Senator Frank Jones Villisca Axe Murder Suspect

 

Ever since the Villisca Axe Murders, there had been rumors that Frank Jones and his son Albert had skin in the game. Some residents traced it back to when Joe Moore left Jones’ implement business and opened his John Deere dealership. Supposedly, there had been hard feelings ever since.

Another story making the rounds was that Joe Moore was sleeping with Albert Jones’ wife. But that allegation held little water; rumors had linked Dona Jones to half the men in Villisca.

Like the case against Mansfield, the charges against Jones went nowhere. Investigators brought in more suspects over the years, but nothing came of it.

William "Blackie" Mansfield Villisca Murder Suspect

In mid-June 1916, newspaper headlines across the state screamed, “Great crime at Villisca now solved.” William Mansfield, an ex-convict and dope fiend, better known in his circle as “Insane Blackie,” was the killer.

The key to the case was the ax murders in Blue Island, Illinois, of Mansfield’s wife, infant daughter, and mother-in-law and father-in-law. Investigators also placed him in Paola, Kansas; Aurora, Illinois, and Villisca, Iowa when those gruesome murders occurred.

Detective J. N. Wilkerson of the Burns Detective Agency ferreted out the link.

Unfortunately, the case fell apart after Mrs. Elmo Thompkins, who claimed to have overheard three men plotting the Villisca murders, failed to identify Mansfield in court.

The prosecution dismissed the case against William Mansfield on July 21, 1916.

Elsie Swender Pushed for the Death Penalty

Elsie Swender

In the fall of 1920-something, when most people did everything short of faking typhoid to avoid jury duty, 24-year-old Elsie Swender marched into the courthouse like it was opening night on Broadway. She told the Register she “wouldn’t have missed jury duty for the world.” Not even for a date, a promotion, or the promise of free chocolates at Younkers.

She got the Joe Williams murder trial—one of the most closely watched cases of the year. It was her first time on a jury, and she took to it with a kind of fervor usually reserved for revival tent preachers and championship wrestling fans. From the moment the jurors filed into the deliberation room, Elsie planted her feet and fired her opening salvo: death penalty.

According to the paper, she wasn’t just in favor of it. She was one of the most aggressive jurors pushing for it. She preached. She argued. She held the floor like she had been waiting her whole life for this exact moment. “Our first vote was for the death penalty,” she told the reporter, half proud, half disappointed. “I sure did a lot of preaching.”

Eight jurors strongly favored first-degree murder. Elsie was among them, doing everything she could to swing the remaining four to her side. She tried logic. She tried emotion. She tried whatever it is a 24-year-old uses when she’s suddenly the most forceful person in a room full of grown adults deciding a man’s fate.

Great Burlington Ice Cream Heist of 1914

Boys stealing tastes of ice cream on the heat-soaked riverfront

The Great Ice Cream Heist of Burlington didn’t look like a crime wave at first. It slid in slow and sticky, the way trouble sneaks into river towns when the heat gets mean and people get stupid. By July 1914, Burlington was staggering through one of those summers when the Mississippi smelled like dead fish and everyone walked around half-dizzy. Tempers thinned. Judgment wilted. That’s when strange things start moving in the dark.

The Burlington Ice Cream Company started losing tubs off their wagons. Not a pint here or there—five-gallon buckets. At first, it looked like sloppy bookkeeping or a hungry stray. Then the numbers piled up. Fifteen gallons went on Tuesday. Thirty on Thursday. By August, someone had hauled off hundreds of gallons. The Burlington Hawk-Eye called the culprits “ice cream fiends,” adding that “whole tubs vanish nightly.” Another line warned that the city was “plagued by a youthful gang whose appetite exceeds their morals.”

The McGreggor Murders--Andrew Thompson

Andrew Thompson dragged Marie Haggerty and her
children across eastern Iowa and Wisconsi for over a week

The river keeps secrets until it’s ready to spit them back.

 For almost six months, the Mississippi held its tongue about what Andrew Thompson did on a frozen December night in 1868. It kept quiet while the ice tightened, the slush thickened, and the current dragged four bodies along its dark ribs. No one in Iowa or Wisconsin knew a thing. Thompson went home, fed his livestock, slept beside his wife, and pretended his hands weren’t stained.

 

Love—or whatever twisted thing he felt—had pushed him there.

