November in Jeffries means corn stubble, gray skies, and the crack of shotguns across the fields when quail season opens. In 1938, a covey of quail on the supper table wasn’t sport for most families. It was meat. This case lives at the edge of a cornfield, where the law and an empty stomach met.
The Setup
Ward Hollis, 41, is found dead in a cornfield on the Eberly farm on the afternoon of Thursday, November 10, 1938. Ward was a deputy game warden for the county and an Army veteran of the Argonne. He had gone out that morning to hunt quail with his oldest friend, Ben Saylor.
Ben walked into town white as paper and told the sheriff what had happened. A covey flushed between them. Ben swung on the birds and fired both barrels. When he lowered his gun, Ward was down in the stubble. The county doctor ruled it a hunting accident, the kind that happens every fall somewhere in Indiana. Nobody blames Ben out loud. Ben blames himself. He hasn’t eaten since.
Ward is buried on Armistice Day. Anna goes out to the Eberly farm the next morning with the sheriff, who wants to close his report, and notices four things.
July 23, 1931, Minburn, Iowa – In the world where Anna Ghere lives and works, it isn’t hard to imagine a scene like this one.
It is three in the morning in a small Iowa railroad town. The depot platform is quiet. Most of Minburn’s three hundred residents are asleep, the Great Depression pulling at them in their beds — worrying the farmers, thinning the merchants, stretching every dollar until it frays. Town Marshal Virgil Untied is on foot patrol, walking the dark streets the way he does every night. He is thirty-three years old. He has a wife named Elsie and three daughters at home.
What happens next takes less than a minute. Ninety-five years later, no one has ever been charged for it.
The telephone operator on night duty, Miss Lena West, was awakened in the small hours by sounds coming from the Gootschalk grocery. She rang the alarm. Marshal Untied and two other men converged on the Shaw grocery store, where they found the thieves mid-burglary. The men opened fire the moment they saw the marshal crossing the railroad tracks.
More than ten shots rang out in the darkness. Five of them found Virgil Untied. One bullet struck him in the eye and lodged in his brain.
He crawled to the depot platform and collapsed there.
His companions returned fire as the three bandits fled toward Des Moines in a waiting car. A second gun battle erupted near Grimes when county authorities tried to stop a speeding vehicle matching the description. The car never slowed. No one inside was hit. No one was ever caught.
Untied was carried to Kings Daughters Hospital in Perry, where doctors offered little hope from the start. He died four days later, on July 27, 1931, his wife and three daughters at his bedside.
The state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, led by Chief J.E. Risden, mounted a manhunt across a thirty-five-mile corridor between Minburn and Des Moines. It came to nothing. Investigators believed the killers were Iowa men — not the celebrated outlaws whose names filled the newspapers that summer (Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde were all operating that year) — but ordinary, desperate men whose names history never recorded, because justice never found them.
Everyone in Minburn knew Virgil Untied. No one ever gave up the men who killed him.
He is buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Minburn, Dallas County, Iowa. His gravestone is still there. The case is still open.
*If you have information about the murder of Town Marshal Virgil Untied, contact the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office at (515) 993-4771.
The Jeffries Casebook explores real crimes from Depression-era small-town America—the same world where Anna Ghere lives, works, and keeps asking the questions no one else will.
