The murder of Cora Ann Okonski

The case was not solved by forensics; there was no body to examine. For fifteen years it sat as a missing person file. In 2003 police acted on community tips and searched a farm and a salvage yard in Tama County, but the bone fragments they recovered were animal. In March 2015 the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation reopened the case with the Attorney General's Office and local police and sheriff. According to the state's announcement, agents with cold-case experience spent months interviewing key witnesses across the country, and by November 2016 they concluded Cora's disappearance was not voluntary and reclassified it as a homicide. A grand jury indicted her fiancé, Tait Purk, then serving a federal sentence on unrelated drug and gun charges, on December 9, 2016. The centerpiece of the state's case was a fellow federal inmate who testified in May 2017 that Purk had told him, at Leavenworth, that he lost his temper with Cora, grabbed her by the throat and slammed her to the floor, breaking her neck, kept her body overnight in a bathroom closet and buried it the next day in a state park or wildlife area. The witness acknowledged on cross-examination that a reduced sentence had been mentioned in a 2005 interview; a second inmate called by the defense said Purk never admitted killing her. A neighbor also testified that Cora had said she feared Purk. The first jury convicted Purk of first-degree murder, but the trial judge set the verdict aside in August 2017 as unsupported by the evidence. At a retrial before a different judge sitting alone, the judge found the inmate's testimony corroborated and credible, concluded that Purk killed Cora in their home, and convicted him of second-degree murder because premeditation was not proven. He was sentenced to 50 years in February 2018. Purk has consistently denied killing her.