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. 

Iowa: It's Weirder Than You Think

 

People who’ve never been to Iowa think the entire state is just corn, soybeans, and pork tenderloins.

 

That’s because Iowa has spent decades hiding its weirdness from the rest of America like some kind of agricultural cryptid.

 

This is a state where pigs outnumber people, where sliced bread first showed up and people reacted like cavemen discovering fire. Iowa accidentally helped invent the computer. One town became an island because the Mississippi River basically shrugged and said, “Figure it out, nerds.”

 

There’s a crooked street that looks hammered, the world’s largest truck stop, and a literary city filled with writers wearing sweaters in July and pretending their student loans are part of the creative process.

 

Also, Iowa used to belong to France, which feels impossible after you’ve watched somebody eat a pork tenderloin the size of a hubcap while washing it down with ranch dressing and barbecue sauce.

 

The best part is that Iowans barely react to any of this. They might casually say, “Yeah, we got more pigs than people,” before changing the subject to Casey’s breakfast pizza.

 

It’s deeply unsettling behavior.

Two Confessions And No Body in Conway The Murder of Thomas Worm

 

Dorothy Worm and Henry Schmitt standing over the body of Thomas Conway

Thomas Worm, 42, disappeared from his farm near Conway, Iowa, on November 4, 1943. At least that’s how the case started.

 

For over two years, nobody knew what happened to him.

 

Then the story started coming apart.

 

Dorothy Worm said she met Henry Schmitt back in 1938 when he offered her a ride on a saddle horse she “couldn’t quite afford.” Somehow that turned into an affair, and eventually a murder.

 

The Des Moines Register described Dorothy as an “attractive brunette” with a grown son. Henry Schmitt was 63 years old, married, and had four children. Still, he kept showing up at the Worm farm once or twice a week for nearly six years.

 

Schmitt said he wasn’t really in love with Dorothy. He “just loved being with her.”

 

That might have been believable if Thomas Worm hadn’t vanished.

 

Dorothy later claimed she only spent time with Schmitt because he threatened her son’s life. Investigators didn’t completely buy it. They thought Schmitt spoiled her with things her husband couldn’t afford, and Dorothy liked the attention.

John Culver: The Iowa Politician Who Could Never Win Today

The craziest thing about John Culver’s political career might be this — if he ran today, he probably couldn’t win. Not because he wasn’t smart, or wasn’t good at the job. Mostly because he belonged to a different kind of politics that barely exists anymore.

John Culver came from the old political world where a candidate could look like a banker, talk like a college professor, and still end up shaking every hand from Davenport to Sioux City. No screaming. No cowboy act. No cable-news circus. Just a tall guy with a calm voice, a Harvard education, and the patience to stand around Legion halls drinking weak coffee while somebody complained about soybeans for forty straight minutes.

And somehow, people liked him for it.

Culver had one of those faces that looked Midwestern. Big grin. Thinning hair combed carefully into place. Suits that always looked slightly rumpled. A politician who carried folded newspaper clippings in his coat pocket and read briefing papers on airplanes.

He wasn’t flashy enough to become a national celebrity. That probably helped him in Iowa.

Iowa Nearly Destroyed America's First Cross-country Highway

(Denison Review. May 19, 1915)

The first time America built a road across the country, Iowa nearly swallowed it whole.

Cars got buried in mud. Bridges collapsed. Drivers slept beside the road. Men with horses and shovels fought rain, dust, heat, and freezing weather to carve a highway through the middle of Iowa. Some never made it home.

Today, you can fly across Iowa on Interstate 80 without thinking twice. Air conditioning blasting. Cruise control on. Coffee in the cupholder.

The Lincoln Highway opened in 1913. The idea sounded ridiculous at the time — one road running across the country from New York to California. Most Americans had never traveled farther than the next town over. Many Iowa farmers still trusted horses more than automobiles.

When the highway opened, people started talking about driving across the country.

What Every Iowa School Lunch Tasted Like

 

The lunch ladies always knew your name.

The trays were beige.

The milk was ice cold.

Everything smelled faintly like bleach, mashed potatoes, and cafeteria pizza.

If you grew up in Iowa anytime from the 1960s through the 1990s, school lunch wasn’t just food. It was part of childhood. Some meals were incredible. Some were borderline punishments. Most of them tasted exactly the same no matter what town you lived in.

The weird part?

Almost all of us miss it now.

Fur Traders And Their Posts In The Iowa Country After 1824

 

Sac and Fox hunters trapping beaver along an Iowa stream

By the 1820s, the fur trade was everywhere in the Iowa country. Rivers turned into highways. Canoes, keelboats, and trading boats traveled up and down the Mississippi carrying furs, lead, whiskey, blankets, traps, and trade goods.

Money drove everything. Beaver pelts. Otter skins. Deer hides. Muskrat. Lead from the Dubuque mines. Traders hauled it south to St. Louis where fortunes could be made fast. Some men got rich. Plenty more went broke trying.

George Davenport became one of the biggest traders on the Upper Mississippi. He built posts across eastern Iowa and traveled from village to village, buying furs from Native hunters. Russell Farnham worked the same country for John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. By the mid-1820s, Astor’s company took over many of its smaller competitors.

The Sac, Fox, Sioux, Winnebago, and Ioway were the key players in the Iowa country. Hunting grounds mattered. So did old rivalries. When tribes went to war, traders lost money. Camps emptied. Hunting parties disappeared. Rumors could wreck an entire season.