History Happenings: Love gone wrong

The Saturday, Aug. 13, 1994, edition of The Gazette included a couple of stories about love gone wrong.

The first story appeared on the front page, just under the masthead, sharing that real estate with an Associated Press story headlined “U.S., N. Korea break impasse in nuke talks.”

The local page 1 story, written by Gazette staff writer Rick Smith, was titled “Very wrong number,” and the subhead revealed what made the number so wrong: “Caller mistakenly harasses Marion detective.”

Smith wrote:

“Dismay over the break-up with a girlfriend apparently led Steven A. Graham Jr. of Marion to call and call and call her on the phone, Marion police say.

“Most of the calls were hang-up ones, but occasionally Graham would leave a message on the answering machine. Most of the messages made little sense, but one called the woman a derogatory name and another hinted at a threat.

“That started Graham’s problems.

“But the 26-year-old’s biggest headache came later, when he found out he had been calling the wrong phone number. Instead, he been phoning the home of a Marion police detective.”

That’s a pretty big mistake to make, and we find ourselves wondering what the outgoing message on the detective’s answering machine was. Shouldn’t the brokenhearted Graham have been able to glean he wasn’t calling the right number? And how did he get the wrong number anyway?

Smith discovered the answer to that question, which requires us to recall that in the early 1990s your phone number would often change when you moved to a new home.

“Marion Police Capt. Joe Neuhaus said Friday that the girlfriend apparently changed addresses, and Graham, a Marion restaurant employee, apparently obtained her new phone number from another employee at the restaurant. The number somehow turned out to be the detective’s.”

What came next was straight out of a television cop show like “Law & Order,” which was only in its fifth season in 1994 and did not yet have any spinoffs.

“Neuhaus said the detective endured calls, one or two a day, from about June 1 until a few mostly incoherent messages on his answering machine convinced him to put a phone trap on his line,” Smith reported.

That led to Graham being charged with third-degree harassment (a simple misdemeanor) for making calls without legitimate purpose in a manner likely to cause annoyance. (Your authors might suggest that describes nearly every phone call.)

Capt. Neuhaus noted that Graham was “somewhat sorry about the mix-up,” which seems to us to be a surprising low level of sorriness.

A ‘Love bandit’

Another person who might have been feeling sorry in August 1994 was Paul Brewer, who had come to be known as the “love bandit” because he had swindled a Cedar Rapids woman out of around $14,000 by promising to marry her.

Gazette courts reporter Dick Hogan penned a story for the Aug. 13 Gazette that described Brewer’s resentencing in federal court following a successful appeal of his original sentence.

The end result wasn’t terribly dramatic, though Hogan’s reporting of it dangled something of a moniker mystery while assuring readers that justice for the wronged woman would still be delivered.

“[Judge Michael] Melloy ordered Brewer, 36, who is also known as Mark Latham, to serve the remaining 16 months of federal sentence concurrently with the state sentence.

“Melloy also reimposed the conditions that Brewer make restitution of $14,688, most of it to the woman he bilked.

A happy ending

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There was one other love story — this one happy rather than criminally sketchy — happening in Cedar Rapids on Aug. 13, 1994, though The Gazette didn’t cover it.

On that day 30 years ago, Rob Cline — the elder author of this column — married his beloved before rushing off to Tulsa, Okla. Not for a honeymoon, mind you, but for Rob’s first (and last) full-time teaching job, which began on the Monday two days after the wedding.

Neither the teaching nor the sojourn in Tulsa lasted long, but the marriage has, and for that, Rob is ongoingly grateful.

Jessica Cline is a Leadership & Character Scholar at Wake Forest University. Her dad, Rob Cline, is not a scholar of any kind. They write this monthly column for The History Center. Comments: HistoricalClines@gmail.com