Historic Iowa Murders

Iowa likes to think of itself as harmless. Flat land. Straight roads. Church on Sunday. Supper at six. A place where nothing truly bad happens—at least not the bad that makes headlines twice. When violence breaks through, people rush to explain it away. A moment of madness. A stranger passing through. A one-off tragedy that doesn’t belong to the place itself.

 That’s a lie. Iowa has always killed quietly.

 Not with gang wars, public massacres, or gunfire rattling the skyline. Iowa murders happen behind doors. In rented rooms. On farms where the nearest neighbor is half a mile away and doesn’t ask questions. They happen with tools already at hand—axes, hammers, ropes, poison poured into cups meant for children. They happen where silence is built into the landscape.

 What makes Iowa dangerous isn’t violence. It’s restraint.

 People here are trained not to pry. Not to interfere. Not to speak unless spoken to. Shame works better than chains. Reputation matters more than truth. And when something goes wrong—when a body turns up in a barn or a bedroom or a river—the instinct isn’t outrage. It’s containment.

Handle it quietly. Don’t make trouble. Move on.

 That culture shaped the crimes, investigations, who got punished—and who walked free.

Women who killed abusive husbands were studied like curiosities. Women who killed babies were pitied, excused, or erased. Prostitutes were murdered and written off as inevitable losses. Children died and were buried with paperwork instead of justice. Men confessed, recanted, vanished, or were hanged on evidence that barely held together. Whole families were wiped out, and towns trampled the crime scenes before the blood was dry.

Again and again, the same pattern emerges: everyone knows something, no one says anything.

Iowa didn’t lack lawmen. It lacked the will to look too closely at what it had created—tight communities built on pressure, obedience, and moral certainty. When those structures cracked, the violence didn’t explode outward. It folded inward. Into homes, marriages, children, and the dark hours after supper, when the land goes quiet and nobody is watching.

These aren’t stories about monsters from elsewhere. They’re about neighbors. Husbands. Wives. Mothers. Ministers. Men who wore authority like a costume and women who were crushed by it. They’re about how easy it is to disappear someone when the ground itself seems willing to help you forget.

The cases that follow span decades—but share a common rhythm. The killing is sudden. The explanation is thin. The silence afterward is thick enough to last generations.

Iowa still tells itself these things don’t belong to it. But they do. They always have. And once you start paying attention, you realize the state isn’t quiet at all. It’s just learned how to whisper.

PART I: THE HOME IS THE WEAPON

The danger was already inside.

People like to imagine murder as an intrusion. A stranger in the night. A knock at the door that shouldn’t be answered. Iowa’s record says otherwise. Some of its deadliest crimes happened where people were supposed to be safest—beds, kitchens, barns, nurseries. The weapon didn’t come from outside. It was waiting in the house. So were the anger, the fear, the desperation, and the silence that let it grow.

Margaret Hossack — The Marriage That Never Ended

Margaret Hossack

For years before John Hossack’s skull was split open in his own bed, his wife Margaret told anyone who would listen that she wanted him dead. Neighbors heard it. Friends heard it. Even strangers heard it. John was cruel, violent, and feared inside his own home. Margaret didn’t hide her hatred. She sharpened it.

When John was murdered in December 1900, the story she told didn’t fit the blood, the ax, or the silence of the house. The dog never barked. The blow would’ve required someone standing over her. Her clothes were clean. The bed was soaked. Evidence vanished. Witnesses unraveled. Money ran out.

She was convicted. Then freed. Then left behind in a town that never really believed her innocence—or her guilt could be proved beyond doubt. As Susan Glaspell wrote, the line that still haunts the case: “If she didn’t kill him, she knew who did.”

Irene Dolph — Too Young to Be Innocent, Too Broken to Ignore

Irene Dolph

Irene Dolph was seventeen when her husband’s head was blown apart in their Lyons, Iowa, home. She didn’t call the police. She called her mother. Then a lawyer. By the time authorities arrived, the crime scene was already wrapped in strategy.

The trial exposed a life that never had a chance. Abuse. Exploitation. Disease. A marriage built on coercion and humiliation. Witnesses described threats, beatings, jealousy, and a home soaked in alcohol and cruelty. Irene never denied the killing. Her defense didn’t argue innocence—it argued inevitability.

The jury split the difference. Manslaughter. Eight years. The papers blamed the state for failing her long before the gun went off. Irene walked out of jail years later, damaged and labeled, into a world that had already decided what she was.

The house didn’t kill Fritz Dolph. What happened inside it did.

Jennie Brunner — When Self-Defense Is the Only Exit

Jennie Brunner

Sam Brunner didn’t hide his violence. He bragged about it. He kept guns everywhere. He beat his wife and shot her dog to make a point. On a farm near Mason City in 1941, Jennie Brunner learned threats don’t always stay hypothetical.

