Seventy-six-year-old Andrew “Andy” Hatges, a Greek immigrant who had come to the United States at the age of eighteen and subsequently served in the military before opening his first grocery store in 1962, was a much-loved fixture in Mason City. By 1968, he was running the West Vu Market on Fourth Street, and lived alone on South Virginia Avenue, his wife Maria having died in childbirth many years before, and his two grown daughters having moved to Tampa, Florida.
At around ten p.m. on the foggy night of Thursday, March 7th, 1968, Andy locked up the grocery for the day and caught a ride with one of his employees and her husband. The couple dropped him off shortly afterward at his home, which was located just three miles away from the store.
Unbeknownst to the kindly old man, however, someone was lying in wait for him in the surrounding darkness.
The following morning, March 8th, a bread delivery man arrived at the West Vu Market at around ten a.m. and found the shop still closed. Suspicious, the man notified the authorities, who quickly dispatched officers to the home of Andy Hatges.
Inside the residence, investigators discovered the lifeless body of the grocer, face down in a corner of the living room, and still clad in his overcoat. He had been bludgeoned in the face with a crescent wrench which was found beneath his corpse, and his throat had also been slashed so deeply that he was nearly decapitated. Cuts and bruises on his hands and arms indicated that he had put up a desperate struggle against his attacker.
It was presumed that whoever had murdered Andy Hatges had simply entered the house through the unlocked back door and waited for his victim to come home. There was some confusion as to whether robbery had been the motive; though Andy was found to still have money in his pockets and the house did not appear to have been ransacked, some sources speculated that Andy might have been in the habit of taking the day’s receipts from the store home with him, and that it was perhaps this sum which was stolen. Mason City police officer Duane Jewell, however, has gone on record as stating that the crime was not a robbery.
Because of the low outside visibility at the time that Andy was murdered, few neighbors had seen anything unusual, though some witnesses did report spotting a red pickup truck parked near the Hatges home on the night of the homicide. Detectives pursued the lead, but ultimately got nowhere.
Though over four-hundred people were interviewed over the course of the investigation, and though officers were able to narrow the suspect list down to a promising few, the case has never come anywhere close to being solved, and whoever killed the beloved elderly grocer in cold blood on the night of March 7th, 1968 will likely never face justice.
Crime Immemorial 