Three people from southeastern Iowa were murdered in April 1984 in a case that stayed unsolved for decades. On April 13 firefighters found 20-year-old Justin Hook Jr. near his burned mobile home in rural Drakesville; he had been beaten to death with a blunt object. His 41-year-old mother, Sara Link, was reported missing and her body was found on April 16 in a farm field in rural Eldon, also fatally beaten.

Nineteen-year-old Tina Marie Lade of Ottumwa, Justin’s fiancée, was reported missing and her body was discovered April 18 in a ravine about half a mile from where Link’s body was found; her cause of death was blunt force trauma.The investigation identified several persons of interest in 1984, including local burglar Andrew Wessel Six. In 2012 DNA taken from the inside of Lade’s jeans was reanalyzed and matched Six. By January 2014 investigators named him as the killer, but Six had been executed in Missouri in August 1997 for an unrelated 1987 murder.

Many details about motive and the full sequence of events remain publicly unresolved.