Mrs. Cook and the Klan
Available Fall 2024
University of Nebraska Press
The murder of Myrtle Underwood Cook in a small eastern Iowa farm town took place 96 years ago and remains an unsolved mystery. Until now. The crime made national headlines because Cook was the president of the Benton County Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and local authorities were initially convinced that the killing had been carried out by a bootlegging gang or mob boss. Perhaps a gang from Chicago, maybe by a man named Alphonse. Cook’s funeral was also newsworthy due to the eerie presence of a small army of the Ku Klux Klan in full regalia.
Mrs. Cook and the Klan is an 80,000-word true crime, narrative non-fiction investigation that not only sheds new light on who the killer was but also explores the unlikely confluence of the social, political, and economic forces that brought the Klan, the bootleggers, and the temperance movement tragically together in the parlor of the Cook house in Vinton, Iowa.
This story could only have happened here.
Perhaps more than any other state, Iowa struggled with the liquor question, going wet to dry and back eight times before the Volstead Act was adopted. At one point, the entire adult population was deputized, given authority to seek out violators, and rewarded with a bounty.
Iowa has a surprisingly painful history in race relations. One of the first acts of the Territorial Assembly was the adoption of the “Black Codes,” which were as restrictive as any in the Antebellum South. Here, too, the revitalized Klan of the 1920s found a welcome reception among the farmers weary from a post-war recession and a decade of growing intolerance and xenophobia.
Just as the Outfit ran Chicago and the Pendergast machine ruled Kansas City, the underworld of Iowa was governed by a mob boss named John Looney, who controlled the vice and bootlegging from his home just across the river in Rock Island, Illinois. Lawlessness reigned here, too, as gunmen like Tommy O’Connor, Tex Maynard, and Red Burzette ran amuck in the streets of Waterloo, Davenport, and Des Moines.
This story could only have happened in Iowa, and only at a time when the flames of the American Gothic were just beginning to ignite.
VICTIM ELEVEN
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Cole’s house had been on the market for only a couple of weeks before the arrest. He’d never heard of the guy—a seventy-two-year-old retiree living in another part of Sacramento County—but the cops said he was the Golden State Killer, who was suspected of committing at least fifty rapes and more than a dozen murders back in the 1970s.
The mailman said one of the attacks took place inside Cole’s house. So Cole, an investigative reporter by trade, set out to confirm that the crime actually took place, and who committed the murder. Along the way, he found something even more compelling. All this time, the cops had been sitting on evidence that the Golden State Killer had an accomplice.
A Little Scherzo plays in drytown
Benny’s wife of twenty-five years leaves him for a 2009 Harley Fat Bob and a quest for something more. Benny, a simple shopkeeper, resigns himself to go the distance alone.
But this is Drytown, a place tucked and magically folded into the Sierra foothills. Here the miner’s code still resonates and the curse of the Mother Lode still swirls. And when an ancestor’s long forgotten will threatens the town, Benny has no choice but to comply with its demand.
He must find love again.
At risk is the only home he’s ever known. Indeed all is in peril—St. Mel’s parish, the refugee camp in the hills, the Dabbagh Motel and Aquatic Park, even Uncle Nik’s Coffee and Cannabis Canteen.
Benny is no hero but protect those he loves, he braves the darkness of online dating for seniors; hooks up with a Ukrainian supermodel; and foils the kidnapping of his true love by henchmen working for a Samoan drug lord.
And, oh yeah, there’s treasure.
EnterPrise reporting
More than a decade before a distracted nation became transfixed by clumsy efforts to fake the news, a cabal of corporate insiders organized a far more nuanced and insidious persuasion machine in the California capital. Led by one of the state’s top political reporters and his uncle, the managing partner of a big wheel lobbying firm, the operation netted the partners more than $7 million during the brief, sixteen months the website was running.
The deception was clever and hard to spot, never anything too overt, just enough to push a client’s agenda along. It was sweet. No one could ever claim to be a victim and no one could ever argue a crime had been committed. They even had a line into the governor's office but had to be careful that nothing blew back on an unsuspecting Schwarzenegger.