Researching unsolved homicides is a cheerless process by definition. As I pore over Iowa cases going back as far as 1893, what is even more saddening is the sameness amongst victims, killers, and motives.
Greed, jealousy, alcohol, love triangles, fratricide, anger, lust, and insanity wove through the dismal fabric of murder 120 years ago as they still do today.
And yet much has changed. Most obvious is how we get our information. As we receive minute-by-minute breaking news on our cell phones and laptops, it’s difficult to recall that large-city newspapers once printed several daily editions that readers eagerly waited for.
And other things are different as well.
Discreet exterior photos of murder scenes have replaced graphic interior pictures showing blood stains and chalk outlines of bodies and, even sometimes, shroud-draped victims.
Words like “berserk,” “bloody-thirsty,” “Negro,” and “gory” no longer shout from headlines to incense the public and, in some cases, incite lynching attempts.
Nor is the word “divorcee” used in accounts of crimes against women who had once been married, as though that fact were somehow relevant to the crime, even when it was known not to be.
Dorothy Coon was murdered in late August of 1960
“Clues Scarce in Slaying of D.M. Divorcee.”
That was the headline in the Cedar Rapids Gazette above the story reporting 36-year-old Des Moines resident Dorothy Coon’s 1960 murder. And every other newspaper covering the homicide mentioned she was divorced.
In the fifty years since Dorothy’s murder, divorce is no longer regarded as a social stigma or an index to character.
But in 1960, the media felt it was permissible to use a word which then was weighted with the suggestion of misconduct on the victim’s part, seeming to imply she deserved to be murdered or had brought it own herself.
The facts of her death are stark.
On Thursday evening, August 27, 1960, Dorothy Coon waited until her teenage children Nancy, 19, and Dennis, 17, were asleep.
The house at 2017 61st Street in Des Moines where Dorothy Coon was raising her children (photo courtesy of Google Street View)
She put on a dark green dress and white shoes and left the house she shared with them at 2017 61st Street.
Dorothy disappeared around midnight. Heavy rains during the next few days seemed to wash away all traces of her.
On Monday, August 29, a farmer mowing weeds found her body in a county road ditch 12 miles north of Chariton in Lucas County — 47 miles from her home. Her purse was discarded along the road a mile from her body.
An autopsy showed Dorothy was dead for several days, and throat bruises and broken neck bones suggested strangulation.
As with contemporary homicides, authorities had to rule out spousal involvement. Dorothy’s ex-husband Richard, whom she divorced in 1950 and who was living in Albia and running a business there, was interviewed and proved to have an alibi for the time of Dorothy’s death.
Dorothy held a job in the business office of a Des Moines department store and raised her two children on her own.
Instead of the headline she was afforded in 1960, today we might read: “Hard-working Single Mom Murdered.”
As times passes, news communication modes and language are modified.
Unfortunately, the gloomy facts of murder seem never to change.
Julie Bell Davis
As part of the ongoing “Cold Case Thursdays” series, WHO-TV Channel 13′s Aaron Brilbeck will report tonight on the unsolved August 1997 Julie Bell Davis slaying.
Davis, a 33-year-old Marion, Iowa, mother of two, was found August 28, 1997, in the Skyline Display’s satellite office in east downtown Des Moines where she worked. Her throat had been slashed and she had been stabbed multiple times in the chest.
Brilbeck’s story includes an interview with former Des Moines Police Department detective Craig Hamilton, one of the lead detectives who worked Davis’ case. Hamilton retired from the DMPD in 2007.
At the time of her death, Davis had just posted one of her best months ever in selling trade-show displays through her company’s Cedar Rapids and Des Moines offices. The office where she was slain was in a new business park between the state Department of Economic Development and the Botanical Center.
Police believe the last contact Davis had with anyone was an afternoon telephone conversation with an employee of Skyline Display’s Cedar Rapids office, 419 First St. SE. Davis routinely traveled to Des Moines once or twice a week to conduct business at the showroom, though the office was open only a couple days a week and by appointment only.
