The IOWA Cold Case That Was SOLVED 50 Years Later

Imagine a September morning on the southwestern edge of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The lowlands along Ely Road, dense trees, the air carrying the scent of damp earth and decaying autumn leaves of the Midwest. Two young boys out hunting spot an abandoned car. They approach, they look into the trunk, and they run. That day was September 24th, 1971.

This is not a story about a stranger or a random attack. This is the story of a 17-year-old girl who had just moved from Sioux City to Cedar Rapids to start a new life. Killed by someone who knew her name, knew she lived alone, knew what time she got off work. A man who later proactively went to the police station to inquire about the progress of the investigation as if nothing had happened.

For the next 50 years, she existed only as an open case file, a fading photo in old news reports. Her name was Maureen Brubaker Farley. She was from Sioux City, Iowa, and it took five decades, a piece of evidence no one thought would still be usable, and a DNA technique that didn’t exist on the day she died for the truth to finally come to light.

But let’s go back to where it began. In 1971, America was in the middle of the Vietnam War. Anti-war protests broke out on streets from Washington to San Francisco. In the White House, Nixon was preparing for his historic trip to China. But in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, far from all that noise, the lives of working families in the Midwest still followed the familiar rhythm that had existed for generations.

 The Quaker Oats plant and the Iowa Beef Processors packing plant opened at 7:00 in the morning. Lutheran and Catholic churches were full on Sunday mornings. Corner diners were places where people called each other by name, and no one felt the need to lock their doors at night. Cedar Rapids that year had about 110,000 residents.

 Big enough to have stable jobs, small enough to believe that bad things wouldn’t happen here. Maureen Ann Brubaker was born on July 4th, 1954 in Sioux City, nearly 300 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids, the eldest of seven children in the Brubaker family. Those who knew her remembered Maureen with small details. Whenever her parents asked if her younger siblings had been good, Maureen always said yes, so each one could get a penny reward because she wanted her siblings to be happy.

 She was the eldest child in every sense, the one who set the tone for the whole family, the one her siblings looked to for how to react in new situations. At 16, Maureen asked her parents for permission to marry the boy named David Farley, whom she had met and fallen in love with. Mrs.

 Mary Ann objected, saying her daughter was too young, but Maureen said bluntly that if she was prevented, she would leave home and never come back. And Mrs. Mary Ann, knowing her eldest daughter’s personality, could not stop her. They got married, but that young marriage quickly ran into trouble. David was arrested and sent to Anamosa State Penitentiary, about 26 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids.

 In the summer of 1971, 17-year-old Maureen decided to leave Sioux City and move down to Cedar Rapids to be close enough to visit him more often. She rented an efficiency apartment at 522 10th Street SE, a small room just enough for one person, cheap rent. She got a job as a waitress at Weida’s Restaurant at 836 1st Avenue NE, about a 15-minute walk from her place.

 A 17-year-old girl, husband in prison, living alone in a strange city with no close family or friends around, that was Maureen Brubaker’s situation in the final months of 1971. Less than 3 months, that was all the time she had in Cedar Rapids before everything stopped. The last time anyone saw Maureen was at 5:30 p.m.

 on Friday, September 17th, 1971. She got off work at Weida’s, walked out the door like any other day. Nothing unusual. She simply stepped out of sight of those around her and never returned. September 18th passed. September 19th passed. Her husband was in prison. Her family was in Sioux City, nearly 300 miles away in an era when a long distance call was not something done every day.

There was no one at 522 waiting for her to come home each evening. No one knocking on the door to check on her. And that was the gap that investigators later could not stop thinking about. Three days when no one was looking for her. Three days when no one knew. Three days during which, according to the later autopsy results, she very likely was still alive.

 By the morning of Monday, September 20, when Maureen did not show up for her morning shift and could not be reached by phone, the owner of Witwer’s restaurant reported her to the police. They went to 522, knocked on the door, got no answer, went inside and found the room neat, no signs of disturbance, no note left behind, luggage still there, clothes still in the closet.

 Just a complete, eerily calm absence. Three days. That was the time between the last time someone saw Maureen Brubaker and the first time someone realized she was missing. Three days and no one knew where she was or what she was going through. Four days after Maureen Brubaker was reported missing, on the morning of Friday, September 24th, 1971, two young boys hunting in the wooded lowlands along Heeley Road SW, the southwestern edge of Cedar Rapids, a wild piece of land near the old dump where broken cars and scrap had accumulated over the years, found the

body of a young woman on the trunk lid of an abandoned car. She was not fully clothed. She had no shoes, but her feet were clean, and that detail would haunt investigators for the next five decades because it could only mean she had not walked there. She had been carried there, placed on the trunk lid of that car by someone who had moved her after she was dead, and that person had laid her down carefully, not dumped like something worthless, but placed down as if in all that had happened, there still remained a little something that was not

entirely animalistic. The police identified the victim as Maureen Ann Brubaker Farley, 17 years old, residing at 522 10th Street SE, the person who had been reported missing 4 days earlier. The Linn County Medical Examiner determined she had been dead for no less than 48 hours and no more than 96 hours from the time of discovery, placing the time of death around September 20 to 22.

