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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
journalist and author Dan Zupanski. Good Evening, the newest installment in the New York Times best selling series of tales of America's most notorious criminals and the crimes that shape the places we call home. This time, you'll have no better guide through the darkest side of Iowa than Katherine Ramslin, one of America's most legendary true crime authors and researchers. Doctor Ramslin is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and
one of my favorite authors in any genre. She digs in, deep in and covers things that others before her has simply missed. With each story, she gives readers a look deep into the heart of darkness Iowa style. A parent murdering teen, an axe wielding serial killer, a school shooting on campus, killer, brothers posing as police, and many more notorious Iowa criminals. The book they're featuring this evening is Heartless Notorious USA, Iowa, with my special guests, journalist and
author Professor Kathryne Ramslin. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much for Greenda's interview.
Katherine Ramslin, Hello, thanks for having me. Good thank you an, thank you very much for joining us once again with this very interesting collection called Heartless. Let's get right into this because we won't have the time to cover all of these stories, but it's amazing. Some of these stories sound so similar, but we've never heard of these ones in particular. Let's tell us how you came to selecting the stories for this collection called Heartless.
Well, first, the Heartless is strictly about Iowa, and that Iowa is part of a trilogy that I called Heartland Horrors, and the trilogy is part of a larger project that crime writer Greg Olsen is sort of steering. I think this is I think I've done at least thirteen of these now, of thirteen different states, and so he wants to have crime stories for each state and he tends to package them three or four together under themes. So that was the first thing, is just to get a theme.
This package is Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, so that's you know, the heartland, and that's partly what led to the title, and also the kinds of crimes that I selected. I already knew of Balliska because I'd done a lot of work on that one with the actual the place that runs the tourist you know, industry there in Valliska, Iowa. So I already knew about that one, and I knew that John Wayne Gacy as Seria Killer had some associations and actually a number of Syria Killers had associations with Iowa.
And then from there I started looking for other ones that I thought would be intriguing, like there's a Haunted graves to Hoe one, and there are a few that are kind of classick love triangle gone bad types of stories, but they definitely represent the sense of being in the Midwest, and especially you know the deep Midwest, where like you know, where sometimes very hard to exist, where people can be in isolation, where legends grow up around certain incidents, sometimes
ghost stories, sometimes stories about how murders happened, unsolved murders and whatnot. So there's a special way that I think Midwesterners tend to tell stories and then pass them along, and I wanted to capture that kind of thing for Iowa.
Let's just go through, maybe just a brief description of the stories, starting with mystery Boys, and before we delve into a couple specific stories that we're going to talk about this evening.
Well, the Mystery Boy actually came from I was driving across from Michigan, actually another Midwestern state. I was driving there and I was listening to a podcast called Criminal and they had uh mentioned the uh the unique aspect of this story being that an eleven year old boy had murdered his parents and went to prison, but had the wherewithal to figure out how to to craft appeals and to get out of prison and actually end up
doing very well for himself. So that was a really interesting story, and it was it was Iowa, so so for me that absolutely went into the collection because it's such a unique story. You don't hear about eleven year olds not only killing their families. I mean, I have heard of that a couple of other times, but you don't hear about, uh, somebody who ha who has the kind of person and the ability to teach himself things about the law and politics and whatnot and write these
appeals for himself and he won people over. I thought that was a really interesting story. Some of the others, there's a mass murder on the campus grounds. There's a you know, a slaughter of some kids in sort of a hiking area that was pretty famous. Let's see say something about every single one of them, or do you do you want to just how do you want to do this?
Well, we could just we could talk about some of them specifically. I think like we talked about Velliska, Iowa, and you said you had done some research before on this and this is a particularly horrifying story, So maybe we can talk about June twelfth, nineteen twelve in Velaska.
And uh okay, Well that I mean when I was writing for the Crime Library, which was part of Court TV. When Court TV was around, the people at the Liska, which is currently run as a sort of a museum and some you can pay to stay overnight if you're a ghost hunter type of person who wants to experience the vibes. They had actually contacted my editor at the Crime Library and wanted the piece done, so they gave me a lot of materials to work with. And the
point was it remains unsolved. Although there are certainly people who believe it solved because they have their own theories, which I mentioned in this in my rendering, it is currently unsolved. And although the theories are out there, like Jack the Ripper, you know, there's over three hundred people named for Jack the Ripper, and yet that is still not solved. But in the minds of the people who
have their theories, it's solved. I wasn't convinced by any of the theories thus far, so to my mind, this still remains a really creepy murder where not just a family of six, but two young girls who were staying, you know, doing a sleepover with their friends were also slaughtered in this house by one person apparently with an axe, who had some peculiar habits like covering over the windows, and there was a you know, a hunk of bacon sitting out and the lamp, the glass cover for the
lamps they were using, you know, seem to have been placed in an odd place, and there were just a number of strange elements of this crime. And also they didn't necessarily have any enemies, and even if, even if, you know, the father might have because he was a well to do men and he had he had a rival in business, and maybe he had some enemies, but why would you slaughter the whole family over something like that?
