CEDAR RAPIDS — A Marion man is accused of bludgeoning four people with a metal pipe — killing three and severely injuring one — motivated in part by thinking the murders would become a movie, authorities said Thursday.
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Investigators and law enforcement vehicles surround an outbuilding Wednesday, June 5, 2024, where three people were found dead earlier in the day in the 3600 block of East Otter Road north of Robins. A fourth person was airlifted to a hospital in critical condition. (Savannah Blake/The Gazette)
9 serial killers with ties to Iowa
John Wayne Gacy
John Wayne Gacy Jr. (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer and rapist. Before his crimes, however, he was considered a model and upstanding citizen in Waterloo.
In 1966, Gacy began to manage the three KFC restaurants his father-in-law purchased in Waterloo. In 1967, he was named "outstanding vice-president" of the Waterloo Jaycees. But Gacy was convicted of sodomy on December 3, 1968, and sentenced to 10 years at the Anamosa State Penitentiary.
Gacy was granted parole with 12 months' probation on June 18, 1970, after serving 18 months of his 10-year sentence. One of the conditions of his probation was that Gacy would relocate to Chicago to live with his mother.
Gacy sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Cook County, Illinois, inside his Norwood Park ranch house. His victims were typically lured to his address by force or deception, and all but one victim were murdered by either asphyxiation or strangulation with a makeshift tourniquet. Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home. Three further victims were buried elsewhere on his property, while the bodies of his last four known victims were discarded in the Des Plaines River.
Convicted of 33 murders, Gacy was sentenced to death on March 13, 1980 for 12 of those killings. He spent 14 years on death row before he was finally executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.
Gacy became known as the "Killer Clown" because of his charitable services at fundraising events, parades, and children's parties where he would dress as "Pogo the Clown", a character he devised himself.
Robert Hansen
Robert Christian Hansen (February 15, 1939 – August 21, 2014), known in the media as the "Butcher Baker," abducted, raped and murdered at least 17, and possibly more than 30 women, in and around Anchorage, Alaska, between 1971 and 1983.
Hansen was born in Estherville in 1939. He was the son of a Danish immigrant and followed in his father's footsteps as a baker.
In 1957, Hansen enlisted in the United States Army Reserve and served for one year before being discharged. He later worked as an assistant drill instructor at a police academy in Pocahontas.
On December 7, 1960, he was arrested for burning down a Pocahontas County Board of Education school bus garage, for which he served 20 months of a three-year prison sentence in Anamosa State Penitentiary. Over the next few years, he was jailed several times for petty theft. In 1967, he moved to Anchorage, Alaska.
He was arrested and convicted in 1983 and was sentenced to 461 years with no possibility of parole for four of the homicides.
Robert Ben Rhoades
Robert Ben Rhoades (born November 22, 1945), also known as The Truck Stop Killer, is a serial killer and rapist and a native of Council Bluffs. From 1975 to 1990 he is believed to have tortured, raped, and killed more than 50 women, although he has only three confirmed victims.
Rhoades became notorious for the truck he drove. He converted the sleeper cab into his own personal torture chamber. Rhoades is believed to have first killed in November 1989.
In the early morning of April 1, 1990, Officer Mike Miller of the Arizona Highway Patrol found a truck at the side of I-10 with its hazard lights on. When he investigated inside the cab, he discovered a nude woman, handcuffed and screaming. After failing to talk his way out of the situation, Rhoades was arrested and later charged with aggravated assault, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment.
In 1994, Robert Ben Rhoades was convicted of the first degree murder of Regina Kay Walters and sentenced to life without parole at Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois. Rhoades later was extradited to Texas for the murder of Candace Walsh and Douglas Zyskowski where Rhoades, in a deal where the DA agreed to drop the death penalty, pleaded guilty to their deaths and received a life sentence in Texas.
Rhoades was still alive as of March 2017 and serving out his sentence in Illinois.
Randy Steven Kraft
Randy Steven Kraft (born March 19, 1945) is an American serial killer known as the "Scorecard Killer" and the "Freeway Killer" who committed the rape, torture, mutilation and murder of a minimum of 16 young men in a series of killings spanning between 1972 and 1983, the majority of which had been committed in California.
Kraft is also believed to have committed the rape and murder of up to 51 further boys and young men.
Kraft became known as the "Scorecard Killer", because upon his arrest investigators discovered a coded list depicting cryptic references to his victims; and the "Freeway Killer", because many of his victims' bodies were discovered beside or near freeways.
One entry on Kraft's scorecard simply reading "Iowa" is believed to refer to an 18-year-old U.S. Marine named Oral Alfred Stuart, Jr. Stuart had been born in Iowa; his body was found discarded close to a Long Beach condominium in November 1974. The man had died as a result of blunt force trauma; his body remained unidentified until March 2012.
Kraft was convicted in May 1989 of murdering 16 victims and is currently incarcerated on death row at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California.
Gayno Gilbert Smith
Gayno Gilbert Smith (January 23, 1938 – May 16, 2005) was a mass murderer from Iowa who killed six people in 1961 and 1962.
Smith came to Martinsburg to live with his stepmother. When he had problems with her, he moved to the home of his uncle Andrew and lived there.
On May 27, 1962, Smith murdered Andrew McBeth, 51, Dora McBeth, 41, and their three children: Amos and Anna McBeth, both 19, and Donna Jean Kellogg, 17.
