Four or five years ago, when Lawrence Hartman was in his middle fifties, there didn’t seem to be much of what life in Grundy County could offer that he didn’t have. He owned one of the most prosperous corn-and-bean farms in the county. He ran a large cattle-feeding operation. He had served as a trustee of his township and a trustee of the Presbyterian church and a member of the landfill commission and a member of the election board and a member of the condemnation board. His wife, Esther, was a Meester—a member of the largest and most prominent of northern Grundy County’s founding families. His two grown sons, Rodney and Rollyn, worked with him on the Hartman land, as he had worked with his own father. Rodney, who was then about thirty, was a big, beefy, occasionally rambunctious bachelor who was gradually settling back down to life in Grundy County after a couple of years at a business college in Waterloo and a particularly unsettling year as a combat infantryman in Vietnam. Rollyn, eight years younger, was a quieter man, who had only recently left home for the first time: he got married and moved to a farmhouse just down the road from his parents. When Rollyn was asked some time later to describe the sort of farming the Hartmans did, he summed it up in one sentence: “It’s a father-son operation.”
In farm families, where people who have ties of blood may also be connected as business partners, it is customary to be explicit about the terms of the partnership. When Lawrence Hartman’s father retired and moved to town—in 1947, the year Lawrence and Esther Hartman were married—Lawrence began farming the Hartman home place, two hundred and forty acres on a county road known as the Buck Grove Blacktop, in a fifty-fifty partnership. He worked his father’s land with his father’s equipment for half the profits. Thirty years later, Lawrence Hartman’s arrangement with his two sons was as clearly defined. Lawrence and Rollyn Hartman were fifty-fifty partners in a hog operation—the corn for feed provided by the father, the labor by the son. In the main farming operation, Rodney and Rollyn traded their labor—they prepared the ground, their father did the actual planting—for the use of Lawrence Hartman’s machinery and his planting expertise on a smaller farm they had bought for themselves with his help. The one person whose labors in the family’s enterprises seemed beyond any agreements or categories was Esther Hartman.
Esther Hartman seemed to have inherited undiluted the values brought to Iowa by the God-fearing, thrifty, hardworking settlers from East Friesland. She was strict about going to church and strict about keeping the Sabbath and strict about not having any liquor in her house. Although she was three years older than her husband and had a slight hunch from curvature of the spine, she seemed to have the energy of a strapping farm girl. She kept an immaculate house. She canned vegetables long after most of her neighbors had been won over by the frozen-food cases of the Cedar Falls supermarkets. She baked pies and she baked cakes. In the Hartman household, it was taken for granted that Rodney, who lived nearby, would bring his laundry home to his mother every week. Esther Hartman had always done the laundry and the spring-cleaning for her elder brothers—bachelor twins who together still farmed the Meester home place, a couple of miles away, speaking the Plattdeutsch of their childhood to each other over supper. From the beginning, she had worked alongside her husband on the Hartman farm—not just managing the house but opening gates and helping with the livestock and keeping the books.
After thirty years of hard work by the Hartman family, the books looked remarkably good. The Hartmans had most of their land paid off; their income was more than respectable, even by city standards. As a farmer, Lawrence Hartman was known as a good manager—a man who could get his land plowed and planted with less equipment and less labor than his neighbors required for the same number of acres, a man who could judge the best time to plant and the best time to buy supplies in quantity. He was also shrewd at acquiring property. The Hartman holdings grew steadily. Esther inherited some land from her family, but mostly Lawrence bought land from his neighbors. Several times in the late sixties, he bought nearby farms by first arranging to sell off what is known as the acreage—the house and the outbuildings and the few acres they stand on—and then using the money as a down payment. About the most he paid for land was five or six hundred dollars an acre, and gradually it became clear that Grundy County farmland at that price was a great bargain. In the middle seventies, the value of farmland in Grundy County seemed to increase almost daily. The boom was not the result of outside speculation; local farmers were attempting to increase their holdings. They were trying to expand partly because of two or three particularly good crops in a row and partly because increasingly efficient and expensive farm machinery made it sensible to spread a huge investment in tractors and combines over an extra hundred or two hundred acres of land. There was another factor that people in Grundy County talk about now and then in the drugstore over morning coffee or in the tavern over a beer: for one reason or another, a lot of people had come to the realization at about the same time that the black soil of Grundy County was limited in supply, and that nobody was ever going to produce any more of it. Around 1977, prime farmland in Grundy County was changing hands for thirty-five hundred dollars an acre and going toward four thousand. Lawrence Hartman—a man whose education amounted to eight years in a county school, a man who had started with a half share in a quarter section, a man who had worked with his hands just about every day of every week except the Sabbath since childhood—had more than five hundred acres of it.
