Ramona Jean Cox was originally a farm girl from Moravia, Iowa, but she had moved to the capital city of Des Moines in 1956, the same year she graduated high school. She had easily secured secretarial work in the big city, and by all accounts was a well-liked, socially popular young woman who had many friends and spent time at some of the area clubs and bars.
On Sunday, April 22nd, 1962, twenty-four-year-old Ramona had spent most of the day working at her second job, as a cashier at Ardan’s retail store. At approximately five-thirty p.m., she returned home to her apartment on Woodland Avenue. She was planning to make it a somewhat early night, as she had to get up on Monday morning to go to her other, full-time job as a secretary at the C.D. Wilcox Company.
According to neighbors, a man was seen visiting Ramona between seven and seven-thirty that evening. Witnesses stated that they had seen him through the window, sitting at her kitchen table, and that he was clad in a white or light-colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Nothing at all seemed amiss for the next several hours.
At around eleven p.m., all hell seemingly broke loose. Neighbors heard screaming coming from Ramona’s apartment, and hurried to summon police. Before authorities arrived, the neighbors also heard the sound of someone moving around inside the apartment, and the front doorknob rattling. They also saw someone pulling down a window shade, and then quickly yanking it back up.
The same witnesses then reported seeing a man of about average height and wearing a white shirt and dark pants jumping out of the small bathroom window of Ramona’s apartment and then running off into the darkness.
Although officers arrived as swiftly as they could have managed, it was sadly too late to save Ramona Cox. Police found her naked body on the living room floor, surrounded by an ever-widening pool of blood. She had been raped and beaten, and her throat had been slashed with a linoleum knife bearing a wide, curved blade. The murder weapon had been haphazardly cleaned and left behind in the bathtub.
It appeared that Ramona had been preparing for bed when she was attacked, as there were a few curlers in her hair and her pajamas were found near her remains. Her assailant had likely surprised her while she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and then dragged her into the living room to rape and kill her. A bedspread was also found partially wrapped around her head. Because of the general shambles in the living room and elsewhere, it was surmised that Ramona, a taller-than-average young woman, had put up quite a fight against her killer.
The front door of the apartment was found to be locked, leading investigators to assume that Ramona had either known her attacker and had willingly let him in, or that he had climbed in through the open bathroom window. Since the man seen fleeing the scene did not appear to have any blood on him, it was hypothesized that he had removed his clothing before killing Ramona, or had changed clothes before leaving the premises.
In the days following the slaying, police followed up on a handful of leads. Though the linoleum knife that had been used to kill Ramona belonged to the landlord of the apartment building, he was immediately ruled out as a suspect. However, a fourteen-year-old boy who was known to hang around the building and admitted to snooping in the unoccupied basement apartment where the knife had previously been kept was brought in for questioning. Though authorities established that the teenager had peeped into Ramona’s windows on at least one prior occasion and was also suspected of stealing women’s clothing off clotheslines around the apartments, he was eventually released, though investigators suggested to his parents that he should probably get some counseling.
Several of Ramona’s friends and coworkers were likewise interviewed and given polygraph tests, though all had solid alibis for the night of Ramona’s murder and were summarily dismissed.
A neighbor came forward and told police that a week before the killing, someone had called her and asked who the woman next door was, referring to Ramona. The neighbor said she had told the caller she didn’t know. Though this suggested that perhaps the man who had murdered Ramona had been stalking her beforehand, authorities were not able to massage this clue into anything resembling a viable suspect.
Over the ensuing months, a few more persons of interest and connections to other crimes were examined. For a short time, investigators thought that Ramona’s murder might be linked to a similar slaying that had taken place in Kansas City, but no definitive connection was found. Later on in the year, a man named Frank Evans was arrested in Des Moines for tying up a woman in her home and robbing her, but there didn’t appear to be any reason to think he was responsible for killing Ramona Cox.
For their part, the Cox family believed that Ramona was slain by someone who knew her, and suspected that she might have gotten mixed up with a bad crowd in some of the disreputable bars she hung around in Des Moines. They noted, however, that she had never mentioned anyone by name, and they admitted that they had no more idea than the police did who would want to kill her.
Crime Immemorial 