Recent high school graduate Paula Jean Oberbroeckling was a beautiful, blonde eighteen-year-old with aspirations to become a model. In the summer of 1970, she was working part-time as a sales clerk at Younker’s Department Store, while also tutoring developmentally disabled children in her spare time. She and her roommate Debbie Kellogg shared a small house on 10th Street in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
On the evening of July 11th, 1970, Paula had been out on a date with her boyfriend Lonnie Bell, and reportedly the pair had an argument. Paula arrived home at around one a.m. and asked Debbie if she could borrow the keys to her Chevy Nova so she could make the short drive to the store for cigarettes. Debbie agreed, and Paula set out, not even bothering to put on her shoes. She never returned from the store.
Paula’s mother Carol reported her daughter missing, though it doesn’t seem that police took Paula’s disappearance all that seriously at first. Investigators presumed that Paula had simply gone off of her own volition, perhaps to attend a nearby music festival. Carol knew better, however, and insisted that her daughter would never abandon her family and job without telling anyone where she was going.
The day after Paula vanished, Debbie’s borrowed car was found in the no-parking zone of the Eagle Supermarket, about two miles from where Paula lived. Neither the keys nor Paula’s purse remained in the car, though the vehicle bore no traces of violence. The back windows had been left rolled down, and it appeared as though it had simply been voluntarily abandoned. The car was impounded days later.
Police did follow up on a few leads provided by the Oberbroeckling family. According to Paula’s mother, Paula had confided in her that she feared she might be six weeks’ pregnant. Carol Oberbroeckling also told police that Paula used to date a black man named Robert Williams, and that the family had not approved of the relationship. The pair had subsequently broken up.
Paula’s current boyfriend Lonnie Bell stated that Paula had been in correspondence with another black man by the name of John Strayhorn, but when police visited the apartment building where he supposedly lived, they found no one there by that name.
Though the investigation continued over the ensuing days, no sign of Paula was forthcoming, and in fact it would be four long months before her family would learn what had happened to her.
On November 29th, two boys walking along a railroad track across from a sewage treatment plant in Cedar Rapids came across a skeleton that would eventually be identified as that of eighteen-year-old Paula Jean Oberbroeckling, who had vanished after going out to buy cigarettes on July 11th. The site where the body was found lay approximately six miles from Paula’s home.
Though there were no obvious signs of violence on the body, the hands and ankles had been bound with a length of plastic clothesline and a fiber cord, respectively. The bones were curved around a metal pin that was protruding from the ground, though police could not determine whether Paula had still been alive when placed in this position, or whether her body had rolled down a hill and become hung up by the obstacle.
A post-mortem examination could establish no definite cause of death, stating that neither asphyxiation, soft tissue injury, nor poisoning could be ruled out. It further asserted that death could have been caused by a combination of these factors, or from some injury which rendered her unconscious, at which point she could have died from exposure.
No fetal remains were discovered, though as she only claimed to be six weeks’ pregnant, this was not necessarily surprising. Though some investigators speculated that she might have died during the course of a botched abortion, there was no obvious pelvic injury.
Her boyfriend Lonnie Bell was questioned, but it did not appear that he was responsible, though some rumors did circulate that he had gotten Paula into drugs. Some of Paula’s family members surmised that Lonnie had been attempting to break up with Paula in the time before she vanished, but Paula’s mother stated that she liked him and didn’t believe he was involved in her daughter’s death.
Paula’s former boyfriend Robert Williams was also extensively interrogated, but had a solid alibi, and was cleared of suspicion. Rumors swirled about him as well, chief among them that Paula had actually not been planning to go to the store on the night she disappeared, but instead was going to find Robert, who reportedly lived in a very unsafe neighborhood. No solid proof of this assertion exists, however.
In later years, Paula’s mother Carol hypothesized that Paula might have been an early victim of serial killer Ted Bundy, but there does not appear to be sufficient evidence to warrant further investigation of this scenario.
Though investigators have definitively stated in the media that they suspect foul play in the case of Paula Jean Oberbroeckling, her cause of death is officially categorized as “unknown.”
Crime Immemorial 