A Prairie High School graduate, Julie Bell Davis was married to Frank Davis, a Cedar Rapids firefighter. The couple had two sons, ages 3 and 5. Davis’ husband was ruled out as a suspect early in the investigation.
The case remains open today.
If you have any information regarding this case please call the Des Moines Police Department at 515-283-4800.
Bipolar disorder is a frightening condition for its victims and the people who care about them. Medications help tremendously, but there is always the chance that patients will stop taking them.
Christopher Lee Stewart was last seen August 14, 2003 in Des Moines
That’s what happened to 36-year-old Christopher Lee Stewart before he disappeared; and without them, he is mentally and physically endangered.
Christopher was last seen outside his apartment in the 600 block of 18th Street in Des Moines at 10:30 p.m. August 17, 2003.
Stewart, whose friends called him “Chris” and “Christo,” is 5-foot-9 and weighs 189. He has brown eyes and hair (although his head was shaved when he disappeared), has pierced ears, and wears glasses. He was born November 13, 1966.
If you have any information that can bring Christopher Lee Stewart home, please contact the Des Moines Police Department at 515-283-4800 or 515-283-4864 or the Iowa DPS Missing Person Information Clearinghouse.
As today comes to an end, the families of three more Iowa victims go to bed knowing yet another year has passed without answers or justice for their loved one’s lost life.
Dennis Clougherty, a 23-year-old Vietnam vet and soon-to-be graduate student, was shot five times while hitchhiking through Iowa.
Twenty-three-year-old Dennis Clougherty was a Vietnam vet preparing to start graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Eugene Martin, only 13, just wanted to make some extra money to attend the Iowa State Fair. And Helen Morrow, 55, surely could not have imagined her fate when she’d employed a younger man to work for her.
Around 4 p.m. on Monday afternoon, August 12, 1974, Dennis Clougherty left Madison, Wisconsin, with plans to hitchhike to Torrington, Wyoming, to retrieve his motorcycle. The bike had broken down in Torrington earlier that year and he’d had to leave it behind for repairs.
The 905-mile route between the two cities — a 15-hour trip on Interstate 80 — would be the fastest, but Clougherty chose the familiar Highway 20, perhaps in the hopes of catching a ride with someone he knew. From Torrington, Clougherty planned to ride the bike to Detroit, Michigan, where he’d attend a weekend family wedding.
This map shows the I-80 route from Madison, WI, to Torrington, WY. Clougherty was found in Cedar Falls north of Waterloo near the map’s purple star.
Clougherty never made it to the wedding, or to Torrington, or even past the first day of his trip; sometime between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and midnight, he was shot five times in the chest and left along Union Road south of First Street in Cedar Falls, Iowa. A passing motorist discovered his body the following morning. Some of his personal belongs, including a backpack, a clothes bag and Clougherty’s motorcycle helmet, were located approximately five miles south on Viking Road.
An investigation confirmed a motorist picked him up about 7 p.m. Monday while traveling westbound on Highway 20 near Dubuque, and gave him a ride to Independence, IA, dropping Clougherty off at a café there around 8:15 p.m. Clougherty ate at the then-Rush Park Café and left Independence around 9:15 p.m., hitchhiking westbound on Highway 20. Another motorist picked him up and drove him to Waterloo, dropping him off at the Highway 20 and Highway 63 intersection.
Here, two male subjects in their early 20s, driving a brownish/gold 1962-1964 Chevrolet car — possibly a four-door with beige interior — pick up Clougherty around 10:30 p.m. The young military vet and soon-to-be graduate student was never seen alive again.
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Eugene Martin disappeared while delivering newspapers for the Des Moines Register.
Ten years later to the day, young Eugene Martin got an early start at 5 a.m. to deliver the Des Moines Register newspaper on his regular paper route. His older brother normally accompanied him, but on this day Eugene went alone; the Iowa State Fair was in town, and he was anxious to earn some extra money to spend at the fair.
