“Arrowood Kidnapping” page on Wikipedia. He also mentioned a personal connection to the case: He was from nearby Fort Madison and remembered hearing about the twins on the news when he was a kid.
Why exactly do you want to interview me?
I’d asked. I was all for bringing attention to the case if it could spark a new lead, but I didn’t see how interviewing me would accomplish that. I didn’t have anything new to add.
I’m writing a book,
he’d replied.
About famous unsolved Iowa crimes. The three big ones are the Villisca ax murders, the
Des Moines Register
paperboy kidnappings, and the disappearance of your sisters. I want to add more personal details to bring the cases to life. It would be helpful if you could share some family stories, that sort of thing.
So you’re hoping to profit from this?
I’d asked.
It’s possible,
he’d written,
that I could make some money, though I rarely make much from my writing. My other books have yet to break even. I’m not doing this to get rich. My ultimate goal is to reexamine cold cases, draw attention to them, in hopes that they might get solved.
I wasn’t completely sure that I believed him. Professional investigators had failed, and I had no reason to believe that an amateur one, a “mystery buff,” would fare better. Was it even possible to solve a crime like the Villisca ax murders, when everyone involved was long dead? My sisters’ case was nearly two decades old, and the paperboy kidnappings even older. It didn’t seem likely that publishing personal details about the families would help anyone except for Josh Kyle, if it helped him to sell more books. I couldn’t stop him from writing about my family, but I didn’t have to assist him.
After that first encounter, I had blocked any emails from Kyle and tried to forget about him and his book. Then, the day my father’s obituary hit the Keokuk paper, there was Mr. Kyle’s name in my in-box again. He’d switched email accounts.
The subject line read,
Sorry for your loss.
In the body of the email, Kyle had sent his condolences and apologized for possibly offending me, noting that he’d sent several emails after our last exchange with no response and had taken the risk of emailing me from a different address in case I had blocked him. I didn’t write back.
Today, though, his subject line froze my finger midscroll:
Harold Singer
.
There had been one man in town with a gold car like the one I’d seen drive away with my sisters inside, a factory worker named Harold Singer. The police had dogged him to the point that he lost his job at Union Carbide and was practically run out of town. Singer claimed that he had parked along Grand Avenue earlier in the day, that he liked to sit there looking at the nice houses while he ate lunch in his car. He claimed that he had not seen me or my sisters in the yard on the day in question.
My parents never discussed the case in front of me, and I didn’t learn the details until I was a few years older, when Grammy allowed me to read through her scrapbook of newspaper clippings. I had heard snippets of gossip from kids at my new school, once they realized who I was, but I didn’t know which parts were true until I saw it all in print. Regardless of Singer’s claims, police obtained a search warrant for his house and car. Hidden in a crawl space beneath his home they uncovered shoe boxes containing dozens of rolls of undeveloped film. Yes, he admitted, he was an amateur photographer. That wasn’t a crime. When the film was developed, investigators discovered that the photographs featured several houses around town, and that many of the pictures included children—playing in front yards, biking down the sidewalk, swinging on swing sets.
When Singer was questioned, he said that the children were incidental to the photos; he had been taking pictures of the houses to case them for potential robberies. Singer never wavered in his assertion that the timeline was all wrong,
Why exactly do you want to interview me?
I’d asked. I was all for bringing attention to the case if it could spark a new lead, but I didn’t see how interviewing me would accomplish that. I didn’t have anything new to add.
I’m writing a book,
he’d replied.
About famous unsolved Iowa crimes. The three big ones are the Villisca ax murders, the
Des Moines Register
paperboy kidnappings, and the disappearance of your sisters. I want to add more personal details to bring the cases to life. It would be helpful if you could share some family stories, that sort of thing.
So you’re hoping to profit from this?
I’d asked.
It’s possible,
he’d written,
that I could make some money, though I rarely make much from my writing. My other books have yet to break even. I’m not doing this to get rich. My ultimate goal is to reexamine cold cases, draw attention to them, in hopes that they might get solved.
I wasn’t completely sure that I believed him. Professional investigators had failed, and I had no reason to believe that an amateur one, a “mystery buff,” would fare better. Was it even possible to solve a crime like the Villisca ax murders, when everyone involved was long dead? My sisters’ case was nearly two decades old, and the paperboy kidnappings even older. It didn’t seem likely that publishing personal details about the families would help anyone except for Josh Kyle, if it helped him to sell more books. I couldn’t stop him from writing about my family, but I didn’t have to assist him.
After that first encounter, I had blocked any emails from Kyle and tried to forget about him and his book. Then, the day my father’s obituary hit the Keokuk paper, there was Mr. Kyle’s name in my in-box again. He’d switched email accounts.
The subject line read,
Sorry for your loss.
In the body of the email, Kyle had sent his condolences and apologized for possibly offending me, noting that he’d sent several emails after our last exchange with no response and had taken the risk of emailing me from a different address in case I had blocked him. I didn’t write back.
Today, though, his subject line froze my finger midscroll:
Harold Singer
.
There had been one man in town with a gold car like the one I’d seen drive away with my sisters inside, a factory worker named Harold Singer. The police had dogged him to the point that he lost his job at Union Carbide and was practically run out of town. Singer claimed that he had parked along Grand Avenue earlier in the day, that he liked to sit there looking at the nice houses while he ate lunch in his car. He claimed that he had not seen me or my sisters in the yard on the day in question.
My parents never discussed the case in front of me, and I didn’t learn the details until I was a few years older, when Grammy allowed me to read through her scrapbook of newspaper clippings. I had heard snippets of gossip from kids at my new school, once they realized who I was, but I didn’t know which parts were true until I saw it all in print. Regardless of Singer’s claims, police obtained a search warrant for his house and car. Hidden in a crawl space beneath his home they uncovered shoe boxes containing dozens of rolls of undeveloped film. Yes, he admitted, he was an amateur photographer. That wasn’t a crime. When the film was developed, investigators discovered that the photographs featured several houses around town, and that many of the pictures included children—playing in front yards, biking down the sidewalk, swinging on swing sets.
When Singer was questioned, he said that the children were incidental to the photos; he had been taking pictures of the houses to case them for potential robberies. Singer never wavered in his assertion that the timeline was all wrong,
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