The Deck - Karen Streed (4 of Spades, Iowa)
Episode Date: December 10, 2025In 1971, 21-year-old Karen tried hitching a ride to go and meet her husband after work. She never made it and a week later her body was found floating in a canal nowhere near where she’d left or her... destination.Was Karen a victim of a predator passing through? Or was a former Sheriff with a dark side responsible… and maybe that’s why this case has never been solved?If you or anyone you know has any information on the murder of Karen Streed, you can call Chief Deputy Todd Sauerbrei at the Iowa County Sheriff’s Office at 319-642-7307.View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/karen-streedLet us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org.The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Our card this week is Karen Street, the four of spades from Iowa.
In 1971, 21-year-old Karen tried hitching a ride to go meet her husband after work.
She never made it, and a week later, her body was found floating in a canal, nowhere near where she left or her destination.
Was Karen a victim of a predator just passing through?
Or was a former sheriff with a dark side?
responsible. And maybe that's why this case has never been solved. I'm Ashley Flowers,
and this is the deck.
The Mill Race Canal in Amana, Iowa is about 20 miles from the nearest big city, Cedar Rapids.
It's a perfect spot for walking and fishing, or if your high schooler, Lynn Trumpled, duck hunting.
Sunday, October 24th, 1971, was calm on the water.
It was inching towards dusk, maybe 5.30 or so, and as he meandered through the water and his family's green monarch flat-bottomed vessel, he all of a sudden saw a woman in the water.
She was fully clothed, but the way she was floating told Lynn everything he needed to know.
He immediately drove that little green boat back towards his family's home to get his parents.
And his father, Melvin, didn't necessarily call police right away because it probably seemed unimaginable,
that his son would find a body in water that they fish and hunt on all the time.
It had to be a mistake.
So Melvin grabbed a friend and went down to check on things for themselves.
But Chief Deputy Todd Sauerbri of the Iowa County Sheriff's Office told us
Lynn hadn't given them an exact location, and he did not want to go back out there again.
I think it took them a little bit of time to find her at that point because, you know,
he's just saying, you know, she's in this area.
So it was a little difficult.
They had trouble finding her at first.
It would have probably been getting dark by that time of day.
By the time Melvin and William got back to where she was located,
she had drifted a little bit.
So like I said, it took them a little bit of time to figure out where she was,
but they found her.
That was around 6.30 p.m. by the time they found her,
and they tied a rope to her because they didn't.
didn't want her to float away or sink.
One of them must have gone back to Middle of Manna,
and it was at 7.10 p.m. is when another person actually called the sheriff's office,
and that was Carol Zuber.
In total, it was about two hours after Lynn found the woman before the sheriff's office arrived on scene.
But it was clear just by looking at her that she had been in the water even longer.
She was severely decomposed. Her skin was literally.
slipping off her bones.
Water destroys physical evidence, period.
So sheriff's deputies knew that this would be a tough one to solve from the jump.
But the first question they had, who was the woman?
Well, that had an easy answer.
She had a Massachusetts driver's license on her and was in her maiden name.
I think it was Karen Casey.
And even from the onset, I think Sheriff Spurrier was pretty sure that this was Karen's
Street just based off of the bulletins that were probably going out to other counties and
jurisdictions of a missing person.
She'd been reported missing about a week earlier.
Karen Street was her married name.
And a week before, on October 18th, her husband, Ron Street, had reported her missing after
she failed to show up for a planned rendezvous.
Karen and Ron had been married for about a year.
They were just in Newlywoods.
They had moved from California.
and she worked at an optical place in Cedar Rapids.
She had a job and she's living a nice quiet life in Iowa,
just the prime of her life, and then she disappears.
Ron was a student at the University of Iowa,
participating in the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop.
And that meant on October 18th he was half an hour away in Iowa City
when Karen called him from work to talk through.
their plans. It was right before her shift ended at 5 p.m. that he got that call. Now, he was supposed to
pick Karen up in Cedar Rapids and then they were going to go back to Iowa City to have dinner.
But Ron had bad news. Someone had blocked in his car so he couldn't get back to Karen. And that's
when she told him it was fine. She would just find a way to him. Now, before setting off, she made a
quick stop by their house. Ron's brother Craig Street was there. He lived with them. And she told him
about her plan to hitch a ride to Ron.
He told us that he hadn't been surprised
that Karen was going to hitchhike.
In California, she'd hitchhike quite a bit
to get around because she didn't have a car.
