Town note
The town was originally called Faroaks.
about 0:07:25The story
Shenandoah, Iowa, sits in the far south-west corner of the state, close to the Nebraska line, in Page County. It was first named Faroaks and took the name Shenandoah in 1870, when soldiers returning from the Civil War thought the countryside resembled the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Henry Field, born there in 1871, was selling packets of seeds at the age of six and built one of the largest seed companies in the United States. The Everly Brothers came from the town. By 1988 it was the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked, where violent crime ran at about half the national average, and where a murder was expected every few decades rather than every few years.
Robert Borton was born in Marshalltown in 1947 and served in the US Navy. He met Cynthia Doms, born in 1949, and they married in 1969, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. Their son John was born in 1970. Robert entered the ministry in 1977, graduated from a seminary in Evanston, Illinois, in 1981, and from 1982 to 1984 was pastor of the Church of God in Shenandoah. In 1984 he left the church, and money was tight. Cynthia was a homemaker who volunteered at churches and worked three part-time jobs; she also worked afternoons at a donut shop. Robert worked at Select Motors, a car dealership less than a mile from the house, cleaning and preparing cars for sale. In 1988 John was eighteen and a senior at high school.
On 6 September 1988 Cynthia did not turn up for her afternoon shift. Her manager, Sue Rogers, called Robert at work, because Cynthia was always on time or a little early. Another employee, Ruth Fender, went to the house and called through the screen door but got no answer, and the dog was barking. Robert came home at about 3.30 p.m. and found his wife on her back in the house, a two-pronged barbecue fork standing straight up out of her throat. There had been a struggle: things were knocked over and blood was smeared about, and marks in the blood showed she had crawled through it towards the telephone. She had been stabbed twenty-nine times and her throat had been cut. Nothing was missing and the house had not been ransacked. There was no sign of sexual assault. John came home from school to find police outside and learned his mother was dead.
The investigation found no usable fingerprints anywhere in the house. The kitchen knives did not include the murder weapon, and the fork had no print on it. Robert said he had come home for lunch and gone back to work about one o'clock. Attention settled on him partly because he was the last person known to have seen Cynthia alive, and partly because of his manner: he called 911 from outside the house and waited there, he yawned during interviews, and he offered the theory that his wife had tripped and fallen onto a meat fork. Investigators followed him for months. A lie detector test in Des Moines was inconclusive, and the agents afterwards called him a fiend and told him his ministry was a sham. He moved with John to Gladbrook in November 1988, and by Christmas he had plans to marry again in the spring.
On 30 November 1988 someone made a half-hearted attempt to burn Shenandoah City Hall, one of a series of small fires in the town, including one in a school car park and one in a pickup truck. A note left at the scene was signed Night Stalker and named Broad Street, the Anderson pickup and Cynthia Borton, saying she was nothing compared to what was coming next.
In January 1989 a teenager walked into the Shenandoah police station. He had watched and waited for Mr Borton to leave, then rang the doorbell and asked Cynthia if she would act as a reference on a job application. She let him in and went to fetch him a glass of water. He told Jackson he had planned it for a week. Jackson gave his account to police on 26 January 1989. They did not believe him at first, thinking it was a teenager boasting.
He was told he had failed. His fingerprints matched the note from City Hall. The knife was consistent with the wounds, though the examiner said many knives could have caused them. He was nineteen, a high-school dropout who lived with his parents, and he seemed to think he would be sent to a group home.
State officials defended their aggressive investigation.
His lawyer, Gary Guy, argued in closing that the whole thing was a lie that got out of hand, teenage bragging.
In 2014 Governor Terry Bransted denied his application for commutation. By 2016 he was forty-five and held at the Clorinda Correctional Facility, offender number 0806368. An Investigation Discovery programme, Murder Comes to Town, featured the case on 22 February 2016. Robert Borton had moved twice more, was living in Eldora and working for a plastics recycling firm, and was engaged to Elaine Hewen.