect? Why did the police suspect Robert Leeper killed his father-in-law? And why didn’t they wait for the verdict of the coroner’s jury before arresting Leeper?

Mormon Trek Across Iowa

 

The Burlington Hawkeye didn’t have a high opinion of the Mormons. They wrote, “Wherever they go and grow strong, there springs up dissensions and violence between them and other citizens. The crimes charged upon them are without number.”

As examples, they pointed to the Hodges brothers, who were involved in the murders of John Miller and Henry Leisi, and to the murderers of Colonel Davenport who took shelter with the Reddens, who were also Mormons.

 

It is easy to understand why they felt the way they did. The main troublemakers in Lee County, and elsewhere in Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois had up to that time been Mormons. 

 

“The Mormons caused bitter rivalries and discord wherever they went,” observed Jacob Van Der Zee. Before being expelled from Illinois, they were thrown out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri. Their home base in Illinois centered on the temple in Nauvoo and some other property they owned in Keokuk and Montrose in Iowa.

 

Benjamin Gue, in his landmark History of Iowa, said the Mormons had to go because “their religion and peculiar social practices were so obnoxious to their neighbors.” Unlike Jacob Van Der Zee, he didn’t talk about the crimes or depredations committed by the Mormons, but more about their religion and polygamy. That’s what he thought other citizens found peculiar about the Mormons.

Things came to a head after the murder of Joseph Smith. In the late fall of 1845, Brigham Young promised his neighbors that the Mormons would leave Illinois, “so soon as the grass would grow, and the water run.” All he asked in return was that the persecution and house burnings would end.

A Double Murder in Low Moor

 

By the time the sun came up over the Lincoln Highway on November 14, 1922, Homer (47) and Rose Brownfield (38) were dead on the floor of their roadside store and the killer was gone.

 

No witnesses. No arrest. No suspect.

 

Just two bodies beside one of the busiest roads in America and a murderer who vanished into the darkness somewhere west of Low Moor, Iowa.

 

People around Clinton County still talk about it more than a hundred years later. A husband and wife running a little highway store. A cold November night. Then gunshots followed by silence.

 

The Lincoln Highway brought strangers through eastern Iowa at all hours.

 

That was part of the problem.

 

By 1922, it had become one of the busiest roads in the country. Cars rattled through Clinton County day and night carrying salesmen, drifters, farm families, tourists, and men nobody knew anything about. Most just passed through.

 

Some didn’t.

 

Homer and Rose Brownfield ran a little roadside store near Low Moor. It sat out in the open country where the road cut through fields and darkness. Travelers stopped for gas, cigarettes, sandwiches, coffee, or directions before moving on.

 

The Brownfields worked long days.

Who Poisoned Ross Ashbaugh in Maynard Iowa?

By the time they dug Ross Ashbaugh out of the ground for the third time, people around Maynard had stopped asking whether he’d been poisoned.

They were asking who had done it.

The Ashbaugh farm sat outside Maynard, Iowa, surrounded by fields that rolled flat into the summer heat. Neighbors noticed everything. Who came by? Who stayed too long? Which marriages looked strained at church on Sunday morning.

Ross Ashbaugh was 44 and built like a man who’d spent his life outdoors. He farmed, raised livestock, and kept the operation running through the endless cycle of planting, feeding, fixing, and harvesting. He and his wife, Effie, were raising two children, Lucile and Edward. By most accounts, Ross wasn’t flashy or loud. Just another hardworking Iowa farmer trying to get by.

Arthur Cahoe had been around the farm for four years.

He was 38, hired help, and close enough to the family that people didn’t think twice about seeing him there. He worked alongside Ross during the day and spent evenings in the house. Over time, neighbors noticed the way Cahoe and Effie acted around each other.

The Chilling 1972 Mystery of Lynn Schuller and the Alligator Named Pogo

 

Lynn Schuller was a 25-year-old mother living the suburban dream in Cedar Rapids with her husband, Keith, and their three-year-old son, Eric. On the surface, the couple enjoyed a picture-perfect life. They’d tied the knot in 1967 and welcomed their first child in 1969. Life was good, right? But as often happens, appearances can be deceiving.

Keith dropped a bombshell on Lynn in 1971. He wanted a divorce. But Lynn wasn’t ready to give up on her marriage and refused. He kept pushing, but she wouldn’t sign the papers.

Things went sideways. Fast. Lynn wrote a letter to her mother, Eloise Tickner, in 1972, confiding Keith had threatened to kill her. But she quickly dismissed it, saying, “He would never do anything like that.” Was it denial? Or wishful thinking?

Fast forward a few months.

It’s August 6, 1972. Keith told authorities: He woke up early, left the house with their son around 7:30 a.m. to take his son fishing, and let Lynn sleep in. When they returned just after noon, Lynn and her bicycle were gone. No note. No trace—just gone.

