Algona, Iowa A Time to Kill, And a Time to Heal

By ROY ROWAN

"Tragedy has been our teacher," the speaker tells the subdued audience squeezed into the gleaming new hospital lobby. "Even though an entire family suddenly ceased to exist on this earth, something good has come from that terrible moment."

The speaker is a retired furniture dealer, not a preacher or philosopher. As chairman of the Kossuth County Hospital in Algona, Iowa, he is welcoming some 700 townspeople to a cookie-and-punch open house at the just-completed John and Agnes Dreesman Memorial Addition.

Plans were drawn in 1982 for the badly needed hospital expansion. But county voters rejected it. Only after the tragedy, as Algonans refer to the murder- suicide rampage in which the seven Dreesman family members died, did construction finally begin. "They were the catalyst," explains Pastor Gerald Hartz of St. Cecelia's Catholic Church. "There was nobody to prosecute, nobody to put in jail. However, we had to do something for those beloved friends."

As small towns go, Algona embodies the American Dream. Nestled along the East Fork of the Des Moines River, it is a quietly prospering place for 6,015 men, women and children. And unlike so many other Iowa communities, its economy isn't entirely tied to corn. Algona is the county seat, the home of a Snap-on Tools plant as well as some other light manufacturing, so it is more resistant to the farm recessions that periodically smite neighboring towns.

Ordinarily, except for a twister or two, nothing very exciting happens ; there. Back in World War II, the town did house 3,000 German and Italian prisoners of war. The POWs are still remembered for the fancy European-style banquets they gave, and for the 50-ft.-wide Nativity scene carved out of concrete, which today is Algona's sole tourist attraction.

Occasional disputes divide the town. The argument about widening Highway 169 from two to four lanes where it passes through the business district sputtered on for 25 years. The staunchest supporter of the status quo was John Dreesman, millionaire farmer, a director of the Interstate Bank and a former city councilman who wore his bib overalls everywhere except to church. He and his wife Agnes had two extremely bright children whose horizons soon extended far beyond Iowa.

Their daughter Marilyn, born in 1939, studied in Switzerland and married the son of a wealthy Chinese textile manufacturer. Called a jet setter by Algonans, she, along with her three children, spent time in Geneva, Hong Kong and Honolulu. It was gossiped that she shared Sophia Loren's gynecologist.

The Dreesmans' son Robert, born in 1947, was a husky but grimly introspective boy who became a perennial student. He took courses in pre-med, horticulture and psychology at various American colleges, and studied veterinary medicine in the Philippines, where he was briefly married. His esoteric hobbies ranged from beekeeping to acupuncture. "I'd rather have a loving son than a genius," his mother once confided. Though his father showed a strong attachment to Robert, it was thought that he financed his moody son's quest for college diplomas to keep him away from home. When Robert graduated first in his class from the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa, in 1986, the family was relieved that he finally seemed set to embark on a career.

For the Dreesmans, as for most farm families whose children scatter, the Christmas holidays meant a time of reunion. So it was that on Dec. 30, 1987, Agnes Dreesman, a superb cook and flower arranger who frequently contributed culinary and horticultural creations to church and garden-club benefits, readied their house for a celebration. Marilyn, widowed in 1984, had flown in from Honolulu with the three grandchildren. Robert too would be home for dinner.

When the family sat down to begin the midday meal, however, Robert was missing. Agnes left his plate warming in the kitchen. Two hours later, police found the family's bullet-riddled bodies still seated around the food-laden table. There was so much blood it had seeped into the basement.

Police and the Iowa division of criminal investigation quickly reconstructed what had happened. A few serving dishes had been passed, and the six family members were just beginning to eat when Robert appeared in the dining-room doorway, pointing a high-powered, semiautomatic rifle. Firing short bursts, he swung the rifle barrel right around the table. Nobody had time to move. They all died within 30 seconds. Then he stepped back into the hallway, picked up a shotgun he had left there, pushed the barrel up under his chin, and blew his brains out.

"This kind of tragedy crashes into our world without warning, a cruel uninvited guest," sermonized Father Hartz at the memorial service for Marilyn and her children. (A Lutheran service was held for John, Agnes and Robert.) "We can neither anticipate it before the fact, nor understand it after the fact."

At first the community was too stunned to react, clamming up protectively as the TV vans rolled into town. "It was as if we could hide this horror from the outside world as well as from ourselves," says Molly MacDonald, then editor of Algona's weekly newspaper, and Marilyn's lifelong friend.

Shock turned to grief, followed by the hollow ache of the town's terrible loss. For weeks, Algona's ministers counseled their congregations. Funeral director Mike Schaaf, who buried the Dreesmans, organized a grief-recovery seminar, bringing from Des Moines a psychologist specializing in traumatic losses. "If the killing had occurred in a crack-ridden city like New York or Detroit," says Schaaf, "we would have understood. Not in Algona."

The best therapy, though, was the kind Algonans gave one another over coffee at the Chrome, a 24-hour truck stop and favorite local hangout, where the 1979 tornado struck. "In public places like that, you could actually feel the town coming closer together," says MacDonald, who switched from editor to columnist so she could spend more time with her children. "We all suddenly realized how fragile life is, that we better get on with the things we have to do."

Still gnawing at the community's conscience are the many missed signals of the danger that was lurking in Robert. "The Dreesmans were very private people who didn't inflict their problems on friends," says Midge Andreasen, wife of a state-supreme-court justice and a close friend of Marilyn's. "Some of us knew about the black hole of hatred in Robert. We should have involved ourselves more with the family."

Steve Mueller, the chiropractor who sparked Robert's interest in the profession, sensed how deeply withdrawn he was. "I called him Bob and treated him like a pal," says Mueller, "trying to coax him out of his shell." Once Robert invited him out to the farm to practice firing his .45-cal. Magnum. "I was struck by this mild young man's fascination with guns," recalls the chiropractor. "He kept shooting at trees as if they were people. That should have been a warning."

Today a few Algonans fear their town will be indelibly marked by Robert's madness, the way Villisca, Iowa, is by the brutal ax murder of eight residents there back in 1912. But uppermost in everyone's mind is the hope that the Dreesmans will be remembered for all they did, not for the way they died. The hospital addition will help, although Robert almost killed that possibility too, by assuming he could dispose of his family's wealth with his own will, since he would be the last to die. For some contorted reason, he left $1 to each of his victims and everything else to the World Wildlife Fund, of which he wasn't even a member.

Robert's will didn't stand up, and the belated discovery of an obscure Iowa statute allowed the executors of the parents' will to give the hospital marketable properties worth $282,000 in lieu of paying Iowa taxes on the estate. The proceeds enabled the hospital to launch its long-planned $1.5 million expansion project.

As the last guests left the open house, an orange moon rose above the seven side-by-side graves in East Lawn Cemetery next to the hospital. "Wherever they are," said one of the departing guests, "I hope we made them proud."