And that was fairly common.
So she was pretty familiar.
I mean, she knew the dangers of hitchhiking.
Karen left her house at around 5.30 p.m.
But she never made it to Iowa City.
So, in fact, I was.
I was probably the last person to see her alive because I was at home when I was washing the dishes when she left and hitchhiked out of Iowa City.
By around 7.15 p.m. Karen still had not arrived. Ron was getting worried. I mean, that trip shouldn't have taken Karen more than an hour, tops. So he and a friend drove to Cedar Rapids and looked for Karen along the road.
When they couldn't find her, they headed back to Iowa City to report Karen missing.
But the police department there said that since Karen's last known location was Cedar Rapids,
they had to go back there to file the report.
So it wasn't until 10.30 p.m. that Ron arrived in Cedar Rapids.
He went to his house first just to confirm that Karen wasn't there before he took that last
final step of reporting her missing.
His brother was there, though, asleep.
But when Ron woke him, he said that he hadn't heard from or seen Karen since she left at
530. Just 10 minutes later, Ron was already at the police department filing that report on Karen.
Now, of course, police looked at him first. They interviewed him multiple times, but after they were
able to confirm his alibi via that friend who was with him all night, and they saw how genuine
and cooperative he was being, they quickly determined that he wasn't involved in his wife's
disappearance. I mean, he was out there every day for the next six days looking for her with a
search party that he organized. They looked everywhere between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City,
but they hadn't thought to look in Amana, Iowa, where the Mill Race Canal was. Why would they?
It wasn't on the route that she would have been hitching a ride. I mean, it was 20, 30 minutes west
of both big cities. And she had no reason to be there on her own. So once she was found,
the question became, who took Karen out to the Mill Race Canal? And why? Was it just a
place to leave her? Or could that area hold more meaning? As the autopsy on Karen got
underway, it told investigators a number of things. Confirming first and foremost that Karen had
been murdered, our reporter Regine Wright asked Chief Deputy Sowerbri about Karen's injuries.
She had four gunshot wounds and one was to the right behind her right ear. I think one was another one
was in the back of her head, and I think she had two on the front of her face just above
her left eyebrow.
And the wound that was on the top of her head, where was it at?
They were right on the top of her head, you know, getting indicating that someone struck
her with something right on the top of her head, some sort of blunt object.
If I had to guess, I'd say it was maybe the butt of a handgun.
The autopsy revealed chilling evidence no one had been able to see when Karen was in the
water of the mill race.
She was sexually assaulted, and there was really no question on that.
She was pretty brutally sexually assaulted, not to be too graphic, but there was no question
in their mind.
She had been sexually assaulted.
They did find spermazoa in those microscopic slides that they collected that was noted
in those original autopsy reports.
So that just tells us she had sexual intercourse with somebody, and run
On Street did confirm that they'd had sex the day before.
So, I mean, again, we don't know if it's a suspect or if that's Ron's, but it gave us a place to start.
Problem was it gave them a place to start, but nowhere really to go.
In 1971, there was no way to test if that was Ron's sperm or someone else's.
They also couldn't do much else with the other evidence they collected from her, like bullet fragments from Karen's head.
I mean, they knew they came from a 22, but that was about it.
And they also had samples of pubic hairs and her fingernail scrapings.
Now, even though they couldn't tell whose DNA was left behind,
they could tell that the crime was sexually motivated.
And they had to look for suspects beyond Ron.
So investigators paid special attention to any tips that had come in
while Karen had been missing.
According to the case file, several witnesses saw a woman who matched Karen's description
trying to hit your ride in downtown Cedar Rapids on October 18th,
sometime between 5.30 and 6 p.m.
And witnesses said that this woman was hitchhiking southbound on 6th Street,
the side that went towards Iowa City.
One witness even saw a car pull up to the woman who looked like Karen,
although the witness didn't see whether she got in the car or not.
It was described as a 1963 or 1964, four-door Oldsmobile,
88 or 98 sedan, green in color.
Now, it says green in color, but most of the reports I read described the vehicle as Turkish.
And what was significant about it was it had left rear quarter panel was spotted with red
primer paint between the wheel well in the bumper, two-thirds way back from the bottom.
So that's pretty descriptive.
This tip carried a lot of weight for investigators, and they released all of the details they
could to the public in those initial days and weeks after Karen was found.