 The cause of death was an extremely powerful blow to the right side of the head that fractured the base of the skull, not an instant death, but a prolonged one. Investigators believe she had survived unconscious for several days before dying. The autopsy also confirmed she had been sexually assaulted before death. There were no signs of struggle at the Ely Road Lowlands, no blood on the ground, no scattered footprints, nothing to indicate this was the scene of the attack.

 During the autopsy, the medical examiner collected a cotton swab according to the standard sexual assault examination protocol, numbered, labeled, packaged, and sent to storage along with the other evidence. In 1971, there was no technology in the world that could process that sample to reveal the identity of the person who left it. The person who collected it did not know they were creating the only thing that could tell the truth 50 years later.

They were simply doing their job correctly, following procedure. The Cedar Rapids Police Department immediately opened a homicide investigation. Investigators built a suspect list from the men who had been around Maureen’s life during the weeks she was in Cedar Rapids, co-workers at Whiteis, neighbors in the building at 522, acquaintances in the neighborhood around 10th Street.

 Each person was interviewed, statements recorded, inconsistencies noted, but there were no direct witnesses who saw anything on the afternoon of September 17. The wooded area along Ely Road, where the two boys found Maureen’s body that day, is now Tait Cummins Park. There is not a single sign, not a single line of text recording what happened there in the fall of 1971.

The cotton swab was numbered, packaged, and sent to storage. The investigation continued. In the suspect list that Cedar Rapids police began building, one name stood out more than the others. Not because the police had direct evidence, but because the combination of small details created a picture that was hard to ignore. George M.

 Smith was not a stranger to Maureen. He worked at a liquor store on 10th Street, near the apartment at 522, where she rented a room. Close enough to know who she was, know she lived alone, know what shift she worked at Wida’s, and what time she got off. In addition to his job at the liquor store, Smith also ran his own hauling service, meaning he had a truck, was familiar with routes in the southwestern Cedar Rapids area, and had legitimate reasons to appear at various locations around the city at any time.

But it was not that geographic connection that made investigators mark his name with suspicion in the file. It was what he did in October 1971, while the investigation was ongoing and police were interviewing everyone on the list. George Smith proactively went to the police station, not once, but multiple times, asking about the progress of the investigation, asking what the police had found, asking if there were any new leads.

 A man with no clear reason to repeatedly show interest in the progress of a case with which he had no family relationship or legal obligation to the victim. Just showing up at the station, inquiring, leaving, and coming back again. Investigators noted those visits, marked them in the file, and when it came time for direct questioning, they asked pointed questions about the inconsistencies they observed.

 Smith answered, explained, did not appear flustered, but when offered a polygraph test, he refused. That was his right under the law. No one could force him, but in the context of a case where physical evidence was thin and police were trying to narrow the list, that refusal was enough to keep his name in focus. The core problem was not a lack of suspects, but a lack of tools to prove it.

 In 1971, there was no DNA forensics, no CODIS, no national genetic database, no technique that could take a swab from an autopsy and turn it into the name of a specific person. Only statements, fingerprints, and logical connections that defense attorneys could dismantle before a jury. And George Smith knew that, or at least acted like someone who knew that, continuing his normal life in Cedar Rapids as his name gradually faded in the file.

The years passed. People who had once known Maureen Brubaker’s name gradually disappeared from the community. Smith grew older, continuing to live in the city, in the neighborhood. Time passed with no progress. Maureen Brubaker Farley’s case gradually slipped into what investigators call a cold case, a status no one officially declared, but everyone understood implicitly when the file was put away.

 Periodic reviews becoming administrative procedures rather than real investigative activity. Once a year, someone would open it, review the suspect list with crossed out names and names not yet crossed out, shake their head, and close it again. No new leads emerged. No witnesses came forward after years of silence. No conscience spoke up and called the police.

 The investigators who had worked the case in 1971 retired one by one, taking with them memories of the interviews, the inconsistencies in statements, the small details they felt were important but could not prove, and new people took over the thick file, read through it, then moved on to cases with fresher leads, witnesses who remembered more clearly, evidence not yet worn down by time.

