Margaret Hassock: She Got Away With Murder

Margaret Hossack
(Des Moines Register. February 17, 1903)

It always starts with a thought you’re not supposed to say out loud. Something primitive. Something sharp and heavy. Something with a handle.

What woman hasn’t pictured it? The ax. The swing. The sudden silence. Society pretends this thought doesn’t exist, but it does. It lives in kitchens and bedrooms and long marriages that curdle into private wars. Margaret Hossack didn’t invent the thought. She just refused to pretend it wasn’t there.

She talked about killing her husband the way other people talked about the weather.

John Hossack had been married to Margaret for thirty-one years. He’d become a domestic dictator—an aging tyrant stomping around a farmhouse in Iowa, barking orders, threatening his children, ruling through fear. Neighbors said he was one man in public and another in private, which is a polite Midwestern way of saying he was a bastard behind closed doors.

Margaret told anyone who would listen that she hated him. Wanted him dead. Wanted God to take him away if no one else would step up.

An Unlikely Suspect in the Villisca Axe Murders

Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly

Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly was an unlikely suspect in the Villisca Axe Murders. He was often described as a queer, strange, little man—standing only five foot two and weighing 120 pounds. An article in Smithsonian Magazine said he was well known as a sexual pervert. Just days before the murders, he was observed peeping into windows in Villisca.

Detectives arrested Kelly in 1917 and charged him with the killings, and for a while, it seemed they had the case wrapped up.

Kelly made a written confession. He said he saw a shadow by the Moore house while he was out walking. “Something prompted him to follow it. He saw an ax. He picked it up. Then came a voice saying: ‘Go in. Slay utterly.’”

He crept up the stairs and into the children’s bedroom. The voice came back. “Slay utterly. Suffer little children to come unto me.” He replied, “Yes, Lord, they’re coming quick.” Chop—went the ax.

Krampus: The Christmas Monster Iowa Didn't Want

Krampus approaching a small Mississippi River town

Krampus had a very clear role in the old world, and it wasn’t subtle.

In the Alpine parts of Europe—Austria, Bavaria, and a few neighboring regions—Christmas came with rules. Saint Nicholas rewarded good kids. Krampus handled the rest. He was hairy, horned, loud, and carried chains and sticks because apparently subtle parenting hadn’t been invented yet. If children behaved, great. If not, there was a half-goat demon lurking nearby to remind them consequences were real.

Krampusnacht wasn’t a cozy night with cocoa. It was grown men in terrifying masks running through the streets, clanging chains, and scaring everyone within range. Kids were meant to be afraid. Adults were meant to remember that winter was dangerous, life was fragile, and order mattered. It made sense in mountain villages, where darkness came early and folklore was taken seriously.

Then Christmas crossed the ocean.

James Wilson: The Iowan Who Made Farming Make Sense

James Wilson

James Wilson didn’t stumble into power. He plowed his way there, boots dirty, hands calloused, brain always chewing on the next problem. Born in Scotland and dragged to America as a boy, he grew up learning that the land didn’t care about your intentions. Crops failed. Weather lied. Hard work sometimes wasn’t enough. That lesson stayed with him longer than any sermon.

He became the longest-serving Secretary of Agriculture in American history—sixteen years, three presidents, no theatrics. McKinley picked him. Roosevelt kept him. Taft trusted him. While others came to Washington to make noise, Wilson came to fix systems. He turned farming into science, dragged food safety into the daylight, and built the Department of Agriculture into something that actually mattered.

Wilson believed farmers deserved facts, not fairy tales, and that belief reshaped American agriculture whether anyone noticed.

The story starts before Washington ever smelled him coming.

A Speaker Without Swagger: The Iowa Politician Who Didn't Need It

David Bremmer Henderson

David Bremner Henderson was born in Scotland in 1840, brought to America as a boy, and raised in the Midwest, where reliability mattered more than ambition. That background stayed with him, even after he reached the highest levels of power.

When the Civil War broke out, Henderson joined the Union Army. He expected the war to be short. Most people did. It wasn’t. He was shot in the neck. Later he was shot again, this time in the leg. Part of that leg was taken off, and he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Years later, he summed up the experience with characteristic restraint. “War is not a parade.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.

After the war, he went back to Iowa. He became a lawyer, married, and stayed involved in his community. He didn’t trade on his injuries or his service. He believed that surviving carried responsibilities, not privileges.

Politics eventually found him anyway.

Henderson entered Congress in the early 1880s and stayed there for twenty years, representing Iowa’s 3rd District. Washington was loud and combative in those days, but Henderson wasn’t interested in volume. He listened more than he talked. A colleague said he had  “the manner of a man who had already seen the worst that could happen.”

Book Review: Whatever It Took by Henry Langrehr

Henry Langrehr came from Clinton, Iowa. A river town. Factories, cold winters, work that didn’t ask how you felt. That kind of place teaches you to endure before it teaches you to dream. 

On June 6, 1944, he jumped into France with the 82nd Airborne. The sky over Normandy was shredded with anti-aircraft fire. Men were hit in the air. Some never reached the ground. Langrehr crashed through the glass roof of a greenhouse in Sainte-Mère-Église and kept moving because stopping meant dying.

 

The drop was chaos. Units were scattered. Orders didn’t exist. The survivors fought German tanks with rifles and nerve. Most of the men he trained with were gone within days. On June 29, he was captured.

 

From there, the war showed its real face.

 

Langrehr was held near a death camp and saw what the Nazis called efficiency. People marched to their deaths. Bodies stacked like lumber. It wasn’t rumor or ideology. It was machinery. He watched because he had no choice.

Bringing Christmas Home: How Evergreen Trees Came to Iowa

Christmas trees weren’t a big deal on the Iowa frontier. Not at first, anyway.

For many early settlers, Christmas was quiet. Sometimes it meant church. Sometimes, nothing at all. Winter was hard. Money was tight. There was wood to cut, animals to feed, and snow to shovel. Decorating a tree wasn’t high on the list.

 

The truth was, a lot of early Iowans didn’t know what a Christmas tree was. One widely reprinted explanation in American newspapers during the 1850s tried to spell it out plainly, calling it “a German custom, recently introduced into this country, and designed chiefly for the delight of children.”

 

The idea came west with German immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s, in places like Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington. Back home, they’d grown up with evergreen trees brought indoors and lit with candles. When they did the same thing in Iowa, their neighbors didn’t know what to think.