116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
COLD CASE: Son remembers mom being ‘tough as nails,’ never one to back down
Dorothy J. Rose was found strangled in her apartment Nov. 28, 2006
Dec. 15, 2024 5:00 am, Updated: Dec. 16, 2024 7:54 am
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This is the sixth installment in an occasional series about cold case investigations in Cedar Rapids and Linn County.
CEDAR RAPIDS — Robert Deason remembers his mother, Dorothy J. Rose, being “tough as nails,” someone who wouldn’t back down from anybody.
“She was a hard worker and supported us as teens while working at Wendy’s,” Deason, 35, of Davenport, told The Gazette during a phone interview last week.
Before Rose split with her two sons’ father, the family moved frequently because of the father’s job, and his mom “kept everything in place.” She was a stay-at-home mom before the two separated when Deason was 9.
The family was living in Mississippi, and Rose, who’d been born in Osceola, moved her family back to Iowa.
As teens, Deason and his brother, Ed Deason, were in separate foster care homes and didn’t see much of their mother but stayed in contact with her. The last time Deason saw his mom was shortly before Thanksgiving, Nov. 23, 2006. They argued over cigarettes or something. He never saw her again.
Deason was 17, and Ed was 18, when their mother’s body was found in her apartment at 206 12th St. SE in Cedar Rapids on Nov. 28, 2006. Police officers came to their school the following day to tell them.
“I didn’t see her too often, but it was a shock,” Deason said. “She was living in a bad part of town. I worried about that.”
Deason said he and his brother, thought to be living in Mississippi now, are estranged and haven’t been in contact for about 10 years.
The crime scene
Cedar Rapids Police Investigator Matt Denlinger said a neighbor called the landlord in 2006 and reported a “strong odor coming from the vents” in the apartment building, which was an older home that had been converted into four apartments.
Rose, 43, lived alone with four cats on the first floor in an efficiency apartment with only one entrance and with the windows secured from inside.
On Nov. 28, the neighbor, Jeffrey Blozvich, went with the landlord, Jordan Zuccarelli, to knock on Rose’s door. When they received no response, they yelled a few times before the landlord used his key to enter, said Denlinger, who reactivated the case this year as a member of the police department’s Cold Case Unit.
“The landlord steps in and sees Dorothy, lying face down between the kitchen and living room area,” Denlinger said. “She’s obviously deceased and has been for some time. He steps out and calls police. The neighbor doesn’t go inside.”
Police are called about a person being down and possibly “DOA.” They discover Rose had an electrical cord from a box fan and another item wrapped around her neck. She had been strangled.
“Now, it was a homicide,” Denlinger said.
The box fan was still attached to the cord, but Denlinger wouldn’t reveal what the other item was.
During the original investigation, the crime lab had no luck finding DNA on the cord or the other item. Denlinger said it’s sometimes difficult to find DNA on pieces of evidence, and many times results are “inconclusive.”
Denlinger started working the unsolved case earlier this year because he thought more DNA testing that could be done in 2024 than was possible in 2006.
Jim Kelly, retired crime scene investigator with department, said he remembered Rose’s murder but not all the details. He recalled the apartment was in “disarray,” and the body had been left there for a few days, based on the body’s decomposition.
Kelly said he and Ron Shifflett, who also retired but recently came back to the police department, were the crime scene investigators on Rose’s homicide. They didn’t have much to go on. He said they collected a number of cigarette butts. Some were tested for DNA, he said, but didn’t lead to a suspect.
Kelly, who started working as a patrol officer in 1989 and retired in 2011, said he had been working as a crime scene tech for four years in 2006.
“It was always interesting and hard work,” Kelly said. “We had to work backward and try to recreate what happened. We usually had good luck figuring them out. The evidence showed us. It was always gratifying to find a suspect.”
Rose’s struggles
Nobody had seen Rose for about a week, according to the officers’ case notes, Denlinger said.
