Ida County in Iowa
*Please Note: The cases listed below are within Ida County but may fall under a city police department’s jurisdiction. They are included here for cross-reference purposes. More specific information may be found on each victim’s individual page.
Connie Ruddy
Homicide
Connie Ruddy
21 YOA
Ida Grove, Iowa
Ida County
February 10, 1997
Connie Ruddy, a 21-year-old mother of two, vanished from her Ida Grove, Iowa home without a trace on February 10, 1997. Ruddy’s 2-year-old and 2-month-old children were found alone in the residence, unharmed. On August 31, 1999, more than two years after her disappearance, a man looking for fossils near Ida Grove found a human jawbone in the Boyer River in Crawford County near Dow City. Dental records confirmed the remains were Ruddy’s, and officials reclassified the former missing person case as an unsolved homicide.
Homicide
Dung Kim Truong
37 YOA
Case # 97-12883
Washta, Iowa
Cherokee and Ida Counties
Went Missing: September 22, 1997
Body Found: November 27, 1997
Dung Kim Truong, a 37-year-old female Vietnamese legal alien authorized to work in the United States, left the Omaha home she shared with her boyfriend and went to the recently opened Ameristar riverboat casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Nov. 27, 1997. She was last seen at 6:30 p.m. that night, leaving the casino with an unidentified Asian male who’d offered to give her a ride home. Truong’s remains were found at the Washta Access area in Ida County two months later on Nov. 27, 1997.
i hope the remains found in dow city are that of connie ruddy who was a childhood friend of mine, so she can final be laid to rest
Daniel: Crawford County Sheriff Steinkuehler has ruled out the connection to Connie Ruddy because a jaw bone was one of those found in Dow City. (And of course Connie’s jaw bone has already been recovered.) Hopefully the IA DCI and State ME’s office will have some answers soon. They’d said it might take 3-4 weeks to get the results.
Thanks for writing!