In the first installment of Kewanee Back When’s three part, true crime series, Murder We Wrote with Dave Clarke and Sean Patrick, we discuss the shocking 1978 unsolved murder of Sandra Brown. As the story goes, Sandra Brown was brutally murdered on the morning of August 8th, 1978. Her nearly decapitated body was found on the property owned by then Henry County Coroner Glen Case, in the area of IL 78 just north of Kewanee, on the evening of August 10th, 1978. Police were baffled by the case and to this day, we still have no justice for Sandra Brown.
In 1995 a pair of murders shocked Kewanee. On February 20th, 1995, Martin Woolley and his wife were at Phylly’s Cue and Brew when an argument ensued between Woolley’s wife and the owner of Phylly’s, Diana Turley. The argument ended with Martin Woolley pulling out a gun and shooting Turley and Phylly’s bartender, Rane Baldwin. Dave Clarke takes us through the case and the aftermath. Later in the year, an equally shocking murder would also grab headlines as Laurie Gwinn, an employee of the Health Department and a member of Kewanee’s Women in Business organization, was murdered by a pair of outsiders who kidnapped her while leaving a Kewanee bar. We discuss these cases in episode 2 of our three part series Murder We Wrote.
In the third, and for now, final installment of our Murder We Wrote mini-series, Sean Kernan and Dave Clarke discuss two more of the most infamous murders in Kewanee history. On Wednesday, October 29th, 1975, Logan Harvey was having drinks at a bar in Kewanee when an argument ensued between Harvey and an itinerant worker named Richard Koch. Harvey left the bar and Koch is said to have followed him. A fight occurred outside the bar with the much larger man, Koch, attacking Harvey. Harvey did not die right away but rather suffered an injury that led to his death after the fight. After going through the story of Logan Harvey, Dave then took us back farther than ever, a story from the late 1800s, the murder of Mrs. Maggie Copeland.
