Iowa Cold Cases

A former Iowa City woman was extradited from Missouri to Iowa City and formally charged with first-degree murder in the 1992 death of an infant found at the city’s landfill.

A woman has been arrested after DNA testing connected her to a baby that was found dead in the Iowa City landfill in 1992.

The case of the abduction of Jodi Huisentruit, a 27-year-old Mason City news anchor in 1995, remains unsolved 30 years later, but her family, friends and co-workers are still hopeful that police investigators will uncover what happened to her.

A 15-year-old Cedar Rapids girl vanished in 2001, leaving police with little or no clues as to whether she ran away or was abducted. The last person to see her was convicted in another cold case murder last year, but police don’t have any evidence that he was involved in the teen’s disappearance.

The man facing a first-degree murder charge in connection with the 1983 death of Ronald Novak placed himself at the home where the death occurred, a criminal complaint released Saturday shows.

Ron Novak’s body was found beaten, shot, and frozen in an unheated storeroom of his rural Walker home on Christmas Eve, 1983. On Wednesday, nearly 42 years later, the Linn County Sheriff’s Office announced it has arrested an Oregon man they believe was Novak’s killer — or, one of them.

Iowa’s top prosecutor is adding a new feature in the hopes of flushing out suspects and bringing useful tips to dormant investigations.

Denise Fraley was 30 when she went missing from her home in Cedar Rapids in 1982. Her husband said she took off, but she left her 2-year-old daughter and everything she owned behind, including money in the bank. Will new blood evidence solve this case decades later?

Senior Judge James Drew will decide within 30 days whether a search warrant related to the 1995 disappearance of KIMT-TV anchor Jodi Huisentruit should remain sealed now that John Vansice, a longtime person of interest in the case, has died.

For more than 41 years, family and friends of Terri McCauley continued to hope that someday authorities would solve the mystery of who had killed her. Now an arrest had been made in the cold case.

A Cedar Rapids landlord found his first-floor tenant, Dorothy J. Rose, 43, lying face down in her apartment on Nov. 28, 2006. Police found Rose had been strangled with an electrical cord and another item. The murder remains unsolved but is being reviewed again by cold case investigators.

The unsolved murder of Willie Brocks, who was fatally shot in November 1999 has come full circle for a Cedar Rapids investigator who responded to the crime scene as a rookie and now has been actively following up on the case. He has a person of interest who may be able to identify the shooter.

A three-episode documentary series about a 12-year-old Iowa cold case is set to be released next week on HBO Max.

A prosecutor said the prosecution was unable to provide a confession made by Curtis Padgett, who killed his friend, Dennis First, in 2007, to a witness because the witness died three months before trial. Padgett was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without parole.

Local families still waiting for their loved ones’ murders to be solved support the Iowa Attorney General’s Office setting up a statewide cold case unit. The new unit, announced last month, was being touted Tuesday in Cedar Rapids.