Arlene Gehrke, a 58-year-old woman who served as a church organist in the Buckeye, Iowa, area, was killed on September 4, 1976. Contemporary reporting places the homicide on September 4 rather than September 5. Gehrke was robbed and then shot in the back of the head, an execution-style killing that initially appeared to be an isolated act of violence in rural Iowa.
The method used in her death would later become an important part of a much larger investigation spanning the United States.
Authorities eventually connected Gehrke's killing to Allen Leroy Anderson, a fugitive whose movements during the summer and fall of 1976 left a trail of robberies, stolen vehicles and homicides across several states. Anderson had left a halfway house in Seattle on June 1, 1976, taking a vehicle and credit cards belonging to the facility's director. Investigators said that while traveling across the country he supported himself through theft, robbery and the use of stolen credit cards. During the same period, people were being murdered in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Washington and California.
A striking similarity emerged among the killings. Gehrke and most of the other victims associated with Anderson were shot in the back of the head with a. 22-caliber weapon, frequently after being robbed. Investigators determined that a. 22-caliber Colt Frontier revolver had been stolen from a residence in Texas while Anderson was traveling through the area. The same general type and caliber of weapon figured repeatedly in the homicide investigation. When Anderson was ultimately captured, police recovered a. 22-caliber revolver from him.
The investigation that brought the scattered cases together was driven in large part by Washington, D.C., detective Clyde R. Pulsifer. What initially looked like unrelated murders thousands of miles apart began to form a recognizable pattern when investigators followed stolen automobiles and credit-card receipts. Purchases made with stolen cards provided a record of Anderson's movements, placing him in or near communities where murders had occurred. That paper trail helped authorities connect the Iowa homicide with killings elsewhere and transformed Gehrke's death from a seemingly local murder into part of a nationwide investigation.
By January 1977, investigators publicly identified Anderson as the suspect in Gehrke's killing and reported that he had been charged with first-degree murder in Iowa. At the same time, prosecutors in numerous other jurisdictions were building cases against him. Anderson had been arrested on October 28, 1976, near Malibu, California, after officers stopped a stolen van connected to another homicide. The. 22-caliber revolver found in his possession became another important piece of the broader investigation.
Anderson did not face the cases in a single nationwide prosecution. Instead, individual states pursued their own murder charges. He pleaded guilty to a California murder and soon afterward pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Minnesota, where he received a life sentence. He later pleaded guilty in Wisconsin to the 1976 murder of antique-store owner Irene Carlson and received another life sentence. He also faced murder proceedings in Florida and Virginia and was questioned concerning additional killings.
The precise final judicial disposition of the Iowa prosecution is less clear in surviving online records. A May 1977 Washington Post report stated that police said Anderson had pleaded guilty in both the California and Iowa murders. However, later accounts of his convictions consistently describe his life sentences for murders in California, Minnesota and Wisconsin without identifying a separate Iowa sentence. Because of that inconsistency, it is safest to say that Anderson was formally charged with first-degree murder for Gehrke's death and was publicly identified by investigators as her killer, while the ultimate disposition of that particular Iowa charge is not as clearly documented online as his convictions in several other states.
Anderson eventually admitted that he had killed eight people during his 1976 travels. Authorities investigated him in connection with still more deaths. He remained imprisoned in Minnesota for the rest of his life, repeatedly denied release and subject to outstanding claims from other jurisdictions if he were ever freed. He died at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater on February 3, 2021.
Gehrke's murder became one link in the chain that exposed the extraordinary geographical scope of Anderson's crimes. The combination of the robbery, the shot to the back of the head, Anderson's movements through Iowa and the documentary trail left by stolen vehicles and credit cards allowed investigators to connect her death to a fugitive moving thousands of miles across the country. What happened near Buckeye in September 1976 was ultimately recognized not as an isolated killing, but as part of one of Anderson's violent cross-country crime sprees.