So it's really a mystery. There was some sense that whoever had done this might have been spying on them from their own barn, because it was kind of it looked like there was an indentation in the hay and a little peep hole that would have given this person some pretty good sense of their movements. But it really wasn't about watching their movements and learning their routines and whatnot. He happened to come in very late at night on a Sunday after they'd all been to church for a
special church program for the kids, and slaughtered them. So, for all we know, that was just simply you know, luck. He might or might he, or they might or might not be related to a number of other axe murders in neighboring states over a few years, and some of them had behavioral similarities such as the glass cover and the lamp and the way the house is entered, and things like that so possibly, even probably, I would say Bliska wasn't an isolated incident, probably has some relationship to
a few of those. Does it have a relationship to fifty or sixty or two hundred, No, it doesn't, but people have certainly made it stretch to that many.
You write about something very very interesting that I've never read before, a superstition, that something that happened in death involving the retina and the superstition. Please explain this.
During a certain period of time, there was a notion that are you talking about the image left in the eye. Yes, you mean there was a certain idea that if if people saw their killer coming at them, that as they were dying, the retina would retain the killer's image, and
so what needed to be done. And they did believe that one of the although the rest seemed to have been killed in their sleep, one of the girls appeared to have struggled a bit and there looked to be a l you know, the potential there for some sexual assault or moistation, and if she had her eyes open and as she was dying, the idea was that we could somehow get the image of the killer off her retina,
that is a superstition. It's not true, but it was in the context of those times, people did think that was a possibility.
With this case, this brought up again confessions and they thought they had the culprit at one point or some points. Tell us a little bit with that.
Well, there was this really weird minister who confessed to the crimes. He went in and he heard about it. I think he was from a neighboring town, and he liked to ride the trains and whatnot, and he muttered a few things on the train to make people think that maybe he had something to do with it. And he went in and managed to get himself into the house while it was still being under investigation, which wasn't
uncommon in those days. People tramped through murder scenes all the time, And so he did get himself into the house so he could see things, which of course means that if he's not the killer but he wants to confess, he would have seen the layout and seen where everything had happened, and heard law enforcement talking and whatnot. This also was really way before anybody from the FBI, for example, would have known what to do with something like this.
This is a very unusual kind of crime in a in a town that's relatively quiet, where they really don't have much in the way of law enforcement that knows how to do murder investigations. So anyway, so this guy interesting kind of psychology are people who will falsely confess to things, and we've seen that a few times in our own time, like the guy John Mark Carr who wanted to be the one who killed John beIN a Ramsey even though he wasn't anywhere near the blades at
the time. There are people who like to associate themselves with sensational crimes, and sometimes it's because they feel guilty over something else, or sometimes just because they get so excitable when something like this occurs that they just want to be part of it so much that they're willing to confess. Even when you have something like not just conviction but the death penalty in place, they still sometimes
will falsely confess. We have a lot of research for that now to understan then the mindset of somebody who might do that. But anyway, so he you know, he was an odd guy. So that was that kind of made people realize maybe he's you know, he's not for real. And there were things that he didn't get right, and he couldn't have been there at the time he said he was there, et cetera, et cetera. That he then pretty much ended up not being He was the primary suspect for a while, but then in the end he
wasn't the guy. But the fact that he confessed is so weird, and that continues to be something that people, you know, investigate today.
And with this story, it doesn't end there because you say, there's another fan of the murders and a man named Andy Sawyer, and he also came under suspicion, and that this is in nineteen nineteen seventeen, So what happens with that? And then you talk about another another confession, because it's not just one confession. And after that, so tell.
