News : Blairstown\'s 1981 cold case began with ominous 1 a.m. phone call

Amos Jellison lived in a trailer on this lot on Prospect St. in Blairstown until his murder there.

Amos Jellison was buried with an unmarked stone at Dunkard Cemetery in Midway, north of Marion.

Just four years after the Blairstown/Luzerne area was rattled by the murder of one of its hardest-working senior citizens, it lost another one in another murder that was never solved.

It began in the fog, in the beginning of August, 1981. Daryl Jellison called authorities in the middle of the night, to tell them he had received an anonymous phone call from an older man at around 1 a.m., telling him that his uncle is hurt badly, and adding, "you'd better come." Jellison asked the authorities if an officer could check on his uncle.

A few minutes later, Daryl Jellison and his father, Elmer, went to Amos's trailer house at 306 Prospect. They found Amos dead from head trauma caused by an unknown weapon, possibly an ax.

It was a foggy morning on Monday, Aug. 3, when Blairstown residents woke up to the disturbing news that one of their neighbors had been murdered.

"The people felt kind of nervous that it would happen in town -- that it could happen that close to them but nobody saw or heard anything," says Steve Meyer of Blairstown, a long-time resident who helps keep track of the history of that area.

That weather that day was "terribly foggy," recalls Meyer. "You could only see half a block away," he said.

Some people thought that perhaps the same unknown person who had killed Charles Plucar, a few miles southeast of Blairstown, on June 22, 1977, may have also robbed and killed Amos.

"We had some nervousness," recalls Meyer. "Scared to death," some Blairstown residents said to the media in 1981.

The Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation (DCI) and the Benton County Sheriff's Office investigated the case. They said very little about the investigation. "Lawmen mum" read one headline; "Lawmen stay mum" read another headline in that same newspaper a few weeks later. The Benton County Sheriff's Office released a statement saying that some of the information getting out was incorrect; the story about that incorrect information, however, did not say what information was wrong.

The autopsy report was not released; Amos Jellison was buried with an unmarked stone.

Nobody was ever charged. Thirty years later, the murder of Amos Jellison is one of several from Benton County, and one of more than 500 across Iowa, to be documented on the Iowa Cold Cases Web site.

One newspaper quoted a source that said Jellison had been robbed of $10,000; others disputed that.

"It was not robbery," Daryl Jellison said this week from his home in Georgetown, Texas, where he has lived for many years. "There was still money in Amos' house after he died."

Other relatives, however, told authorities that Amos was so poor, he could not afford a funeral.

There was also speculation that Amos may have become a target for robbery after he mentioned that he had money during a visit to the VA Hospital in Iowa City. Other authorities expressed doubts about that theory.

Retired Sheriff Ken Popenhagen said he believes the suspects who killed Plucar and Jellison died in the years after the murders.

"One way or another, they were dealt with," Popenhagen said.

The victim

The day before he died, Amos Jellison and his brother walked from the trailer house to the creek, to check the a drainage tile. The brothers did yard work together and fished nearly every day. Elmer's wife was in a care center; Amos had lived alone for several years since the death of his wife, Elsie. The couple had no children.

The Jellison brothers lived next door to each other on Prospect Street. Now, 30 years after Amos' death, the only indicatin that there was once a home on the vacant lot at 306 Prospect is a utility pole where there used to be an electrical meter. A pedestrian bridge adjoins the span that allows cars to cross over the creek where Amos walked a few hours before his death.

The Iowa Cold Cases web site page for Amos Jellison explores more deeply the contradicting theories about his murder.