Crime Immemorial

On the morning of Friday, March 22nd, 1968, twenty-five-year-old Geraldine Lempke Maggert was at the apartment in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that she shared with her four-year-old daughter Richine. Geraldine and her husband Richard had divorced in mid-1967, after which Richard had moved to Ithaca, New York, and Geraldine had taken a job as a secretary in the Cedar Rapids Urban Renewal Relocations Office and was raising their daughter on her own.

On this particular day, Geraldine’s parents arrived in Cedar Rapids to pick up Richine so the child could spend the weekend at their farm near Elkader. The Lempkes didn’t notice Geraldine acting particularly strangely, and drove off with Richine in tow.

But after her parents left, Geraldine phoned in sick to work, and according to witnesses, was seen leaving her home at a little before noon, carrying a small suitcase. Bank records also indicated that Geraldine cashed a check at a branch in downtown Cedar Rapids, and by some accounts withdrew cash in the amount of one-thousand dollars, though this sum is disputed. After exiting the bank, she seemingly disappeared.

Geraldine Maggert was not reported missing for quite a while, but that doesn’t mean that no one was worried about her. Coworkers became concerned when she didn’t show up for the entire week following her vanishing act, and their apprehension grew when they went to her apartment and found no sign of her.

Since friends at work knew that Geraldine’s ex-husband lived in Ithaca and that the pair was still in communication with one another, they presumed that Geraldine had simply flown out to visit him. A search of the parking lot of the Cedar Rapids airport, in fact, seemed to confirm their suspicions, for Geraldine’s car was discovered there. Still, though, the coworkers phoned Geraldine’s parents to voice their unease about her unexplained absence.

The Lempkes agreed that it certainly looked as though Geraldine had taken a flight to New York, though it seemed very odd that she had not told anyone about the trip. Geraldine’s mother subsequently went to the Cedar Rapids police, and accompanied the officers when they examined Geraldine’s apartment. Mrs. Lempke noticed right away that Geraldine’s suitcase and some of her clothes were missing, though there was no other evidence of anything amiss in the home.

A little more than a fortnight later, on Saturday, April 6th, a troop of Boy Scouts who were hiking near the Coralville Reservoir in North Liberty came across the nearly nude body of Geraldine Maggert in a picnic area known as The Rock. It appeared she had been beaten or strangled to death, or had been beaten into unconsciousness and later died of exposure. Because of the cold weather, it was unclear how long Geraldine had been dead, though the coroner suspected that she had been lying there for approximately seven days prior to her discovery.

None of her belongings were ever found, and neither was the murder weapon, despite an intensive search of the area. Significantly, though, an autopsy uncovered the fact that Geraldine had been three months pregnant.

Because Geraldine had obviously packed for a trip and had withdrawn a large sum of money before her disappearance, it was hypothesized that she had been traveling somewhere to obtain an illegal abortion. However, investigators could find no clue as to who the father of Geraldine’s child could have been, and were likewise unable to establish whether she had purchased a flight at the airport on the day she vanished. Since her abandoned car contained no indication of a struggle and no evidence that a body had been transported in it, detectives wondered if she might have been abducted from the airport parking lot by an assailant in another vehicle.

Geraldine’s ex-husband Richard Maggert was initially sought for questioning, and he voluntarily flew to Cedar Rapids to cooperate with the investigation. He admitted speaking to Geraldine several times over the phone in the weeks prior to her murder, but claimed he knew nothing about where she had been going or who had killed her. Richard Maggert easily passed a polygraph, and was quickly dismissed as a suspect.

For a time, detectives were looking into the possibility that the slaying of Geraldine Maggert was related to the January 28th murder of Sheila Jean Collins, but further inquiries established no connection between the two homicides.

Authorities interviewed over two-hundred persons of interest in the case and even expanded their investigation to encompass neighboring states after an anonymous tipster claimed that Geraldine had actually been heading for Omaha, Nebraska. However, none of these leads panned out, and Geraldine Maggert was consequently added to the long roster of Iowa’s unsolved crimes.