Thirty-six-year-old Massie Pittman owned the Blue Note Tavern in Davenport, Iowa, and lived alone in an apartment next door to the establishment. Massie was a widow; her husband Hubert Pittman had been murdered in 1962, only a month after their wedding. Sadly, the same fate was soon to befall the surviving member of the doomed couple.
On the afternoon of February 17th, 1969, two regular customers of the Blue Note dropped by the bar to have a drink, but became concerned when they discovered that the tavern was closed. The men—Bobby Fields and Leon Campbell Jr.—went next door to Massie’s apartment to see why she had failed to open the Blue Note that Monday.
Upon receiving no answer to their summons, the men proceeded to climb in through an unlocked window, at which point they found Massie’s body sprawled across her bed. They quickly phoned the police.
Massie Pittman was found fully clothed, though her blouse had been hiked up to reveal her bra. Though this detail would seem to suggest a sexual motive, it was soon established that Massie was known to carry substantial sums of cash in her bra, leading investigators to assume that whoever had killed Massie had known her routines and sought to rob her. Bolstering this thesis was the fact that Massie’s purse was left near the body and seemed to have been emptied of money, and the .32 caliber pistol she often carried was found to be missing.
Though robbery was clearly the main motive, the murder was unnecessarily savage. Massie had been killed by a devastating blow to the right side of her head, but she had also sustained many other grievous injuries, including several puncture wounds that had likely been inflicted by a screwdriver or an ice pick. Further, she had been beaten so severely in the head and face that several of her teeth had been knocked out, and were found on the floor next to the bed.
A canvass of the neighborhood determined that Massie had last been seen on Sunday, February 16th at around six p.m. At that time, two girls who were renting an apartment from Massie in the same building had dropped by to speak to her about some decorating they wanted to do in their flat.
Another neighbor told authorities that she had heard voices from Massie’s apartment at around midnight on Sunday, though she did not indicate that she had heard any obvious sounds of an argument or violence.
Though detectives interviewed at least twenty witnesses and persons of interest, and gave polygraphs to a few promising suspects, no compelling leads in the case were developed, and Massie Pittman’s name was soon added to the grim roll call of Iowa’s unsolved murders.
Crime Immemorial 