—
One evening in 1978, in a bar called the Apartment Lounge in Cedar Falls, Lawrence Hartman picked up a woman named Katherine Sunderman. The Apartment Lounge is in the College Square shopping center—a large, modern mall close to the campus of the University of Northern Iowa. Although the designer of the Apartment Lounge included examples of just about every type of decoration found in any type of American bar, from hanging plants to brewery art, the design element that seems most appropriate to the clientele is a series of drawings of Northern Iowa fraternity and sorority houses. At the Apartment Lounge, the waitresses are likely to be young women wearing crew-neck sweaters, and the bartender may be a physical-education major in a swim-team T-shirt. In that atmosphere, Katherine Sunderman, who worked as a cocktail waitress herself at one time or another, stood out—a divorcée in her early thirties with a lot of tight blond curls and a habit of calling all women “babe” and all men “tiger.” The people who worked at the Apartment Lounge referred to her among themselves as Flo, after the brassy, gum-chewing waitress in a television sitcom. That night in 1978, she and a friend fell into conversation with a couple of men at the next table—Lawrence Hartman and a partner of his in a cattle-feeding operation. Not long after that, Katherine Sunderman and Lawrence Hartman were thought of by the Apartment Lounge staff as a couple—Flo and the quiet farmer.
Why was Lawrence Hartman trying to pick up a brassy blonde over a drink in a Cedar Falls lounge instead of discussing the weather with his neighbors over coffee in Aplington or over a beer in Parkersburg? What had changed a family man and community leader of unassailable reputation? Some people in Grundy County would say simply “Cattle-buying.” A corn-and-beans farmer never wanders far; he even comes home in the middle of the day for dinner. Someone who buys cattle—buys them with the thought of feeding them for a year and then selling them—may find himself in a large city with the day’s work done and an empty evening on his hands. “It’s almost like a traveling salesman,” someone in a café in Aplington said recently. “You got to be pretty well-grounded.” For thirty years, Lawrence Hartman had, in fact, seemed pretty well-grounded. There was a time when he managed to buy cattle by ordering over the phone from a dealer in Sioux City whom he knew and trusted, or by driving to Sioux City with Esther, so that she could go shopping with the dealer’s wife while the deal was being made. By the time he met Katherine Sunderman at the Apartment Lounge, though, he had begun traveling to places like Kansas City to buy cattle, with some cattle-buyers who were known in Grundy County for being interested in big-city entertai
nment as well as in livestock. “He’d been here thirty-some years farming, and then he got to the city,” Rodney Hartman said not long ago. In the city, according to an Aplington man who dealt with Lawrence Hartman for a number of years, “he had some money and he probably found it could buy him some goodies he hadn’t been aware of.” Lawrence Hartman began to pay less attention to the farm than he had in the past. He began talking about the pleasures of drinking screwdrivers at cocktail lounges. Then, Rodney Hartman has said, “she came along.”