And while they hoped for someone to recognize the car, they worked on the side to put together
a list of violent offenders in the area.
and it was not a short list, but police couldn't connect any of them to Karen,
and no one was able to ID their mystery Oldsmobile or its driver.
So pretty quickly, Karen's case hit a dead end.
Her brother-in-law Craig remembers just how hard that lack of closure was on his brother Ron.
After Karen was killed, he worked for a few years, and I don't know what, a number of years here.
in Iowa City, and then you wound up moving down to Missouri.
He worked in a plastics plant.
I mean, obviously this whole thing, it changed him.
All of Karen's loved ones were changed and left without answers or really much of anything.
I mean, for years and then decades, there wasn't even an update in her case.
Until November 17, 1995, that's 24 years after Karen's.
murder. And that's when a former sheriff walked into his old stomping grounds. And it turned out that
he had something to share about the case.
One day in 1995, the former sheriff in Iowa County, William Spurrier, showed up at the sheriff's office,
kind of out of the blue. And he brought his old colleagues a tip in a case that most of the new guys there
probably didn't even know about.
William said that he had gotten this tip just a few days before.
And Chief Deputy Sowerbry says it's the kind of lead that could break Karen's case wide open.
He came to Sheriff Slocke, who was the current sheriff in 1995,
and reported that he had information that Larry Slamaker was responsible for the murders.
He had reported to Sheriff Slocut that an informant had told him that he had admitted to the
murders.
I'm sorry, which Larry, did you say?
I mean, this was the first time that law enforcement had heard the name Larry Slaymaker
connected with Karen's case.
But they knew Larry all right.
He was a local guy who lived at the time in Moringo.
Where's Meringo, you ask?
Oh, just a little west of the Mill Race Canal.
You could actually pass through a manna where the canal is on your way home to Meringo from
Cedar Rapids if you wanted to.
A little background on Larry.
He was the police chief in the city of Moringo until 1968.
He was alleged to be a window peaker at that time, even though he was the chief of police.
Window peeker makes it sound innocent.
This man practiced voyeurism.
Now, we couldn't find any police documentation to back up those allegations, so I can't go into detail.
But according to Chief Deputy Sauerbri, voyeurism wasn't the only crime that Larry was accused of.
He was also accused of raping a woman at knife point in Iowa City around the time of Karen's murder,
though Chief Deputy Sowerbred doesn't have any police documentation from the victim.
Investigators only heard about it through third parties.
Needless to say, though, this man did not have a good reputation.
Certainly not by 1995 when Williams rolling in with the following story.
According to him, an informant said that Larry had confessed to Karen's murder to
this sky, a short time after Karen's body was found in the canal. Larry allegedly told him,
quote, I really showed that bitch. I shot her four times in the back of the head with my 22 caliber
pistol, end quote. Though not actually his though, he told the informant he'd stolen the pistol
from a maintenance room at the Iowa County Secondary Road Department, which wasn't a totally
outrageous possibility. Guns were kept there for killing injured animals, and being the
The sheriff and all, he would have had easy access.
Clearly, investigators had to follow this possible connection to Larry.
So he was first looked at in 1995 by Sheriff Slockett.
I don't think a lot of that really developed into anything at that time.
We didn't have any ideas of DNA testing or anything like that.
So I don't think he was ever interviewed or questioned or anything like that.
There's no way that's right, right?
We had to really dig in here because it not even being worth a conversation sounded bananas to me.
But nope, Chief Deputy Sowerbite is right.
They never made it to have face-to-face with Larry.
Our reporter Laura Freider found that investigators talked with the informant on November 24, 1995.
But he just denied the whole thing.
He said, yeah, he didn't know Larry.
Yes, he worked the guy back in 71 when Karen went missing.
So, yeah, he would have been around him when she was found.
and the informant even said that he remembered when Karen was found,
and he always had been suspicious that Larry did it.
But he said that Larry never confessed to him.
Now, they didn't completely drop it here.
In the new year, at the beginning of 1996, they talked to one more person,
Larry's relative, Shirley Slaymaker.
Shirley told investigators that, yes, Larry owned a 22-cali-pistol,
the same type of gun that was used to kill Karen.
And she was confident about that since she'd been the one to buy it for him
in the 1960s.
Shirley also said that when Larry drank,
he would sometimes have blackouts,
which made him forget what he did.
Now, that didn't give investigators proof of anything,
but if you ask me, it also didn't disprove anything.
And yet, this is where all lines of inquiry on Larry stopped.
