The Bank Robbers Had Guns. Iowa Farmers Had Telephones

 

Abner Hicks (Sioux City Journal. December 30, 1903)

On the morning of December 16, 1903, burglars hit the Citizens’ Savings Bank in Quimby, a small town in Cherokee County in northwest Iowa. They got inside, attacked the safe with explosives and left with thousands of dollars in cash and a stack of notes worth considerably more.

 

It looked like another successful small-town bank job.

 

Fifteen hours later, two of the men were surrounded in the countryside near Sheldon. They had three revolvers, a magazine gun, and hundreds of cartridges. They surrendered without firing a shot. The other two men made it all the way to Kansas City before authorities caught up with them.

 

The four men who eventually went to prison were Charles White, John Wicks, Elmer Dunning, and Abner Hicks. Their mistake wasn’t robbing the bank. It was trying to escape across northwest Iowa in 1903.

 

Bank robberies had become a problem in Iowa. The men who did it were sometimes called yeggmen. They traveled, often by railroad, looking for banks in small towns where police protection was thin and safes could be attacked at night. They didn’t need a teller to cooperate. They needed explosives.

Pat Crowe Spent Five Years Running From The Law, Then Spent The Rest Of His Life Fighting For Prison Reform

 

Pat Crowe at the time of Eddie Cudahy's kidnapping
(The Duluth News Tribune. May 29, 1921)

Pat Crowe spent five years running from the law. Then they caught him.

The strange part came later. A jury let him go; Crowe admitted the crime anyway, and the outlaw who had embarrassed police and Pinkerton detectives started lecturing about prison reform.

He was an unlikely man for the job. By the time Crowe became famous, he’d already robbed, stolen, escaped custody and spent years moving between Iowa, Nebraska and cities farther east. He knew jails, the police, and how much he liked money.

In 1919, Crowe talked about his past with the San Antonio Light. “I had got the habit of easy money,” he said, “and it was easy money I wanted.”

That explained a lot.

Crowe grew up in Iowa and left his parents’ farm near Vail as a teenager. He opened a small butcher shop in Omaha in 1886, but the business failed after running into competition from a Cudahy retail operation.

The Iowa State Bank Robbery At Des Moines (1919)

 

(Des Moines Tribune. March 25, 1919)

For seven weeks, M. R. Pharmer was the victim. Then the police decided he might have helped plan the robbery.

Pharmer was assistant cashier at the Iowa State Bank in downtown Des Moines. On the morning of March 25, 1919, two gunmen talked their way through the bank’s locked door, pulled revolvers and forced Pharmer and two other employees into a back room.

Minutes later, the gunmen were gone with a bag full of cash and bonds.

The Des Moines Tribune put it across the top of the front page:

BANK ROBBERS GET $20,000

Police searched Des Moines and the surrounding countryside, questioned witnesses, checked automobiles, and chased suspects.

Nothing worked.

Three days after the robbery, the chief of detectives admitted he had no fresh evidence. Two men had walked into a downtown bank in broad daylight, taken a small fortune and disappeared.

They Robbed Two Iowa Banks And Escaped - Then They Ran Out Of Gas

 

Jerry Nepovin

At 10:15 on the morning of May 8, 1928, two young men entered the Swisher Trust & Savings Bank. They carried guns but didn’t bother with masks. Both wore overalls and blue denim jackets. They were in their twenties, about five feet eight inches , 150 pounds. One was dark-complexioned, the other light.

The robbers ordered assistant cashier Jerry Bys and customer J. Doskocil to turn around and put up their hands. Then they tied them up.

One robber stayed with Doskocil while the other forced Bys to explain how to open the safe. When it was over, $2,017 was gone.

Outside, two young women were sitting in a parked car. Instead of walking out, the robbers waited inside the bank until the women drove away. Then they emerged, climbed into an old red Marmon, and headed out of Swisher.

It should have been the beginning of their escape. Instead, the car began to fall apart.

The Marmon was an old touring car. A 1921 model with yellow wheels and a broken rear window patched with dark material. Part of the license plate had been painted over. It was about the worst getaway car two bank robbers could have chosen.

And people noticed it.

A farmer north of Swisher saw a car matching the description heading toward Cedar Rapids. Other witnesses saw it too.