Through a neighborhood canvass, officers learned her apartment was a “gathering place” for neighbors to drink alcohol and use drugs, and police found evidence of that activity in her apartment.
Rose’s two sons didn’t live with her at the time, but they would go over and check on her, Denlinger said.
“One of the sadder things about this one, her son Ed brought over some pumpkin bars around Thanksgiving, but he said (his) mom wasn’t home so he left them inside a small outdoor grill with a note,” Denlinger said.
The pumpkin bars were still in the grill when police found the body.
Possible suspects
During the first half of 2006, Rose had a boyfriend, Ron Perkins, who had a history of domestic violence involving Rose, Denlinger said. But the two split up September 2006, and he was living in Marion with another woman.
According to court records, Perkins was arrested on a warrant for contacting Rose in October because Rose had a no-contact order against him after he twice assaulted her.
Denlinger said Perkins was initially a suspect, but no one in 2006 had seen him at Rose’s during the time period when she was killed.
Perkins’ girlfriend was interviewed and said he was with her over the holiday in Marion and that he didn’t have a car to take him to Cedar Rapids.
Denlinger said Perkins was cooperative and told investigators he hadn’t seen Rose since Oct. 12, 2006. He talked with investigators about Rose and gave them a DNA sample.
“There were no red flags in the interview,” Denlinger said.
Rose also had a longtime male friend officers interviewed at the time because her sons said he was in a financial dispute with their mother.
The friend had sold a car for Rose, and she thought her cut should have been bigger. Denlinger doesn’t regard that disagreement as a motive because the friend wasn’t looking for money from her. It was the other way around.
Also, the friend had no history of violence, was cooperative and provided a DNA sample, Denlinger said.
Rose lived at 12th Street and Third Avenue SE, which was a “high crime” area at the time, with drug activity and “familiar faces” — repeat offenders — and many of them had been at her house, Denlinger said. Investigators collected a lot of DNA swabs, as Kelly mentioned, from beer cans and cigarette butts.
“We can collect 300, but we can’t get the state lab to process all those because of their workload, so we have to be methodical on what we select for testing,” Denlinger said.
Denlinger also discovered another man who knew Rose and who, years later, had a history of burglaries and strangling two woman. He was convicted in both cases and is in prison.
Denlinger said he reviewed the details of those crimes, and he and another cold case investigator interviewed the man in prison. The man admitted to knowing Rose but denied the killing.
Next moves
Denlinger said he went back to the evidence and started brainstorming with the other two cold case investigators — retired police officers Ken Washburn and J.D. Smith — on next steps.
One of the problems, as with other cold cases, is that a lot of the Rose evidence was damaged in the 2008 flood that swamped the police department’s basement.
The investigators found several envelopes with damaged DNA swabs but found a couple of things that could be tested again. Denlinger declined to identify those items but said the state lab is testing the items now.
“If it comes back to the right person who doesn’t want to give us a reasonable explanation for how it got there, we might be on to something,” Denlinger said.
Investigators also needed a swab from Rose’s DNA to compare with any DNA profile they might find, Denlinger said.
Normally, police would have the victim’s DNA from the autopsy, but the state lab performed this autopsy in 2006 and initially confirmed Rose’s identity from her driver’s license and fingerprint records. The Linn County medical examiner did collect some tissue that could potentially be used, Denlinger said.
“This one is challenging because police didn’t find the body right away,” Denlinger said. “No matter who Dorothy was, she has two children, and they deserve answers.”
Robert Deason said he was surprised to hear investigators were working on his mother’s murder after all these years.
“I appreciate it,” he said. “I still hope they find the person responsible.”
Comments: (319) 398-8318; trish.mehaffey@thegazette.com
Information?
If you have information about Dorothy Rose’s 2006 strangulation — or any other unsolved Cedar Rapids murder — call Investigator Matt Denlinger at the Cedar Rapids Police Department at (319) 286-5442.
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