Sometime between 5 and 5:45 a.m., residents living near Southwest 12th Street and Highview Drive observed Gene speaking to a clean-cut white male in his 30s. The teen folded papers as he spoke to the man, and the witnesses said the conversation appeared friendly — almost like a “father-son” sort of conversation.
Less than an hour later, sometime between 6:10 and 6:15, the boy’s newspaper bag was found on the ground outside Des Moines — 10 folded papers still inside.
Authorities issued a nationwide bulletin for a man described as between 30 and 40 years old, 5 feet, 9 inches tall, clean shaven and with a medium build. Federal agents wondered if Eugene’s disappearance might be connected to that of missing Register paperboy Johnny Gosch, 12, who’d gone missing two years earlier on September 5, 1982.
Eugene Martin’s aunt, Jeannie McDowell, told WHO-TV’s Aaron Brilbeck in a July 2010 Iowa Cold Cases segment she believes her dying brother, Don Martin, needs some type of closure in his son’s disappearance before he can let himself go. The elder Martin once read and clipped from daily papers every article or reference he could find about Eugene. Courtesy photo WHO-TV
Many Iowans believed both boys had been kidnapped and sold into a pedophile sex ring, though nothing has been proven in either case.
Eugene Martin’s aunt, Jeannie McDowell, spoke with WHO-TV Channel 13′s Aaron Brilbeck in July for an update on his case, and said she fears her brother — Eugene’s father Don Martin, who is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and cancer — is hanging on until he gets some kind of closure in his son’s death. Gene’s mother, Janice, died recently from diabetes without ever knowing what happened to her child.
The Martin family — like Johnny Gosch’s mother Noreen — continue to wait with hope for the one strong lead that might break open and provide long-awaited answers and justice.
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In Eldon, Iowa, witnesses saw Herman Pierce, 48, leave the home of Mrs. Helen Morrow, 55 — for whom Pierce worked — the evening of August 12, 1980. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until flames began to shoot from the two-story frame home moments after Pierce left.
Authorities found Mrs. Morrow lying on a bed in a first-floor bedroom, and an autopsy report concluded she died of smoke inhalation.
Police held Pierce in jail on an intoxication charge, and on August 26 county prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder in Morrow’s death. Despite the filed charges, the prosecutors decided to take the case to the grand jury. It was a move they later would regret.
On Friday, October 3, 1980, a four-man, three-woman Wapello County Grand Jury failed to return an indictment against Pierce. Helen Morrow’s case remains unsolved.
If you have any information regarding Helen Morrow’s murder, please contact the Wapello County Sheriff at (641) 684-4350.
Tips on the Eugene Martin case may be submitted to the Iowa Cold Case Unit online or you may call the Iowa DCI at (515) 725-6010.
Information involving Dennis Clougherty’s murder may also be submitted online to the DCI’s Cold Case Unit, or you may contact the Cedar Falls Police Department at (319) 273-8612.
In mid-August of 1978, 59-year-old Glenn W. Turner was passing through Iowa, transporting a new van and towing another to Pella. He was nearly 600 hundred miles from his home in Arcanum, Ohio.
What should have been a pleasant drive across the state during one of the most distinctive times of the prairie calendar — fields tall with corn, wildflowers blooming in the ditches — ended in brutal death.
On August 8 someone beat him, stole his wallet, and left his body in the back of the van in the parking lot of the Latin King Restaurant at 2222 Hubble Avenue in Des Moines.
The Latin King parking lot where Glenn Turner's body was found August 11, 1978
When Glenn’s body was discovered on August 11, he became Des Moines’s 21st homicide of the year, although it was hardly the sort of distinction we would’ve have wished for him or any other visitor to Iowa.
His family took Glenn back to Ohio. Left behind, however, was the mystery of who viciously killed and robbed him in our state.
If you have any information on the 1978 homicide of Glenn Turner, contact the Des Moines Police Department at 515-283-4864.
