Cold Case Thursdays on WHO-TV Channel 13

On July 23, 2010, in Media, News, The Families, by Jody Ewing

All this month, WHO-TV Channel 13 in Des Moines has been profiling Iowa Cold Cases during July sweeps.

The NBC affiliate’s Aaron Brilbeck crossed the state to interview victims’ family members as well as law enforcement officials who have dedicated countless hours in search of justice for victims and families alike.

For those who may have missed any of the episodes, a recap — including the videos — is listed below.

The first in the series aired July 1 and covered the five-year anniversary of the unsolved murder of 5-year-old Evelyn Miller of Floyd, Iowa, who was reported missing in the early morning hours of July 1, 2005, and whose body was discovered five days later in the Cedar River about two miles from Evelyn’s home.

The second installment aired July 8 and featured the unsolved disappearance of 13-year-old Eugene Martin, a Des Moines Register paperboy who disappeared without a trace on August 12, 1984.

The July 15 episode focused on the unsolved murder of 23-year-old Lisa Ann McCuddin of Fort Dodge, a mother of two young children who was shot while sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle on its way to a Fort Dodge motel where Lisa and a friend intended to have breakfast. Lisa’s mother, Becky McCuddin, also of Fort Dodge, is now raising Lisa’s young son and daughter.

The fourth in the series addressed the unsolved murder of 36-year-old Frank Goff of Des Moines, who was shot and killed — allegedly by one of his own brothers — inside their parents’ Des Moines home on September 23, 1977.

The series concludes on July 29 with a story on Earl Thelander of Onawa — an active 80-year-old family man and father of five children, six stepchildren, 22 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren — who lost his life in 2007 at the hands of copper thieves a few months prior to the 25th wedding anniversary he and his wife would have celebrated. Earl became the nation’s first innocent fatality in the growing copper theft epidemic.

The Iowa Cold Cases group would like to thank Aaron Brilbeck and the WHO-TV producers and staff for the time and hard work they invested in this project, and for the exceptional reporting on lives cut short but remembered by so many.

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