Black Hawk County in Iowa
Deborah Ann Simmons
62 YOA
The New York House
Jefferson Street between 4th and 5th
Waterloo, IA
Black Hawk County
April 26, 1879
In 1879, Deborah Simmons and her husband George W. Simmons, Sr., both 62, lived on Jefferson Street between 4th and 5th streets in Waterloo and ran the New York House, a hotel they named for their native state.
The hotel was a stopping place for area farmers. It was a two-story, frame structure with a porch and entrance in front. The second floor had rooms for guests.
Inside the first floor was an office, dining room, and siting room. Opening off the dining room was the Simmons’s tiny bedroom, which had space for only a bed with about two to three feet to spare.
Their daughter Abby Simmons, 22, slept in a room on the south side of the first floor. Son George Simmons, Jr., 26, slept upstairs on the northwest corner of the house.
There were no guests at the hotel on the night of Saturday, April 26, 1879.
George, Sr. and Deborah retired at 8:15 p.m. to their bedroom and were asleep by 9:00. Between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m., George, Sr. was awakened by what he thought was Deborah snoring.
After he nudged her to wake up, she made gasping sounds. When the noises continued, he took her right hand and found it “limpsy and cold.” He feared she’d had a stroke similar to one four years before.
He called for his children and they came running; George, Jr. lit and brought a lantern from the kitchen table.
They could see Deborah was lying unconscious on her back — face towards the ceiling — with blood running from her head, nose, and mouth and covering her clothes.
George, Jr. and Abby ran outside to raise the alarm to neighbors.
The first person on the scene was Nelson Rudquast, the hostler at the De Soto House next door. Other neighbors soon gathered and Officer Charles Mantle responded as word of the attack spread.
Clad only in his “pantaloons and shirt,” George, Jr. ran to the home of his sister, Margaret Simmons Tardy. At 2:10 a.m., he summoned Dr. Alonzo Middleditch, the Simmons family physician.
Officer Mantle searched the hotel and found the outside cellar door unlocked and the door from the cellar to the kitchen open. However, he found no footprints or other clues in the basement.
He ordered that nothing be moved or touched, including Deborah Simmons. Town Marshall Harvey W. Jenney questioned witnesses.
At 3:00 a.m., Officer Clark Inman and Dr. George J. Mack arrived at the hotel.
Dr. Mack examined Deborah and described her as comatose and breathing heavily, with blood oozing from the nose and mouth. She had a triangular wound about three inches long over her left eye, likely inflicted by a left-handed person he said.
Dr. G.F. Roberts, also summoned to the hotel, agreed with Dr. Mack’s assessment; both stated the wound was only hours old.
Outside the rear door of the kitchen, Officer Inman found an axe; it lay in the driveway between the New York House and the De Soto House 15 feet northwest of the room where Deborah was attacked.
The underside was wet and the upper side dry; there was dirt on the blade as though it had been thrown down. When Dr. Mack examined it, he found “blood globules.”
Witnesses inside the house described George, Jr. as distraught by the site of his mother. He raised her head, begged her to tell him who hurt her, and said, “My best friend is gone.”
George, Jr. told authorities he went to his room at 8:15 p.m. Saturday night but soon crawled out a window and climbed onto the porch and down a post. He then visited his ex-wife Sarah Beal, who had recently divorced him.
He said he stayed with Sarah from 9:00 to 12:30, all the while telling her he intended to leave Waterloo and take up farming and imploring her to go with him.
He said he sneaked back into his room at the hotel in the same way he left, not wanting his parents to know he was in contact with Sarah Beal.
Deborah Simmons lay unconscious until 8:30 a.m. Sunday morning, when she died.
Thirty minutes later, Black Hawk County Coroner Walter O. Richards convened a jury consisting of J.W. Logan, James Ellis, and C.B. Scroggy.
The three men sat at a dining table in the kitchen adjacent to where Deborah’s body lay and discussed the death.
Outside the hotel, crowds milled in the street.
At 9:30 p.m., the jury announced its findings: Deborah Simmons was struck on the head with a heavy and blunt instrument by her son George, Jr. — who was left-handed — and died from that blow.
George, Jr. was arrested by officers Andrew M. Hiserodt and William C. Munger in the presence of Sheriff George W. Hayzlett.
As he was led away to jail, George, Jr. cried and moaned to his father, “I am innocent of this thing.”
Many suspected George, Jr. because he was “wild” and “irregular in his habits.” The Iowa State Reporter noted, “The young man implicated . . . is well known around town as rather reckless, and a little inclined to dissipation.”