(photo courtesy of Google Street View)
Rafael Robinson, murdered July 31, 1996 in Des Moines
Fourteen years ago today on the afternoon of July 31, 1996, Iowa 90 Crips gang member Rafael Robinson was shot multiple times outside a public housing complex at 926 Oakridge in Des Moines. Gunshots from more than one weapon were heard, but no one admitted witnessing the shooting.
The weather that day was not particularly hot for late July in Iowa, but the situation in the Des Moines gang world was boiling over. It was one of the most violent times in the city’s history.
Rafael Robinson’s death was part of an on-going dispute among gang members that began with the murder of 23-year-old Jody L. “Monster” Stokes outside the TNT Lounge on October 14, 1995.
That killing set off a chain reaction of violence and death that involved Rafael Robinson, his cousin Royal Robinson, and his half-brother Timothy McCoy, III — as well as other Crips members and their extended families.
In May 1996, an Iowa 90 Crips member told FBI agents there was a contract on Robinson because the gang abided by Chicago rules of respecting rank, and Robinson — who was regarded as a lower-level soldier — did not stand up for the gang when a member was shot. Some also believed Rafael’s cousin Royal Robinson was involved in that incident.
The feud peaked on April 6, 1996 when an innocent Des Moines businesswoman — 42-year-old Phyllis Davis — was caught in the crossfire of a shootout between a dark-colored SUV and a brown Oldsmobile Cutlass during evening rush hour traffic at 9th and University.
Three occupants of the Oldsmobile Cutlass — Jermaine Allen, Vincent Cortez Brown, and Antonio Speed — were found guilty in Phyllis Davis’s murder.
David Flores, convicted of the murder of Phyllis Davis
Also convicted in the Davis murder was David Flores, a young man many in Des Moines believe is innocent because evidence against him was circumstantial and even insubstantial. For a time, the Polk County Attorney even dropped the charges; and on the day of the verdict, the jury foreman said he believed Flores was not guilty.
David Flores grew up in the Homes of Oakridge area and was friends with murdered gang member Jody Stokes, but was not known to be a gang member himself.
He was advised not to take the stand in his own defense, and his girlfriend gave conflicting and incorrect information to the police that sealed Flores’s fate because she was afraid of retaliation against the one-year-old son they had together.
Many people, including Crips members, say that Flores was not involved in the Davis shooting and that Rafael Robinson was.
The primary evidence against Flores was that he was driving his girlfriend’s car that afternoon and it was similar to the dark SUV involved in the shoot-out. However, Rafael’s cousin Royal Robinson owned a 1986 dark blue Bronco SUV and one of the men convicted in the shoot-out said there was a second person in the SUV. Flores was alone at the time.
Also, there was testimony from three witnesses that the driver of the dark SUV was black; David Flores is a light-skinned Latino.
In addition, three people have identified Rafael Robinson as the shooter:
• fellow gang member Calvin Tyrone Gaines
• Jermaine Allen, who was feuding with Robinson and is in prison for Davis’s murder
• Robinson’s girlfriend at that time, Carla Harris, who told authorities he confessed to her in an April 8, 1996 phone call.
Rafael Robinson owned older-type guns, including .12-gauge and .22 caliber weapons similar to those used in the Davis shooting.
Don C. Nickerson, 5th District Court Judge, ruled in late 2009 that David Flores was entitled to another trial because of new evidence and the suppression of evidence on hand during the first trial. There were questions about the quality of his legal representation as well.
In 2009, David Flores was granted a new trial in the murder of Phyllis Davis
If Rafael Robinson shot Phyllis Davis, he can never be brought to justice because he was a victim of murder himself.
However, David Flores and his family hope that a new trial will release him from jail for a crime they say he did not commit.
If you have any information about the murders of Rafael Robinson or Phyllis Davis, contact the Des Moines Police Department at 515-283-4811 or the Polk County Attorney.
With permission, I am posting here a recent e-mail received from Eugene Martin’s cousin, Vickie Martin.
I am the cousin of Eugene Martin. His father Don is the younger brother of my father, David.