Rodney and Rollyn Hartman found out who she was almost as soon as their mother finally told them that their father had apparently been seeing another woman for some time. They traced a number from a telephone bill to Katherine Sunderman’s mobile home, in a trailer park outside a little town between Aplington and Cedar Falls. When Lawrence Hartman arrived home the next morning and spoke harshly to his wife, apparently not realizing that Rodney was in the house, Rodney hit him hard enough to break his jaw. Even now, Rodney finds it astonishing that he hit the man he had been brought up to respect and obey. “I was probably out of line bad,” he said. “But I couldn’t handle it.” It was not the last violence to pass between father and sons. Once, Rollyn Hartman and his father exchanged blows. Once, Lawrence Hartman threatened Rollyn with a shotgun, and Rollyn tried to knock him down the stairs. Once, Rodney and Rollyn forcibly dragged Lawrence Hartman to the Happy Chef restaurant in Cedar Falls so that the sons could confront Katherine Sunderman as a home-wrecker in their father’s presence.
Lawrence Hartman had told his sons that his personal life was none of their business, but they considered it literally their business. They were concerned not just about their mother but also about the future of the farm they had worked on all their lives. “My father lost his ability to manage,” Rodney has said. Lawrence Hartman was often gone, even at the time of year when hogs had to be taken to market or planting was imminent. “We had to know what was going to be corn and what was going to be beans,” Rollyn has said. “If you farm eight or nine hundred acres, you may have one chance at a crop. You’d better be there when the weather’s right.” At times, Lawrence said he wanted to work out his marital problems. There were sessions with a marriage counselor and with the Hartmans’ minister, Charles Orr. At times, Hartman assured his sons that he had given up Katherine Sunderman, only to disappear again over a long weekend. “We tried a lot of things,” Rodney Hartman said recently. “But we never did get the job done.” For two Christmases in a row, Lawrence Hartman was absent when his family—his wife and his sons and his daughter-in-law and, the second year, his first grandchild—gathered at the Hartman home place. It was an act that seemed to shock them almost more than anything else he had done. What it all meant in Rollyn’s view was that Lawrence Hartman was “no longer part of our family.” In the spring of 1980, Esther Hartman, who had been raised in a society where the permanence of the marriage contract was unquestioned, finally began divorce proceedings. She got a court injunction that barred her husband from their farmhouse and severely limited the amount of money he could draw from the family account.
Within a couple of months, she had taken him back. “Oh, he begged her,” a close friend of Esther Hartman’s said. “He didn’t want to be alone, he said. He’d miss her pies. He’d miss her mashed potatoes.” Hartman said he was through with Katherine Sunderman. He and his wife took a trip together to Arkansas. He no longer found reasons for being away from the farm all the time. Rodney and Rollyn Hartman allowed themselves to believe that some inexplicable chapter in their father’s life might have finally ended. By autumn, Esther Hartman seemed more cheerful than she had been in years. She chatted away with friends about plans for a new garden and a new strawberry patch. Then, shortly after 3 A.M. on a stormy Saturday in September, Charles Orr, who is the ambulance driver in Aplington as well as the Hartmans’ pastor, was awakened by a telephone call from Lawrence Hartman. “It’s Esther,” Hartman said. Orr drove the ambulance to the Hartman farmhouse. Esther Hartman was dead.
She had bruises on her face and hands. All but one of her ribs had been broken, crushing her lungs and cutting off her ability to breathe. Lawrence Hartman said he had been out during the evening—at Katherine Sunderman’s new apartment, not far from the Happy Chef, in Cedar Falls, as it turned out—and after his return had found his wife at the bottom of the basement steps, presumably the victim of a fall while carrying laundry on the stairs. Hartman seemed in sort of a daze. “Esther was good to me,” he told Rick Penning, who was then a deputy and is now the sheriff of Grundy County. “She always baked me stuff—pies and stuff.” His sons—and particularly Rodney—were in a state that seemed in danger of erupting into violence. As the farmhouse began to fill up that night with the sheriff’s deputies and doctors and friends, some of the law-enforcement people spent part of their time making certain that Lawrence Hartman was not alone with his sons. “I finally asked the boys if they would go up to Rollyn’s home and wait until we called them,” William Marten, who was then the sheriff, has said. “Because I felt the situation was becoming out of hand.” Before the boys left, though, Rollyn had made their feelings clear to his father. “Someday,” he told Lawrence Hartman, “you’ll burn in hell.”
