Crime Immemorial

A few days before Christmas of 1970, an Iowa woman would turn up dead in circumstances that involved a nasty divorce and an illicit affair.

Thirty-seven-year-old Mary Bernice Lange worked as a clerk at the Burlington Municipal Court and was also the mother to three children aged eleven, fourteen, and eighteen.

In 1970, Mary and her husband of twenty years, Marvin Lange, were undergoing a particularly vicious divorce and custody dispute, though they were still living under the same roof for the time being. It had gotten so bad, though, that Marvin had actually hired two brothers who were friends of his—Donald and Ivan Gugeler—to monitor his wife’s activities so that he would have further ammunition against her in the upcoming divorce proceedings.

On the evening of Wednesday, December 16th, however, Mary Lange was apparently trying to get into the Christmas spirit. She arrived home from work and made dinner for her children at around four p.m., and about three-and-a-half hours later, she got dolled up in a white dress and black fur coat and headed for the Memorial Auditorium in downtown Burlington, Iowa, where the city was having a Christmas party for all its employees.

At approximately nine p.m., Mary left the party in the company of one Charles Hutson, a married man that she had been having a relationship with. According to Hutson’s later statement, he and Mary had some drinks at the Palms Restaurant in Fort Madison, after which they had sex in Mary’s 1966 Chevrolet Impala after pulling off onto a remote gravel road.

At about two-thirty a.m., Marvin Lange called the Gugeler brothers to inform them that his wife had not come home and that they should come to the Lange house to wait for her. Donald and Ivan Gugeler apparently sat in the kitchen of the Lange residence until around five-thirty a.m., at which point Marvin told them they could leave, since it appeared that Mary was not coming home.

Meanwhile, Mary reportedly dropped her lover Charles Hutson off in downtown Burlington at about quarter to three in the morning, after which he drove to the nearby Voyager Motel and checked into a room. At some stage later that night, Mary Lange would completely vanish.

Marvin did not immediately report his wife’s disappearance to police, claiming that she had stayed out all night before. However, Mary’s coworkers and her sister Dorothy were not so cavalier, and filed a missing persons report on Thursday, December 17th.

At around half-past midnight on Friday, December 18th, Mary Lange’s white Impala was discovered abandoned on Smith Street in Burlington. The vehicle was locked, but police found blood spattered around the interior, as well as some mud, and noted that a white rug that had come from the back porch of the Lange residence was folded up in the back seat of the car. Officers obtained four sets of fingerprints from the inside of the car, as well as other physical evidence.

Authorities fanned out into the surrounding woods in an attempt to locate Mary, but their efforts were unsuccessful. At around ten a.m. on the morning of December 19th, however, a farmer named William Moore spotted what appeared to be a coat caught in a fence in Long Creek, and upon closer inspection, saw a hand extending from the water. After investigators arrived on the scene, they determined that the remains of Mary Lange had been found. The site where she was dumped lay approximately fourteen miles from where she was last seen alive.

Mary Lange had been beaten three times in the head with a blunt object and then deposited into the creek, where she subsequently drowned. She was discovered fully clothed, and had not been sexually assaulted, though consistent with Charles Hutson’s statement, it appeared she had presumably consensual sex shortly before her death.

Mary’s purse, containing an uncashed payroll check and an undisclosed amount of money, was found about a mile away from her body, and some of her other possessions were discovered along the country roads that the killer would have driven after leaving the scene. Detectives assumed that the assailant had tossed Mary’s things out the windows of his moving vehicle as he fled the area.

The following day, Charles Hutson was brought in for questioning, as he admitted to having a sexual relationship with Mary and was the last person other than her killer to see her alive. He claimed he had no knowledge of her murder, and a polygraph test seemed to confirm his statement. He was subsequently cleared of suspicion.

Police next focused their attention on Marvin Lange, who had an obvious motive for eliminating his soon-to-be-ex-wife. Authorities found it slightly suspicious that Marvin had withdrawn two-thousand dollars from an Illinois bank account on or around the same day that Mary had vanished.

During the questioning, Marvin largely kept his mouth shut, refusing on the advice of counsel not to be interviewed or polygraphed. He did inform police that he had known about the relationship between Mary and Charles Hutson, and further confirmed that he sometimes had his wife followed in order to gather evidence to be used against her in the divorce and custody hearings. Marvin also permitted detectives to search the Langes’ property, but they found nothing of note.

Donald and Ivan Gugeler were likewise investigated, but it appeared that there was insufficient evidence to charge them with any wrongdoing. Ironically, they served as pallbearers at Mary Lange’s funeral on December 22nd.

In an eerie little coda to the case, farmer William Moore, who had discovered Mary Lange’s body, found a bizarre reminder of the crime in the spring of 1971. He reported that right around the spot where Mary’s remains had been dumped, he stumbled across a mystery novel lying on the ground. It had been left open on a page containing a chapter heading that read, “Murder Against My Will.”

Though nearly two-hundred people were interviewed over the course of the investigation, police were never able to put the case to bed, and it eventually passed into the cold case files in 1972. In the same year, Marvin Lange remarried, and he and his new wife lived in the same house in Burlington that he had shared with Mary. He passed away in 2009, and the killer of his first wife remains unknown.