The Strange Case of John Gordon Iverson

"Arizona Gazette," January 12, 1991, via Newspapers.com

Bizarre details are a staple of missing-persons cases.  However, it’s not every day you come across a disappearance that is as utterly bonkers from beginning to end as the following mystery.  Buckle up, this one is quite a wild ride.

John Gordon Iverson was a talented electrical engineer and inventor.  His company, Electron Kinetics, produced highly-regarded audio amplification systems.  Unfortunately, this genius had a dark side.  He was a heavy drinker, which hardly improved his already difficult personality.  He displayed a crude prejudice against minority groups.  He was in the habit of telling colorful, and completely fictitious, stories about his personal life and career.  Iverson was, in short, an irritating, perhaps even disturbing man.

In 1991, the 42-year-old Iverson was living in Lake Havasu City, Arizona with one Kathleen Munro.  He and Munro had married in 1987, but quickly divorced, supposedly for financial reasons which were never publicly explained.  After the divorce, Iverson put all his assets in Munro’s name, for equally obscure reasons.  That move of his may--or may not--have been a critical factor in later developments.

Iverson had his problems.  He and Munro had had some serious quarrels, which led him to contemplate leaving her.  According to some reports, he owed the IRS back taxes and his business was being threatened with an audit.  However, on the surface, at least, the couple’s lives seemed relatively quiet.

On the evening of January 4, 1991, Jack Weber, a machinist who had worked with Iverson for the past few months, visited the couple’s home.  According to Munro’s later story, he came by to drop off a project he had been working on for Iverson.  The engineer was not at home at the time, so Munro--who was Iverson’s bookkeeper--gave Weber a $1,000 check for his work.  A short time later, Iverson arrived home.  Munro, who was suffering from the flu, told him she had paid Weber, and then went to bed.  When she woke up at around 9:30 p.m., she found that both men were gone.  

As she was walking back to her bedroom.  Jack Weber entered the house, wearing gloves and holding a gun.  He told her menacingly that he had Iverson bound and gagged in his, Weber’s, van.  He asked how much money Iverson had in the bank, and ordered Munro to give him whatever cash she had in the house.

Munro gave Weber $4,000, and wrote out a check for $2,500.  She made some deliberate mistakes while drafting the check, in the hope that someone at the bank would realize something was amiss.  Then, she managed to escape by dashing into one of the bedrooms, locking the door behind her, and fleeing the house through another door which led outside.  She then ran screaming to a neighbor’s house, where she called the police.  By the time officers arrived on the scene, the van with Weber and Iverson in it was long gone.  Iverson's motor home was still in his driveway.  Police found that a table inside it had been damaged, and there were the remains of a small spot of blood on the carpet.  An effort had been made to clean it.  However, it is unknown whose blood it was, or if the stain was a recent one.

Weber’s whereabouts were initially a mystery.  He wrote to his wife telling her to collect his van, which he had left in a parking lot about ten miles from his Las Vegas house, but the postmark on the letter was unreadable.  When police searched the van, there were no signs of any sort of violence having taken place in it.

On April 23, nearly four months after he and Iverson vanished, Weber, facing charges of kidnapping and armed robbery, turned himself in to the authorities.  And he had quite the alibi.  Weber insisted that, far from being the villain of the piece, he was the real victim.  Munro and Iverson had colluded in a plot to frame him.

According to Weber, Iverson had asked his assistance in building a new type of gun; one that didn’t require live ammunition.  He agreed.  When Weber went to Iverson’s house on January 4 with his prototype for the gun, he was expecting to be paid $8,400 that he was owed for his work.  After Munro wrote him a check for $1,000, he explained that this wouldn’t be enough.  He said that Munro seemed uneasy, but she didn’t say anything.  After Iverson arrived home at 6:30 p.m., Munro went off to her bedroom in silence.

Soon after this, Iverson got a phone call.  He afterwards told Weber that it was from a prospective buyer of their gun.  Weber refused to give his prototype to Iverson until he was paid in full.  While the two men examined the gun, which was in the back seat of Weber’s van, Iverson proposed that he give Weber $2,500 immediately, and the rest in a week, after their would-be buyer had a chance to see the gun.  Weber agreed, leaving Iverson in the van while he went to collect his money.  He said that Munro asked him to give the $1,000 check back, and she wrote a new one for $2,500.  Weber suggested that as a receipt, they simply change the amount on the $1,000 invoice he had left on the kitchen table.

They began to walk to the kitchen, when suddenly Weber realized that Munro was no longer behind him.  Then he heard her standing in the driveway, screaming.

Weber returned to the van and asked Iverson what was going on.  Iverson claimed to have no idea, but that he and Munro had been having “problems.”  He suggested that he and Weber should just leave for a while to give Munro a chance to cool down.  Iverson collected a box from his garage and asked Weber to drive him to Bullhead City, 65 miles away.  Along the way, Iverson made a phone call, which he said was to Munro.  He claimed she told him that the police had come to their house, but she sent them away.

Weber and Iverson spent the night in the van, and tested out their new gun in the Arizona desert.  (A curious little detail: Weber said they fired the gun using ball bearings, which they carefully retrieved when they had finished.)  Weber stated that while the weapon needed more fine-tuning, it did work.  That day, Weber called his wife.  She gave him the unwelcome news that the FBI was looking for him, because they thought he had kidnapped Iverson.  Weber explained to her what had happened, and that Iverson was fine.  After Weber talked to his wife, Iverson made a call, again allegedly to Munro.  Iverson reported to Weber that when Munro was unable to find Iverson, she had police issue the kidnapping warrant.

Weber said he wanted to immediately return to Lake Havasu City to straighten everything out, but Iverson declined.  He pointed out that he was already in trouble for violating his probation (in 1990, Iverson had been convicted of stealing telegraph wire,) and he wanted to talk to a lawyer he knew in Phoenix before going home.

After spending another night in the van, Iverson called his attorney friend.  He set up a meeting with him, which would take place in five days.  They hid the gun and its blueprints somewhere near Laughlin, Arizona, and drove to Phoenix.  Then, they went their separate ways, agreeing to meet again on the day of their appointment with the lawyer.

Weber drove back to his home, packed a suitcase, and left.  He lived in his van for the next several days.  He drove back to Phoenix, but Iverson never turned up at their pre-arranged meeting place.  When he went back to the place where they had hidden the gun and blueprints, he found that they were now gone.  When he realized that Iverson and Munro had tricked him, he went into hiding at his home, in the hope that the FBI would find Iverson and realize that Weber had not kidnapped him.  His wife eventually persuaded him to surrender to the police.

The police realized they had a fine mess on their hands.  Their only evidence regarding Iverson’s disappearance were two statements which were not only completely contradictory, but equally outlandish.  Munro failed a lie detector test, which she blamed on the Prozac and Valium she was taking.  When asked to take a second test, she insisted on using a polygraph examiner of her own choosing.  She passed this test, but police considered it to be unreliable.  As police were unable to find any clue about where Iverson was and what had happened to him, all charges against Weber were eventually dropped.  Less than two months after Iverson vanished, Munro liquidated all her assets--or, you might say, Iverson’s assets--and moved to California.  These actions of hers raised a few eyebrows, especially among Iverson’s relatives, most of whom were inclined to doubt her version of events.

To date, John Iverson has never been seen again, alive or dead.  As for Munro and Weber, at least one of them was lying, and their stories are so equally weird it seems highly possible that they both were--to use the formal legal expression--telling porkie pies.  But then, the question becomes, “Why?”  What were they hiding?  What really happened on the night of January 4?