It was also known that George, Jr. argued about his recent divorce with his mother, whom he blamed for his marriage breakup.
The Waterloo Daily Courier later reported that “Evidence was exposed that the Simmonses were naturally quarrelsome people [and] that the home life was constantly a vaudeville of troubles.”
At midnight, Deborah’s body still lay in the bed where she died 12 hours earlier.
Using a ruse, the physicians lured a guard away from the scene. Then they secretly opened Deborah’s scalp and sawed out the portion of the skull containing the fracture — replacing it with a similarly-sized piece of wood — and then pulled the scalp back up.
In a crowded courtroom on May 14, 1879, Justice of the Peace Joseph H. Kuhns began the legal proceedings against George, Jr.
The testimony was detailed word-for-word in the Waterloo Courier for those who could not attend.
Courtesy photo Souvenir of Des Moines by the Mail and Times 1891George, Jr. was represented by several lawyers, including former Iowa Governor Horace Boies.
The case turned solely on the murder weapon, with authorities claiming it was a flatiron that George, Jr. had access to.
Most of the testimony was medical evidence from physicians concerning the size and nature of the wound and the weapon that made it.
Dr. John H. Crippen speculated it was a hammer; Dr. Otho S. Knox testified it was a hammer or hatchet, as did Dr. James M. Ball. Dr. George J. Mack believed Deborah Simmons was killed with a flatiron, the tip of which punctured her skull; Dr. H.W. Brown agreed. Dr. Walter O. Richards stated it was not a flatiron. Dr. Alonzo Middleditch testified that Deborah Simmons was sitting up at the time and was struck with something other than a flatiron. Dr. W. Eddy said it was a wedge-shaped instrument; Drs. Samuel N. Pierce and Dr. Charles H. Horton claimed it was neither a hatchet, hammer, nor flatiron.
The Defense requested Deborah’s body be exhumed and then brought her head into court to show that the fracture was made by a weapon which penetrated deeper than a flatiron could.
Defense Attorney Horace Boies proclaimed, “That wound has no more the shape of a flatiron than has Mark Twain’s war map.”
After eleven days of testimony, Justice Kuhns dismissed the charges against George, Jr. and the case was not sent on to a grand jury.
While George, Jr. was in jail, his father brought flowers and special food to the cell.
In late August of 1905, the former New York House — on property then owned by William Galloway — was razed. In the rubble, workers found a flatiron, which those who remembered the murder assumed was the long-missing murder weapon.
Joseph Kuhns was still Justice of the Peace in 1905. In an interview with the Waterloo Daily Courier, Kuhns declared the Simmons case one of the “most remarkable in the criminal annals of Black Hawk County.”
Kuhn asserted that George, Jr. did not kill his mother but said the evidence against the real killer was so slim that prosecution could not be made even if that person were still living. He also refused to open the case to spare the surviving family mental anguish.
Deborah Ann Faulkerson was born July 9, 1816 in New York. She married George W. Simmons, Sr. on November 23, 1843 in Stuben County, New York.
The newlyweds moved west and settled in Marshall, Michigan, where several of their children were born, including George, Jr.
About 1851, the Simmons family moved to Waterloo, when it was nothing but a tiny enclave of log cabins. George, Sr. worked as a sawyer before acquiring the New York House.
Courtesy photo Chuck, findagrave.comDeborah’s funeral was held at the New York House and she was buried in Elmwood Cemetery, which the Iowa State Reporter called the “new cemetery on the west side” of Waterloo.
She was survived by her husband George, Sr. and her children Charles M. Simmons, Lucy N. Simmons, Eliza Jane Simmons Spencer, Margaret Simmons Tardy, Emma Ann Simmons, George W. Simmons, Jr., Abby D. Simmons Brisban, and Eunice Simmons.
George Simmons, Sr. put the New York House up for sale in March 1880 and in September of that year sold it to A. Bartholomew of Lester Township in Black Hawk County.
In October 1880, the hotel became “Tremont House,” although residents still referred to it as the New York House until it was razed in 1905.
George Simmons, Sr. died in 1894 at the age of 78. A newspaper reported at the time that George, Jr. “was last heard from at Cairo, Illinois.”
Questions and information about the unsolved 1879 murder of Deborah Ann Simmons should be directed to the Waterloo Police Department at 319-291-4336 or Iowa Cold Cases through the Contact form.
Copyright 2012 Iowa Cold Cases, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.D
Recent Comments