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.

What Happened to Mrytle Cook: A Vinton Iowa Mystery

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.”

When Hollywood Dreams Turned Dark: Iowa's 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.”

The First Hollywood Heartthrob From Iowa: 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.