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.

Maybe both stories were true. Maybe neither was.

 

The problem was that every time investigators questioned them, the details changed.

 

Dorothy’s version made Schmitt the killer.

 

She was outside when she heard a gunshot. Minutes later, she saw Schmitt run into the house carrying a .38 caliber revolver before racing back outside and driving off.

Henry Schmitt and Dorothy Worm said they dumped the body i the Mississippi

When he returned, her husband was still alive but badly wounded in the granary. Dorothy said she grabbed a rifle because she was scared Schmitt might kill her, too. She may have fired a few shots at him. She wasn’t sure.

 

Anyway, Schmitt took the rifle away from her and fired the last shot into Thomas Worm’s head.

 

Schmitt told it differently.

 

He was unloading corn in the granary when Dorothy walked in carrying a rifle and shot her husband.

 

“My God, woman,” he shouted. “What have you done?”

 

He grabbed the rifle away from her, covered Worm’s body, and helped Dorothy figure out how to explain his disappearance.

 

One thing never changed, though. Both of them admitted helping hide the body.

 

The first burial happened on Schmitt’s farm near Lenox. The next day, they dug the body up and moved it to Schmitt’s son’s farm near Creston.

 

They dug Worm’s body up a second time and dumped it in the Mississippi River below Keokuk.

 

Dorothy said she never knew what Henry did with the body. He wouldn’t tell her because he thought she’d eventually talk.

 

Maybe he was right.

 

When the body was gone, they needed a story, so it they worked on their alibi.

 

Something simple and believable.

 

Dorothy told her mother that Thomas had gone out the night before to help a stranded motorist and never came home.

 

She was worried.

 

Her mother contacted Sheriff Caskey in Bedford. Before long, deputies found Worm’s truck abandoned in a ditch where Dorothy and Henry had left it.

 

A month later, Dorothy offered a $200 reward for information about her missing husband.

 

Weeks passed. Then months.

 

The Bureau of Criminal Investigation joined the case, but the trail stayed cold.

 

In January 1944, a body pulled from the Mississippi River near Rock Island briefly raised hopes that investigators had finally found Worm. Dorothy and other family members looked at the remains but couldn’t identify them.

 

The case drifted for over two years, but investigators never let it go. They interviewed Dorothy and Henry over fifty times before somebody finally cracked.

 

In February 1946, Dorothy broke down and told Deputy Sheriff Lester Round that “sex” killed her husband. Not sex itself exactly, but the affair she’d been carrying on with Henry Schmitt.

 

Dorothy said Schmitt shot her husband twice in the head. Detectives picked Schmitt up on March 25. He insisted Dorothy shot Thomas first with a .22 caliber rifle before he finished the job.

 

The only real question left was which one of them was lying.

 

Four days later, Schmitt pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and got 99 years at Fort Madison Penitentiary.

 

Dorothy was arrested soon afterward and charged with first-degree murder. A few days later, she changed her plea to guilty in the second-degree and received a 45-year sentence at the Rockwell City Women’s Reformatory.

 

Even then, the case didn’t feel finished.

 

After entering her plea, Dorothy quietly told Sheriff Caskey she had “pleaded guilty to something she didn’t do.”

 

Then there was the problem with the gun.

 

Detectives recovered a .38 caliber bullet from the siding of the Worm house. Schmitt said he used a .22 caliber revolver. Dorothy said she fired a .22 caliber rifle.

 

If both stories were true, who fired the .38?

 

Three years after Thomas Worm disappeared, there was still no body. Two people were sitting in prison for murder, but parts of the story still didn’t fit together. And from the looks of it, never would.

 

Dorothy Worm was paroled in December 1959. Henry Schmitt got out five months later.

 

By then, Thomas Worm’s disappearance had become one of those cold-cases people argued about for years afterward.

Before you go ...

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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