And it didn't help that no one ever seems to have interviewed Larry about Karen's murder.
Laura requested an interview with the investigator who talked with Larry.
but he never responded.
So 1995 came and went.
And over a decade later,
I don't know if anyone around knew much
about the Larry lore.
But they did know about Karen's case.
And in 2007, the Iowa County Sheriff's Office,
specifically now retired Lieutenant Tim Walters,
decided to take another go at some of the physical evidence.
By then, everyone was solving crimes with DNA,
and we wanted to jump on that.
board. And so he looked at everything. Anything that we had in evidence, those hairs, the bullets,
the fingernail clippings, the vaginal smears, anything that could be tested, we wanted to test.
So Detective Walters first sent those to the Iowa Crime Lab Division of Criminal Investigations,
the crime lab here in Iowa, and submitted all those items for testing. And they all came back
with negative results. There wasn't anything found for DNA. There was a partial profile of
Karen developed from, I believe, one of her pubic hairs. So by February 2008, all Lieutenant Walters
had to work with, DNA-wise, was a partial DNA profile belonging to their victim. I mean, it wasn't
ideal, but it was more than they had before. At least this way, if DNA technology advanced enough
down the line to bind other DNA in this case, they at least now had a way to exclude that new
DNA as being Karen's. But that might be a ways away. And in the time it took to get familiar
with Karen's case and find the evidence, Lieutenant Walters had gotten invested. He spent
about a month going through the case file. And even though he was going to have to wait for science
to catch up, he realized that there was a lot of good old-fashioned detective work that he could do
in the meantime.
And right away, he developed not one, but two suspects.
All he had to do now was track them down.
First stop, Tennessee.
There was some young females that had reported attempted abductions in Cedar Rapids,
and I think Lieutenant Walters was reviewing some of those reports
and just trying to get an idea who might be suspects.
And so he developed Richard as a possible suspect in 2008 when he was looking through
the files.
Richard was Richard Dean Richieson, a curly-haired blonde guy originally from Iowa City.
Lieutenant Walters discovered that just six days before Karen went missing, Richard had picked up
two hitchhikers on First Avenue in Cedar Rapids who were looking for a ride.
The pair of women got into Richard's Red Ford, and he started driving west.
And things were fine for the first 15 miles.
but suddenly something terrible happened.
According to the two women, Richard tried to push one of them out of the moving car.
Now, both women managed to escape and they were able to ID their abductor as Richard in a photo lineup.
But not before he attempted to abduct a third woman.
The day before Karen vanished, a woman was trying to hitch a ride in downtown Cedar Rapids when Richard picked her up.
According to the police file, as he drove her outside the city, he suddenly turned down a black top.
road, stopped the car and grabbed her hair, forcing her head into his lap.
When he eventually let her go, he told her to get in the back of his car.
And this is when the woman took her chance and took off.
She told police that as she ran, she heard Richard drive in the opposite direction.
And when she finally reached police, she too was eventually able to identify his picture
in a photo lineup.
So that's two attempted abductions, both of which happened in the same area that Karen was
last seen within days of her disappearance.
and all three women involved had positively identified one man, Richard Dean Richieson.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, Richard was never charged with any of those abductions.
And yes, we did check his criminal background just to make sure.
Now, the one thing that gave Lieutenant Walters pause about Richard as he was learning all of this
was that Richard's car was different from the turquoise one that witnesses had to be.
described approaching Karen.
And as Chief Deputy Sowerby points out, it's a pretty big difference.
The two girls said it was a red Ford two-door with a hard top.
That was October 12th.
The other one October 17th was the, she was sure it was a Dodge 500 cornet because she
remembered seeing that on the car.
So some of that didn't necessarily match the vehicle description we were looking for
in some of the other reports.
So for maybe that reason, or maybe a different bad excuse,
it doesn't seem like anyone talked to Richard Dean Richieson
back when Karen went missing and then was found murdered.
But if anyone would have done a little more digging
like Lieutenant Walters was doing in 2008,
they might have discovered an interesting tidbit about Richard.
But it is noted in here that he,
Richardson worked at a body shop or owned a body shop
and would have had access to multiple vehicles.
If the prior attempted abductions weren't enough reason to be suspicious of Richard, his long history with the law was.
In 1959, he'd been found guilty of sexually assaulting a minor.
He'd also been caught selling narcotics, and he had his driver's license revoked on multiple occasions, though for what reasons the records didn't show.
