Cedar County
Thomas Stewart “Tom” Mather
32 YOA
Springdale, IA
Cedar County
Case Number: 91-07431
September 30, 1991
Tom Mather
On September 30, 1991, Tom Mather, 32, was shot in the head and stabbed several times in his home on County Road X-40 about a mile north of the West Liberty exit off Interstate 80.
His wife Dawn said he was shot by an intruder. She escaped to a nearby farmhouse owned by Mark and Mary Mather.
The peculiar details surrounding the eastern Iowa murder spawned rumors and speculation that both fascinated and divided the community.
Its complicated investigation involved good old-fashioned detective work, a grave exhumation, a television reenactment, and space-age tools.
In 1990, Thomas “Tom” Stewart Mather lived with his parents, Stewart and Mildred Mather, on 160 acres in Cedar County near the unincorporated village of Springdale 15 miles northeast of Iowa City. The town of 100 was founded by early Quakers who settled in the county; it was an Underground Railroad stop and once home to abolitionist John Brown.
The Mather family had farmed in the area for generations and were pillars of the community and the church at the center of it, Springdale United Methodist. They belonged to fraternal organizations and civic groups that made good things happen for the community.
Courtesy graphic Cedar Rapids GazetteThe Mather home sat on County Road F-44 four miles east of West Branch and just north of Interstate 80. It was located in a farming neighborhood where no one locked their doors.
The close-knit community had watched Tom and his sister, Julie, grow up.
Tom was a hard-working night-shift custodian at the University of Iowa Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
He was friendly and smiled readily; his characteristic high-pitched laugh delighted his friends. He liked “Star Trek” and pheasant hunting. He and his dad were avid roller skaters who gave local children lessons and organized skating parties for their church. And he was a proud Mason.
Before and after work, Tom spent a lot of time playing video games at an arcade in the Iowa City Sycamore Mall.
At the arcade, he met cashier Dawn Woodard, a 1989 University of Iowa Elementary Education graduate. Soon they were dating, and Dawn moved into the elder Mathers’ home in January 1990. On August 4, 1990, Tom and Dawn were married in Urbandale, Dawn’s hometown.
Stewart and Mildred Mather moved out of the family farmhouse to West Branch, but they saw Tom and Dawn often. The Sunday before the murder, they watched Tom’s pride as Dawn joined the choir at the family’s church.
Thirteen months after the wedding, 32-year-old Tom was murdered in his home and Dawn was left a widow at 24.
Courtesy photo Cedar Rapids GazetteDawn said she and Tom were watching television on the evening of Sunday, September 30, 1991, and that Tom planned to leave at 11:00 p.m. for his Iowa City shift.
About 8:40 p.m., Dawn said, a naked white man entered their house through a garage door and came into the living room.
She described the intruder as about 30 years old, 6-feet tall, a slight-to-medium build, and clean-shaven with his collar-length, straight hair bleached blond with dark tips.
He carried two pieces of rope and a six-shot revolver and announced to the Mathers, “I’ve come to rob you.”
Keeping the gun on Dawn, he ordered her to tie up Tom with the rope; when she fumbled, he took the rope and finished.
He forced Tom to crawl into the bedroom and back out and ordered Dawn to take off her clothes, which he used to tie her up. She managed to wriggle free and Tom urged her to flee.
Dawn ran naked and barefoot out the door and down a gravel road and across the highway to a nearby farmhouse, where she was taken in. The residents notified the Cedar County Sheriff.
Dawn was evaluated at University Hospitals in Iowa City. The Best Man at her wedding, David Beranek, and his wife Amy consoled her there when she was told at 11:00 p.m. that Tom was dead. Dawn stayed at the Beraneks’ home after being released from the hospital.
Unknown to Dawn, Tom’s parents had their police scanner on that night and heard dispatches concerning a robbery at the Mather home. Then they heard a call go out for the coroner and a discussion of who would tell Tom’s parents their son was dead.
When authorities from Cedar and Jones counties arrived at the Mather home, they could see tire tracks outside the house.