Through the ’80s and ’90s, Cedar Rapids police periodically reviewed the file whenever new technology appeared, running names from the suspect list through newly built federal criminal databases, re-interviewing people who had been questioned in 1971 and were now in their 50s or 60s, their memories fading.

 Each time they came up empty, not for lack of effort, but because what time had erased could not be recovered by effort alone, and what remained in the file was not enough to create a breakthrough without something new to add. Then in 2006, investigator Doug Larison reviewed the file and saw something that those who had read it before him had not seen.

 The cotton swab collected in 1971, sitting in storage for 35 years, could now be tested for DNA using technology that did not exist in 1971. The test was performed. The result returned a complete DNA profile of the person who had assaulted Maureen, a full biological identity, but with no name attached hanging in the database.

Larison ran that profile through CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, containing millions of profiles from convicted offenders and unsolved cases nationwide. No match. The glimmer of hope appeared and went out immediately. From 2006 onward, whenever conditions and legal authority allowed, police collected DNA from the men on the original suspect list who were still alive.

 One by one, testing and comparing against the 2006 profile, clearing them, moving to the next. The process was slow, expensive, requiring voluntary cooperation or court orders for each case. By 2015, 15 men had been completely cleared. 15 people who had once been suspects, who had once had names on the list, now confirmed not to be the person who left the 1971 DNA profile.

 15 people eliminated. A nameless DNA profile still sat in the database. Throughout those years, while the file sat in a drawer, there was one person who had no file to close, Mrs. Mary Ann Brubaker, the mother. In 1971, she was 36 years old when she lost Maureen. Young enough that she still had a whole life ahead to live with an unanswered question, to wake up every morning and remember that the name of her daughter’s killer had not yet been spoken.

 In 2021, when the phone rang and there was an investigator’s voice on the other end, she was 86 years old. Half a century, more than half a lifetime had passed, and in that time, she had more than once wondered if she would live long enough to hear the answer. Mr. Brubaker had not lived long enough. He passed away in 2002, 19 years before the answer came, leaving without knowing the name, without knowing the face, without knowing why his eldest daughter had ended her life on the trunk lid of an abandoned car at age 17. He died with

the question never answered, never given the chance to be answered, and that is something that cannot be fixed in this entire case. Maureen had six siblings, four of whom were still alive in 2021. They grew up in the shadow of the case, knowing their eldest sister had been killed, knowing no one had been arrested, knowing the file was still open, but with no promises of results, learning to live normally while carrying a void that could never be filled.

 Every holiday was missing one person. Every family meal had an empty chair no one sat in. Maureen remained frozen at age 17, while they grew older, got married, had children, had grandchildren, experienced everything normal life brings, and Maureen remained forever the 17-year-old big sister with brown hair in the photo taken before she left Sioux City.

 Her siblings remembered her in specific fragments. Her voice when she called them in for dinner, the way she folded clothes for the younger ones with the patience that children who grow up in large families often have, the smell of their parents’ kitchen in Sioux City whenever she came home to visit on weekends.

 Those fragments did not fade with time. They only became lonelier because there was nothing new to add. In 2018, when a local television station did a report on unsolved cold cases, in 2020, when Iowa’s Unsolved aired Maureen’s story, Mrs. Mary Ann Brubaker answered interviews with the calm of someone who had repeated the same thing too many times.

 “I just want to know who did it before I die. I want to know.” She did not talk about punishment. She did not talk about trials or sentences. She only talked about the right to know, the right a mother deserves, the right she had waited for since she was a 36-year-old woman. In 2015, as the Maureen Brubaker Farley case entered its 44th year without an answer, investigator Matt Denlinger of the Cedar Rapids Police Department’s Cold Case Unit opened the file from the first page.

 Not because a new lead had appeared, not because someone had called with important information, but because that was how he worked with all the cold cases assigned to him. Every case deserved to be looked at with fresh eyes after each cycle of technology because what could not be done 10 years ago could sometimes be done today, and the difference between a solved case and a case that would never be solved sometimes came down to someone willing to sit down and reread the file at the right time.

 Denlinger was not romantic about the job. He simply believed in one simple principle. What could not be done in 2006 could be done in 2015. And what could not be done in 2015 could be done in 2020. Hundreds of pages accumulated over 44 years. Statements from the 1971 interviews. Crime scene reports with forensic details meticulously recorded according to the standards of the time.

DNA test results from 2006. A long suspect list with 15 names crossed out afterward. Demlinger read every page paying attention to small notes, the marginal details in interview reports recording the behavior and attitude of those questioned. The deeper he read into the file, the clearer it became to Demlinger that the problem with this case was not a lack of suspects or a lack of circumstantial evidence pointing in one direction.

