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by Deb Nicklay (Author)
Historic Crimes from the Hawkeye State
The 1895 death of Price V. Evans, the brand-new Osage High School principal, sparked a two-month "Was it suicide? Was it murder?" debate in Iowa. The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette proclaimed, "There has not been another tragedy in the history of Iowa that has called forth such bitter sentiment and been the cause of so much unseemly and wordy strife." Osage authorities ruled it a suicide--despite being shot three times--while his hometown of Williamsburg declared murder. The Evans case, still unsolved today, leads this deep dive into not just one but four murders that rocked small-town Iowa over the course of a decade. Author Deb Nicklay explores the heart-wrenching rural cases that gripped an entire state.
Author Biography
Deb Nicklay grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, and is a graduate of Mankato State University, where she earned degrees in English and American Studies. She is a second-generation journalist, following in her father's footsteps. She served as editor and reporter for a number of weekly and daily newspapers - including the Mason City Globe Gazette, the Austin Daily Herald, and the Mitchell County Press News -- over her 30-plus years as a journalist. "Who Killed Price Evans?" is her first non-fiction book. She won several awards for her reporting and photography over her career, including an Associated Press Managing Editor's first place award for her investigative reporting in 2010. In 2022, she served as the lead writer for "Our Austin, Our America, Embracing Diversity," a book dedicated to the many stories of immigrants in the culturally-diverse community of Austin, Minnesota. She is a past volunteer narrator of audiobooks for the Iowa Department for the Blind. Today, she serves as secretary for the Fine Arts Council of Mitchell County; she is also a passionate history "geek" who is a volunteer in the research library at the Mitchell County Historical Society Museum, where she is never, ever bored.
