Mormon Trek Across Iowa

 

The Burlington Hawkeye didn’t have a high opinion of the Mormons. They wrote, “Wherever they go and grow strong, there springs up dissensions and violence between them and other citizens. The crimes charged upon them are without number.”

As examples, they pointed to the Hodges brothers, who were involved in the murders of John Miller and Henry Leisi, and to the murderers of Colonel Davenport who took shelter with the Reddens, who were also Mormons.

 

It is easy to understand why they felt the way they did. The main troublemakers in Lee County, and elsewhere in Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois had up to that time been Mormons. 

 

“The Mormons caused bitter rivalries and discord wherever they went,” observed Jacob Van Der Zee. Before being expelled from Illinois, they were thrown out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri. Their home base in Illinois centered on the temple in Nauvoo and some other property they owned in Keokuk and Montrose in Iowa.

 

Benjamin Gue, in his landmark History of Iowa, said the Mormons had to go because “their religion and peculiar social practices were so obnoxious to their neighbors.” Unlike Jacob Van Der Zee, he didn’t talk about the crimes or depredations committed by the Mormons, but more about their religion and polygamy. That’s what he thought other citizens found peculiar about the Mormons.

Things came to a head after the murder of Joseph Smith. In the late fall of 1845, Brigham Young promised his neighbors that the Mormons would leave Illinois, “so soon as the grass would grow, and the water run.” All he asked in return was that the persecution and house burnings would end.

A Double Murder in Low Moor

 

By the time the sun came up over the Lincoln Highway on November 14, 1922, Homer (47) and Rose Brownfield (38) were dead on the floor of their roadside store and the killer was gone.

 

No witnesses. No arrest. No suspect.

 

Just two bodies beside one of the busiest roads in America and a murderer who vanished into the darkness somewhere west of Low Moor, Iowa.

 

People around Clinton County still talk about it more than a hundred years later. A husband and wife running a little highway store. A cold November night. Then gunshots followed by silence.

 

The Lincoln Highway brought strangers through eastern Iowa at all hours.

 

That was part of the problem.

 

By 1922, it had become one of the busiest roads in the country. Cars rattled through Clinton County day and night carrying salesmen, drifters, farm families, tourists, and men nobody knew anything about. Most just passed through.

 

Some didn’t.

 

Homer and Rose Brownfield ran a little roadside store near Low Moor. It sat out in the open country where the road cut through fields and darkness. Travelers stopped for gas, cigarettes, sandwiches, coffee, or directions before moving on.

 

The Brownfields worked long days.

Who Poisoned Ross Ashbaugh in Maynard Iowa?

By the time they dug Ross Ashbaugh out of the ground for the third time, people around Maynard had stopped asking whether he’d been poisoned.

They were asking who had done it.

The Ashbaugh farm sat outside Maynard, Iowa, surrounded by fields that rolled flat into the summer heat. Neighbors noticed everything. Who came by? Who stayed too long? Which marriages looked strained at church on Sunday morning.

Ross Ashbaugh was 44 and built like a man who’d spent his life outdoors. He farmed, raised livestock, and kept the operation running through the endless cycle of planting, feeding, fixing, and harvesting. He and his wife, Effie, were raising two children, Lucile and Edward. By most accounts, Ross wasn’t flashy or loud. Just another hardworking Iowa farmer trying to get by.

Arthur Cahoe had been around the farm for four years.

He was 38, hired help, and close enough to the family that people didn’t think twice about seeing him there. He worked alongside Ross during the day and spent evenings in the house. Over time, neighbors noticed the way Cahoe and Effie acted around each other.

The Chilling 1972 Mystery of Lynn Schuller and the Alligator Named Pogo

 

Lynn Schuller was a 25-year-old mother living the suburban dream in Cedar Rapids with her husband, Keith, and their three-year-old son, Eric. On the surface, the couple enjoyed a picture-perfect life. They’d tied the knot in 1967 and welcomed their first child in 1969. Life was good, right? But as often happens, appearances can be deceiving.

Keith dropped a bombshell on Lynn in 1971. He wanted a divorce. But Lynn wasn’t ready to give up on her marriage and refused. He kept pushing, but she wouldn’t sign the papers.