 The problem was one specific name on the list. A person who had been marked as suspicious by the 1971 investigators. A person who had never been cleared by any method. Who had died in 2013 and therefore could no longer provide a DNA sample directly through any procedure. To bring that name into the DNA comparison process, they needed a different path.

 A path that did not go through the suspect himself, but through people who shared his bloodline. Together with former DCI special agent J.D. Smith and former CRPD Lieutenant Ken Washburn, Demlinger began researching the possibility of applying investigative genetic genealogy. The technique of tracing living relatives of a suspect through commercial DNA databases like GEDmatch and public family tree records.

 Building family trees from distant DNA matches, narrowing down toward the suspect, then finding a relative close enough genetically to produce a meaningful result when compared to the 1971 profile. This technique was still new at the time Demlinger began researching it. Still expensive, still controversial regarding the legal and ethical boundaries of using relatives DNA to investigate someone who was deceased.

But after 2018 when California authorities used this exact technique to arrest Joseph James DeAngelo after more than 40 years, no one called it science fiction anymore or debated its legal value. The process of tracing George Smith’s living relatives began. He had been gone for many years and the family was scattered.

 Not everyone was easy to find, but step-by-step pieces of genealogical information came together and one relative was gradually identified. A person close enough genetically to George Smith that if that person’s DNA were compared to the 1971 cotton swab profile, the result would be meaningful enough to stand up under any legal standard.

 They were not sure they would succeed. They were only sure that if they did not try this path, the answer would never come from any other path. After identifying a living relative of George Smith through the genetic genealogy search, Denlinger faced the next question. How to collect the DNA sample in a way that did not violate that relatives rights, did not reveal the direction of the investigation before results were in, and had enough legal value to stand up in court if the result was positive and the case needed to proceed through official judicial

process. Because a DNA sample collected improperly, no matter how clear the result, could be thrown out entirely before a judge. They could not simply knock on the door and ask. They needed a court order, needed a legal document proving there was probable cause to believe this relative’s DNA would be relevant to the case.

 Denlinger sat down to draft an affidavit, a detailed document recreating the entire 50-year history of the case. On September 24th, 1971, two boys found the body on Ely Road. Autopsy results with cause of death and evidence of sexual assault, the cotton swab collected and stored, the DNA profile extracted in 2006 with no name found in CODIS, the process of clearing 15 people over the years, and everything the 1971 file recorded about George Smith, the distance from the liquor store where he worked to the apartment at 522 where Maureen rented a

room, the route from the 10th Street area to Ely Road that his hauling service had legitimate reason to travel, the times he proactively went to the station to inquire about the investigation, recorded in reports with the word suspicious, his refusal of a polygraph when offered. Each small detail was placed next to the others in the affidavit not to convict.

 No single detail among them was enough to convict anyone, but to create an overall picture convincing enough for a judge that there was probable cause to take the next step. The judge read the affidavit, considered it, and signed the order. The DNA sample from George Smith’s relative was collected according to proper legal procedure, sealed, and sent to the Iowa State Police Lab along with the DNA profile extracted from the 1971 cotton swab.

 Lab technicians performed STR analysis, short tandem repeat, the method of comparing short repeating segments in the DNA sequence at multiple locations across the genome, the international standard for determining genetic relationships between individuals when direct DNA from the suspect is not available. The results took several weeks, several weeks during which Denlinger told the Brubaker family nothing, not because he forgot, but because he knew that false hope was even more cruel than silence, that telling 86-year-old Mrs. Mary Ann there might

soon be an answer, and then getting a negative result was the kind of harm he had no right to cause. The STR report from the lab came back. Conclusion, the DNA profile collected from the 1971 cotton swab matched the DNA profile of George M. Smith’s relative at a probability that completely excluded any other possibility.

 A probability that in forensic science means there is no one else on the planet who could produce this result except George M. Smith or his direct blood relative, and the only direct blood relative in this picture was the man himself. George M. Smith was the person who sexually assaulted and killed Maureen Brubaker Farley in September 1971 on the streets of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 50 years, one cotton swab.

When the lab results came back and George M. Smith’s name was confirmed by science, Denlinger and the cold case team faced a small administrative, but deeply meaningful decision. Which day would be the day of official announcement? Which day would be the day the file was closed and the Brubaker family was called? They chose September 24th, 2021 because on September 24th, 1971, exactly 50 years earlier, was the day two boys hunting in the lowlands along Ely Road, found Maureen on the trunk lid of an abandoned car. The day the case truly

began, and closing it on that exact day, after exactly 50 years, was the only ceremonial act a criminal case could perform for the deceased when there was no one left to arrest, no trial to hold, no sentence to pronounce because George Smith had died in 2013. The file was closed with the standard line, no prosecution, suspect deceased.