 

Maria Haggerty. Thirty-six. Pretty, dark-haired, sharp-eyed. She ran the Bull’s Head Saloon after her husband left for the Union Army. Thompson was a regular. A big, soft-bellied farmer from Monona Township with money in his pockets and hunger under his skin. When Maria poured the whiskey, he fell hard and stupid.

 

People whispered. John Haggerty came home from the war and didn’t even try to fight it. He divorced her, turned the saloon over to her, and headed west.

Boxcar Murder in West Davenport, 1922

Harry Carey (aka Walter Baum)

Manuel Rodriguez didn’t expect anything unusual when he walked into his friend’s boxcar shack on May 4, 1922. He just pushed open the door—and froze. Manuel Rocha was on the floor, head in a pool of dried blood. Three ax blows to the skull. Then the killer flipped the ax and smashed his face in. Rocha hadn’t even gotten off the soapbox he used as a chair.

Police barely had time to process the scene before the rumors started: Rocha had been sleeping with his friend Harry Carey’s wife, Margaret. In that part of Davenport, an affair was a fast way to end up dead.

 

Margaret wasn’t hard to track down. Detectives found her half out of her mind at Evelyn Locke’s brothel on Warren Street—drugged up, covered in blood, and rambling. Locke said she’d shown up around ten the night before, screaming, “The Mexican has killed Harry. My poor Harry. He will never have to go to jail no more.”

Murder At The Handy Grocery Store Davenport Iowa 1913

Floyd Sheets

February 5, 1913. Davenport was half-frozen and half-drunk. Somewhere on Rockingham Road, a boy with a .38 in his pocket decided he’d had enough of being hungry.

The Handy Grocery was open late. Ernest Dalldorf, twenty, and Clyde Jager, seventeen, were closing up when a skinny shape shuffled through the snow and pressed his face to the glass.

 

Dalldorf felt sorry for him, and unlocked the door. “Come on in and warm up.”

 

The boy stepped inside, pulled a gun, and shouted, “Throw up your hands.”

 

That’s how fast life goes sideways.

 

He shoved them against the counter, grabbed what he could from their pockets. Then nodded at the cash register.

 

Dalldorf raised one hand, pretending to open it. He grabbed a bread case with the other and hurled it. The boy panicked. Three shots cracked through the store.

 

Murder on the Brunner Farm Mason City Iowa

Jennie Brunner

The morning of September 30, 1941, started quietly on the Brunner farm, a few miles northwest of Mason City. By noon, Sam Brunner was dead, and his twenty-two-year-old wife, Jennie, was running for her life.

They had known each other eight weeks before marrying. Long enough for a smile and a dance. Not long enough to see the violence underneath. Within two weeks, the fights began—sharp, fast, unpredictable. Once, Sam pressed a gun to his own chest and dared her to watch him pull the trigger.

That morning, they were in bed. Jennie reached over, teasing him, tickling his ribs. He told her to stop. She laughed. Then he reached under his pillow for the pistol he always kept there. “Quit it,” he said, “or I’ll shoot you.”

Rise and Fall of Rock Island Gangster John Looney

John Looney

John Looney ran Rock Island like a man conducting an orchestra of crooks, cops, and terrified politicians who couldn’t tell whether to bribe him, arrest him, or beg for a job. He wasn’t one to hide in the shadows—he built his pulpit and screamed into the microphone. In 1912, the Rock Island Argus said, “Mr. Looney has taken leave of his senses,” but they were wrong. He hadn’t lost them. He’d sold them to the highest bidder.

He was born in 1865 or 1866, the son of Irish immigrants who believed America rewarded hard work. It didn’t. It rewarded nerve, and Looney had a surplus of that. He studied law, passed the bar, and by 1889 was prowling the Rock Island courthouse in a cheap suit that somehow made him look dangerous. People remembered the eyes—too bright, too still. You could tell he was thinking of angles, leverage, a thousand and one ways to make a buck.

The newspapers described him as “ambitious and fearless,” which was code for ruthless. He practiced law for a while, but law was just another racket. He wanted something bigger, something that could make or break reputations. So he created the Rock Island News, a scandal sheet dressed up as journalism. It was a blackmail factory disguised as a printing press. For a fee, your name stayed out of the paper. Refuse, and the next morning your sins were spread across the front page. “The people of this city are being held hostage by a madman with a printing press,” the Argus wrote, and they weren’t wrong.