Us about this, Yeah, well we actually have. When you have a famous murder, and this obviously became quite quite famous and sensational, you do get a number of confessions. I would suspect wasn't just these two. I would think there's probably more that we just don't know about, because the Lindbergh kidnapping case, for example, had over two hundred confessions. The Black Dahlia had quite a few confessions even including a guy who had hadn't even been born at the
time she was killed. So what is it that drives people to falsely confess, Well, they get it. They get very obsessed with something. They're already mentally unstable in some odd way. And this guy, Andy Siwyer that you mentioned, he'd purchase the newspaper with the headlines about the crime. So there there we go. He's he sees the big scary headlines. He liked to sleep with his acts, which is, I don't know, I think that's an odd habit. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I think that's a very
odd habit. And then he would start to kind of mumble about the murders. He already was kind of an odd guy. So odd people often come under suspicion is you know that they're you know, who knows what they're capable of doing? Kind of thing. He he got so involved, like after reading about in his paper, we got so involved that he actually would demonstrate reconstructions of how he think it might have happened, how the guy could have
gotten away. So so someone like that is actually a pretty viable candidate because why is he why is he trying to show people how how this all took place, and how the killer might have gotten away. But there there really wasn't any evidence at all. Now I'm not going to say he's not the guy, but there wasn't anything that linked him to it, aside from his own kind of obsessed with his ruminations about it.
But then you talk about a reverend JJ Burris from Oklahoma. He testified before a grand jury they he'd heard a confession in nineteen thirteen from a young blacksmith in Montana. Nothing case.
Yeah, and that's similar to this whole confession thing, I mean the Lizzie Borden thing. The maid who had been in the Lizzie Bordon house and her deathbed supposedly confessed that she knew what had happened and that Lizzie had been in it, and why did it take her so long? Well, part of it. The reason it took her so long
is she had made a money deal. I mean, they had paid her off to say nothing, and then finally she wanted to tell it to a minister who then later wrote the story and said she had confessed to him. So why are people confessing so long afterward? Well, first of all, all we have is this report. We don't know that this person didn't confess earlier. He might have and nobody took him seriously, or nobody reported it, or
the reports were lost. So sometimes we get in this in the habit of thinking only only documents we have access to, that's that's the whole of the story, when in fact we don't know that he didn't confess earlier. But even if he didn't, that wouldn't matter, because people do get very caught up in these these kinds of cases. It's a mystery. People love solving them, people love having
some association with them. I mean, we're having a lot of people now come out of the woodwork about you know, I met Ted Bundy along the roadway or or not. You know, how many years has it been since Ted Bundy? And suddenly people are starting to say, hey, I knew him. You know, you can get a book deal to saying you knew Ted Bundy basically.
Sure.
So it's an odd psychological thing that people get so attached to a particular story and then in some way think they either they're either responsible or they know someone who is responsible. But in this story, in this case, nothing came of it. I mean, he said he heard a confession from a young blacksmith. Well, where's who's who was it? Where is he? What? Did he say anything specific or was he just general? We don't know. We don't have details about it.
It continues with other with another confession as well. But do you you talk about a a officer that gets involved mcclowry and he he puts a pattern together. You mentioned another jurisdictions that there's similar similarities to other murders, and especially in the idea of covering up the bodies, covering up the wind goes, and the idea of the lamps. So tell us a little bit about just this pattern that he thinks he has and then what he does with that assumption or that theory.
Okay, well, he's doing what we call linkage analysis, long before behavioral profiling has ever even entered anyone's lips. So he's trying to figure out if these other axe murders in other jurisdictions. One's Colorado Springs where six were killed, and now there is an Illinois, another ones in Kansas, when there's actually several in Kansas. There were two in Kansas. There was one instance where it was two side by side houses and both houses everyone was killed. There were
similarities there. So then that came from nineteen eleven to nineteen twelve and he heard about this guy, Henry Lee Moore, and Henry Lee Moore is actually the person a lot of people think is the killer. I just saw it in another book that he definitely is the killer, even though there's nothing proven that he's the killer, but quite a few people believe that. I think it's on Wikipedia
that way and whatnot. Anyway, so Moore had killed his mother and grandmother with an axe because he wanted to inherit the house because he had promised it to some woman that he had gotten involved with it. So because he had used an axe, which by the way, was very common in those days as a murder weapon, that wasn't in any way than usual. So because he was he had murdered with an ax, he was convicted. This
mcclathory decided that he had to be the guy. He knew that Moore had been or had kind of wandered around and you know, been in some of these other states. So if he could be tied to them, that would
close twenty six cases. The only thing is it wasn't a very good linkage analysis, because really, the way Moore went about killing his mother and grandmother, I mean, first of all, he faked his name, and he stayed in a hotel under a false name, and his whole approach to it wasn't like this sneaky entering at night and then exiting. There was very little in common between how he had actually killed his mother and grandmother and the way these other murders were carried out, aside from it
being an axe. But mcclawfree was convinced, even though he couldn't get more to confess, he was convinced he had the right guy, and he tried to present this but nobody in Valliska was interested. So nothing really happened with this case to tie it to more. Even though he had the same last name as the you know, JB. Moore, the murder victim, they had no relationship to each other.