—
Around Christmastime of 1980, Lawrence Hartman was indicted for the murder of his wife—the first murder case in Grundy County in thirty years. A few months later, Rodney and Rollyn brought a wrongful-death suit against their father in civil court—a suit that was really about who would own Esther Hartman’s share of the farm she had worked on for so long. To defend him against the murder charge, Hartman hired one of the best-known criminal lawyers in the state. (People in Grundy County, speculating about the fee that such a big-city lawyer might command, said, “There goes one farm right there.”) It was nearly a year before Hartman was actually tried for murder. The defense argued, without much opposition, that Hartman could not get an impartial jury in Grundy County, and the trial was set for the seat of Black Hawk County—Waterloo, the city right next to Cedar Falls. A lot of people from Grundy County made the drive daily. At times, there were crowds too large to be accommodated in the courtroom. The atmosphere among the spectators was caught by a photograph in The Des Moines Register—a row of eight women, middle-aged or older, staring at the proceedings with expressions that carried no hint of forgiveness.
The prosecutor, a young Grundy Center attorney named Richard Pilcher, presented evidence to show that in the summer of 1980, Lawrence Hartman had gone back to Katherine Sunderman after all. He had given her a diamond ring. He had leased a car for her. He had promised her that once the fall harvest was in, he would have his final divorce settlement and would then be able to marry her. They had talked about a honeymoon in Hawaii. Evidence was entered that Hartman had once injured his wife by kicking her and that she had expressed fear that he would attack her again. Pilcher claimed that Hartman had wanted “the best of both worlds”—the pies and cakes and solidity of the home that Esther provided as well as a new and drastically different life with a blonde who had a habit of calling men “tiger.” According to the prosecution’s case, when Hartman finally had to make a choice—when he was getting pressure from Katherine Sunderman to marry her and getting pressure to straighten out from his wife and his sons and pressure from the court injunction—he saw no way to have both his farm and his new life except to kill Esther. Rodney and Rollyn both testified against their father.
“The truth of the matter is, Rollyn,” the defense lawyer said on cross-examination, “you’d like to see him, in your words, ‘burn in hell.’ ”
“Well, if that’s justice,” Rollyn said.
Hartman did not deny his relationship with Katherine Sunderman—that he had slept with her the night of Esther Hartman’s death, that he had lied to his family about her, that he was living with her as he stood trial for his wife’s murder, that he planned to marry her. Although he expressed his love for his wife (“Esther was a good person; nothing wrong
with Esther”), he said that his marriage had dried up after the boys moved out. He had told Katherine Sunderman that he felt like a slave at times, and that Esther sometimes seemed to care more for her brothers than she did for him. Throughout the trial, it was said that Lawrence and Esther Hartman had become incompatible. The word used to describe the relationship between Lawrence Hartman and Katherine Sunderman was “bouncy”—in Katherine Sunderman’s testimony, “very bouncy.” There wasn’t much brought out about Hartman’s behavior that might have softened the stares of the women who drove to the courthouse from Grundy County every day. The defense attorney took care to remind the jury that “Lawrence Hartman isn’t on trial here for having an affair.”
To refute the testimony of pathologists called by the prosecution, the defense presented some pathologists who said that Esther Hartman’s injuries could have resulted from a fall and an effort at cardiopulmonary resuscitation by her husband. Even so, there were a lot of problems with the defendant’s explanation of what had happened that night. He had to explain what he was doing in the basement, and why Esther was walking back down the basement stairs with clean laundry of Rodney’s that had been seen in the kitchen that afternoon, and why a couple of presumably disinterested neighbors testified that they had seen him in Aplington or Parkersburg when his alibi called for him to be in Cedar Falls. Katherine Sunderman’s testimony supported Hartman’s story—if that can be said of testimony that she knew he was still in her bed at two in the morning because she had set the alarm clock for two in order to take a twelve-hour cold pill—but she acknowledged making a statement that seemed rather damaging. When an investigator informed her that Esther Hartman was dead, Katherine Sunderman acknowledged, her response had been to blurt out, “Oh, God! Was she beaten?”
Killings Page 18