1803
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 included the land that became Iowa.
about 0:08:51The story
Joyce Amelia Monahan was born in 1949 in Granite City, Illinois, the oldest of three children. Her father Eugene was a teacher and her mother Virginia a homemaker. After Granite City High School she worked as a secretary for the Mississippi Glass Company in St Louis. Their only child, Bartley, was born in 1971.
The family settled in a three-bedroom house at Royal Oaks Drive, known locally as the Castle House because of the turret on one side. By 1983 the marriage was in trouble and the Klindts were discussing an amicable divorce. She borrowed money from the Roths, hired her own lawyer and began moving jewellery, documents and her car to their house.
She gave the tape to the Roths for safekeeping.
At 11 he was seen at Princeton taking his airboat onto the Mississippi, which was high and rough. Later that day her Volkswagen Jetta was found at the Moline Holiday Inn in Illinois. She missed a meeting with a minister about how to tell Bartley of the separation, and she never contacted her son.
Almost two weeks later, on 16 April 1983, two commercial fishermen found a lower torso floating in the Mississippi just inside the western limits of Bettendorf. About five hours later a stomach and intestines were recovered nearby. The medical examiner said the body had been cut with a blade five-sixteenths of an inch wide moving in a circular motion, in other words a chainsaw, and that the torso had probably been in the water since March. There were no surgical scars or tattoos, only two freckle-sized birthmarks near the bikini line. Blood type A matched Joyce's, but that was common. Police searched the Castle House on 17 April and took a chainsaw and an Avon hairbrush for hair samples, and later took hair from a wig in a storage unit at 3031 Hickory Grove.
A statistician put the probability that the torso was Joyce at 98.82 per cent, while the defence argued that the torso came from a larger woman and that Joyce had run off with thirty thousand dollars.
In January 1985 the state revoked his chiropractic licence. An estate sale followed in July, the bank bought back the house in September, and memorials were placed in the chapel at Zion Lutheran Church and at her grave in Davenport Memorial Park. Two days later, he said, he returned with a chainsaw and two pieces of panelling and cut the body up in the water.
He returned to Davenport, where in 2006 he was running a taco stand called Eats and Sweets, telling a reporter he had learned to make tacos from Hispanic inmates. Bartley became a chiropractor in Kentucky. The Castle House was sold in 2022.