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An Iowa Witch Hunt
Location: The bar at the Warrior Hotel, Sioux City, Iowa
It is a beautiful September evening in Iowa. The beer you are tossing back, as you sit at the bar, feels cold in your hand. Iowa State, under Coach Vince DiFrancesca, looked like it would be lucky to win a football game this season. When the newspapers across the state scoffed at the thought that the Iowa Hawkeyes could be a winning program, Coach Forest Evashevski seemed to be steering the team in the right direction. In a year or two they might actually compete for the Big Ten title. The New York Yankees were going to meet the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series again this year. The musical Oklahoma was still packing them in at the nearby movie theater. Bill Haley and the Comets were making waves with a song called “Rock Around the Clock.” President Dwight Eisenhower, a few weeks earlier, had just increased the national minimum wage by a quarter to a whole dollar an hour.
At that moment, local police pour into the bar. Raid! A beefy officer throws you onto the counter, spits an epitaph at you, and violently slaps a pair of handcuffs on you. Marched out of the place, the local newspaper is there to take your picture and record your name. You know that this arrest is going to cost you everything, your job, your family, your friends, everything. When you walked into a restaurant or a local store, there would be that look of disgust and repulsion. You will be an outcast the rest of your life. Things are never going to be the same. What you did not know is, there was going to be no trial, no hearing before a judge. You legally have no rights. The state has labeled you a “sexual psychopath” and claims you show characteristics of “sexual violence.” You are about to disappear. Be taken away with nineteen other men to the state’s Mental Health Institute for the Insane and Inebriated, Ward 15 East, in Mount Pleasant. There you will stay, no chance of release, until you are “cured.” Your crime? You are a homosexual.
For the most part histories are white washed, awful things overlooked or forgotten. Yet, one cannot make sense of the present without understanding the past. History becomes mere propaganda without the inclusion of events that people should be less than proud of, or where they fail to live up to their ideals. What happened in Sioux City is like something out of an Elwood Leonard novel and should be made into a Hollywood movie. At the very least, it should merit an apology to the homosexual community by Iowa’s governor, and serve as an example of how hysteria can destroy innocent people’s lives. It was the deaths of two young children that led to this witch hunt in western Iowa.
Due to a speech impediment, which the other children in town made fun of, eight-year-old Jimmy Bremmers was a lonely child. His main source of comfort and friendship was a small black-and-white mutt he called Specks. The Bremmers family was building a new home and spent most evenings trying to get the place ready to move into. Instead of helping his father lay bricks like he normally did, the little boy decided to watch television at a neighbor’s house, less than a block away, just two houses down. A few hundred feet does not seem that far. After watching the television show Life With Father, a little after 8 p.m., little Jimmy Bremmers headed home. He was never seen again.
Two days later, on September 2, 1954, the police arrested a mentally challenged door-to-door salesman named Ernest Triplett for the crime. Labeled a “simpleton,” Triplett had been trying to make ends meet selling music lessons on commission for a local business. The main evidence against Triplett was that he had only arrived in town three weeks earlier and had been working the area the previous few days. The police made sure the newspapers got the innuendo that Triplett’s sexual activity “went beyond the missionary position.” Investigators thought Triplett was a homosexual. If Triplett’s “sexual deviance” was not enough to convict him of the crime in the court of public opinion, they noted that he was an abuser of marijuana. Without a lawyer present, police worked over the homeless salesman for the next two weeks. Finally, Triplett agreed to be voluntarily committed to the Mental Health Institute in Cherokee. It was there that they hoped that the doctors would help them come up with answers as to what happened to young Jimmy.
Thirteen days later, a county crew putting up a snow fence discovered Jimmy’s body just north of the town, on Ridge Road. The little boy’s skull had been crushed. Who had ever killed the child had also cut off his head and hands. While the head was discovered a few feet away, the hands were never recovered. Never mind that Triplett had no means of transporting the boy’s body to that location, the police were sure they had their man. If they had any doubts, they quickly vanished when they took Triplett out to the location where the body was found. They observed that the door-to-door salesman acted strange, a sure sign of guilt.
Only a handful of individuals knew what was really going on. The state, in order to save money, hired foreign-trained doctors, who had not yet received their licenses to practice medicine in America. They worked at Cherokee and sometimes their methods were not standard practice. Under the care of Dr. Anthony Sainz, Triplett, who was refused food, was injected with 80 milligrams of an amphetamine, Desoxyn, backed up by three grains of a barbiturate, Seconal. If that chemical cocktail was not enough, Sainz filled Ernest with 500 milligrams of LSD. It is little wonder that the mentally challenged man quickly confessed to the crime.