Things went sideways. Fast. Lynn wrote a letter to her mother, Eloise Tickner, in 1972, confiding Keith had threatened to kill her. But she quickly dismissed it, saying, “He would never do anything like that.” Was it denial? Or wishful thinking?

Fast forward a few months.

It’s August 6, 1972. Keith told authorities: He woke up early, left the house with their son around 7:30 a.m. to take his son fishing, and let Lynn sleep in. When they returned just after noon, Lynn and her bicycle were gone. No note. No trace—just gone.

Who Remembers Wacky Waters Water Park in Davenport?

 

Wacky Waters was the place where your parents handed you twenty bucks at 10 in the morning and basically said, “Good luck surviving.”

Then they disappeared for six hours.

The park opened in Davenport in 1984, off Interstate 80, and for Quad Cities’ kids it quickly became the greatest place on earth besides maybe Aladdin’s Castle at the mall.

Before Wacky Waters, summer mostly meant sweating in somebody’s backyard kiddie pool while mosquitoes carried off small pets.

Then suddenly there were water slides. Not normal water slides either. These things looked like they’d been designed by a man who hated chiropractors.

The Daredevil and Thunderbolt towers were gigantic. At least they felt gigantic when you were nine and wearing jelly sandals. You’d stand at the bottom staring up while another kid shot out the end like a human missile and skipped across the water face first.

Clifford Samuels 17-Year-Old Des Moines Inventor

 

Clifford Samuels and his machine. (Des Moines Register. November 26, 1911)

Most 17-year-olds in 1911 spent their time thinking about school, baseball, or getting into trouble.

Clifford Samuels of Des Moines spent two years building a wireless telegraph machine.

The whole thing cost him seven bucks.

He became obsessed. His grades started slipping. Friends hardly saw him. Family complained he spent all his time reading, fooling with wires, and staring off into space. Sometimes he got so wrapped up in it that he forgot to eat.

And then he spent a day with a Navy officer learning about wireless communication. When he got home, he started building his own machine.

Then came the big test.

After two years of tinkering, reading, and daydreaming, Clifford fired the machine up.

It worked. On the first try.

Clifford told a reporter for the Des Moines Register that it could send messages up to fifteen miles and pick up signals from as far away as three hundred miles. Not exactly small-time stuff for a high school kid in 1911.

Murder of Marlene "Mickey" Padfield Lisbon Iowa 1959

 

When Marlene “Mickey” Padfield, 17, of Lisbon, Iowa, disappeared on February 18, 1959, it was assumed she’d run away. There was a small notice in The Cedar Rapids Gazette the next day, then nothing for nearly two months. But that all changed on April 29 when the skeleton of a young woman was found on a section of timberland near Roy White’s farm.

White said his dogs walked up to him carrying what looked like bones. When he checked, it was a human hand. He did a little digging and found a skeleton lying on a nearby road. Apparently, the dogs dragged it out of the timber.

Ethel Padfield, Marlene’s mother, identified the remains by the blouse she was wearing and the color of her fingernail polish. More of Marlene’s clothes turned up in May—her purse, a shoe, and her underwear, but none of them helped detectives piece together what happened to her. Her skirt turned up the following February, and pieces of her slip after that.

A pathologist examined the remains but couldn’t determine the cause of death because there wasn’t enough soft tissue left to test. The skeleton didn’t provide any clues—there weren’t any broken bones or other clues to show foul play.

Detectives spent the next few weeks piecing together the girl’s life and last days.

Marlene was described as an attractive, brown-haired girl who tried a little too hard to be popular during her junior year. She had short hair above the ears, with curls up front—stood 5 foot four, weighed 112 pounds, was smart, aggressively friendly, and wanted everyone to like her.

She joined the band and acted in the school play, “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.” And then, six weeks into her senior year, Marlene decided it was too much. School bored her, and she wasn’t learning anything worthwhile, so she dropped out and ran through a string of low-wage jobs, earning $28 to $32 a week. She worked as a waitress at several restaurants, clerked at Mongomery Ward, then got a job as a bookkeeper at J & T Radio and Television Repair.

Ethel Padfield dropped Marlene off at J & T Radio and Television Repair in Cedar Rapids on February 18. She talked to her daughter on the phone several times during the day, and said her daughter planned to take the bus home.