1855
Mark Twain lived in Muscatine briefly during the summer of 1855 while working at the local newspaper, the Muscatine Journal; his brother was a part-owner.
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Muscatine, Iowa, sits on the Mississippi River in Muscatine County, on the Illinois border. In 1979 it was a river town of about 24,000 people, known for pearl buttons and watermelons.
His father, Ronald, was a senior vice-president of Stanley Consultants, an engineering firm based in the town, and his siblings became an engineer and a nurse. He graduated with an accounting degree in 1977. In 1975 he married a laboratory technician named Diana, and in 1976 they had a son, Branson.
His divorce lawyer suggested that he keep a journal. On 20 April he wrote that he had thought about killing her so that she and Branson would remain with him. In 1977 he left a notebook behind at the Golden Burger Palace, a restaurant in Iowa City. An employee opened it and found what police later called details of a plan to terrorise, injure and murder his wife and then collect her insurance. The restaurant called the police. Iowa City officers made a copy of the notebook, returned the original to the restaurant and kept the copy on file.
The notebook contained plans to blind Diana with an acid telescope, to frame another man, to kill her and bury her, and a revenge list of twenty-one relatives and friends he blamed for the divorce. It also contained a plot to kidnap, sexually abuse and murder a Des Moines Register paper boy and then collect reward money by framing someone else. He said the writings were fantasy, that his lawyer had told him to write things down, and that some were school projects. The copies stayed with the police.
There he met Carol Ann Willitz, twenty-one, a teller at the First National Bank of Muscatine who had moved to the town in 1978. She was one of ten children, had been voted class clown at high school in 1975, and was active at the Mulford Evangelical Free Church. He also met Cynthia Walker, nineteen, who had moved to Muscatine from Maryland as a child and worked the night shift at the hotel. She was engaged to David Titus and hoped to become a flight attendant. He later said he had sexual relationships with both women.
He told her it was sensible for their planned drive to California. Her parents were unhappy about the trip and about the policy.
On 14 January 1979 Carol had applied at the Muscatine County Sheriff's Department for a permit to carry a weapon, then telephoned two hours later to say she had applied for the wrong permit and wanted a permit to purchase a gun instead. The next day she bought a .38 calibre pistol.
On 22 February Carol worked at the bank, then bought ingredients for a spaghetti dinner and entertained four former colleagues from Nielsen's Clearing House at her apartment at East Third Street. They said she was cheerful and showed them family Christmas photographs. They would stay at Carol's apartment and drive to Iowa City the next day to see a friend's new baby. She left after 11.30 without her nightshirt or her purse.
At 6.30 the next morning, 23 February, a driver found Cindy's body in the middle of Brent Road, a gravel road three miles south of Muscatine. She was fully clothed in a ski jacket and had been shot three times, twice in the head and once in the abdomen. An hour later, at the intersection of U.S. 61 and Burlington Road, police found Carol's Ford Granada with its engine running and lights on. Carol was in the driver's seat, shot once in the right temple. A .38 revolver lay on her lap. She was blindfolded with what looked like a torn piece of a fancy pillowcase and was wearing men's work gloves. A note in her handwriting lay on the dashboard.
The first investigator on the scene was Darrell Werner of the Muscatine County Sheriff's Department, Cindy's first cousin by marriage. He identified her immediately. The deaths first looked like a murder-suicide: two women involved with the same man, one shooting the other and then herself. Carol's friends rejected the idea. They said she was afraid of guns, valued life and was a Christian. A forensic pathologist later gave six reasons for calling Carol's death a homicide: the blindfold, which he had never seen in a suicide; a knot tied on the left by a right-handed person when Carol was left-handed; the large work gloves; the gun resting on top of her hand in her lap rather than recoiling away; a straight bullet path rather than an angled one; and an intact paper bag on the seat that should have been disturbed.
The physical evidence was thin. Police found cigarette butts of Cindy's brand in Carol's car, hairs from both women, and sand on the bumper and in the shoes that matched the sand where Cindy was found. In Carol's apartment they found a torn-up rough draft of the note, misspellings of her own name in the margin, and a note advertising a .38 revolver with the telephone number of the Thin and Feather Sports Shop in Iowa City. His letter to Carol had no cancellation impressions, and a document examiner tested 105 envelopes through the Muscatine post office and found impressions on every one. The blindfold resembled pillowcases from his parents' house. Two witnesses reported seeing a second car with rectangular headlights near Brent Road, and his father owned a car with rectangular lights.
In June the bodies of both women were exhumed because the first fingerprints had been inadequate. He moved to Modesto, California, where he worked at the Del Monte cannery and lived at the Surfside apartments on College Avenue. In December 1982 a woman he had lived with, Cecilia French, reported a burglary; she later found the missing items in a trunk in her garage.
Police learned of the move from the return address on a letter he had written. The prosecution was led by James Raimi, who called it the most unusual case he had seen. The defence argued that Carol had shot Cindy and then herself.
It held that the 143-page journal from 1977 had been properly admitted because it tended to explain the insurance policy, but that the second journal, with the paper-boy plot, should not have been. A retrial followed in 1987.
Cindy's family and Carol's family never received a full account of what happened on Brent Road, and the case remains a tangle of circumstantial evidence, missed chances and conflicts of interest.