The shooting happened in bed. A struggle. A gun that never should’ve been there. Sam was hit twice. Jennie fled, believing she’d be dead by nightfall if she stayed. The sheriff didn’t trust her story. The shell casings didn’t line up. The injury raised questions.

The jury leaned in. Witnesses told them who Sam really was. Jennie described years of terror. The verdict came back fast: not guilty.

The house was dangerous long before the bullet flew. The law just caught up to it.

Raymond Hardy — The Family Left Behind

Raymond Hardy

Three people were beaten to death on the Hardy farm. A mother on the couch. A brother on the kitchen floor. A father in the barn. Raymond Hardy found them and became a suspect before the bodies were cold.

Every detail betrayed him. A bloodstained hat. A revolver in the wrong place. Bloody overalls hidden, moved, missing. His calmness unnerved people. His answers shifted. And yet, nothing held. No weapon. No motive strong enough. No witness.

The coroner’s jury believed him. The sheriff didn’t. Raymond sat in jail while the town decided whether grief could look like guilt. Then he walked free. Married. Had children. Lived out his life.

The murders were never solved. The house kept its secret.

Baby Farms — When Care Became a Cover

West Baby Farm. Des Moines, Iowa

Some homes killed quietly.

Baby farms thrived on desperation. Women paid to make babies disappear. Mrs. Fred West in Des Moines and Martha Place near Mitchellville promised care. What they delivered was neglect, poison, fire, and silence.

Laudanum kept infants quiet. Furnaces erased evidence. Nurses learned not to ask questions—or learned to forget. When one finally spoke, the system collapsed just enough to shut the doors. No convictions. No real justice. Just rumors, fires, and empty houses no one wanted to live in.

These weren’t murders committed in alleys or fields. They happened in cradles, behind curtains, in kitchens that smelled faintly wrong.

Nellie Taylor— When the System Looked Away

Nellie Taylor

Nellie Taylor strangled her newborn in a Des Moines cemetery vault and spoke about it like a chore she regretted but accepted. She said murder was her only option. The city seemed inclined to agree.

Doctors testified she didn’t understand the crime. The jury acquitted her outright. No institution. No supervision. No reckoning. Her lover got six months. The baby got a grave.

The house didn’t fail Nellie. The entire structure around her did.

PART II: THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR

Violence that arrived from the outside.

Not every killer was already inside the house. Some came from the road, the rails, the riverbanks, or the dark spaces between towns. They showed up as workers, drifters, lovers, or men pretending to be something they weren’t. Iowa learned early that isolation cuts both ways. It kept danger out—until it didn’t.

The Villisca Axe Murders — When the Night Walked In

Moore family. Villisca, Iowa

Eight people were murdered with an ax in a locked house in Villisca in 1912, and the killer vanished as if the earth opened and swallowed him. No forced entry. No theft. Curtains drawn. Faces covered. The weapon wiped clean.

The investigation collapsed under its own weight. Neighbors trampled evidence. Bloodhounds lost the trail. Suspects came and went: drifters, a jealous businessman, a mad preacher, a roaming ax murderer who followed the rail lines. Confessions were given  and then withdrawn. Witnesses forgot. Files disappeared.

The Moore house became a symbol of something worse than murder—proof that even a quiet town, doing everything right, could be erased in a single night by someone who didn’t belong there.

The Huber Brothers — Frontier Silence

Dead Body inside Huber cabin

In 1874, Henry and John Huber were beaten to death with an ax in their Carroll County farmhouse. No robbery. No fire. No suspects that stuck. Just blood on the stove and an ax left behind like punctuation.

The inquest produced rumors instead of answers. A wagon seen at dawn. A quarrel over money. A hired man who vanished. Everyone suspected someone. No one testified anything useful. The case quietly dissolved into local legend.

The murders didn’t scar the land so much as teach it something: silence works. The county moved on. The killer was never named.

The West Liberty Tourist Camp — A Man Who Pretended

Gabe Simons

Harland “Gabe” Simons didn’t break into the Fergusons’ tent in 1924. He introduced himself. He smiled and called himself a park ranger.

He guided them to a quiet spot, watched their tent, shared drinks, and waited. When the moment came, he lured Orton Ferguson into the dark and killed him with a pipe for pocket money. Then he came back for Diana.

She escaped. He didn’t.

This time, the stranger didn’t get away. A girlfriend talked. A letter left a trail. Simons confessed, recanted, and was convicted anyway. He went to the gallows insisting he’d rather die than live in prison.

Iowa learned something else that summer: the most dangerous stranger is the one who asks permission first.