 That was all the system could do after 50 years. On the morning of September 24th, 2021, investigator Denlinger called Mrs. Mary Ann Brubaker, the mother who had waited for this call since she was 36 years old, who had answered countless press interviews over the decades with the same answer that she just wanted to know the name before she died.

 Denlinger told her what the legal system had recorded. His name was George M. Smith. Mrs. Mary Ann Brubaker, after listening, did not speak about justice in the legal sense. She only said what she truly felt after 50 years. We just think he’ll answer for it in hell. It happened. At least we know exactly who it was, and we can stop agonizing.

 We can let it go now. Let it go. Not forgive, not forget, not accept that what happened was okay, but only to release the weight of the unanswered question she had carried for 50 years. Smith had taken Maureen on a September afternoon in 1971. He had taken away 50 years of peace from the Brubaker family, taken away Mr. Brubaker’s chance to know the answer before he died in 2002, taken away the years Mrs.

 Mary Ann deserved to live without carrying that question. 11 days after the call to Mrs. Mary Ann, on October 5th, 2021, the Cedar Rapids Police Department held an official press conference. Chief Wayne German stood before the microphones and announced the Maureen Brubaker Farley case, open since 1971, had been solved.

 The suspect was George M. Smith, and there would be no prosecution because the suspect had passed away. German praised the many generations of officers who had contributed to this outcome. The person who collected the evidence sample, according to procedure on that morning in 1971, Doug Larison in 2006, when he realized the cotton swab could be DNA tested.

 Denlinger and the cold case team in the final 6 years, with genetic DNA genealogy techniques never before applied to such an old case in Iowa. Then he said, “No matter how much time passes, our officers remain committed to seeking justice for all victims of violent crime and their families.” The name George M. Smith spread through the Cedar Rapids community.

 Older people called each other, remembering the familiar face at the liquor store on 10th Street, remembering his voice, remembering the way he delivered goods, remembering chance encounters in the neighborhood over the decades without anyone knowing who they were standing next to. Not a stranger from the shadows, not a criminal from somewhere else, a neighbor, a familiar face, a person Cedar Rapids had lived alongside for 42 years after Maureen’s death without knowing.

 People asked each other if they had seen any signs in those years, if there had been any moment that made someone pause and think, if there was anything unusual in his eyes or behavior. And most answered, “No, nothing. He looked completely normal, exactly the way people like him usually look.” Them questions with no answers began to arise.

 Not about the case, but about what was inside George Smith’s mind during those 42 years. Did he know the cotton swab from 1971 was still sitting in the forensic storage? Did he follow the development of DNA technology in the news over the years and wonder if science would catch up to him? Did he have sleepless nights or had he buried that memory so deeply that even he no longer thought about it? Had he lived 42 years as if nothing had happened, eating, drinking, sleeping normally, looking in the mirror every morning and seeing an ordinary man, and finally

passing away at age 94, still believing he had gotten away? Those questions would never have answers because he had taken them with him, and that is the kind of void no trial can fill, whether it happens or not. The Maureen Brubaker Farley case leaves lessons not only for police or forensic scientists, but for everyone.

 The first lesson is about procedure. The medical examiner who collected the cotton swab in 1971 did not know how important what he was doing would become. And precisely because he followed procedure correctly on an ordinary morning, the case was solved 50 years later. That reminds us that meticulousness in daily work, even when no one sees it and no one praises it, sometimes creates consequences we may never know.

 The second lesson is about the patience of family. Mrs. Mary Ann Brubaker did not give up, did not stop talking about her daughter to the press, did not let the case sink completely into oblivion, and that constant presence kept the name Maureen Brubaker Farley alive in the community’s memory through many decades. If your family member or loved one is the victim of an unsolved case, do not stay silent.

Contact local police periodically. Talk to the press on anniversaries. Keep the name of your loved one from being forgotten. The third lesson is about DNA technology. If you have a missing loved one or a victim of violent crime from the decades before DNA forensics existed, ask the investigating agency whether any evidence samples are still preserved because what could not be tested in 1985 may be completely testable today, and the answer you are looking for may already be sitting in a storage cabinet for a long time, just

waiting for the right person to ask the right question at the right time. If Maureen’s story touched you, please hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next cases, and thank you for taking the time to listen. We’ll see you in the next episode.