Crime Immemorial

Seventeen-year-old Maureen Brubaker Farley originally hailed from Sioux City, Iowa, and was the oldest of her parents’ seven children. In 1971, despite her young age, she had married her husband, David Farley, but not long after the couple’s wedding, David had gotten arrested for some minor infraction and was incarcerated at the correctional facility in Anamosa. Maureen, therefore, rented a room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa so that she would be close enough to the jail to regularly visit her husband.
To make ends meet while David was away, Maureen got a job as a waitress at Weida’s Restaurant. When she wasn’t working, she faithfully visited David, as well as spent time chatting over the phone and writing letters to her parents and siblings back in Sioux City.

On the morning of Friday, September 17th, 1971, Maureen borrowed a small amount of money, which she used to purchase a pack of cigarettes which she presumably took back to her tiny flat. She had planned to drop by the restaurant where she worked later that afternoon to pick up her paycheck, but strangely, she never showed up.

The manager at Weida’s, though, didn’t become alarmed until the following Monday, September 20th, when Maureen failed to turn up for her scheduled shift. Concerned, the manager reported the young woman missing.

When officers searched Maureen’s residence, they found a pack of cigarettes that was partially empty, and also discovered that Maureen’s car was still parked behind the building with a full tank of gas. These clues seemed ominous, and a larger search was subsequently undertaken.

But it would be yet another week before anyone knew what had become of Maureen Farley. On September 24th, teenaged friends Kevin Coppess and Danny Lineweaver were out hunting with their rifles. As they crossed a railroad trestle at around five-thirty p.m., they happened to glance down and spotted something strange.

At the bottom of the ravine, the boys saw an old car, though this was not what caught their attention. What gave them pause was the fact that a fully clothed though barefoot woman was lying across the vehicle’s trunk, and she appeared to be sleeping.

After wondering at the odd sight for a few minutes, the teenagers decided that it would be best to leave the young woman alone, and they continued on their way. A little later that evening, though, as they were making their way back home, they agreed to climb down the ravine a short way to take a closer look, just in case something was the matter.

Indeed, the woman was still lying on the car, her back against the rear window, and one leg propped up. The boys approached, and the closer they got, the more unsettled they became. The woman did not appear to be injured, but the boys noted that her skin had an unnatural hue that suggested that she was dead. After a quick survey of the situation, the teenagers bolted out of the ravine and went back to the Lineweaver home to report what they had seen to Danny’s mother Violet, who reported the dead woman to police after going to the site herself to confirm the boys’ story.

Not long after authorities arrived, they surmised that the remains belonged to seventeen-year-old Maureen Brubaker Farley, last seen buying cigarettes on September 17th. A post-mortem examination determined that Maureen had been dead between two and eight days, had likely been murdered somewhere other than where her body was found, and had been killed by one violent blow to the side of her head, which had fractured her skull. Her clothing was not torn, though she had been raped. And although her shoes were missing, the bottoms of her feet were found to be clean.

It was not clear whether Maureen’s body had been thrown out from a passing vehicle, or whether her killer had left her lying on the back of the car where she was found. A lack of defense wounds on Maureen’s body indicated to detectives that the victim had perhaps been incapacitated somehow prior to her murder, though no traces of drugs or alcohol were found in her system.

Investigators immediately began trying to establish the victim’s movements between the afternoon of September 17th and the evening of September 24th, but despite a massive media blitz, no solid leads emerged. Oddly, though, upon another search of Maureen’s apartment, several items belonging to her were found to be missing. These items, which have never been recovered, included Maureen’s purse, which had contained a wallet with red velvet lining which her husband David had made while in jail.

Weirder than that, though, was the fact that four pairs of Maureen’s shoes had disappeared from the residence. Though police were uncertain which pair Maureen had been wearing when she vanished, they were at a loss to explain why so many sets of shoes—including moccasins, sandals, work shoes, and yellow dress shoes—were not in the apartment.

None of the missing items ever turned up, however, and though authorities interviewed and polygraphed many persons of interest, the investigation hit a wall not long after Maureen’s body was found. David Farley moved back to Sioux City after his release from jail, and thereafter often appeared in the media with the Brubaker family to encourage the public to help bring the case to a close.

For years, though, there was little movement on the case. But then, in 2021, authorities confirmed that they had identified the killer through DNA: he was a man named George M. Smith, who at the time of the murder had worked at a liquor store near Maureen’s apartment and also frequented the diner where she worked. Smith had been interviewed about the crime in 1971 and had refused to take a polygraph, but he wasn’t investigated any further at the time.

Because Smith died in 2013 at the age of ninety-four, law enforcement in Cedar Rapids now consider the case closed.