Who Remembers Wacky Waters Water Park in Davenport?

 

Wacky Waters was the place where your parents handed you twenty bucks at 10 in the morning and basically said, “Good luck surviving.”

Then they disappeared for six hours.

The park opened in Davenport in 1984, off Interstate 80, and for Quad Cities’ kids it quickly became the greatest place on earth besides maybe Aladdin’s Castle at the mall.

Before Wacky Waters, summer mostly meant sweating in somebody’s backyard kiddie pool while mosquitoes carried off small pets.

Then suddenly there were water slides. Not normal water slides either. These things looked like they’d been designed by a man who hated chiropractors.

The Daredevil and Thunderbolt towers were gigantic. At least they felt gigantic when you were nine and wearing jelly sandals. You’d stand at the bottom staring up while another kid shot out the end like a human missile and skipped across the water face first.

Clifford Samuels 17-Year-Old Des Moines Inventor

 

Clifford Samuels and his machine. (Des Moines Register. November 26, 1911)

Most 17-year-olds in 1911 spent their time thinking about school, baseball, or getting into trouble.

Clifford Samuels of Des Moines spent two years building a wireless telegraph machine.

The whole thing cost him seven bucks.

He became obsessed. His grades started slipping. Friends hardly saw him. Family complained he spent all his time reading, fooling with wires, and staring off into space. Sometimes he got so wrapped up in it that he forgot to eat.

And then he spent a day with a Navy officer learning about wireless communication. When he got home, he started building his own machine.

Then came the big test.

After two years of tinkering, reading, and daydreaming, Clifford fired the machine up.

It worked. On the first try.

Clifford told a reporter for the Des Moines Register that it could send messages up to fifteen miles and pick up signals from as far away as three hundred miles. Not exactly small-time stuff for a high school kid in 1911.

Murder of Marlene "Mickey" Padfield Lisbon Iowa 1959

 

When Marlene “Mickey” Padfield, 17, of Lisbon, Iowa, disappeared on February 18, 1959, it was assumed she’d run away. There was a small notice in The Cedar Rapids Gazette the next day, then nothing for nearly two months. But that all changed on April 29 when the skeleton of a young woman was found on a section of timberland near Roy White’s farm.

White said his dogs walked up to him carrying what looked like bones. When he checked, it was a human hand. He did a little digging and found a skeleton lying on a nearby road. Apparently, the dogs dragged it out of the timber.

Ethel Padfield, Marlene’s mother, identified the remains by the blouse she was wearing and the color of her fingernail polish. More of Marlene’s clothes turned up in May—her purse, a shoe, and her underwear, but none of them helped detectives piece together what happened to her. Her skirt turned up the following February, and pieces of her slip after that.

A pathologist examined the remains but couldn’t determine the cause of death because there wasn’t enough soft tissue left to test. The skeleton didn’t provide any clues—there weren’t any broken bones or other clues to show foul play.

Detectives spent the next few weeks piecing together the girl’s life and last days.

Marlene was described as an attractive, brown-haired girl who tried a little too hard to be popular during her junior year. She had short hair above the ears, with curls up front—stood 5 foot four, weighed 112 pounds, was smart, aggressively friendly, and wanted everyone to like her.

She joined the band and acted in the school play, “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.” And then, six weeks into her senior year, Marlene decided it was too much. School bored her, and she wasn’t learning anything worthwhile, so she dropped out and ran through a string of low-wage jobs, earning $28 to $32 a week. She worked as a waitress at several restaurants, clerked at Mongomery Ward, then got a job as a bookkeeper at J & T Radio and Television Repair.

Ethel Padfield dropped Marlene off at J & T Radio and Television Repair in Cedar Rapids on February 18. She talked to her daughter on the phone several times during the day, and said her daughter planned to take the bus home.

Murder of Edward Stuart At Lone Grave Bluff In Clinton

 

Harold Riggs (The Daily Times. October 8, 1926)

The place already had a bad reputation before Edward Stewart was murdered there.

 

People around Clinton called it Lone Grave Bluff. Legend says a steamboat stopped there once so the crew could bury a dead river pilot. Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn’t. By 1926, nobody cared much either way. The name fit. High bluffs. Thick brush. River fog rolling off the Mississippi. The place kids dared each other to visit after dark, then ran all the way home afterward.

 

It was where Harold Riggs took Edward Stewart.

 

Riggs was young, but the police already knew him well. According to the Clinton Advertiser, officers first arrested him when he was eight for breaking into automobiles. Not long after, they picked him up again for stealing a gun from a local house. He pleaded guilty and was supposed to go to reform school, but got paroled at the last minute.

 

The city watched him grow up mean.

 

Teachers complained. Police hauled him in over and over. Neighbors said he was always looking for trouble. Even as a teenager, he had a bad temper and could fly off over almost nothing.

