In the early spring of 1967, twenty-four-year-old secretary Gloria Fay Slump was excited to introduce her parents to a nice new man she had met. She phoned them on March 3rd and said she would bring him over for a weekend visit. She never arrived.
On Monday, March 6th, workers at the Burlington Railroad discovered Gloria’s frozen body in Pony Creek, beneath the train trestle, not far outside of Council Bluffs, Iowa. She had been severely beaten, and stabbed fourteen times in the throat with what appeared to be a dull implement akin to a knife or a can opener. There were no signs of sexual assault.
Significantly, the day before Gloria’s body had been discovered, a police officer had found an abandoned vehicle only about one-hundred-fifty yards east of the dump site. Records indicated that this car belonged to a twenty-four-year-old Omaha man named Jerry Neve, who was subsequently brought in for questioning.
Witness reports stated that Jerry Neve had been seen in the company of Gloria Slump on the Friday before her disappearance, and when he agreed to take a polygraph, the results suggested deception when he was asked if he knew anything about the murder.
The following Saturday, the 10th, investigators received a tip that Gloria had been seen at a hotel not far from Pony Creek on or around March 3rd. This information led authorities to discover Gloria’s coat in a hotel room that had been registered to Jerry Neve and another man named Herschell Gitchell, who was at that time awaiting trial on burglary charges.
Though Jerry Neve seemed the obvious culprit in the brutal murder, police would never get a chance to interrogate him further; on Sunday, March 11th, he committed suicide in the backyard of his parents’ Omaha residence by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. According to Neve’s stepfather, Jerry claimed he had not murdered Gloria, but implied that he was nonetheless involved in her death, and had killed himself because he was trying to be a “good fellow.”
The murder, therefore, passed into Iowa’s cold case files, where it remains to this day.
Crime Immemorial 