Courtesy photo Laurie Rhiner

Martha “Marty” Erickson

Martha “Marty” D. Erickson

Homicide

Martha “Marty” Diane Erickson
47 YOA
Case # 95-13479
Avon, IA
Polk County
November 21, 1995

Case summary by Jody Ewing

On Tuesday evening, November 21, 1995 — just over one day before Thanksgiving — Martha “Marty” Erickson, 47, was murdered while on her way to a dance.

Her body was discovered the following day in Avon Lake’s shallow waters, and State Medical Examiner Thomas Bennett said Erickson had been beaten and stabbed. He estimated she probably died between 24 and 48 hours before her body was found.

Courtesy photo WHO-TV, Des Moines

Martha Erickson’s body was discovered along the edge of Avon Lake in Polk County.

Erickson enjoyed helping people fight their demons, and often attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings even though she wasn’t an alcoholic. News of her murder shocked and saddened many who’d gotten to know her.

“She just wanted to help out,” Erickson’s oldest sister Laurie Rhiner said in a September 9, 2010 interview with WHO-TV Channel 13′s Aaron Brilbeck.

Rhiner said she remembers how excited her sister had been about the dance.

“That’s all she would talk about, was how much fun she was going to have … who she’s gonna see there and what they are going to talk about,” Rhiner recalled.

Courtesy photo WHO-TV

Iowa DCI Director John Quinn spoke with Channel 13 reporter Aaron Brilbeck about Martha Erickson’s unsolved case.

Police said the body offered few clues due to time spent in the water, and that they couldn’t even say for sure whether Erickson had been sexually assaulted.

“Anytime you have a body at a location, remote in that area – also with the body being submerged which causes destruction of physical evidence – what you have to do is go back and track down the subject’s time line and establish who it was that she was with,” Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Director John Quinn told Brilbeck.

That task proved virtually impossible due to the people with whom Erickson associated.

“Some of the meetings, they only use first names and some of the people are unwilling to go ahead and discuss the incident and interactions with people,” Quinn explained. “So we did have some barriers to success.”

Courtesy photo WHO-TV Channel 13

Laurie Rhiner says she copes with the pain of losing her sister through artwork.

Rhiner said the hurt never goes away, but one just has to learn to live with it. Rhiner copes with the pain through her art, and says her younger sister is the inspiration for much of it.

Still, there are thoughts that come back to haunt her.

“You start thinking, what were her last moments like?” she wondered. “And you get so sick to your stomach you start shaking because you weren’t there to help her.”

Rhiner said she’d always been there to protect her baby sister and keep her out of trouble, but this time, she wasn’t.

Two of Erickson’s acquaintenances also murdered, officials study connections

Susan Kersten

The week after Erickson’s death, Johnson County officials said they’d discovered Erickson was an acquaintance of Susan Kersten, an Iowa City woman whose severely burned body had been found two months earlier on September 24 in the charred remains of her car in a farm field southeast of Iowa City. Kersten, 38, died as a result of blows to her head suffered before the fire.

Erickson knew Kersten from a group both participated in, Johnson County Sheriff Robert Carpenter said in a Cedar Rapids Gazette article dated December 1, 1995. Carpenter said he didn’t know if the two were close friends, but that there appeared to be no link between the deaths.

Officials had interviewed Erickson in Des Moines shortly after Kersten’s death, along with a number of other acquaintances, Carpenter said, but the interviews were strictly routine.

Polk County Detective Dennis Marshall — who was in charge of Erickson’s murder investigation — said the fact that the two women knew each other was not high on the list of leads.

Channel 13′s Aaron Brilbeck reports on the unsolved murder of Martha “Marty” Erickson. September 9, 2010

“Martha lived in Iowa city for a short time,” Marshall said, “But we’re concentrating on things here because of the leads we have. We’ll work the leads from the top down, and it’s one lead we’ll eventually cover.”

Donna Marshall

Marshall also confirmed that Erickson knew Steven Klein, the father of Kersten’s twin daughters, but reiterated that they only knew of their acquaintance and had no strong link between the two deaths.

On January 8, 1996, Donna Lee Marshall, 37, was found shot in the head in her home in Bon Aire Mobile Home Lodge in Iowa City, and it appeared that she, too, was an acquaintance of Kersten and Erickson. But the investigation into the acquaintance of all three women yielded nothing substantial, Johnson County Sheriff Carpenter said in a May 12, 1996 story in the Gazette.

Carpenter said detectives and DCI agents were talking at least weekly on the cases to evaluate their progress.

Courtesy photo Katie Lou, findagrave.com

Martha Erickson’s gravestone in Glendale Cemetery

To date, all three women’s cases remain unsolved.

Martha Diane Erickson was born February 18, 1948, and was buried in the Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.

Information Needed

If you have any information about Martha Erickson’s murder, please contact the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation at (515) 725-6010, e-mail dciinfo@dps.state.ia.us, or contact the Polk County Sheriff’s Office at (515) 286-3800.

Sources:

• Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation
• COLD CASE: Fifteen years after Martha Erickson is murdered her killer remains unknown, WHO-TV Channel 13, Aaron Brilbeck, reporter, September 9, 2010
• Find a Grave Memorial
• “Law continues work on Kersten, Marshall murders: Investigators remain optimistic about cases,” Cedar Rapids Gazette, May 12, 1996
• “Polk County detective: Connection between murder victims a weak lead,” Cedar Rapids Gazette, December 2, 1995
• “D.M., Iowa City murder victims were acquainted,” Cedar Rapids Gazette, December 1, 1995