And you continue to write that there's other people the father daughter, author of sports actual writer decided to take upon this and as you write in the book, come to conclusions that they shouldn't have come to and make assumptions. Tell us about what they ended up writing about.
Well, they actually kind of played off of what someone had done for this Smithsonian magazine, doing a different kind of linkage analysis and linking. And it wasn't too more. It was too They had another suspect, Paul Mueller, and a fairly good suspect. You know, it wasn't totally out based. But what ended up happening is which I've seen before, is they began to think that almost every potential similarity had equal weight, which is a mistake that people make
when they participate in what we call confirmation bias. You have an idea and you just start looking for anything that will support it, and it's very easy to see what you want to see when you've decided that this person who's riding the trains in fact, went from one side of the country to the other over a period of quite a few years and ended up, you know, massacring a bunch of people. I can't remember how many
they had, but it was a lot. And by the end of the book, I was like everybody who aside from Lizzie Borden's parents, basically everybody killed with an axe seems to be linked together, even though they were dramatic dissimilarities. But what happens with confirmation bias when you're doing linkage analysis, as you have a hypothesis and you begin to that hypothesis puts weight on those factors that support your hypothesis and minimizes those factors that don't. And that's not really
a fair way of doing a behavioral analysis. It's not
based on real probability. It's based on you see things that you want to see, but but you don't realize that's what you're doing because you're getting so excited about all these great connections you're making and and you've discovered one of the world's worst serial killers ever ever to behold, you know, and I've seen that before people who just start going, Wow, this guy was over here and over here and over here, Oh my god, he's he also killed John F. Kennedy and John Benny Ramsay and the
Black Dahlia. And by the end of the day when you're when you're reading some of these accounts, it's like they have no stop gap measures, they have no real methodology. Their methodology is simply, while somebody killed with an axe, it wasn't very far from a railroad track. Uh, let's let's put them into the mix without looking at the genuine and dramatic behavioral differences that would put that person
out of the loop. And that's what I saw was, Oh my god, there's just there's so much going on here without seeing that the things that make it not work in your scenario are simply ignored or minimized for no particular reason. So that that does happen when you get people who who don't really have much experience in the in the criminal justice field, and they start getting very excited about their theory and wanting to show, Wow, this is this is one of the biggest stories ever
that no one's ever realized before. Reason they don't haven't realized it before is because it just isn't all it's correct up to be according to the way you're you're looking at the data. So that's what I have to say about that.
When you looked at the linkage evidence, when you looked at some of the similarities in other states, what was your conclusion. I mean, you said that Adam Sawyer probably wasn't wasn't a bad suspect, But well.
I think were you able to I think Adam ended up being in a different town or something at the time with also no evidence. I I don't know who it is, and I don't really speculate on who it is, but I do think that Balliska isn't an isolated incident because of certain very specific behaviors, being the handling of the the glass. I don't know what do you call that, the thing that's on top of the glass, chimney, the handling of the glass him needs very very odd and
very specific. That would be what we call signature behavior, really distinct, really unusual that you don't see in all of these, but you do see in a few, and they're neighboring stakes, like the couple in Kansas. I think we're probably and I think mcclawfrey's linkage is fairly good, so I would agree with him, except that he took it too far by deciding that Henry Lee Moore and the way he killed his mother and grandmother is similar
to these other ones, and it isn't at all. So he did that same thing because it was an ax he's good for these and he and that isn't correct, because his entire approach to killing his mother and grandmother was so distinctly different from these others that you have to consider. You know that just because you want him to be the guy, doesn't make him the guy. But I do think mcclaffrey was correct in the fact that
these were neighboring states pretty close together. And I'm not sure i'd put the I might not put the Illinois one in, but but the ones in Kansas, Colorado, and Iowa, I think we're pretty good. But I don't really speculate as to who it could have been, because it can so easily be somebody who's not who never even got on the record at all. It could just be a you know, an anonymous person just like Jack the Ripper, could be maybe all the suspects that have been named, none of them, is it?
What I found interesting for the time was that this signature of opposing and displaying a victim that early was quite interesting.
What what do you mean? I mean displaying a victim is has different purposes, but a lot of times that's that's sexual. And I mean we've seen that, you know, into history. But what is it that you found interesting about it?
Well? I just that that he had so many unique features in a signature. For that, I don't know, I just I just attribute sort of the interesting and unique features to more modern serial killers.
Yeah. I mean, I think the thing with the with the hunko, I guess there's a pound of bacon or something sitting out was it weird? And then something with the mirror was also I can't recall exactly what it was, but he it's clear this guy has mental health issues, not just because he's a mass murderer, but he's got some other kind of mental instability because he does have rituals and weird, seemingly weird superstitions. He it looks as if he did a bit of sexual molestation one of
the girls in the Baliska house. But when he goes up and he seems to know the layout of the house, that's that's sort of peculiar too. He knows exactly who's who's where and what bedrooms. He goes right for the parents and you know, murders them really fast. So there's there's definitely something odd about him and about.