Kate Ryan — Bucktown’s Dead End

Kate Ryan

Kate Ryan went into the night with a man who had already promised to kill her. When her body was found in Fairmount Cemetery in 1903—shot between the eyes, strangled, dragged, and discarded—the city pointed to Pete Sardine and stopped asking questions.

Everything fit. The threats. The rented buggy. The jealousy. The disappearance. And yet, no one ever proved he pulled the trigger. The Red-Light District closed ranks. The suspect vanished. The file stayed open forever.

Kate’s murder exposed the limits of justice in places built on tolerated vice. Everyone knew what happened. No one could say it out loud in a way that mattered.

Myrtle Cook — When Enemies Are Everywhere

Myrtle Cook

Myrtle Cook was killed through her own living-room window in Vinton in 1925 while writing a temperance speech. She lived long enough to name a man. Police dismissed it.

Her crusade against bootleggers made her enemies. Her ties to the W.C.T.U. and the Ku Klux Klan made her polarizing. Her estranged husband made her vulnerable to suspicion. Every theory worked until it didn’t.

The investigation went nowhere. The town split along dry and wet lines. The governor promised crackdowns. Myrtle stayed dead. Her killer walked.

Sometimes the stranger isn’t one man—it’s everyone who wanted you gone.

Officer Ollie Thomas — The City Turns on Itself

When Patrolman Ollie Thomas was shot from above near Fourth and Grand in Des Moines in 1925, the city unraveled. Bootleggers. Burglars. Rooftop shooters. Rewards. Raids. Arrests without answers.

Policeman Ollie Thomas

Two years later, a confession closed the case. William Osgood claimed jealousy and fear drove him to kill. The sentence was light. The explanation thinner.

Whether or not the truth came out almost didn’t matter. By then, the city had already learned what it needed to know: violence didn’t always come from outside town. Sometimes it came from the rooftops.

PART III: JUSTICE, IMPERFECT AND IMPATIENT

When the state stepped in—and often got it wrong.

Not every killer vanished. Some were caught, tried, confessed, recanted, hanged, imprisoned, or broken by the process meant to contain them. These cases didn’t offer comfort. They offered something else: proof that justice in Iowa was often rushed, improvised, and shaped as much by fear as by fact.

Edward P. Cochran — Anger with a Gun

Edward P. Cochran

In 1911, Edward Cochran walked into a Davenport barbershop looking for work. He walked out humiliated. Minutes later, he returned with a pistol and shot John Hassman to death over a fence.

There was no mystery here. Witnesses saw it. Cochran admitted it. He said no man could “run over” him. The jury agreed—second-degree murder, thirty-five years.

He didn’t serve them. Cochran died inside Fort Madison four years later after an emergency appendectomy. The punishment ended early. The lesson didn’t.

John Junkins — A Confession Built on Cocaine

When Clara Rosen was beaten to death in Ottumwa in 1909, the town demanded answers. They found John Junkins—a drifting addict with a record and no one willing to protect him.

The investigation blurred into coercion. Pinkertons supplied him with cocaine and whiskey. Interrogations went on for hours. Confessions shifted. Names changed. Stories contradicted themselves.

He was convicted anyway.

On the gallows in 1910, Junkins writhed before going still. Ottumwa called it justice. Whether it was truth never really mattered once the rope

Andrew Thompson — The River Decides

Andrew Thompson in his sleigh

Andrew Thompson murdered his mistress, Maria Haggerty, and her three children in 1868 and trusted the Mississippi to erase the evidence.

It almost worked.

When the river gave the bodies back, the trial followed. Jurisdiction was argued. Motives laid bare. Thompson was convicted and sentenced to hang.

Years later, he confessed—hammer blows, cords, panic, regret. It changed nothing. The river had already spoken. The law only finished the sentence.

Fred Smith — The Man Who Didn’t Finish the Job

Policeman Harry Janssen

In 1911, Fred Smith shot Davenport officer Henry Janssen in the neck during an arrest and ran. Janssen lived—barely.

Smith was caught, confessed, and sentenced to thirty years. Janssen returned to duty, unpaid medical bills and all. The city retired him at half pay. He died still working.

The state punished the criminal. It neglected the victim. That imbalance lingered.

PART IV: THE CASES THAT BROKE THE SYSTEM

When the investigation failed, the story didn’t end—it just leaked.

Some Iowa murders didn’t go cold. They went sideways.

Evidence was mishandled. Bodies were misidentified. Confessions contradicted themselves. Suspects disappeared. Trials ended with verdicts that satisfied paperwork but not logic. These cases didn’t just remain unsolved—they exposed how fragile early justice really was.

What they reveal isn’t a mystery. It’s breakdown.

