Robert “Bob” Hatcher was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa on March 21st, 1968, the son of William “Bill” C. Hatcher and Marjorie Ann Brockman Hatcher. He grew up in the area and graduated from Treynor High School in 1987 before attending Iowa Western Community College for a year.
Bob spent much of his working life in the restaurant and hospitality business. He had been employed as a cook at the Ameristar casino in Council Bluffs and later worked at Sam’s Italian Villa and the Railway Inn.
By March 2007, then-thirty-eight-year-old Bob apparently was looking for another job. According to later reporting by Omaha television station KETV, he had attended a job fair on March 8th and was walking home.
The Iowa Riverfront Trail runs through the western edge of Council Bluffs along the Missouri River, directly across the water from Omaha. The section where Bob was walking was near Playland Park and underneath the I-480 bridge, an area dominated by the highway structure and the river corridor. Official cold-case materials place Bob on or alongside the trail when someone opened fire on him.
Accounts of the case consistently report that Bob was struck seven times. In a 2017 interview, his father, Bill, described the wounds as concentrated from Bob’s neck upward. The sheer number and placement of the shots led his family to believe that Bob had not simply been the unlucky victim of a stray bullet or an impulsive robbery. Bill Hatcher publicly expressed his conviction that the shooting had been deliberate and personal.
Nothing in the publicly available record identifies a firmly established motive for Bob Hatcher’s murder. There has been no demonstrated evidence that he was robbed, killed during a random confrontation, or targeted over some known dispute. Nor has law enforcement publicly released a definitive reconstruction explaining whom Bob met on the trail or precisely what occurred in the moments before the shots were fired.
A passerby found his body beneath the I-480 bridge area, and Council Bluffs police began a homicide investigation. Bob was only twelve days short of his thirty-ninth birthday.
For more than a year after the murder, there was no arrest. Then, in 2008, the investigation appeared to make a dramatic breakthrough. Later reporting by KETV states that Council Bluffs police arrested three men in connection with the investigation. Contemporary newspaper coverage, however, indicates that only two of those men were actually charged in connection with Hatcher’s shooting.
The case against the accused men initially appeared substantial enough for prosecutors to proceed. An arrest-warrant affidavit reported on by The Daily Nonpareil in November 2008 contained a particularly intriguing allegation: the gun used to kill Bob Hatcher had supposedly been taped to a brick and thrown into the Missouri River.
If accurate, it suggested an intentional effort to permanently dispose of the murder weapon only yards from one of the largest rivers in the country. A firearm weighted down and thrown into the Missouri could be extraordinarily difficult to recover, particularly after months of shifting currents, sediment and debris.
But an allegation contained in an affidavit is not the same thing as proof established in court. The prosecution ultimately ran into a much larger problem: the evidence was not strong enough to sustain the murder case. The charges were dismissed.
Ten years after the murder, Council Bluffs detectives made another attempt to shake loose an answer. In March 2017, the department revisited the cold case, again publicizing the circumstances and asking anyone with information to contact investigators. Police said at the time that the three men arrested in 2008 remained suspects. But the renewed attention did not result in charges.
Police again highlighted the case as the sixteenth anniversary approached in 2023. Detectives continued seeking information, and Bob Hatcher’s family again appealed publicly for anyone who knew what happened on March 8th, 2007, to speak up.
The Iowa Attorney General’s Office still lists Robert Hatcher among the state’s cold cases. His photograph appears in Iowa’s Cold Case Playing Card Deck, an initiative designed to circulate information about unresolved crimes and encourage new tips.
As of August 2026, Robert “Bob” Hatcher’s homicide remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 