It was a serene and peaceful midnight on Feb. 3, 1897, in the small farming community of Walford, Iowa. It was cold and crisp, windless and silent. Most of the town's 214 residents were sleeping away another mid-winter night without much of a care.
The only movements of note were the few kerosene lamps with their dancing flames showing faintly behind closed curtains. The dark silhouettes of the two most prominent buildings on Main Street Walford, the Novak & Zabokrtsky General Store and the First State Bank of Walford, were clearly outlined against the moonless, star-filled sky. It was a scene off of a Christmas card.
At 2 a.m., the tranquility of the scene was shattered by the first verbal alarms of fire as the night sky in Walford came aglow as the general store and the bank burned like kindling. Neighbors and merchants rallied in attempts to save anything savable, but with no fire department, the buildings collapsed into their basements and were only cinders.
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By the weakly slanting rays of the winter morning sunlight, the good people of Walford saw that the store and the bank were destroyed, with nothing standing but a blackened brick wall between the two.
By late afternoon, battalions of citizens tended the ruins and through the whispers of the crowd, it became apparent that Frank Novak, owner of both the general store and the bank, was still unaccounted for.
Then, before the sun could set on that day of days, a shout went up that a body had been found in the basement, lying on a cot, a few feet away from the gasoline boiler used to heat the building. The remains were unrecognizable. The legs and one arm were completely burned off and all of the flesh around the scorched face was missing, leaving only a ghastly and grimacing skull.
Despite the near cremation of these remains, no one doubted that it was Novak's corpse; especially since searchers found several items known to be generally on his person: pocket scissors, his monogrammed penknife, a metal identification check that matched the one that he always wore on his suspenders.
The men also found a partial dental bridge that had fallen onto the dirt basement floor. By the end of the day there was no one who needed convincing that the incinerated and disfigured body was that of the young Walford entrepreneur Frank Alfred Novak. A Cedar Rapids newspaper reported that Novak's father was so distraught over the loss of his son he attempted suicide.
How could it have been anyone else?
So it was quite a shock when the next day Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette editor W.I. Endicott received a telegram from his reporter on the story in Walford, stating that 83-year-old retired farmer William Murray was frantic that his 40-year-old bachelor son, Edward, who farmed the old man's land, had not returned home the night before.
Edward Murray milked cows requiring a systematic schedule and had never shirked his farm responsibilities before. When old-man Murray travelled into Walford to inquire about his son, no one had seen him since the night before.
The gossip that Edward Murray was also missing, put the small community abuzz and in some confusion. With the store and bank ruins still smoking, half of the Walfordians were convinced the body borne from the rubble could be no one other than Frank Novak and the other half believing it to be the missing Edward Murray.
As the local debate raged regarding the true identity of the body found in the general store basement, County Attorney M.J. Tobin arrived in Walford and convened a coroner's inquiry, the purpose of which was to first identify the body but also to investigate the facts of the incident that had leveled two important buildings by fire.
Tobin was fresh out of Columbia Law School and had aced the Iowa Bar Exam in late 1896. Unlike most of the old-school attorneys practicing in Iowa at that time, M.J. was a firm believer in the new investigation techniques of forensic science. Science as it pertains to law had been around for centuries, yet the use of science by law enforcement to convict criminals had its nascence in the United States in the 1880s.
Over one hundred years before the "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" franchise exploded into the true crime genre on CBS, forensic science as practiced in its infancy in 1897 would be a large part of the investigation into the circumstances of a charred body found in a burned out general store in Walford, Iowa.