Inside, they found Tom dead from a gunshot wound to the head. His neck and wrists were slashed and money lay scattered around him on the floor.
Springdale United Methodist Church served food to searchers.
Cedar County Sheriff Keith Whitlatch and West Branch Police Chief Dan Knight spearheaded the investigation, in cooperation with the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation.
Fifty officers and two police dogs from 11 jurisdictions searched around the Mather home that night. When daylight came, they explored the fields — tall and nearly impassible with dry corn — farm buildings, and culverts within a four-mile radius of the house.
The Springdale United Methodist Church served coffee and food to the searchers during the night and its members joined the search the next day.
Nothing — and no one — was found.
Courtesy Cedar Rapids GazetteBelieving the attacker might be a drifter, investigators questioned area homeless men without results.
On October 1 about 8 p.m., someone reported seeing a man matching Dawn’s description of the killer near the east edge of Lisbon in neighboring Linn County; another person thought they saw him at a barn south of there. A tip came in that he was in a brown van on Highway 13 and still another that he was hitchhiking along Highway 30. An exhaustive search in the Lisbon area turned up nothing.
Law enforcement officials began to realize the description Dawn provided fit a lot of men.
Tom Mather’s funeral was held at 11:00 a.m. on October 3, 1991.
Three hundred mourners filled the upstairs and basement and spilled out on to the lawn of the Springdale United Methodist Church to hear the service on loudspeakers.
Shock and disbelief resonated among the people who knew Tom as a gentle and wonderful person. They comforted each other with memories, and all agreed that no one ever had a bad thing to say about Tom.
Courtesy photo DonHTom Mather was buried in the Springdale Friends Cemetery — surrounded by generations of his family — a mere mile from the house where he’d been murdered.
On October 8, law enforcement circulated a composite drawing of the suspect based on Dawn Mather’s information.
For a time, the tips pouring in exceeded the number of officers who could follow up on them. Officials withheld certain details from the public to weed out irrelevant information.
Law enforcement played their cards close to the vest, disclosing very little information. Sheriff Whitlatch stated he didn’t want to prejudice the case should it go to trial.
All jurisdictions involved — limited by recent staff cuts — strained to keep up with the additional work.
The Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation’s caseload had been heavy even before the murder, and the division’s ability to investigate crimes was drastically undermined by both budget cuts and the need for agents to monitor the state’s newly instituted riverboat gambling.
Case details were entered into FBI records in hopes there might be similar homicides that could be linked to Tom Mather’s murder.
In 1979, another Cedar County man, Ady Jensen, was murdered in a farmhouse north of West Branch for his $50,000 life insurance policy. His wife was sentenced to prison for conspiracy in the killing.
Tom Mather also had a $50,000 life insurance policy, which naturally raised suspicions that Dawn had played some role in her husband’s murder.
Some people wondered aloud: If she’d run on gravel as she claimed, why weren’t her feet bruised? Others pondered the young wife’s strange air of detachment.
Sheriff Whitlatch spoke in generalities when asked about Dawn Mather’s possible involvement in her husband’s death. He told the media:
“Anytime you have a spouse killed, the public thinks it’s the surviving spouse who did it. And quite frankly, sometimes it is . . . . And at this point we can’t say [Dawn] is or isn’t [involved].”
Tom’s parents, Mildred and Stewart, were not among those suspecting Dawn. They believed the murderer was a drifter who got off Interstate 80 at the West Liberty exit and walked a little over a mile until he selected the Mather’s house as a target of opportunity.
They said Dawn’s story was plausible and that the man came into the house naked so his clothing couldn’t be described. The Mathers speculated this was his first offense and he panicked and left the money behind on the floor.
The Mathers stayed in touch with Dawn, who moved to Coralville and got an unlisted phone number. Dawn kept the couple informed about the investigation and claimed that authorities tracked her bank account and “harassed” her by accessing her phone records and talking to everyone she called.
The Mathers believed their own phone lines were tapped because investigators knew details they could not have otherwise known.
Tom’s parents also stood by Dawn during a legal case to force Principal Financial Group to pay her Tom’s $50,000 life insurance benefits.