How Tom Vilsack Went From Small-Town Mayor To One Of America's Most Powerful Politicians

 

Tom Vilsack’s political career almost sounds fake when you line it all up.

Mayor. State senator. Governor of Iowa. Secretary of Agriculture. Then Secretary of Agriculture again under a different president.

Most politicians spend their entire careers trying to reach one of those jobs. Vilsack somehow stacked them together like old baseball cards.

The strange part is that he never looked like a political star. He looked more like an attorney explaining zoning permits at a city council meeting than somebody climbing toward national power.

Vilsack had the personality that Iowa voters trusted. He didn’t sound like he was auditioning for television. He sounded like the guy explaining school bond issues at a town hall while everybody stabbed at pie and drank weak coffee out of tiny paper cups.

Before politics, he practiced law in Mount Pleasant.

Then tragedy shoved him into public life when Ruth Harkin was murdered in Mount Pleasant in 1986. Vilsack helped organize a fundraiser for the family, and people noticed he stayed calm while everybody else looked shell-shocked.

Book Review: Skull In The Ashes by Peter Kaufman

Some true crime books feel clean and organized. Nice little timelines. Neatly explained motives. Detectives heroically solving crimes before dinner.

Skull in the Ashes isn’t that book.

It feels like somebody dumped a shovel full of burned secrets onto the table and said, “Good luck figuring this mess out.”

It starts in 1897 when a general store burns down in Walford, Iowa. The next morning they find a charred body in the ashes, and everybody just sort of nods and says, “Well, guess Frank Novak died in the fire.”

Except… did he?

That question hangs over the entire book like smoke.

Pretty quickly things start smelling worse than the burned building. Novak had life insurance policies. Convenient. 

The body might actually belong to a hard-drinking laborer named Edward Murray. Also convenient. 

Iowa: It's Weirder Than You Think

 

People who’ve never been to Iowa think the entire state is just corn, soybeans, and pork tenderloins.

 

That’s because Iowa has spent decades hiding its weirdness from the rest of America like some kind of agricultural cryptid.

 

This is a state where pigs outnumber people, where sliced bread first showed up and people reacted like cavemen discovering fire. Iowa accidentally helped invent the computer. One town became an island because the Mississippi River basically shrugged and said, “Figure it out, nerds.”

 

There’s a crooked street that looks hammered, the world’s largest truck stop, and a literary city filled with writers wearing sweaters in July and pretending their student loans are part of the creative process.

 

Also, Iowa used to belong to France, which feels impossible after you’ve watched somebody eat a pork tenderloin the size of a hubcap while washing it down with ranch dressing and barbecue sauce.

 

The best part is that Iowans barely react to any of this. They might casually say, “Yeah, we got more pigs than people,” before changing the subject to Casey’s breakfast pizza.

 

It’s deeply unsettling behavior.

Two Confessions And No Body in Conway The Murder of Thomas Worm

 

Dorothy Worm and Henry Schmitt standing over the body of Thomas Conway

Thomas Worm, 42, disappeared from his farm near Conway, Iowa, on November 4, 1943. At least that’s how the case started.

 

For over two years, nobody knew what happened to him.

 

Then the story started coming apart.

 

Dorothy Worm said she met Henry Schmitt back in 1938 when he offered her a ride on a saddle horse she “couldn’t quite afford.” Somehow that turned into an affair, and eventually a murder.

 

The Des Moines Register described Dorothy as an “attractive brunette” with a grown son. Henry Schmitt was 63 years old, married, and had four children. Still, he kept showing up at the Worm farm once or twice a week for nearly six years.

 

Schmitt said he wasn’t really in love with Dorothy. He “just loved being with her.”

 

That might have been believable if Thomas Worm hadn’t vanished.

 

Dorothy later claimed she only spent time with Schmitt because he threatened her son’s life. Investigators didn’t completely buy it. They thought Schmitt spoiled her with things her husband couldn’t afford, and Dorothy liked the attention.

John Culver: The Iowa Politician Who Could Never Win Today

The craziest thing about John Culver’s political career might be this — if he ran today, he probably couldn’t win. Not because he wasn’t smart, or wasn’t good at the job. Mostly because he belonged to a different kind of politics that barely exists anymore.

John Culver came from the old political world where a candidate could look like a banker, talk like a college professor, and still end up shaking every hand from Davenport to Sioux City. No screaming. No cowboy act. No cable-news circus. Just a tall guy with a calm voice, a Harvard education, and the patience to stand around Legion halls drinking weak coffee while somebody complained about soybeans for forty straight minutes.

And somehow, people liked him for it.

Culver had one of those faces that looked Midwestern. Big grin. Thinning hair combed carefully into place. Suits that always looked slightly rumpled. A politician who carried folded newspaper clippings in his coat pocket and read briefing papers on airplanes.

He wasn’t flashy enough to become a national celebrity. That probably helped him in Iowa.