Murder of a Prohibitionist: The Myrtle Cook Mystery

"The Columbia Record," September 14, 1925, via Newspapers.com

Some murder cases are impossible to solve because of the inability to find anyone who had a discernible motive to kill the victim.  Other cases grow cold because so many people had a motive, the police are left spoiled for choice.  The following 1925 mystery is a perfect example of the latter.

If one wanted to be tactful, one could describe Myrtle Underwood Cook of Vinton, Iowa, as a strong-minded, courageous woman of deeply-held beliefs.  Or you could be blunt and suggest that she was an overbearing, bigoted busybody.  The 41-year old Mrs. Cook was a very active lady.  She was an ardent prohibitionist--so ardent, that she habitually copied license plate numbers of cars she suspected were rum-running, and spied on her neighbors for any sign of illegal tippling.  She made a perfect pest of herself to the local authorities, demanding that they go after anyone she believed was distributing alcohol.  She managed to have a number of bootleggers arrested.  When she wasn’t chasing after peddlers of bathtub gin, Mrs. Cook was head of the Benton County women’s organization of the Ku Klux Klan.  Although fellow prohibitionists considered her a local hero, she was, unsurprisingly, not very popular in other circles.  In fact, a sizable portion of Vinton's residents saw her as a “meddler and a disagreeable gossip.”

Myrtle lived with her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Cook, and her sixteen-year-old daughter Gertrude.  Myrtle’s relationship with her husband, Clifford Cook, was an unusual one, particularly by the standards of her time.  Clifford had not lived with his wife and daughter for five years, working various jobs such as driving a truck and acting as a traveling salesman--any profession, it seemed, that could keep him well away from the bosom of his family.  However, he would visit his home every couple of weeks, and he and Myrtle regularly corresponded, so you could not exactly call them estranged.  Perhaps Clifford just wanted to have a drink in peace now and then.

On the night of September 7, 1925, Myrtle was sitting in her living room, writing a speech for the next day’s meeting of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  (She was president of the local chapter.)  Her work was forever interrupted when someone crept up to the living room window, and fired a gun.  The bullet went through her heart, killing her less than an hour later.

Elizabeth Cook told police that in the moments before Myrtle died, she named her killer.  However, investigators dismissed the claim.  The man--who was never publicly named--was a businessman of irreproachable reputation.  They simply couldn’t see him as an assassin.  Police believed that if Myrtle really had accused this man, it must have been a case of mistaken identity.

Not unreasonably, police immediately assumed that a bootlegger was the murderer.  Their first suspect was Harold Ponder, a major figure in a prominent local liquor ring.  Ponder had been serving a sentence in the Fort Madison Penitentiary, but he had escaped prison three weeks before Myrtle’s murder.  And he was known to have been in Vinton just before and after the shooting.  The theory was that Ponder had killed her in order to implicate a rival ring.  Ponder was captured in October, but authorities were unable to find any solid evidence linking him to the slaying.

A few days after the murder, four young men were arrested for having egged Myrtle’s house back in July.  One of the youths was the son of a state senator.  However, as was the case with Ponder, there was nothing to implicate them in the murder.

Police then turned their interest to the dead woman’s husband.  At the time of the murder, Clifford was living in a rooming house in Sioux City.  However, he had recently lost his job there.  According to Clifford, when he was unable to find other work, he gave up on Sioux City and headed back to Vinton on September 6.  Because of slippery roads, he said, he spent the night of September 7 in a hotel in Grundy Center, some 50 miles from Vinton.  When he arrived home the following day, he was greeted by the sight of crepe and flowers on the door.  His sobbing daughter ran out to him, crying, “Oh, daddy, mama is gone.”

Detectives soon learned that Clifford could not keep his story straight.  He had told the coroner’s jury--under oath, of course--that he had no female acquaintances in Sioux City.  However, during a later round of questioning, he admitted that he had spent most of the day that his wife died in the company of one Hester Sieling.  (He and Sieling later married.)  Clifford’s lawyer argued that while his client may have been an unfaithful husband, that didn’t make him a murderous one.  Police were unable to prove otherwise.  And as Myrtle was not insured, Clifford had no financial motive to see her dead.  The coroner’s jury concluded that they could not say who shot Myrtle, but they recommended that police keep their eyes on her husband.  (For what it’s worth, Clifford declared that some of his late wife’s many enemies had hired a hit man.)

"Cedar Rapids Gazette," September 7, 2000

In his 1986 book “Tobin Tales,” prominent Vinton judge John W. Tobin suggested that Myrtle’s shooting was accidental.  He pointed out that her home was near railroad tracks that were a hangout for drunks, drug addicts, and other undesirables.  Perhaps one lowlife, trying to shoot another lowlife, happened to hit Mrs. Cook instead?  Tobin also noted that a salesman testified to seeing Clifford in the Grundy Center hotel on the night Myrtle was killed, thus corroborating his alibi.

Although Myrtle Cook’s murder was never solved--and almost certainly never will be--her death had a lasting impact on her town.  Vinton residents, disliking the negative publicity the murder brought to their community, turned against having the KKK in their midst.  The Klan soon went underground, and eventually disappeared from Vinton altogether.  Locals--no matter where they stood on Prohibition--agreed that the lawlessness brought on by rum-running had to end.  The liquor gangs were also largely run out of town, leaving Vinton a considerably more peaceful place.

It is possible that Myrtle’s spirit wound up feeling vindicated.