Mother Place Mitchelville Iowa Baby Farmer

A young woman handing her baby over to Mother Place

Back in 1895, Mother Place was just Mrs. Martha Place, a widow who looked exactly like every widow looked in rural Iowa—gray dress, gray bun, gray outlook on life. She lived on a little patch of land near Mitchellville, and kept to herself, which everyone said was respectable until it suddenly wasn’t.

Her business was simple, if you didn’t think too hard about it. Women from Des Moines or nearby towns would arrive, holding bundles they didn’t want to hold anymore. They’d hand them to Mrs. Place—and she’d take them in exchange for a few crumpled bills and the promise they’d be “well cared for.” Nobody used words like “adoption” or “surrender.” It was more like handing over a problem that couldn’t be fixed.

To the neighbors, it all looked perfectly ordinary. They’d see her hanging laundry, waving from her porch, or tending her garden. Maybe a baby’s cry drifted through the open window now and then, but it wasn’t anything you asked about. In 1895, if someone said they were running a “baby farm,” that was just what it was called. Nobody stopped to ask why it sounded so terrible.

Murder of the Huber Brothers in Carroll County Iowa

The sheriff gave it one more look before removing the bodies

There’s something foul in the soil of Carroll County. You can feel it even now — that twitch behind the eyes of the people who still talk about “the Huber boys.” Two brothers, Henry and John, farmers, hard cases by every account. Dead in their own kitchen in 1874 — skulls split like kindling, blood on the stove door, an axe standing proud in the corner like it had just finished its shift.

 No robbery. No fire. Just two men beaten to a pulp on a weekday morning, and a county that couldn’t decide whether to pray or sharpen its knives.

 

The papers called it “the Carroll County Horror.” What they meant was: somebody ended a family with a tool meant for chopping wood. The sheriff rode out with one deputy, two cigars, and no idea what he was walking into. The neighbors had already turned the place into a sideshow—poking at footprints, whispering about money, jealousy, the usual frontier rot.

Hanging of William Barger Jackson County Iowa

William Barger was hung in June 1857 by a group known as the Iron Hill Vigilance Committee. Barger had killed his wife in 1854 at Bellevue in Jackson County, Iowa. He had accused her of infidelity. She sued for divorce. At the time of her murder, Mrs. Barger lived with a relative in Bellevue. Barger bored a hole in a fence near the house. Then he waited for her to open the door. When she did, he shot her dead.  

He pleaded insanity and was tried for murder twice. The first jury was hung, and the second found him guilty. After that, Barger’s lawyer didn’t think his client could get a fair trial in Bellevue, so he got a change of venue to De Witt in Clinton County for his third trial.  

The Tipton Advertiser justified the hanging, saying, “That the law was sluggish is evidenced in the time Barger has been suffered to lay in the jail at the expense of the county, even when it was judged and positively known that he was guilty.” In effect, they said, if the law doesn’t do it, the people will.

John Looney Rock Island Gangster

John Looney and Lawrence Pedigo
outside of his Rock Island home

Homegrown Rock Island gangster John Looney might have lived in Illinois, but his influence extended into the underworld in Western Illinois and Eastern Iowa. This is a drawing of Looney and Lawrence Pedigo outside the Looney Mansion at 1635 20th  Street in Rock Island, Illinois.

Murder in Davenport's Fairmount Cemetery

Kate Ryan

They found her at dawn in Fairmount Cemetery. A workman on his way to the gate saw a horse first—head down, reins slack. Then a buggy smashed against a tree. Then, farther down a ravine, a woman in black.

She was face-down, her hat in the grass. A hatpin was still in her hand. When the police rolled her over, they found a bullet hole between her eyes.

Her name was Kate Ryan, though in Bucktown she went by Rose Earl. She worked at Babe Foreman’s house, one of the licensed brothels in Davenport’s red-light district.

Since 1893, the city had made vice official business. The police collected monthly fines from the madams, and the girls worked without fear of raids. It was cleaner that way, they said. Predictable. Kate’s boss paid twenty-five dollars for the house license and ten more for each girl. Kate Ryan was legal. Until she wasn’t.

The man everyone blamed was Peter Shardis, known to the streets as Pete Sardine. He was thirty-five, short, with a limp and a bottle habit. He’d come from Greece eight years earlier, drifted between Moline and Davenport, working in foundries until he drank his way out of them.

Edward Bonney Frontier Thief Turned Detective

Edward Bonney at Mother Long's (unfortunately Bonney
never posed for a portrait. This image is from his book.)

