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.

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?

One Kiss Under These Wings And You're Done

 

The Black Angel rises out of Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City—ten feet tall, solid bronze, dark as a storm rolling in. Her wings are raised, her head tipped downward, like she’s watching something you can’t see. Or waiting for it.

People will tell you all kinds of things about her. She moves. Cries at midnight. If you kiss under her wings, you’ll be dead within a year.

It might be nonsense. Maybe not. Either way, nobody walks up to her like she’s just another statue.

People don’t understand that she didn’t start out that way.

When the statue went up in 1913, it was bright bronze. It was commissioned by Teresa Feldevert after the deaths of her son and husband. She wanted something permanent that would hold their memory in place.

A Job Offer Turned Deadly: The 1860 Iowa City Murder Case

 

Jerry Boyd and his wife were offered a good paying job in Iowa City

How does that old saying go? If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Jerry Boyd learned that lesson the hard way back in 1860. Boyd, a free man of color, and his wife, Mary, lived in Galena, Illinois. From all accounts, Jerry was a hardworking man. Twenty years before that, he saved his money and purchased Mary from her previous owner, a man named Vandeventer in St. Louis.

 

Two men, George Goodwin (also known as Wilder) and Peter Boulton offered them good paying jobs if they would move to Iowa City.

 

A few days later, Jerry and Mary Boyd, a fourteen-year-old mulatto girl who lived with them, a younger white girl whom Mrs. Boyd was nursing, and Goodwin and Boulton were headed west in a covered wagon.

City Hall in Iowa City (circa 1900-1905)

 

City Hall building in Iowa City, Iowa (circa 1900-1905)

Before Hollywood Had Rules: Iowa Actress Rita Bell's Wild Moment in Film

Rita Bell was born Marguerite Hughes Bell in 1893, back when the Midwest still believed it could raise children who would never leave. Iowa City was orderly and calm, a place that expected people to fit. Bell didn’t.

She sang her first part in an amateur performance in Iowa City while she was still a little girl, dressed in pinafores and wearing pigtails, standing on a small local stage and learning what it felt like to be seen.

 

She changed her name to Rita Bell because the old name belonged to classrooms and expectations. The new one fit on a program and was easy to remember.

 

This wasn’t a movie story. Despite later guesswork, Rita Bell never worked in silent films. Her career lived where voices mattered and mistakes were public—stages and music halls, where you either held the room or you didn’t.

 

By the early 1920s, she was working professionally. In 1922, she played the ingenue role in The Spice of Life, produced by John Murray Anderson. The role demanded charm without softness and confidence without arrogance.

New Heating Plant at University of Iowa

(From the Des Moines Register. November 6, 1927)

The Des Moines Register published a photograph of the new heating plant under construction at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. The project was expected to be completed by the spring of 1928.

The plant was designed by Proudfoot, Rawson & Souers, with Professor B. P. Fleming serving as consulting engineer. The total projected cost was $500,000.

The Union Brewery and Iowa City Beer

Workers outside a brewery in the 1860s

The Union Brewery in Iowa City felt like a place that survived on nerve alone. Built in 1856 by Simeon Hotz, a shoemaker turned brewer, it grew into a brick stronghold at Linn and Market, a place the Iowa State Register said operated with “a confidence that must be admired, considering the temperance sentiment now fashionable in the Capitol.”

The brewery didn’t just sell beer — it sold identity. Hotz and Anton Geiger were German immigrants who brought their lager brewing with them, and Iowa City drank it up like a man who’d been wandering the prairie too long.

 

By 1868 they expanded into the big building — three stories, beer cellars underneath, steam heat, the whole industrial symphony. Locals wandered in and out of the taproom, leaving footprints in the sawdust and carrying home gossip hotter than the kettles.

Washington Street Iowa City, Iowa. Circa 1910

 

Washington Street in Iowa City, Iowa. (from a vintage postcard, circa 1910)