The murder of Corey Wieneke

There was no forensic breakthrough. The case was solved by a woman who told a stranger what she had heard as a child. For twenty-five years, as the Iowa Supreme Court later put it, law enforcement could reach no conclusion about the killer, because there were no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence. Annette Cahill had always been a suspect, because she had been spurned by Corey Wieneke the night before, but she cooperated with police and had an alibi in Iowa City supported by her sister-in-law. In December 2017, a charge nurse at the University of Iowa hospitals in Iowa City asked a plainclothes man on her floor what he was doing. He was Trent Vileta, a special agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, there on an unrelated case, and when he said he worked on cold cases she told him something she had carried since she was nine. She testified that during a sleepover at the farmhouse where Cahill lived, in fall 1992, she and a friend crept downstairs and saw Cahill crying in the dining room, lighting black candles and saying she was sorry and had never meant to kill Corey. The nurse's mother also testified that her daughter told her at the time. Agents re-interviewed Cahill, who denied involvement but gave an account of the morning with inconsistencies, and she was arrested on May 31, 2018. At the second trial a former friend of the family where Cahill lived also said he saw her burn clothes that looked bloodstained a day or two after the killing; he had not described it to investigators before, he said, because he was avoiding the police at the time. The defense argued that the nurse's testimony was tainted by animosity and that no physical evidence tied Cahill to the bat. The Iowa Court of Appeals said her account of the confession was corroborated by Cahill's admitted presence at the house that morning and by the former friend's testimony.