Edward Bonney came to Nauvoo in the spring of 1844 with a half-smile and a forged past. He’d been a miller, a hotel keeper, and a counterfeiter. Now he was playing saint among saints. The city was busy building heaven on earth, but under the hymns and handshakes was a different congregation—men who printed money at night and buried bodies by day. Bonney recognized the smell. He’d once reeked of it himself.

 The Hodges were the first cracks in the holy façade. William and Stephen—farm-boy faces, dead eyes. They’d killed a man during a robbery gone wrong, then tried to hide behind the good name of the Saints. Iowa wanted blood. Burlington got it. 

 

The gallows went up behind the courthouse. The crowd pressed close, hungry for justice or entertainment—it was hard to tell. One brother prayed aloud; the other cursed the sheriff. When the trap fell, the sound was short and heavy, like a door slamming on the frontier’s soul. 

She Killed Her Baby And Got Away With It

Nellie Taylor

Des Moines, 1909. Everyone was dying dramatically. Fifteen murders. Twenty-five suicides. Five people flattened by streetcars. Ten by trains. It was like the Grim Reaper had a summer home there.

 And then,  Nellie Taylor came into the mix.

 

She was twenty-three, pretty, well-dressed, and apparently powered by poor decisions and unresolved trauma. Her husband, Glen, got himself killed while working on the railroad. Then she fell for one of his friends, Everett Humble—which is a terrible name for a man who absolutely wasn’t. They planned to get married until she got pregnant and he did what men named Everett Humble apparently do and ghosted her like a coward with a mustache.

 

So, Nellie had a baby. Then she panicked. The children’s homes wouldn’t take it, her parents didn’t know about it, and her mental health was circling the drain. So she decided that murder was her “only course.”

 

She told the police that calmly, like she was reading a weather report. “I undressed it, took the string from its shirt, and tied it tight around its neck.” That’s what she said. Straight face. No tears. No tremble. Just… logistics.

The Bellevue War - Frontier Justice Iowa Style

Remains of William Brown's Bellevue, Iowa hotel in 1903

Bellevue, Iowa, late 1830s: a mosquito-ridden outpost clinging to the muddy edge of the Mississippi River. A place for men on the run. The Burlington Hawkeye called it “a sinkhole drawing the very dregs of depravity into this country,” and they weren’t wrong. Every cutpurse, gambler, and counterfeit artist west of Chicago came drifting in like river fog.

At the center of it all was William Brown. He owned the hotel, which doubled as the gang’s clubhouse, courthouse, and probably its morgue. On the surface, he was pure Iowa hospitality—“a kindly address,” people said, “scrupulously honest in his everyday dealings.” Beneath that, he ran what passed for organized crime in a land still half swamp and half dream.

Brown had tried politics first. He ran for sheriff in ’38 and lost. Ran for the Territorial Legislature in ’40 and lost again—to Thomas Cox, a hard man with a mouth that never stopped talking. Cox called him a crook during the campaign, and Brown never forgot it.

Raymond J. Bischoff The Iowa Ponzi

Raymond J. Bischoff

“Someday, I’ll be a millionaire,” Raymond J. Bischoff told the kids outside Van Buren School, lighting a cigarette like a man with inside information. “I’m not going to work hard for a living.” 

 The others laughed. Of course they did. Nobody from Fifth & Pine Streets becomes a millionaire, not with a father pulling twenty-two cents an hour at the Independent Malting Company, or driving beer trucks through the West End mud.

 

His mother married a blind man after the divorce, which did nothing to raise morale in the Bischoff household. Frank Davis could feel the world but not see it. Maybe that’s where Raymond learned to fake things — to see with words instead of eyes.

 

He started young. A teenage magazine hustler in the Putnam Building, taking orders, cashing checks, then vanishing like a phantom publisher. No magazines ever arrived, of course, but Raymond did. He always came back, a different man each time.

 

In 1917, he was back in Davenport calling himself Sergeant D. C. Breckenridge of Canada’s Princess Patricia Regiment — a fine, heroic-sounding outfit, except for the minor issue that it had been annihilated at Ypres. Only ten men survived, and everyone of them had a better story than Raymond. But that didn’t stop him. He said the Canadians wouldn’t take him because “Bischoff” sounded too German. So he’d done the sensible thing: shed his Teutonic skin and re-emerged as a full-blooded hero. D. C. Breckenridge.