I just wanted to say thank you for keeping this case in the eye of the public. I know that there is someone out there who knows what happened to Eugene all those years ago. I sincerely hope that the person who knows what happened will someday need to clear their soul and let someone know where he can be found.
Again, thank you for this website and your efforts to give family members some hope for the future.
And thank you, Vickie, for your kind words. Here, we believe hope is a good thing.
All this month, WHO-TV Channel 13 in Des Moines has been profiling Iowa Cold Cases during July sweeps.
The NBC affiliate’s Aaron Brilbeck crossed the state to interview victims’ family members as well as law enforcement officials who have dedicated countless hours in search of justice for victims and families alike.
For those who may have missed any of the episodes, a recap — including the videos — is listed below.
The first in the series aired July 1 and covered the five-year anniversary of the unsolved murder of 5-year-old Evelyn Miller of Floyd, Iowa, who was reported missing in the early morning hours of July 1, 2005, and whose body was discovered five days later in the Cedar River about two miles from Evelyn’s home.
The second installment aired July 8 and featured the unsolved disappearance of 13-year-old Eugene Martin, a Des Moines Register paperboy who disappeared without a trace on August 12, 1984.
The July 15 episode focused on the unsolved murder of 23-year-old Lisa Ann McCuddin of Fort Dodge, a mother of two young children who was shot while sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle on its way to a Fort Dodge motel where Lisa and a friend intended to have breakfast. Lisa’s mother, Becky McCuddin, also of Fort Dodge, is now raising Lisa’s young son and daughter.
The fourth in the series addressed the unsolved murder of 36-year-old Frank Goff of Des Moines, who was shot and killed — allegedly by one of his own brothers — inside their parents’ Des Moines home on September 23, 1977.
The series concludes on July 29 with a story on Earl Thelander of Onawa — an active 80-year-old family man and father of five children, six stepchildren, 22 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren — who lost his life in 2007 at the hands of copper thieves a few months prior to the 25th wedding anniversary he and his wife would have celebrated. Earl became the nation’s first innocent fatality in the growing copper theft epidemic.
The Iowa Cold Cases group would like to thank Aaron Brilbeck and the WHO-TV producers and staff for the time and hard work they invested in this project, and for the exceptional reporting on lives cut short but remembered by so many.
“Bless . . . the children, for in this world they have no voice, they have no choice.”
If murder is the most unacceptable act in our society, then surely the murder of a child — who is totally defenseless — is the most horrific of all.
Amber Marie Hayes
Amber is only one of Iowa’s murdered children.
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On Tuesday, August 31, 1954, eight-year-old Jimmy Bremmers, a boy with a speech impediment and whose only friend was his black and white dog, was abducted in Sioux City, Iowa, and murdered.
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Donna Sue Davis
Patricia Veach
Valerie Peterson
Kenny Joe Johnson
Ricky Morehouse, III
Jaymie Grahlman
Josh Yoder
Evelyn Miller
And — most importantly — parents can protect their children from unsafe situations and individuals by making wise relationship choices and refraining from substance abuse.
Unfortunately, a child is often abused or murdered by someone they know –- the very people who should be their voice and make the right choice for them.
If you know of an endangered child, contact the Iowa Department of Human Services.
If you have information on any of the child murders on this site, please contact Iowa Cold Cases or the appropriate law enforcement jurisdiction. Continue reading »
John Jeffery, murdered 20 years ago today
Homicides do not claim just one victim. They’re like the proverbial stone plunked into the pond—the effects of murder ripple ever outward from the violent act.
John Wayne Jeffery was murdered on May 30, 1990. Twenty years later, his family and three children still feel the consequences.
His first wife, Pamela, has observed first-hand and shared with Iowa Cold Cases the impact of John’s death on family members who have struggled since the murder, which was life-changing for them. To read about these problems is heartbreaking.
When we remember our victims, we also remember those left behind who must come to terms with what has happened to their loved ones.
Memorial Day is an appropriate time to reflect on all of homicide’s victims.
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