Death of Cary Grant at St. Luke's Hospital Bettendorf

Cary Grant didn’t plan on dying in Iowa. Nobody does. Iowa isn’t a death state, not like Arizona with its heat or New York with its taxis. Iowa is a place for corn, river towns, and people who will tell you directions by pointing with two fingers and a soft “you bet.” Still, that’s where Cary Grant’s story stopped—Davenport, of all places—on a chilly Saturday night in 1986.

 

He’d come for a show at the Adler Theatre. Not a movie—but a conversation. Just Cary Grant on a stage, answering questions, smiling, telling stories about being Cary Grant. People in Davenport bought tickets faster than you’d expect for a Hollywood relic. The Quad-City Times noted, “The Adler has never hosted a presence quite like this one.”

 

He checked into the President Riverboat Hotel, and walked through the lobby greeting people with that soft British-American hybrid voice of his. A desk clerk later told a reporter, “He was polite. Quiet. The sort of man you hope you’ll meet again when you look better.”

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.

Abraham Lincoln, Grenville M. Dodge & the Transpacific Railroad

Abraham Lincoln arrived in Council Bluffs on August 13, 1859, looking less like a future president and more like what he was — a traveling lawyer with a worn suit, a dusty hat, and long legs that seemed to fold awkwardly off the steamboat. He came west partly to see the Missouri River country for himself, and partly to learn more about the growing railroad interests pushing toward the Pacific.

On this visit, he met Grenville M. Dodge, a young civil engineer whose surveys of the region were already respected. Dodge later recalled that Lincoln approached him with a direct question that bypassed all small talk:

“I am informed you are a railroad engineer, and that you have made surveys.”

Lincoln wanted just one thing: an honest engineering assessment of where a transcontinental line ought to begin. Dodge told him that the most practical starting point on the Missouri River was Council Bluffs, citing the favorable grades leading west through the Platte Valley. Dodge recalled Lincoln listened with intense focus, asking what he later described as “a series of minute questions” about routes, elevations, and obstacles.

A Ghost Tale of Clinton Iowa

This one is just for fun. There’s not a hint of truth in it, is there?

 

Folks in Clinton don’t talk much about Silas Burdett. Not when the sun’s up, anyway. In daylight he’s a joke you toss around over burgers at Hook’s or while waiting on a latte at 392. A story. A shrug.

 

But when the Mississippi fog slides in after dark, people stop joking. Conversations dry up. Eyes slide toward the windows. And if you listen, if you really listen, you’d swear you hear crackling wood. Burning. Smoldering. Old smoke that isn’t there.

 

Silas Burdett. Yeah. Him.

 

The lumber baron who ran Clinton back when sawdust blew through town like blizzards and the mills never slept. He had a voice like grinding timber and a jaw cut from white oak. Folks say he didn’t walk so much as shove the ground out of his way. His mill squatted on the riverfront where the LumberKings ballpark stands now—back before baseball, before bleachers, before anything except heat, noise, and fear.

Murder of Mrytle Cooke in Vinton Iowa 1925

Myrtle Cook

Myrtle Cook’s murder had everything police hate—politics, booze, the Klan, and an estranged husband whose alibi kept springing leaks. On September 7, 1925, someone walked up to the living-room window of her Vinton, Iowa home at 703 Third Avenue, confirmed she was sitting at her desk writing a speech for the next day’s W.C.T.U. meeting, and put a bullet straight through her heart.

She stayed alive long enough to whisper a name to her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Cook—a name the town didn’t expect. A man the local police practically trusted with the keys to the city. Detectives didn’t buy it. They chalked it up to shock, pain, and wishful thinking.

Her husband, Clifford B. Cook, wasn’t so dismissive. He said the family reenacted the shooting angle. If Myrtle saw the shooter, she could have identified him. That made everything messier.

Investigators first chased the obvious suspects: rumrunners. Myrtle was one of the loudest prohibition activists in Iowa. She harassed mayors, sheriffs, and state officials. She wrote down license plates and took notes on her neighbors. She treated Prohibition like a personal crusade and made enemies the way some people collect stamps.