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Behaviors which is what helps us to at least theoretically link them to some of those others in Kansas and Colorado, because the more peculiar behavior is that and shows up in something else, the more likely it is its attributable to the same person. So we do have distinct ones there. But just because it's near a railroad track and an AX is used, that to me, that's MO. That's the method of operation. That isn't signature.
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with the audience is the story of the Getchee Girl. Okay, and this is in Gitchi, Manitou State Preserve. In nineteen seventy three and five teens went out one autumn evening tell us about teens were doing in South Dakota in this Lion County in the state Preserve.
Well, I think when you know kids have nothing much to do, they find places where they can go hang out. They were just going to go kind of smoke some dope and listen to music and just hang out and you know, do something instead of stay home and do nothing. And as they were they set up, they got firewood, they had a campfire, and they start to sing, and their music attracts some guys who are actually in that area illegally poaching or trying to poach. I guess they
didn't do a very good job that day. And they decided, okay, you know this at least according to the way this reconstruction is because who knows what acts happen, but they decide to have a little fun and it gets out of hand. It was just ugly away from the start. They came down. It was three brothers. They threatened the kids, shot one of them right away, and the rest of them took off. And these are like, you know, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,
they're young kids. They don't know what this is about, why anybody is accosting them like this. And then they make them They shoot another and wound him, and they make them go back up to where their van is, their car and where these brothers truck is, and there they shoot the boys. I mean, this is this is essentially a mass murder site and they take the girl what was the name, Sandra, I think her name was.
They take her for basically like over the border into into around where they live, and then eventually bring it back drop her off, and she has no idea that her friends are dead, she says, because they had assured her, Oh, you know, they're not really dead. They're you know, we hit them with darts or whatever, they'll they'll be okay, And so she believes that, and she doesn't realize that, you know, the families of these boys are looking for them,
and she's the only survivor. So when the bodies are found, of course she find she's told and the sheriff wants to talk to her. You know, how is it that you survived and they all got killed? Which is what makes it such an astonishing story because she also doesn't have the answer to that question. Also, does she know where they took her? Well sort of, I mean it wasn't like again, you're she's thirteen. Who's paying attention? Sosnight,
who's paying attention? She's scared, she's traumatized. Trauma does a lot of stuff to memory. But but bizarrely enough, she thinks she sees the place, and then the sheriff is going doing this a lot. It's it isn't just a one hit wonder here that he keeps taking her out to see if something comes back, and eventually she thinks she sees the place because she does remember some key things about it. When when the one brother she was with had stopped and at that point that he drives
by in the truck. So they got him. You know what a bizarre coincidence. So another aspect of the Getche thing is is just that that happened, because it could easily have been that she just never was able to, you know, definitively say this is the place. But they did get him, They got all three of them.
Yeah. Hard. What we failed to, I think explain to the audience is that they realized when they were playing the guitar and singing, these kids were smoking pots. So they realized, Okay, we're gonna have a little bit of fun. He went back to tell his brothers and then they posed this police officers. So Sandra at that age and on, all of the boys believed that they were police officers.
And then when Sandra was taken away from him, she saw the boys alive, and just thought that they were all going to be reprimanded and said see on Monday, and thought you'd get in a little bit of trouble.
And then this, and then you write that the nightmare isn't over for her once she said she noticed this this red gasoline tank, and then the farmhouse was nearby, so she does do this incredible she was able to help the police locate them, and like you say, just out of a movie, just a very movie esque, the one the one person, and that brought her home. That was about the Raper, as you write in the book, right, was about the Raper decided to bring her home, I
guess foolishly. Now he drives by in that same blue truck, as you say, coincidences of all coincidences.
So but there are definitely people didn't believe her story. Yeah, and that's because it does sound very far fetched, especially that these now the brothers. Yeah, it was about getting the pot in a way, but also because they were so upset that they had invested so much time and not and we're coming back empty handed. So for them it was well, we're going to get something out of
this trip. The fact that one of those brothers with that kind of attitude would actually have this girl alone and not rape her, I think was I think people just didn't believe that. And I find it hard to believe too, because it's not like these guys had any sense, you know, any moral center or anything. So why would he have done that? I'm not sure. I don't know that we do have the whole story here.
Now you talk about Sandra's PTSD, and you talked about just what happened after in terms of people not believing her. So she dropped out of school and got married. But this did not leave her. This stink of guilt did not leave her ever, did it right?
