Yvonne "Bonnie" Nicholson
Yvonne “Bonnie” Nicholson
32 YOA
South Concord St.
Davenport, IA
Scott County
November 12, 2001
On Wednesday, November 12, 2001, at approximately 9:30 a.m., two construction workers driving along a slough on South Concord Street in Davenport discovered the body of 32-year-old Yvonne Nicholson of Rock Island, Illinois.
Her body — clothed in a sweatshirt, shorts and socks — lay partially submerged in Mississippi River backwater near Credit Island about 75 feet from the road.
The Davenport Fire Department provided officials with a ladder trick in order to get an overhead look at the scene, and investigators took photos while inside the bucket at the ladder’s tip. Officials constructed a plywood walkway through the mud and shallow water in order to retrieve Nicholson’s body from the river.
An autopsy concluded she had been strangled.
In September 2003, a late-summer drought drained enough water away from the tree-lined shore to enable detectives to sift through the mud in hopes of shaking out some clues. Since Nicholson’s murder, the crime scene had never been dry enough to dig around the area where officials found her body.
The Davenport detectives marked out a 20-foot-by-15-foot area and began digging, shoveling the thick mud into a sifter while looking for clothes, personal effects or anything else that might bring them closer to identifying Nicholson’s killer.
Courtesy photo Larry Fisher/QUAD-CITY TIMES“It has been two years, but nonetheless it’s worth a try,” Lt. Dennis Kern, deputy commander of the criminal investigation division, told the Quad-City Times in a story published Sept. 11, 2003. “If we don’t do it, we know we won’t find anything.”
One detective ran a metal detector inside the marked-off perimeter. It beeped only a few times, but turned up nothing more than an aluminum can.
In a Quad-City Times article dated June 26, 2011, Davenport police Lt. Gene Wall, commander of the criminal investigation division — said detectives were going to take another look at Nicholson’s unsolved homicide as well as that of Agnes Kennedy. The announcement followed the arrest of Chad Welsh in the 2007 slaying of Angeles Hennes.
Hennes’ burned remains had been found alongside a road in the 1500 black of 100th Ave. in rural Scott County on January 13, 2007.
Courtesy photo Scott County JailAgnes Kennedy’s body was discovered in Davenport on December 22, 2007, in the north alley in the 1800 block of West 8th Street.
Angela Hennes' burned remains were found Jan. 13, 2007.
Wall told the Times the cases were connected because all there victims were known or convicted prostitutes.
Authorities in Scott County announced on June 8, 2011, that they had charged 33-year-old Chad Michael Lee Welsh with Hennes’ murder. The break in the case came after more than four years. Welsh’s DNA matched DNA taken from the 2007 crime scene.
Welsh was brought to the Scott County Jail from a Springfield, Missouri federal prison, where he was serving an eight-year sentence on child pornography charges.
Agnes Kennedy's body was found in Davenport on Dec. 22, 2007.
Back in Iowa, Welsh now awaits trial on first-degree murder charges — punishable by life in prison upon conviction.
A Burlington, Iowa, resident, Welsh was arrested on the pornography charges September 16, 2003, eight months after Kennedy’s death, according to the Times.
Wall cited the difficulty of solving murders where the victim is a prostitute.
“You never know who they’re with or where they were picked up at,” he said in the Times interview.
Nicholson had been released from prison just 10 days before her body was found.
If you have any information about Yvonne Nicholson’s murder or that of Agnes Kennedy, please contact the Davenport Police Department at 563-326-7979.
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