Barbershop Shootout In Davenport's West End

John Hassman

Edward P. Cochran walked into John Hassman’s barbershop at 804 West Second Street like a man looking for work.

He walked out like a man looking for blood.

Cochran asked if Hassman needed another barber. Hassman looked him over, laughed, and said he didn’t look like a barber. The insult landed hard. Cochran slapped him across the face—then turned and walked away.

Hassman picked up a rock and hurled it after Cochran as he left.

That was the moment the morning turned deadly.
Cochran went to the Miller Hotel, ate breakfast, then went to his room and took a Savage Automatic pistol from its place. Ten shells. Nine in the magazine, one in the chamber. Loaded to the brim.

When he circled back toward the barbershop, he didn’t go in through the front. He came around the back, stopping near a sagging, four-foot-high board fence that separated him from Hassman’s shop.

He Threatened To Chop His Wife's Head Off Because She Wouldn't Walk The Street

John Lee (aka Albert Kling)

Love doesn’t always make sense. You love someone; they go a little crazy. Threaten to kill you, and then...

This story didn’t end in murder, but—it was touch and go several times.

After her husband threatened to kill her and behead their seven children, Mrs. Kling told authorities it didn’t matter. She loved him “more than life.”

“I love that man better than my own life,” she said. “He is the father of my ten children. I still love him with all his drinking and degrading talk, his efforts to force me to lead a life of shame, and his abuse and neglect. I have loved that man as I never loved another.”

John Lee (aka Albert Kling) 39, worked at Zimmerman Steel on Rockingham Road in Davenport, but he had big plans for freeing himself from the day-to-day drudgery of work.

If his wife would cooperate.

Times were tough. The family had ten children, and Lee didn’t enough money to support them. A day didn’t pass that someone went without food or needing new clothes. Someone always had their hand out asking for more money.

One day, he told his wife there were easier ways to make money. All she had to do was sleep with other men. Pretty soon, they’d have everything they wanted.

Crocker's Iowa Brigade: General Marcellus Monroe Crocker

Marcellus Monroe Crocker

Marcellus Monroe Crocker was living in Des Moines when Fort Sumter fell, practicing law and coughing his way through tuberculosis. He was thin, already sick, and had every excuse to sit the war out. Few would have questioned it. Instead, he went to work.

Within weeks he was moving through central Iowa raising volunteers. The Iowa State Register said he took up the task “without flourish or delay,” traveling town to town despite failing health, speaking plainly about what lay ahead and promising nothing except hard service. Those efforts produced the 13th Iowa Infantry. When the regiment elected its officers, the men chose Crocker as colonel, “because he knew what he was doing and didn’t pretend otherwise.”

The 13th Iowa entered service in the fall of 1861 and headed south almost immediately. Training was brief. Rifles and gear were uneven. Crocker made up for it by drilling the men hard. He pushed order and repetition until movement became instinct. An officer said he “taught us to move as if confusion were a thing we could not afford.”

The lesson paid off at Shiloh. On the morning of April 6, 1862, the 13th Iowa was rushed into line as Confederate forces crashed into Grant’s army. The battlefield dissolved into smoke and noise. Units overlapped. Officers vanished. Orders arrived late or not at all. The Dubuque Herald called it “a fog of powder and panic, where men fought what they could see and guessed at the rest.”

Three Dead Before Dawn: The Hardy Family Murders

The Hardy family

Raymond Hardy was days away from getting married when he walked into his family’s farmhouse and found his life blown apart.

His mother lay dead on the couch. His brother was sprawled on the kitchen floor. Before the night was over, his father would be found beaten to death in the barn. Three people were gone. The house was quiet. Whoever had done it was already gone—or so it seemed.

Raymond called for help, grabbed a shotgun, and searched the house in case the killer was still there. Then he waited.

Within hours, Raymond Hardy became the prime suspect.

The case against him was thin, centered on where he hung his hat, and why there was blood on it. Where a revolver turned up, and how much money he had in his pockets. For Raymond, those details became a matter of life and death. If the county attorney convinced a jury, he would hang.

The Night Clara Rosen Didn't Come Home

Clara Rosen

After supper on February 6, 1909, Clara Rosen left her parents’ home on Plum Street in Ottumwa, Iowa, to walk to her sister’s house on Dare Street, a route she knew well.

She never arrived.

At eight o’clock, her sister called the Rosen home. Clara wasn’t there either. By midnight, neighbors were searching the streets. Hundreds joined in, moving through yards, alleys, and empty lots, calling her name.

Around four in the morning, Clara’s brother Fred Rosen and his friend Otto Johnson found her body in an empty lot near Dare Street. Her skull was crushed. Her body had been dragged and left in the dirt. Officer Frank Williams called undertaker C. T. Sullivan. By daylight, all of Ottumwa knew Clara Rosen was dead.

Clara was twenty-nine. Until recently, she had worked as a bookkeeper. For fifteen years, she was the lead soprano in the Swedish Lutheran Church choir. She was engaged to be married that spring. Newspapers printed her photograph: neat hair, a fashionable hat, a respectable young woman. A victim, a town rallies around.

A Demon In Human Form: The Van Winkle Murders At Fairport

Harry Jones

“Sometime during the night,” reported the Muscatine Journal, “a demon in human form visited the home of Mr. and Mrs. Will Van Winkle.”

By daylight on December 4, 1907, Fairport knew they weren’t exaggerating. William and Anna Van Winkle lay dead on the bedroom floor, beaten until their skulls gave way. Blood soaked the bedding, streaked the walls, and pooled darkly on the floorboards. It wasn’t a clean kill. It was violence that left nothing to misunderstand.

The Van Winkles were young, broke, and new to married life. William, 23, was a section hand for the Rock Island railroad, one of dozens of men who spent their days swinging tools along frozen track. Anna was twenty. They’d been married four months and lived in a drafty little home that barely deserved to be called one. They had no money, no enemies, and no business dying the way they did.

People knew almost immediately who’d done it. Or who they thought had done it.

The 6th Iowa Infantry And The War That Wouldn’t End

The 6th Iowa Infantry found itself stalled in the mud and muck

The 6th Iowa Infantry, organized in the summer of 1861, was drawn largely from Johnson, Linn, Cedar, Scott, and Muscatine counties. The recruits ranged from teenagers to men in their forties, many of whom enlisted alongside relatives or longtime neighbors.

The regiment mustered in at Camp Ellsworth in Keokuk, where weapons and uniforms were scarce to nonexistent. The Keokuk Gate City worried Iowa’s first regiments were being sent forward faster than the state could properly equip and train them.

 

Private Ezra L. Brown of Company D echoed that sentiment in a letter home. “We march and halt,” he said, “until our legs do not care which comes next.” What made it harder was the officers were no help. Many of them were learning their duties alongside the enlisted men.