And it isn't even I mean, they blamed her like as if somehow she had attracted these guys and because of her, if only she hadn't been with them, they would still be alive, which is absurd. Nobody knows if that's the case or not. And it's not as if, I mean, who knows. She might have been singing along and maybe they heard a girl's voice and said, no, there's a girl down there, let's let's get her. Maybe that's true, but we don't know that that's true. But
she was blamed. She was ostracized and it did certainly affect her for a long time.
You have in this book also you talk about Iowa in a certain position in terms of position basically in America, where it has been an important place for serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy, and you mentioned other serial killers. Let's talk about i was important to John Wayne Gacy.
Okay, Well, Gasey had married gotten married and was working in Iowa. Let me see if I can find it. I can't remember the exact town, but let me see if I can find it. He was working there and this is the first place where he begins to molest boys. So it's kind of is the start of a criminal life, but also it's the start of his ability to to persuade people. He's a good guy, and you know, he's very civic minded. He's very involved in stuff. He his father in law thought he was just going to be
a loser. So now he's proving himself by by being invited into several things and you know, like lions clubs and whatnot. So he uses these excuse me, he uses these positions, you know, some status to invite boys over and you know, offer them liquor and drugs. And whatnot to you know, show how cool he is. But at the same time, he's using it to to get some of the boys into compromise positions so he can molest them. And he manages to succeed apparently with some but but
others turn on him. And this is the this is the first point at which he gets arrested and he goes to trial and he's convicted and he actually gets a prison sentence for doing this. This is in Iowa.
So the the interesting thing is it became a big deal after he was unmasked as a serial killer in Chicago because he had gotten a ten year sentence, but he was let out after just over two years, and he had kind of this record was it wasn't secret, it wasn't wasn't locked away, but states didn't have much
to do with each other's jurisdictions. And so he's so but somebody does find out he's got a record, you know, when when Rob Peacete was really the disappearance of a boy named Rob peaste was really what started that in Chicago, and they start looking into his past, into Gaycy's past, because Gaysey appeared to be the last person to have seen him when he supposedly was offering him a summer job in construction. There was no reason why Rob Peace
would have run away. There was every reason I believe he'd say he was about on his way home. And so somebody really started looking into Gasey because he already was at the center of a number of other young men's disappearances, all of which he was able to explain away. And in part he acquired this talent in Iowa being able to talk his way through these things and to say, you know that he's a good guy. How could anybody suspect him of doing anything bad. He's, you know, a
family man, he's well placed in the community. Does the same thing in Chicago. I mean, he's politically well connected, he's got a thriving construction business. He dresses like a clown to go entertain sick kids. In my mind, that's enough call it the serial killer personally.
But.
That's just me at any rate. So then they look back and find out he does in fact have a prison record, and it is for molesting boys. Now they have real reason to be worried about Rob Peaste and some of these other boys and young men who've disappeared. So now they're really taking it seriously and they're putting surveillance on him, and that eventually breaks the case. But he got his start in Iowa doing this stuff.
You also say too, the stay in Iowa after he was convicted, and he made a decision before he went to Chicago that he was going to do things differently, didn't he.
Well, yeah, and that's something we see commonly in sex offenders who get caught convicted in a prison sentence is when they do get out, they decide there will be no witnesses, so now it's not going to just be about molesting them. They have to die too.
Yeah.
Absolutely. You have a story in this book. The namesake of the book it's called Heartless, and the story is called Heartless with Brian Hatman and his and his mistress Sidney good Rich Rutledge. Very very interesting story, Heartless.
I think that's funny. I thought the most weird story of the book was the weird suicide. Yeah, I mean, I could talk about by Ray Hatton. It's a classic love triangle, is very similar to one I wrote about when I did The Michigan One, which became a Jimmy Stewart movie. The Anatomy of a murder. It's very similar to that because we have a woman who is kind of you know, her husband's a workaholic. Uh she and he's older than her. Let's see his his name is
Byron Hatman and so Sydney. Oh sorry, you get these these Let me get my name straight. So Byron Hatton moves from Pennsylvania to to Saint Louis to work in Saint Louis, and they go to cedar Rappids. His wife is Sydney, and she is younger than him, and she has a master's degree, and she's you know, sexy and and restless and uh so she starts looking around to have some fun while her workaholic husband is is you know,
just not around. She wants to play and she she meets a guy who has a boat and our yacht her he brings it to the yacht club and and she starts really flirting with him. And then the story gets very very strange because she she ends up getting pregnant. She claims she was raped again. It's very it's very sim much to that story in the in the Upper Peninsula.