Smith, then 24, a nephew of the elder McBeths', confessed to the crime. He also confessed to having murdered his stepmother, Juanita Smith, who had been missing for several months.
After being arrested, he confessed both to the McBeth murders in Martinsburg and also to the murder of his stepmother, Juanita Smith, the previous October in Hedrick. Smith was sentenced to five life terms for first-degree murder and one 50-year term for second-degree murder.
Jake Bird
Jake Bird (December 14, 1901 – July 15, 1949) was a convicted murderer and self-confessed serial killer who was tried and executed for the axe murders of Bertha Kludt, 53, and her daughter Beverly June Kludt, 17, in Tacoma, Washington on October 30, 1947. However, Bird may have killed as many as 46 people.
Bird had an extensive criminal record, including burglary and attempted murder, and been incarcerated for a total of 31 years in Michigan, Iowa and Utah.
Bird's execution at the Washington State Penitentiary was scheduled for January 16, 1948, but Bird claimed he had committed 44 other murders which he was willing to help the police solve, so Washington governor Monrad C. Wallgren granted him a 60-day reprieve.
Police from other states interviewed Bird, and eleven murders were substantiated. He was knowledgeable enough about the 33 other murders to be considered a prime suspect.
In addition to his Washington state murders, the transient Bird apparently had killed people in Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin. He mostly preyed on Caucasian women. Bird had dispatched his victims with an axe or hatchet.
Robert Spangler
Robert Spangler (January 10, 1933 – August 5, 2001) was a serial killer who came into the spotlight following the murders of his first wife, son, daughter, and his third wife.
Spangler was raised in Ames, Iowa, where a laboratory at Iowa State University is named after his father, a civil engineer.
On the morning of December 30, 1978, in Littleton, Colorado, Robert Spangler lured his wife, Nancy, into the basement with the promise of a "surprise." He then shot her in the head with a .38 handgun. Going upstairs, he shot his teenage children, Susan and David. David was slow in dying, so Spangler finished him off by smothering him with a pillow. Spangler had cunningly framed the crime scene, making it appear that his wife had shot their children and then herself.
In April 1993, when Spangler's third marriage to 59-year-old aerobics instructor Donna Sundling went sour, he took her hiking in the Grand Canyon and pushed her off a 140-foot (40 m) drop to her death.
Spangler was never directly implicated in his third wife’s death because it was ruled an accident. He drew national attention with interviews on several television shows. As a grieving husband, Spangler discussed his wife’s accidental death and the dangers of hiking in the Grand Canyon. Spangler continued to backpack the Canyon with a variety of partners several times a year.
After the death of his third wife, Spangler reestablished contact with his second wife, who moved back into his Colorado home and died of a drug overdose in 1994. This death was not investigated by law enforcement.
Spangler confessed to investigators in 1999. He described how, while married to his first wife, he fell in love with another woman, then shot his wife and two teenage children to be with her. Further, Spangler said he smothered his son with a pillow after shooting him because the bullet wound was not lethal. He strongly denied involvement in the overdose death of his second wife and refused to discuss the death in the Grand Canyon because he feared a civil lawsuit from his third wife’s grown children; however, he eventually confessed he pushed his third wife over the edge while she was facing him.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, dying of cancer while in federal prison.
Charles Ray Hatcher
Charles Ray Hatcher (July 16, 1929 – December 7, 1984) was an American serial killer who confessed to having murdered 16 people between 1969 and 1982.
Hatcher was in and out of prison most of his life, mostly on charges of auto theft and assault. On January 13, 1981, Hatcher was arrested as Richard Clark in Des Moines after a knife fight. He spent time in several mental health facilities and was released to a Davenport Salvation Army shelter in April.
In 1982, Hatcher penned a crude map that led searchers to the remains of James Churchill, buried on the grounds of the Rock Island Army Arsenal, near Davenport. It was then that he also confessed to the murder of Eric Christgen.
Hatcher was convicted of the Christgen homicide in October 1983, and drew a term of life imprisonment with no parole for at least 50 years. Facing his second Missouri conviction a year later for the murder of Michelle Steele, Hatcher requested a death sentence but the jury refused, recommending life on December 3, 1984. Four days later, Hatcher hanged himself in his cell, at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.
Carroll Edward Cole
Carroll Edward Cole (May 9, 1938 – December 6, 1985) was an American serial killer who was executed in 1985 for killing at least 16 women between 1948 and 1980 by strangulation.
Cole was born in Sioux City, and later moved with his family to California.
As a teen, Cole committed petty crimes and was often arrested for drunkenness and minor thefts. In 1960, he attacked two couples parked in cars on a lover's lane. Soon afterwards, he called the police in Richmond, California, where he was living, and told them that he was plagued by violent fantasies involving strangling women.
Cole was in and out of various mental hospitals over the next three years. At the last of them, Stockton State Hospital, a Dr. Weiss wrote: "He seems to be afraid of the female figure and cannot have intercourse with her first but must kill her before he can do it."
Arrested on suspicion of murdering the final victim, Cole confessed, claiming that he had murdered at least 14 women over the previous nine years, although he added that there may have been more—he couldn't remember exactly, as he was usually drunk when he committed his crimes.
Sentenced to death, Cole refused to appeal and was executed in Nevada on December 6, 1985.