The Van Winkle Murders — When Everyone “Knew” and Nothing Stuck

Harry Jones

Fairport, 1907. William and Anna Van Winkle were beaten to death in their bedroom with a heavy wooden club. No robbery. No struggle. No defensive wounds. Whoever killed them came prepared and knew exactly what they were doing.

Suspicion landed on Harry Jones—a violent drifter known for threats, drunken rages, and carrying a club the day of the murders. Witnesses placed him heading toward the Van Winkle home that night. The clean socks he’d been given earlier turned up mysteriously in a nearby barn.

The town panicked. Armed patrols walked the streets. Men hunted the woods. Tramps were arrested and released. Jones vanished for over a year.

When they finally caught him in Kansas, he admitted being in the house—but said he left before anything happened. Then, before the trial could begin, he hanged himself in his cell.

Authorities called it a confession. The jury still returned a guilty verdict—after he was already dead.

Fairport was left with two bodies, a corpse in a jail cell, and the uncomfortable truth that the one man they blamed never actually faced judgment.

Angelo Ferrari — Murder in Little Italy

Angelo Ferrari

In 1920s Des Moines, Angelo Ferrari was shot five times in his garage after returning home from cleaning his car. Twelve shell casings. Witnesses saw two men flee. No one talked.

The Black Hand was blamed—an extortion network that thrived on fear and silence. Detectives admitted openly that they knew who was responsible but could do nothing about it.

The suspects smiled, said nothing, and walked free.

Ferrari became another name added to the list the neighborhood already knew by heart. Business resumed. Doors stayed shut. The killers dissolved into the city.

Justice never entered the conversation.

Manuel Rocha — The Murder That Started with the Wrong Body

Harry Carey

Davenport, 1922. An ax murder in a boxcar shack should have been simple.

It wasn’t.

Police identified the victim as Manuel Rocha—until fingerprints proved the body was actually Harry Carey, Margaret Carey’s husband. By then, the real Manuel Rocha had vanished.

Margaret Carey, drugged and hysterical, had told police from the beginning that her husband was dead. They dismissed her. They dismissed everything she said.

By the time they corrected the mistake, the killer had crossed borders and disappeared. Thirty-five years later, the county attorney admitted the case would never close.

One dead man. One vanished suspect. One investigation undone by its own assumptions.

Cyrus Pratt — Poison, Rumors, and a Vanishing Case

Cyrus Pratt

Calhoun County, 1905. Cyrus Pratt died screaming in agony from strychnine and arsenic poisoning. His widow, Jennie, had bought poison days earlier. The hired man had checked Pratt’s finances.

The evidence pointed somewhere—but not clearly enough.

Charges were filed. Newspapers buzzed. Then, quietly, everything collapsed. Prosecutors dropped the case for lack of proof.

Pratt was buried. The official record listed poison as the cause of death. No one was convicted.

In the county’s memory, the case remained exactly where it landed—halfway between scandal and shrug.

EPILOGUE: WHY THE DEAD KEPT GETTING AWAY WITH IT

It’s tempting to read these cases and conclude Iowa was cursed.

Too many axes. Too many poisonings. Too many quiet homes where the danger came from inside the walls. Too many killers who vanished, confessed and recanted, or were never properly tried at all.

But Iowa wasn’t uniquely violent. It was uniquely unprepared.

At the turn of the twentieth century, “police work” wasn’t a profession. It was a job—often part-time, often political, handed to the loudest man in the room or the one who owed the mayor a favor. Most towns didn’t have detectives. They had marshals. Night watchmen. Sheriffs who doubled as tax collectors and jailers.

Training didn’t exist. Forensics barely did. Fingerprinting was experimental. Blood typing was unknown. Ballistics was guesswork. Evidence preservation was a rumor.

Crime scenes weren’t sealed. They were visited. Neighbors walked through them. Journalists picked up objects. Well-meaning townspeople cleaned the blood. Locks of hair were taken as souvenirs. Bedding was cut up. Axes were handled by everyone in the county before anyone thought to write where they’d been found.

By the time investigators arrived, the story had already been ruined.

Confessions filled the gap where science should have been. So did fear.

Police leaned hard on suspects—sometimes literally. Cocaine, alcohol, exhaustion, isolation. Get the story. Any story. Something to hold on to before the town turned on them for not having answers.

Once a name stuck, the system bent around it.

Once a narrative formed, evidence was made to fit. And when the facts didn’t cooperate— witnesses contradicted themselves, or suspects disappeared, juries hesitated.

There was also the matter of who mattered. Women. Children. Immigrants. Sex workers. The poor. The addicted. The unwanted. Their deaths were investigated—but not with the urgency of men with property, influence, or respectable surnames.