But honestly, Lieutenant Walters probably didn't care.
He just knew that a conversation with this guy was almost 40 years in the making.
He, I think he reported that he just didn't really remember anything from that time frame.
He didn't give a lot of answers.
They did bring him to the police station in the town that he lived in,
and he voluntarily came in for questioning.
I don't think he really knew exactly what, you know, this was all about.
So Lieutenant Walter said to explain it to him because it was years later.
I think he basically said he was a drunk back in the 70s and didn't remember a lot of what he did.
was maybe a little not forthcoming with some of his criminal background and criminal history,
which is typical.
He was probably trying to live a normal life where he currently lived and didn't want his neighbors,
you know, the police talking to him, so he agreed to go down to the police station.
He did not want to voluntarily give a buckle swab sample, which I think was interesting.
If you're innocent, you know, on our side of things, we look at that.
We wonder why you are not willing to give us a sample.
So Lieutenant Walters did go to the local magistrate with the local PD,
and he did obtain a search warrant for Mr. Richardson's buckle swab,
and he did collect that later that afternoon.
With Richard's DNA on file, Lieutenant Walters knew there was one other person
at the top of his list that he wanted DNA from.
But here's the thing.
His approach to interviewing this second suspect was very different from the first.
After reviewing all of Karen's files,
the obvious second suspect who'd been overlooked was Larry Slaymaker.
And Lieutenant Walters didn't have to travel far this time.
Larry was still in Iowa, living in Cedar Rapids.
Lieutenant Walters did find him and interview him briefly.
It wasn't, I don't think he even questioned him in regards to the street.
case. I think he talked to him more so on that alleged assault and rape in Iowa City.
But Larry Slamaker did voluntarily give us a bucklew of her DNA testing.
That's it? All these years later and you don't ask him about the main case you're investigating?
The police file gives no reason for why Lieutenant Walters decided not to ask Larry about Karen's
murder. We wanted to talk to Lieutenant Walters ourselves to ask him more about his conversation
with Larry, but he never responded.
And it's hard to know why Lieutenant Walters didn't want to have that conversation,
but he did want that bucle swab that he couldn't compare to anything at the time.
Perhaps it was a way of just gauging how cooperative Larry was.
Or sure, maybe it's for that down-the-line testing when technology advances.
But if anyone ever was going to talk to Larry, that opportunity is now gone
because Larry died in May of 2014.
And then Richard died four years later.
So it seems like all the eggs were in that DNA basket.
And for the next 13 years after Lieutenant Walters collected those swabs,
the department just waited for technology to advance.
In 2021, Chief Deputy Sowerbri reached out to the same lab
that Lieutenant Walters had used back in 2007,
as well as a private lab just to see if either one would be willing to retest the evidence in Karen's case.
But both labs refused.
They didn't think retesting was worth it given the quality of the evidence.
After all, Karen had been in the water for several days before she'd been found.
Chief Deputy Sauerbri read up on Karen's case file anyway, just in case.
And timing is a strange thing.
In October 2025, our reporter Laura called the chief deputy.
She was looking into Karen's case and wondered if there were any recent leads.
And he said, you know what?
This is super weird, but not a single person.
had called about Karen's case in the last 50 years until about a month before Laura called.
Which is kind of random just to have someone call 50-plus years later on Karen's case.
But he had some decent information.
He said he was a student at the University of Iowa at the time in 1971.
He said he recalled going down Highway 218.
He was traveling south back to Iowa City, and he remembered seeing a female walking on the side.
of the road.
This call came from a man named Carl Gotsman.
He was a student at the same university as Ron back in 1971, though there's no evidence
that Ron and Carl knew each other.
During Carl's phone call to Chief Deputy Sowerbide, Carl couldn't tell him the exact date
that he saw the woman on Highway 218.
He did, however, remember something else.
Well, he described it as a two-tone.
He thought it was a white and blue 1950s car traveling southbound on two.
and that he remembered this vehicle, which was in front of him,
stopped and picked up a female along the road.
He recalled that it had either Michigan or Minnesota license plates,
and he was fairly descriptive in recounting what he remembered from 50-plus years ago.
The car color didn't match the description of the turquoise one Karen was seen being approached by.
But his description of white and blue wasn't that far off either.
He felt that he had seen the male driver well enough that he described him as a kind of oily looking,
which I thought was interesting to know from that long ago.
He kind of described me as someone that maybe worked at a gas station or something.
