After a gruesome murder in this state, politicians and the people they work for inevitably fire up the old debate.
Should Iowa restore the death penalty?
It happened again in November when Michael Swanson, 17, of Minnesota was charged with killing two northern Iowa convenience store clerks.
The online forums crackled with familiar questions and answers: Is the capital punishment really a deterrent? Is it applied equally to rich and poor? How many more innocent people must be killed? Which is more just, rehab or revenge? Which is more merciful?
It's been that way since 1965, when Gov. Harold Hughes and Iowa lawmakers - Republicans and Democrats alike - killed the death penalty. The law hasn't changed, and the debate hasn't stopped.
"I think we've had at least a dozen death penalty proposals since Iowa repealed capital punishment," says Dick Haws, who should know.
Haws, 67, completed the project in 2002 but couldn't find a publisher. So he set the history of all 46 executions in his attic.
It stayed there until 2009 when an old Peace Corps friend gave him the encouragement he needed. Haws spent about $3,000 on two freelancers, an editor and a designer, and published the book himself.
He'll never say it's the last word on the subject, or the first. It's simply a thoroughly researched, lively telling of an issue that helps explain who we are. And it belongs in our libraries.
"One thing we need to understand," Haws says. "If someone is executed by the state, it is us doing the executing. We're responsible."
Who were these 46? Forty-three were murderers. Three were rapists. None was a woman. All were legally hanged in gallows.
The first execution occurred in Dubuque, the last in Fort Madison. The average age was 33. The youngest was 18, the oldest 72. Most were crimes of passion. Some were acts of disturbingly cold dispassion.
Many were mindless heat-of-the-moment acts that involved little forethought. One man killed a guard simply because he admired the guard's gun.
"A lot of these guys were cold-blooded killers," Haws says. "If these incidents happened today, a lot of those people would be sentenced to a lesser murder charge."
Or sent to psychiatric hospitals. An autopsy done on a killer with syphilis showed a profoundly diseased brain.
Haws had been interested in the issue since his teenage days in Beatrice, Neb., where he followed the bloody trail left by Charles Starkweather, the nation's first recognized mass murderer.
After Starkweather's rampage through Lincoln, only 40 miles from Beatrice, Haws' father took a shotgun to work. After touring the Badlands, Starkweather was arrested in Wyoming and showed up on the cover of Life magazine.
The images took hold. Haws earned his master's degree at Nebraska and worked 12 years in the newspaper business, much of if it covering crime.
"I came out of Nebraska thinking everyone had the death penalty," Haws says. "I was always intrigued by it."
When Haws joined the ISU faculty about 30 years ago, he was curious about Iowa. He went to the library looking for a comprehensive account and came up short.
That's when he decided he'd help fill history's vacuum. Haws picked up a Freedom Forum travel grant. He spent the next semester wandering the state, visiting state libraries, wading into court and newspaper reports, squinting at old microfilm, formulating a narrative.
In the book, Haws gets right to it. The first sentence: "Patrick O'Conner was the sort of fellow who was almost certain to be hanged."
He was a one-legged brawler, drinker and arsonist who shot a man dead for reasons that remain unclear.
After deciding not to lynch O'Conner — lynching was an accepted frontier practice — the settlers quickly threw together a makeshift hearing. Twelve jurors were plucked out of the crowd. Guilty.
On the day O'Conner was hanged, the stores and shops of Dubuque closed. Steamers filled with passengers arrived from nearby river towns. Bells rang, fifes played, drums banged, people lined the streets.
A thousand witnesses saw a horse-drawn wagon pull away from the gallows and a precedent was set. The early executions were colorful spectacles. Some had the feel and fanfare of a county fair.
In 1858, 15,000 people went to Appanoose County for William Hinkle's hanging. The Ottumwa Courier said it was the largest gathering for any event west of the Mississippi.
One of the book's most poignant tales features Polk County Sheriff William E. Robb, who was also the pastor of Urbandale Federated Church. As sheriff in the 1920s, Robb also played the role of executioner.
The man he was assigned to execute, Eugene Weeks, baited Robb in front of reporters the night before the hanging. How do you like this job? Do you have the guts to pull the lever?
"God will forgive me," Weeks said, "but how about you, Sheriff? Why, Robb, you don't want to knock me off. You kill me, and I'll return to haunt you all the days of your life."
Robb received letters from all over the country. The critics came at him from all sides. The hanging went poorly, as hangings often did. Whether it was rain or humidity, the rope stretched and Weeks' feet scraped the ground.
Robb and the warden quickly lifted Weeks and twisted the rope several times around the pole. Fourteen minutes later, he was pronounced dead.
Facing another execution soon after, Robb issued a statement: "Taking another's life, hurling someone over the precipice into eternity, is the most terrible of all tasks."
And "I would to God that there was some way out of it, but there is none that is honorable, and so I shall do my duty."
Robb served one term as sheriff. And, as Haws says now, "got the hell out of Dodge."
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