Case # 6000902
Hawkeye Hotel
Keokuk, Iowa
Lee County
October 9, 1960
In 1960, 42-year-old Willard Charles Woodring owned a “rooming house” — formerly known as the Hawkeye Hotel — in seedy downtown Keokuk.
It was widely known the place was a house of ill repute and that Woodring had a criminal past.
Woodring was acquitted at a coroner’s inquest in the 1951 death of a Peoria, Illinois, man. In 1957, he was fined 200 dollars for “keeping a disorderly house” in Quincy, Illinois.
On Sunday night, October 9, 1960, Woodring was in the two-story house with four women who “resided” there. They were entertaining a customer, 49-year-old Richard B. Buchanan, a service station owner from Green Rock, Illinois.
One of the women was St. Louis resident Betty Andrews, 22, described by the Ames Daily Tribune as a “young and shapely” 5-foot 2, blue-eyed brunette who claimed to be Woodring’s “fiancée.”
Then, a black-haired male in his 20s wearing a black leather jacket knocked on the door. With him was a young red-head in a lavender dress.
Richard Buchanan
The male asked to see Woodring and Betty Andrews later told police, “It didn’t sound funny. It sounded as if he really knew him.”
Andrews let them into the house and took them to Woodring’s apartment in the back, where he and Buchanan were talking. Woodring invited the couple in.
The male pulled out a .38 caliber automatic pistol and forced Woodring, Buchanan, and Betty Andrews into the kitchen and bound and gagged them.
The robbers seemed to know that Woodring had large amounts of cash. The male asked repeatedly, “Where do you keep the money?”
The couple then went to the front of the house looking for money.
Woodring freed himself and attacked the male when he returned to the kitchen. While the two men struggled, Andrews stripped the tape off her wrists and ran from the room. Buchanan, too, had gotten free and tried to flee.
The male robber shot both men in the back of the head at close range.
The couple fled the house just before a call to police reported the shootings.
The robbery yielded only $200 from a cigar box on the kitchen table. However, Woodring still had $600 in his pockets, while a strong box in another room contained $1,600.
Law enforcement speculated that the male panicked and fired the shots and the two then fled without looking for more money.
Courtesy photo AP/Cedar Rapids GazetteActing on information from Betty Andrews, Keokuk Police also discovered $45,000 in 50- and 100-dollar bills in the trunk of Woodring’s pink Cadillac.
Keokuk Police asked the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation to assist in the investigation.
No fingerprints of the couple were found inside the house and there were few signs of a struggle in the kitchen. Authorities said that the couple “seemed to know what they were doing.”
The other three women living in the house were identified as Dorothy Madison, 27, of Peoria, Illinois; Barbara Sullivan, 31, of Phoenix, Arizona; and Jean Lee, 21, of Bloomington, Illinois. They were charged with “inhabiting a disorderly house,” waived preliminary hearings, and were bound over to the grand jury. Each was placed under $2,000 bond.
Betty Andrews and the other women were shown photographs of Michael Walton Layton, 21, and Nancy Fordyce, 19, of Indianapolis, who committed a murder while robbing a service station in their home town and were early suspects in the Keokuk murders.
However, the four women said Layton was not the man who shot Woodring and Buchanan.
A three-state search for the “bandits” was undertaken.
On October 14 — only five days after the double homicide — Keokuk Police Chief George Jones told a Mason City newspaper that the trail of the two had grown “as cold as any I’ve ever seen.”
Questions and information about the unsolved 1960 murders of Willard Charles Woodring and Richard B. Buchanan should be directed to the Keokuk Police Department at 319-524-3131 or Iowa Cold Cases through the Contact form.
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