The Minister Was A Bank Robber

 

The Get-a-way car. (The Sioux City Journal. October 2, 1929)

On the morning of September 30, 1929, a masked man robbed a bank in Sioux Center, Iowa. A few hours later, he was dying on a farm outside Le Mars with a bullet through his head.

 

The dead man was Rex Frokley, 38, and that’s what made the story strange. He wasn’t a drifter or some hard case passing through northwest Iowa. Frokley was a Le Mars business person, former radio station owner, college football player, husband, and father.

 

He was also an ordained minister.

 

The newspapers went wild with it. One called him a “WEIRD THUG.” Another ran the headline, “ORDAINED MINISTER TURNS BANK ROBBER, SHOOTS SELF WHEN TRACED THRU AUTO.” The Independent Record called him “DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE.”

 

It wasn’t much of a stretch.

 

Frokley had been born and raised near Kearney, Nebraska, and attended Western Union College in Le Mars, where he played football. He was ordained in the Evangelical Church, but had never held a regular pastorate. He filled pulpits while in college and performed a few marriages.

 

Then he went into business.

1932 Robbery Of The City National Bank In Clinton

 

Lobby of the City National Bank shortly after the robbery

Clyde Willard, janitor at the City National Bank in Clinton, showed up for work at around 6:30 on the morning of March 15, 1932. At that hour, he probably expected to have the place to himself.

Instead, he walked into a bank robbery.

Four men had gotten there ahead of him. Clifford Edwards, 22; Earl Jeffries, 28; Lester Stanley, 22; and Eddie Morris, 19, came armed and wearing hoods.

Willard became their first prisoner.

The problem was the vault. It was protected by a time lock and wouldn’t open until 8:30, no matter how many guns they had. That left them with two hours to kill and a bank that would soon start filling with people.

Around 7 a.m., one of the gang took a position near the front door. When an employee walked in, he ordered them to put their hands up, then passed them off to another robber. Their hands were tied, and they were taken to the directors’ room.

A Close Call With An Infernal Machine in Waterloo

 

The infernal machine packed enough power to destroy an entire house

It was a marriage made just south of hell.

Nettie Schwab married Jerome Hoot secretly in Kansas City on January 25, 1899. When she woke up on the second day of her honeymoon, she found him bending over her, holding a handkerchief close to her face. Was it drenched with chloroform? She found a bottle hidden in his belongings the next day. Nettie kept her mouth shut about the incident, but kept a close watch on him afterward.

Another time, Hoot tried to drug her with a tablet, but she spit it out when he wasn’t watching.

The entire time they were in Kansas City, Hoot pestered her to sign her property over to him because he could manage her finances better.

When she didn’t give in, he threw his hands up in the air and suggested a separation. If they couldn’t pull together on something so simple, they might as well go their own way.

Hoot was on the road traveling most of the time they were married, or at least he said he was. Nettie wasn’t sure.

She went home alone after the honeymoon. Hoot came home a few weeks later, and then he was gone again. He came back for one day in March, then he was back on the road.

They met in Dubuque in June and cruised down the Mississippi River on a houseboat. A few hours later, as they were passing through Sabula, Jerome Hoot talked about separating again.

The Highland Park Murders Des Moines Iowa

 

Lena and Thomas Peterson

Thomas Peterson, 13, and his sister, Lena Peterson, 16, were “slaughtered” on Madison Avenue, a half-mile northeast of Highland Park College, on the evening of Sunday, April 13, 1902.

 

The children were on their way home after attending evening services at the First Methodist Church. After leaving the church, they stopped at Watt’s Restaurant, purchased some candy, and continued home. That was at about 9 p.m.

 

Based on the distance they traveled, detectives assumed they reached the scene of the attack at about 9:40 p.m. 

 

Mrs. Edward Dubey lived a quarter of a mile away from the murder scene. She heard screams coming from the road about that time, but did not give it much thought. Her neighbor was a loud, obnoxious drunk, and she assumed he was arriving home after having too much to drink.

 

The attackers could not have picked a better spot for a murder. The children were killed on a lonely, isolated hill, with the nearest house nearly a quarter mile away.

 

Ralph Peck and Naomi Spear rode by the murder scene minutes after it happened.

 

“I heard the Peterson boy cry out,” said Peck, “and saw something at the side of the road. I called ‘Hello,’ and got no response. It was making a noise like a puppy or a child. I thought it was someone hurt, but it occurred to me that someone might be fooling me.”

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?

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.

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.

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.