Claims she's raped. So her husband now has to do the right thing, and and it's just a strange story because of the way the kind of constant back and forth between the two men. Her husband thinks he's gotta, you know, do the right thing and and defend her honor and whatnot. But but he doesn't really have to do anything. That's the bizarre thing. He doesn't really have to act the other The other guy moves away and he's working, you know, in a different town altogether. But
Sydney's husband can't let it go. So I'm not sure where you have me to go with it. To me, it's a typical love triangle gone bad and with a lot of misunderstandings that ends in murder, you know, and a murder I think didn't have to take place, just because it was so weirdly arranged and organized. But I'm not sure why what it is you're wanting to go after with this story.
I just thought it was just the namesake of the book, and it really does. I mean, it doesn't encapsulate anything more than just it really was heartless and that what she had done to the husband when she's discovered, she never owns up to anything at all, and the poor guy ends up killing this person for the wrong, like you say, the wrong reason it could have been avoided.
It was his own, I guess, sense of pride. And then at the end he even leaves a note, a pathetic note too, that just forget about him and move on and she'll have a bright future.
So it's again, yeah, I mean one of them was so the husband, Rutledge would it said that they were constantly being harassed, although they weren't. There was some kind of there were hints that there was an extortion. You know, if you'll pay me, I'll leave you alone. So Rutlers was going over there supposedly to pay him, and and Manhattan ended up dead, fatally stabbed. So the whole thing was so bizarre the way it happened. Yet and yet it is considered I think because it was kind of
a high society one. It was considered a real classic Iowa crime and a lot of the stuff that I saw about it, you know, people talked a lot about it, and I think because it does fit in that kind of noir ish atmosphere of you know, flirtatious married women who lead a man on and the man you know, goes ahead and gets involved with them. So to me, it was a pretty typical kind of story like that, but it was sad because of the way it ends. Obviously, I think so much of what happened was easily avoided.
But you know, in part it was about her, and she didn't want to own up to the take responsibility for her own behavior, so part of it was really about her, and she in the end, I think she's the only one who kind of survived and thrived out of it in a way.
You talk about the story of Glenn Beck and it is truly bizarre. Story. Tell us about this.
Yeah, this is weird because I do a lot with suicideology and I when I came across this story, I just thought it seems so outlandish. So so Glenn Beck, who had an association with the police department, he calls the sheriff's office in the county where he lives and he reports that his wife has killed herself. Now, the weird thing is she's a quadruple amputee, So what how
does a person do that? And it is bizarre. First of all, how she got to be a quadruple amputee has to do with the fact that she had a tendency to get very depressed and one day in the middle of winter, so here we have that whole heartland, the harsh winter's kind of of tone to this. So she just went out, you know, without any protection. They ended up finding her and she had frozen, but she was still alive, but she lost her arms and legs. So here she not of the way to cure depression
by any means. So now she's back in the house. He's caring for her, but it's obviously quite a burden. He does have people come, you know, nurses and whatnot come in and check on her. And at one point he had found her. Somehow she managed to maneuver her way out of bed. And it isn't just out of bed and across the floor. She has to go out
of bed down a step and up and whatnot. But she had maneuvered her way over to the table where the medications were and pulled with her teeth on the tablecloth to pull the medications out because she was trying to overdose. He got her back into bed, according to his story, but that incident showed that it was possible that she had committed suicide. So what we have here is probably an assisted suicide. I'm guessing again here she is. He had left the medications on the table, they without
the caps on. He said accidentally that that part to me is that isn't any accident because he already knows she has done this before. But it's clear she wants to die. It's clear to him she wants to die. And also he's got other ideas for his wife. He's not going to want to do this his whole life.
But anyway, so she so he finds her having accomplished this again without arms and legs, got herself off the bed, across the floor, down the step over to the table, pulled, pulled the tablecloth of the chief and there's apparently water there. So that supposedly the medication had dissolved into the water. Again, what a Barbett's story, you know, I don't believe that for a second. But so supposedly, you know, she just lucked out and it had to and so she's able
to lap it up and die from an overdose. Wow, what a weird, bizarre story, you know. And it doesn't end there because you know, they find out he's involved with another woman, and so now it looks like it's potentially murder. But the fact that he's in this compromised position, and he's also associated with law enforcement. One of the das who would have used him feels like, well, I can't use him at all, and he's the one who insists there needs to be an investigation of this incident.