Dawn alleged in the suit that Principal was refusing to honor the policy on the grounds “that a beneficiary who intentionally and maliciously murders the insured will be disqualified from receiving insurance proceeds.”
A Principal spokesperson maintained that Dawn had not been denied the money but that the case was “under review.” In June of 1992, the company paid her $42,500.
Stewart and Mildred Mather said Dawn needed the insurance money because she moved to Des Moines and had “expenses.”
Investigators found footprints at the crime scene but could not determine whose they were. By Dawn’s account, she and Tom and the murderer were all three barefoot.
Over a year after the murder — in mid-November 1992 — authorities exhumed Tom’s body to obtain his footprints and compare them to those found at the scene.
State Medical Examiner Thomas Bennett acknowledged that footprints are not usually taken at autopsy and said he had done it only twice in over 3,000 cases.
On Wednesday, November 18, 1991, Cedar Rapids television station KCRG pre-empted the popular sitcom “Cheers” to air a half-hour program titled “Who Murdered Tom Mather?”
Its producers saw the reenactment not as entertainment but as a way to educate and remind the public about the crime in order to stimulate memories and generate tips.
Viewers were advised to pay particular attention to a car and how it fit into the sequence of events.
The producers also stated:
“We believe there’s another person involved that we don’t know about” and “as [the viewers] see the murder unfold, [they’ll] see why we believe there are other people involved.”
In addition to details about the car, KCRG showed the position of Tom’s body inside the home and also featured a man wearing brown coveralls and carrying an object over his shoulder.
Filming was done on site at the actual Mather home in cooperation with the home’s new residents.
Cedar County Police Dispatcher Dan Conrad portrayed Tom Mather. Dawn Mather was not asked to participate, and a female volunteer filled in for her.
Courtesy photo Cedar Rapids GazetteA key detail emerging from the television reenactment was the presence of a car.
One version said a white car stopped at the Mathers’ house around 7:00 that night — about 90 minutes before the murder — and that its occupants asked for directions to either Wellman or Wilton. That car could not be found.
In another version, the vehicle was said to be a 1986 or 1987 blue Pontiac Grand Am with racing-style wheels seen on a gravel road near the Mather home about 6:45 p.m.
Another witness saw a man and woman get out of a similar car in the Mathers’ driveway between 8:00 and 8:30 p.m. on the night of the murder.
Still another witness saw a woman talking to a man outside the Mather home the day Tom was killed. The two were standing near a blue Pontiac Grand Am and the woman was wearing a dotted aqua or mint-green coordinated blouse and skirt.
In April 1993, investigators served a warrant on Dawn Mather’s Coralville apartment and searched for an outfit similar to the one worn by the woman reportedly standing by the blue Grand Am.
They found such an outfit in Dawn’s closet.
At that time, Sheriff Whitlatch told reporters:
“I’ve said all along, we’ve never eliminated her as a suspect because there’s no way we can get her out of the picture.”
Dawn’s lawyer William Kutmus, a well-known and high-profile Des Moines defense attorney, claimed that Dawn cooperated with investigators after the murder.
However, Kutmus believed she’d become “a target” of law enforcement because the real murderer could not be found, and he advised Dawn to stop talking with them. At that time, Dawn moved out of state.
In 1994, Sheriff Whitlatch told the Cedar Rapids Gazette that he hoped to use satellite images taken from overhead at the time of the murder to determine if the Pontiac and or the people associated with it could be seen in photos from space.
Keith Whitlatch never gave up on solving Tom Mather’s murder. When he retired in 2000 after 28 years as Cedar County Sheriff, he told reporters that the Mather murder was the most frustrating case he ever dealt with. He said about the investigation, “We’ve had quite a little evidence, but just not the right evidence.”
Iowa Cold Cases continues to receive questions and comments about this perplexing case, even though many years have passed.
Questions and information about the unsolved 1991 murder of Tom Mather should be directed to the Cedar County Sheriff’s Office Crime Stoppers at 563-886-6618 or Iowa Cold Cases through the Contact form.
All sources for this Case Summary are from the Cedar Rapids Gazette:
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