Iowa Cold Cases

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird announced the creation of the new unit; Iowa has not had a statewide cold case unit since 2011

Almost six months after law enforcement publicly named the parents of a baby who was found dead on a farm near Lisbon in 1996, no new information has been found and the case appears to be cold once again.

The sister of Josh Wellman, 35, of Cedar Rapids, makes a plea for any information - ‘any clue’ - of where to find her brother’s body.

All the evidence has been presented in the Curtis Padgett murder trial, but none of the testimony explained the break that opened up the 16-year-old cold case.

Crime scene investigators testified Friday about oven mitts soaked in blood and the murder weapon found in Cedar Rapisd apartment of Dennis First, who was fatally stabbed in 2007. The ex-girlfriend of Curtis Padgett, on trial in the killing, also testified Friday that he denied being the killer but had a suicidal incident and held a knife to his neck in 2010.

Testimony started Thursday in a 2007 cold case of a Cedar Rapids man severely beaten and stabbed to death at his Hawthorne Hills apartment. His former neighbor is on trial for the crime.

‘I wish I could remember that day,’ his daughter, now 42, says

Dianne Martin, daughter of finance manager, Fred Coste, 47, who was fatally stabbed in 1959, has gone through many emotions over the last 64 years, waiting for his killer to be caught. She is hoping Cedar Rapids police Investigator Matt Denlinger can get her the answers she needs to have peace.

The Cedar County sheriff said genetic genealogy was used to identify parents of a dead baby left in a barn in 1996. Investigators want to determine if the baby was alive when it was abandoned. The father has cooperated with police, but the mother has not.

The biggest “enemy” of a cold case is time. It it affects memories, evidence and paper reports. But time also can bring breakthroughs by way of new technology that wasn’t available when someone was killed and murders went unsolved. In a continuing series, The Gazette will revisit some of those unsolved cases in Cedar Rapids and Linn County. Investigators will share their insights and new information gathered over the years, and victims’ families will share memories of their loved ones.

The Iowa Supreme Court affirmed a Manchester man’s murder conviction of 18-year-old Michelle Martinko, who was fatally stabbed in her car parked outside Westdale Mall in 1979. The court ruled Jerry Burns voluntarily left his DNA on a drinking straw police found in the trash of a restaurant. No warrant was needed.

A 42-year-old Cedar Rapids man will be charged Thursday for the 2007 cold case murder of Dennis First, 64. The two men lived in Hawthorne Hills Apartments in southwest Cedar Rapids in 2007. First was beaten and fatally stabbed.

Two young girls from Evansdale, Lyric Cook-Morrissey and Elizabeth Collins, went for a bike ride ten years ago and never came home. Their bodies were found months several later at a nearby wildlife park, but the case has yet to be solved.

Indigenous people are missing in Iowa, but disappearances span the nation.

Indiana State Police identified Harry Edward Greenwell, who died in Iowa in 2013, as the suspect who raped and killed three women in Indiana and Kentucky in the late 1980s as they were working night shifts as motel clerks.