When my friends and I turned 18 in the early aughts, we decided we were tired of our parents’ basements. We found our new hang on the north side of […]
True Crime
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘I’m comfortable here’: Filmmaker Kristian Day makes documentaries in, and about, Iowa
Des Moines-based storyteller Kristian Day has made a name for himself in the world of media production. His bonafides include creating The Last American Gay Bar, a 2024 docuseries for […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling’ by Rachel Corbett
All through college, and for several years after, I was a self-professed true crime girlie. I suspect my interest sprung from watching CSI with my parents growing, nestled up in […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
An art writer with a true crime obsession, Rachel Corbett used her new book to delve into the dark history of criminal profiling
In her latest book The Monsters We Make, author and journalist (and Iowa native) Rachel Corbett dives deep into the dark history of criminal profiling as “a tool for social control,” our collective appetite for true crime entertainment and her own personal history with, as she puts it, “an early father-figure [who] committed an unconscionable act of violence.”
Posted inCommunity/News
Bumper Crops: Pinball bans and the Des Moines mafia
There was never an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting pinball, but that didn’t stop some major cities from banning the game from the 1930s through the mid-’70s. In fact, Oakland, […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: History’s most prolific book bandit is an Ottumwa man. Librarians helped bring him down.
“Organized crime” usually refers to illegal activity as a collaborative enterprise, involving large networks of people and undertaken for profit or power. That’s too damned bad, really, because there is […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: 175 years of Cedar Rapids history began with a log-cabin tavern run by an outlaw
Cedar Rapids celebrated its 175th birthday in 2024. Iowa had been a state for barely two years when the new city was incorporated on Jan. 15, 1849. Of course, people […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Would you stay overnight at the Villisca Axe Murder House?
On the morning of June 10, 1912, the Villisca, Iowa home of prominent business owner Josiah B. Moore and his family was eerily still. That stillness gave way to a […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Forty years after the Johnny Gosch disappearance, fear continues to fuel conspiracy theories in Iowa and beyond
Listen an audio version of this article here, or using the player at the bottom of the page. On Sept. 20, 1984, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in Cedar […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘Somebody knows something’: $10k reward brings new attention to Iowa City woman’s 1996 cold case murder
Just before 2 a.m. on Oct. 26, 1996, Dan Clyde was driving his truck along Route 136 in Kahoka, Missouri, not far from the Iowa and Illinois borders, when he […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Michelle Martinko’s murder ‘haunted’ the Cedar Rapids community for 40 years. Now, her suspected killer is set to go on trial.
Dec. 19, 2018. Like every year, local news stations ran anniversary pieces describing the cold case of Michelle Martinko, an 18-year-old woman stabbed to death in Cedar Rapids in 1979. The facts of the case were recounted. A tip line scrolled across the bottom of the screen. The weather report would be next, and Martinko’s story would be
Posted inCommunity/News
How the Golden State Killer — and true-crime obsession — de-charmed ‘the Midwest of California’
I had passed by this quaint block countless times before on my bike commute to and from work, but this time it felt macabre as a horror story coalesced around me. The dissonance between the crime scenes I’d read about and their plain existence made my head swim. Seeing this unremarkable block through new eyes, I was struck by how normal