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.”

Actress Peg Entwhistle

Peg Entwistle came to New York chasing light. “I would rather play roles that carry conviction,” she said, “because they’re the easiest—and the hardest—for me to do.” She was seventeen when she first hit the stage in The Wild Duck. A young Bette Davis saw her that night and told a friend, “I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle.”

Broadway came quick. Critics called her “a striking young actress with the timing of a veteran.” One paper said, “Peg Entwistle gave a performance considerably better than the play warranted.” 

 

She joined the Theatre Guild and worked the boards with the best. “To play any emotional scene,” she said, “I must work up to a certain pitch. If I reach that in my first word, the rest takes care of itself.”

 

Hollywood came calling next. 1932. The sign still said HOLLYWOODLAND. Peg moved west, signed a contract with RKO, and landed her first film—Thirteen Women. “I’m going to live in that sign,” she told a friend. “I’m going to make them see me.”

Actor Tom Moore

Tom Moore hit New York young, broke, and charming—one of those Irish kids who could sell a story before he even knew how it ended. By 1908, he was in movies, when “movies” meant cardboard sets, frantic gestures, and piano music doing the heavy lifting. He wasn’t born to be a star, but he worked like one.

 In the 1910s, Moore’s face was everywhere—square jaw, slick hair, eyes that carried just enough trouble to keep audiences guessing. One paper called him “a man built for the camera—clean, capable, and just dangerous enough.” Reviewers said he had “the kind of presence that made women lean forward and men sit up straighter.” He wasn’t a great actor, but he was steady. That counted in a business where half the names disappeared before the reel ended.

 

He married actress Alice Joyce, one of the silent era’s brightest lights. Together, they were Hollywood royalty for a few years. “They don’t make noise,” one gossip columnist wrote, “they make movies.” Moore starred in dozens—The Great Accident, Heart of Humanity, The Masquerader—films that made people believe the new art form might actually stick around.

George Wallace Jones Dubuque Iowa Miner Politician

George Wallace Jones was born in 1804, when the world was still figuring out what it wanted to be. He came to Dubuque when it was more mud than map. Men swung picks for lead and prayed they didn’t find bullets instead. The Sauk and Fox still owned the mines. Half the town dug for fortune, the other half dug graves. Jones tried both.He had an easy smile and a fast tongue, the kind that made people forget how dangerous he was. He could sell sand to a riverboat man and have him thank him for it. When the miners started coughing up their lungs, Jones bought their land. That’s how he got rich.

Politics was just another kind of digging. He went from miner to delegate to senator without breaking stride. Washington liked him for a while. He wore good clothes, told good stories, and didn’t scare the ladies. Then the country split in two, and Jones picked the wrong half.

He said it was about “states’ rights.” Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. The war came. His friends wrote from the Confederacy, and he wrote back. The government called it treason and locked him up. He said it was a mistake. Maybe it was.

When he came home, Dubuque had grown up without him. The saloons were quieter, the streets cleaner. He was still loud and proud, walking around like he expected a parade. No one threw one. People nodded when he passed, then went back to their business.

William B. Allison Iowa Senator

William B. Allison worked the Senate like a quiet machine, oiling the gears while everyone else tried to blow it up. “When he rises in his place,” one reporter wrote, “he leaves all that shouting to the youngsters.” They called him “the Old Fox,” and it fit. He never rushed, never panicked, just waited for everyone else to wear themselves out.

He ran the nation’s money like a farmer minding his crops—steady, patient, and suspicious of fast talkers. One colleague said, “No man who has ever been in the Senate knew so much about it as he does.” Allison didn’t argue. He didn’t have to. He knew where the deals were buried, and most of the bodies too.

Presidents came and went—Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt—Allison just kept showing up, same seat, same half smile that said he’d already counted the votes.

When asked how he lasted so long, he shrugged. “You do what you can,” he said, “and you let the noise take care of itself.”

By the time he died, Washington barely looked up. The loud ones had taken over. Still, every bridge, fort, and railroad budget had his fingerprints on it. William B. Allison didn’t shout or grandstand. He built the country, one quiet deal at a time.