Said she was dressed well and he, I think, as he recalled that, this vehicle stopped on the side of the road
where the female was walking and then he kind of recalled the vehicle was pulling up.
off into a restaurant or something along the highway, which he described as, he said it was
the press cow, and I've never heard of the press cow, and I don't know anything about where
in relation to 218 that was. I tried to do some research on that was a restaurant, but I couldn't
find anything. Carl said that he saw the car stop on the side of the road where the woman was walking.
Carl drove around the stopped car, and he said when he looked back in his rearview mirror,
he saw the woman get into the car,
and somehow he was adamant
that he knew the identity of the driver.
He thought it was serial killer,
Henry Lee Lucas.
Now, the problem with Carl's theory
was that Lucas, also known as the confession killer,
was very unlikely to have killed Karen.
Records place him all the way up
in Lanoe County, Michigan.
But I guess I questioned why he called,
why he didn't call if he was a student in 1971 at the University of Iowa.
He certainly would have heard about this on the radio just like everybody else.
Skepticism aside and determined to not repeat mistakes of the past,
Chief Deputy Sauerbri won't let any lead go unbedded.
Now, he's not convinced that Henry Lee Lucas is the guy that killed Karen,
but he at least wanted to talk to this Carl guy further.
But when he called Carl back, he wasn't able to reach him.
and Carl hasn't returned his calls or are reporters.
Despite the lack of foreign DNA found in Karen's case,
Chief Deputy Sauerbri is still hopeful
that one day technology will advance enough to retest the evidence.
But in the meantime, he's trying to hunt down some key items in Karen's case,
items that haven't been tested for foreign DNA yet.
Problem is, police don't know where they are.
She had her driver's license from Massachusetts.
She had a couple packs of matches in her pockets.
She had a gold watch.
It was a gold watch with a chain.
She had a set of keys in her pocket.
I don't have a good understanding if they were with us or where those ever ended up.
Even if we thought they might have some today with DNA,
it might be something to find those items.
So no, I don't know where they're at.
Wherever those items might be, and I hope to God, they are still somewhere in a very sealed bag,
I want you to remember that Karen was more than just the pack of matches or the keys found on her in the canal.
In local coverage of Karen's case back in 1971, they reported repeatedly that the body of a Cedar Rapids housewife had been found in the Mill Race Canal.
One article said that the body belonged to a former Miss New England.
Karen wasn't a housewife, though.
and she had accomplished much more than just winning a beauty pageant.
She was one of the first generations of women
who were not only getting married but also working outside the home.
She was a hopeful representation of what a woman could be,
a true multidimensional person.
It's hard to imagine how Karen's husband Ron must feel today.
Laura tried reaching out to him but he didn't respond.
And while Craig, his brother, can vividly remember the impact Karen's death had on Ron,
It's hard to really measure the true ripple effects that the tragedy has had over the last half century.
I don't think he even went back to school.
He might have, I don't know if he even finished the year, but he didn't.
He wasn't interested, I guess, in going to school anymore.
So he was living in the world.
He got remarried.
He had a kid.
They had a child.
And he just, over there.
years he's just heard less and less and just not heard anything about him so i don't even know if he's
still living when i see people that on tv that have these tragedies and that kind of stuff and they say
it happened a week ago you know i'm getting over and i i think you know you're never really got
get over it i mean i mean you move on and you have lived your life but you still remember it
and have regrets.
Just like you said, it's like,
geez, why didn't I offer to, you know,
it's like down with her or something.
You know, you think about those things.
You always have those regrets.
Chief Deputy Sowerbry also hasn't heard from Ron in about two years.
He tried giving him a call for us, but Ron never called back.
I feel sorry for Ron.
You know, the heartache at the same.
has caused him all these years and his family and Karen's parents.
Karen's parents flew out here a couple days after her disappearance.
They flew out here from Massachusetts.
Her dad was a police officer in Massachusetts.
So this had to be an incredible impact for the family just to have to deal with this.
And for Ron to have to deal with us and live with the fact that he didn't go get his wife on that day
because the car was blocked in or whatever that reason was.
was. They felt it was safe at that time, and unfortunately, it wasn't.
If you or anyone you know has information on the murder of Karen Street, you can call
Chief Deputy Todd Sowerbry at the Iowa County Sheriff's Office at 319-642-7307.
The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.
To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit the deckpodcast.com.
I think Chuck would approve.
