Murder & Mayhem in Scott County, Iowa by John Brassard Jr

Author:John Brassard Jr. [Brassard, John Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2018-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Mae Garber was the postmistress of the McCausland Post Office, which was located on this block. Author’s collection.

But McCausland, unlike some rural towns, kept its post office. By 1916, the building was still very much in use. The postmaster was now a postmistress: Mae Garber.

Garber had come to McCausland with her husband, Robert, around 1914 in order to take a position as postmistress. The couple came from South Dakota, where they had lived for several years. She was about thirty-eight years old at the time. Mae and Robert had four children together. Their eldest two children, a son and a daughter, had already moved out on their own. The younger two were significantly younger and still lived with their parents.

Robert Garber, who had suffered from tuberculosis for some time, was finally committed to a specialized tuberculosis sanatorium in nearby Davenport. Unfortunately, he succumbed to the disease and left Garber a widow.

Mae survived, though. She had several family members in the region, several of whom were prosperous and respected landowners. Garber was also an intelligent, well-educated woman, especially when it came to the subject of music. Since she had moved to McCausland, she had even given several area children music lessons.

During this time, she met William Funk. Funk had also come to McCausland from South Dakota with his wife, Olive. Funk and Garber quickly became friendly. Although they had never met before, perhaps having lived in South Dakota gave them a common bond that aided in them becoming friends. In 1915, Garber offered Funk a job as a rural mail carrier, which he readily accepted. What Garber may or may not have known is that Funk had serious problems at home.

Funk had met his wife in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin. The two had fallen in love and left for South Dakota, where they lived for several years. The couple eventually decided that it was time for a change, so they packed up and moved to McCausland, Iowa, in 1912. Sometime during their relationship, or perhaps even before, Mrs. Funk had developed a severe addiction to the drug morphine. When exactly this started or how long it had been going on will probably never be known. But it is known that Funk took his wife to Davenport to receive treatment for her problem from the Neal Institute, one of several popular institutions of that time that claimed to cure alcoholism and drug addiction. At the time, she seemed willing. And Funk, who loved her, wanted to help her any way he could.

The problem was that the treatment did not come cheap. William Funk did not have the funds to pay for the cure outright, so after some consideration, he decided to resort to some fairly dire measures. He went to the bank and mortgaged both his house and the lot that it sat on in order to obtain the necessary funding. With this, he got the money he needed and took Olive to Davenport.

When the treatment was over, Olive had been cured of her morphine addiction.

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