With no physical evidence tying him to the crime, Ernest Triplett was quickly convicted at the courthouse in Le Mars for the crime. In fact, prosecutors used the man’s alibi that he had been seen listening to The Liberace Show in the Bus Hotel, at the time that Jimmy Bremmers disappeared, against him. As one of the jurors noted, even though the case against Triplett was weak, “he admitted in open court that he listened to Liberace on the radio, and a man who does that is liable to do anything.” The dots were connected and Triplett was sent to the Fort Madison penitentiary.
In the wake of the Bremmer murder, the Iowa legislature passed a preventative law that permanently established that twenty-five beds be reserved for “sexual deviants.” Said “sexual deviant” could be held until a doctor certified that they were “cured.”
The story would have ended there, but a few weeks after Triplett headed to Fort Madison another Sioux City child vanished, twenty-two month old Donna Sue Davis. The youngest of three children, the little girl with the mass of blonde curly hair was known as the “darling of the neighborhood.” With no air conditioning, the Davises left their bedroom window open to capture the breeze when they laid their baby down in her crib. They then returned to the kitchen to talk and read the newspaper before going to bed themselves.
Less than six minutes later, several neighbors spied the shadowy figure of a slight man in a white t-shirt and khaki pants in the Davis’ yard. Due to the poor lighting, they could not give police a better description. He appeared to be carrying something heavy wrapped in a blanket. Ten minutes after they had put their little girl in pink pajamas down, the Davises noticed the bedroom screen was missing and that their little girl was gone. Police and neighbors combed the area.
The best lead of the evening came from a local resident, Sid Goldberg. While driving through the town of Elk Point, South Dakota, he noticed a gentleman matching the description of the kidnapper outside of a hotel holding a baby. Goldberg thought it so suspicious that he even made note of the Nebraska license plate number of the black Chevrolet sedan the man stood next to. Arriving home less than three hours after the child’s disappearance, Goldberg calls the Sioux City police with his information. There is little they can do with the license plate number, as they would have had to wait until the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles opened in the morning. So Sioux City officials called the Elk Point police to see if the man is still there. The mysterious stranger was nowhere to be found. Several other reports of a man with a baby driving a car with Nebraska plates surfaced. Unwilling to call in the FBI, the National Guard, police and volunteers searched for the girl over the course of the next few hours. On July 11, Donna Sue’s body is found in a cornfield just outside of Dakota City, Nebraska. Her body appeared to have been tossed from a speeding car. The little girl was raped, sodomized, her jaw broken, cigarettes put out on her bottom, and her skull crushed.
Even though there is no apparent connection between the cases, local citizens panic. Lead by the newspapers, a mob mentality develops. The Sioux City Journal demanded that every “sexual deviate” in the town be taken care of. Town folk wanted any future sexual predator to think twice before stopping in Sioux City. Neighbors begin informing on neighbors. The mayor was frequently seen ranting at investigators that something has to be done to calm people’s fears. In the midst of this hysteria, to calm fears, police raided the Warrior Hotel bar in what they privately call a “fruit picking” and sent the suspected homosexuals to Ward 15 East.
To the credit of the Mount Pleasant doctors, they recognized a miscarriage of justice when they saw one and actively urged that their new patients be released. When the hysteria died down, seven months later, the inmates were quietly labeled as “cured” and released. With their lives ruined, most of them knew that Sioux City was not a safe place for them to return. A second round of “fruit picking” occurred in 1958. Like before, the Mount Pleasant doctors worked to get the men quickly released. Ernest Triplett was not so lucky. He would remain in prison until 1971 when the courts overturned his conviction as Dr. Sainz’s drug regimen and treatments came to light. Not only didn’t Triplett have any knowledge of the crime, but also it was clear that he was almost a zombie during his so-called confession. Sioux City police clearly knew that he was not in his right mind and was on something. There were even moments that he passed out during the examination.
To this day, the murderers of Donna Sue Davis and Jimmy Bremmers remain a mystery. Yet, we can learn from the hysteria and witch hunt that followed. It is a horrible moment in Iowa history that could be repeated if we are not careful.