But the other DA. So that the weird part is the jurisdiction issues. The other das doesn't know, you know, I accept the story. I'm not going to press charges. So then the Iowa Attorney General gets involved, and he also thinks, oh, you know, any inconsistencies we have here, and there were quite a few, by the way, any inconsistencies or just misstatements, and we're not We're just going to leave it as a suicide. We're not going to
do anything about this. Uh and and so it really, again, it does remain a bit of a mystery because there were inconsistencies. He said at one point it sounded like she like there was some kind of like a squawking in the background when he's on the phone with someone. He said it was his peacock, long before they were comfort peacocks. By the way, he said it was his peacock, and that was weird. He claimed that one of the people the aides who came in had not come in.
She said yes, she had. So there were a lot of inconsistencies in his statements, and I think it's I think it's pretty clear that he definitely made sure if she wanted to die, she could accomplish it. But I also think he probably helped her along a bit as well. But I think it was a strange story. The idea that a person with no arms and legs could commit suicide is just so out there, and I just had to have this for this book, because who's ever heard of something like that.
What I found odd was that they actually could have to get a nurse to say, well, a couple months earlier, or to someone to testify that, yeah, that she had done this before. This lapping up the drugs. You know that that was the most incredible part of the story, and yet they had somebody to say that this had
happened before. I thought that was incredible. You also write that because he had a duel, he was a police chief, or he had a role in one jurisdiction and in another county he was a police chief and in that other county it didn't sit well with him. And he wrote letters to all kinds of officials trying to get this case at least to be prosecuted or look into further. But he failed, didn't he Yeah, because.
The county where it would have had to have been opened, they said, no, we're accepting it. So did they know something? You wonder, because I think there are plenty of good reasons why something this should have been reopened, just some of the odd contradictions. Why not go through and really do an investigation. But you know what, I've seen that kind of investigation in my own state, where it's so obvious this needs to be further explored, but they just don't want to.
And you know, to add even more credibility to what you're saying, this man married his alleged mistress as well. Just if you're talking motive at all, we.
Had plenty of motive. First of all, what a burden. First of all, he's got a woman who's so depressed she wants to die, and she walks out the door when day and they find her in the ditch, you know, frozen. Now he's got to deal with, you know, paying for help to come in, worrying about you know, someone's got to come in and turn her, feed her, do all kinds of stuff. So his life became a nightmare. And then he, you know, gets involved with someone else, and
now he sees a way out. But that way out is not going to happen unless you know, his wife is allowed to go ahead and do what she wants to do in his mind, I'm sure it seems justified. How involved he was is not clear, but it's it is pretty clear that he knew what was going to happen, wanted it to happen, and did some help along the way.
And it does seem incredible, Like you say that the authorities would not prosecute, would not convene a grand jury, would not look at this. It looked like he was getting a pass.
Yeah, And I think what would have happened is her history of depression, her earlier as suicide attempt, heared telling people she wanted to die. I think all of that would have come in and very likely been you know, pretty persuasive.
Yeah, and I you could be right too. The prosecutor just could have said, this has got too many it's very very difficult, so it might be not worth prosecuting.
So yeah, it's one of those cases right on the edge. It's like it's like the tennis ball on the net, which which side is it going to be on? And I think a prosecutor would see, oh my god, this is going to be so full of holes either way that it's going to be difficult to take this on.
Yes, I want to thank you Catherine for coming on and talking about Heartless. How many stories are are in this Heartless collection?
Actually didn't out. It looks like there's a a dozen one, two, three, four, five, six, Yeah about that. Each each of the books has about that many stories. I mean, the fun is that you're really trying to get the character of the state that you're writing about, so you want to really get a central story, but the others have to radiate around that same theme. Some of the states I had lived in and was familiar with. Iowa is not one of those. But I did know the Balliska case pretty well.
And what is the next installment of Notorious that you'll be involved with.
I don't know. I did thirteen so far. I haven't actually talked to Greg about the next one. He has a number of them, like Caitlin Rother has done a few, and Kevin Sullivan has done a few and Greg has done a few, so I don't even know where it is at this point. I think I think all the good states they are kind of taken. I wanted Utah and California, but I think somebody's already working on them, and Greg did Oregon, where I had lived once, so
I'm not really sure. I'd have to look at what's left to see what I want to do.
Oh, there you go, But there's thirteen so far.
There's thirteen in my collection.
Yes, yes, absolutely for those fans it might just want to take a look at. Do you have a website or Facebook page? Tell us about that.
Catherine, it's Facebook. I kind of let my website go because the amount of time it took to work on it I wanted to use to write. So most days do Facebook. I do. I have a one for me. I have a fans of Katherine Ramseling page, and I have my personal page. Any of those people can get on easily and see what when I'm up to.
Well, thank you very much, Catherine. It's been a pleasure, as it always is talking about Notorious USA Iowa. Thank you very much for your time.
You're welcome.
Have a great evening.
Thanks, thanks for your interest.
Bye, thank you, good night.