Courtesy photo WebshotsPatricia Ann Jauron
Case Number: 9806160
45 YOA
1516 Old Highway 141
Sioux City, IA
Woodbury County (Jurisdiction)
May 26, 1998
On Tuesday, May 26, 1998, Patricia Jauron, 45, was viciously stabbed several times in a rural Sioux City home she and her husband, Gene, had just vacated.
The couple had just moved out of one home at 1516 Old Highway 141 and into another across the road at 1541 Old Highway 141, and had been selling off the last few items from the former home. They’d held an earlier yard sale and, according to Gene Jauron, a person who’d attended their yard sale allegedly called several times afterward inquiring about purchasing the waterbed and setting up a time to meet.
Patricia — who’d worked at the Sergeant Bluff Middle School — went across the road at the scheduled appointment time and was supposed to be gone only for a few moments.
In a 2005 interview with KTIV News Channel 4 reporter Melissa Lanzourakis, Gene Jauron talked about his late wife and said he believes he’s met her killer face to face. From his home across the highway, Gene said he saw a red car, and believes the car belonged to the man who murdered his wife. When Pat didn’t return home, Gene says he went to check on her at the other house. He found the waterbed in the basement covered in blood.
“He’d hit her in the head, knocked her down and tied her up,” Jauron said. “She still had the twine on her one arm, but she got loose. He started stabbing. She got out the basement door and she got out into the yard and he must have stabbed all the way out.”
The stabbing was so forceful, Jauron said, that the blade broke off in Patricia’s chest. Jauron said he found her body over an embankment.
“And all I could do was hold her,” he added.
Jauron contacted the Woodbury County Communications Center at approximately to 10:52 a.m. to request assistance.
The couple had been married 25 years and were just settling into retirement.
“She was the life of the party…never see her grumpy…always willing to help everybody,” her husband said.
Jauron said he feels there are still many clues to be followed up on, and believes they met the killer at the garage sale before the murder. The man, he said, paid for a dresser that day but never came back for it. He says the same man told him he worked at an area packing plant.
Phone calls made before the murder were all traced to a pay phone near a local convenience store.
As for the red car in the driveway, Jauron says they’re clues he’d like to see tackled in a cold case crime unit. He also believes someone in Siouxland knows what happened.
“Somebody around here knows,” he said. “He would have had to have been the most horrible bloody mess you ever seen in your life. All I can do is hope they get him.”
Patricia Jauron’s survivors included her husband; her mother of Cylinder, Iowa; a daughter and her husband, Annette and Howard Simpson of Guymon, Okla.; two sons, Jason Patrick of Le Mars, Iowa and Kevin Andrew and his wife Sherrie of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; a brother and his wife, William and Ann Kane of Los Lunas, N.M.; three sisters and their husbands, Sherrie and Harlan Meints of Ute, Iowa, Ginger and Dale Hoffman of Graettinger, Iowa and Therese and Charles Duhn of Emmetsburg; and a granddaughter, Kayla Simpson.
You may also call the Woodbury County sheriff’s office at 712-279-6010 or 800-352-6352, or Crime Stoppers at 712-258-8477 or 800-728-6401.
KTIV’s Melissa Lanzourakis contributed to this report.
Miss you Pat!!!