Cop writes about unsolved deaths (and adds a little conspiracy)
By Heather Ruenz
Staff Writer
Erik Voss didn’t plan on becoming a cop but a ride along with an officer when he was in high school swayed him as he had planned to become a history teacher. He’s found a way to mesh his passion of the two – history and law enforcement – in a series of books he penned about unsolved deaths.
“About 10 years ago, I stumbled across a newspaper article that mentioned a 1928 unsolved murder. I saw that the body had been stuffed in a culvert at Highway 67 and Town Hall Road (in the Town of Delavan.) I went to the library, got out the old microfiche and started researching,” Voss said.
Voss, a detective sergeant, is a 26-year veteran of the Town of Delavan Police Department.
He said his research about the murder was mainly through two local newspapers circulated at the time – the Delavan Enterprise and the Delavan Republican.
“It was a matter of going through them, week by week, and it wasn’t always easy because sometimes it was on the front page but other times it was in a random spot,” Voss said.
The body of the young woman, estimated to be in her late teens to early 20s, was found Aug. 23, 1928 but it was believed to have been there for six weeks. Voss said the coroner determined the cause of death to be blunt force trauma.
Adding to the drama surrounding her death, Voss said a Milwaukee family’s daughter had been missing so another autopsy was done which believed the cause of death to be strangulation.
“That started a war between the two pathologists. But ultimately, they agreed the body in Delavan was not of the missing woman from Milwaukee,” Voss said.
‘To be a voice’
He said the more he researched, the angrier he felt.
“It’s such a lousy way to be treated. I mean, she was a person and came from a family. Somebody took her life and got away with it. I wanted to be a voice for her,” Voss explained.
Other than her estimated age, there were few details known but she had black hair, good teeth and was average to slender in size. She was never identified.
“She was put in the culvert head first, wrapped in a blanket. A dog alerted a county worker who then found her. There was no evidence at the scene,” Voss said.
He said after her body was found, a father and son came forward and said on July 15 of that year, they had turned the corner from the north onto Town Hall Road and saw a Ford Coupe pulled over with a guy in it and a woman slumped over but they didn’t stop.
Voss said chemical analysis of the woman’s blood only showed that she had black hair and wasn’t poisoned, but the tests were very rudimentary at the time.
His next stop after the library was to speak with Walworth County Coroner at the time, John Griebel. He said Griebel told him about the Walworth County Cemetery, which has the bodies of people who died between the 1870s and 1931 at the Walworth County Asylum and poor farm, and unknowns.
“There are no headstones, only a plaque with the names of known people and at the bottom says, ‘possibly other unknown persons.’ It’s kind of humbling, I guess, in the middle of nowhere and literally just looks like grass,” Voss said.
‘Murder Made Casual’
Voss said deciding to write about a book – categorized as historical fiction and titled Murder Made Casual – was a way of honoring that young woman’s life.
“Who knows what potential she could have had? It didn’t seem fair to me. I know she could’ve been an awful person but it’s still not right that someone took her life and got away with it,” he said.
Voss said people in a Delavan subdivision had heard screaming that July and two people were taken into custody but let go. While investigators believed they knew where it happened and what happened no one was ever arrested.
“It kept going through my mind, that she could’ve been killed by so many people so I took the real life details and wove it into the plot of an international conspiracy,” Voss said.
About nine years after finding the first article about the woman, Voss finished his first book.
The sequels
Voss said while researching for his first book he came across other unsolved deaths in the Delavan area so followed up his first novel with the sequels Murder Made Necessary and Murder Made Political.
“These books contained the unsolved murder details of other people that happened in 1930, and 1933 respectively,” he said, adding that he also includes local landmarks in his books such as Penwern, Lake Lawn Resort and Village Supper Club.
And for a continuation of characters, he wrote in two agents, Charlie Postlethwaite and Gretchen Retrum (both family names of Voss’), whose relationship evolves throughout the series.
“As a detective, there’s a lot behind the scenes that no one hears about so I tried to work some of that into the stories,” Voss said. “They have to try and solve these deaths without getting killed but it’s not doom and gloom. They’re both kind of smart alecks and that’s realistic because cops have to balance the bad somehow.”
The second book, Murder Made Necessary, is about a man in his 60s who drown in Delavan Lake. He had a family but they don’t know why he ended up where he did and he wasn’t suicidal.
The third book, Murder Made Political, is about a man in his 30s whose body was found along the side of Highway 50.
Voss said crimes of similar nature tend to happen in close spans of time.
“We get different periods of it – deaths, arsons, burglaries, drownings. It’s crazy. The Delavan Historical Society has a whole folder of Delavan Lake drownings. A lot of people have drown in that lake,” he said.
He doesn’t have another Murder book planned but said the third in the series wraps up nicely and there’s an opening if he decides to do more.
Another series
Voss is currently working on his fifth book, the second in his Mabel Stewart series, which is more along the lines of supernatural. He said he would guess that Harry Potter fans would enjoy his Mabel Stewart books.
“I’ve been on a lot of calls where people die so it kind of ties into some of those experiences,” he said.
His favorite character in the book he’s writing now is what he describes as a “bad guy with a conscience.”
One other book by Voss is “How to Deal with Police: Without Ending up Wearing Orange Jammies.”
“It was like, ‘Why would you do that?’ – and then I’d write it down. Pretty soon I had enough that I decided to turn it into a book,” he said.
Voss said he enjoys writing and is glad he decided to pursue it.
“It was about giving a voice to a woman who was murdered and then it took off. The whole point was not to become a millionaire. But I would like to sell books, I’m not going to lie,” he said with a laugh.
His advice to aspiring writers is to write about something they like, for themselves and for others.
“It has to be a mix. Keep going and find time to write whenever you can,” Voss said. “It’s such a sense of accomplishment to actually do it.”
Voss and his family live in Elkhorn.
His books are available on Amazon under “E.G. Voss” in print for $13.99 each or e-books for $2.99 each.
For more information visit egvossauthor.weebly.com or follow Voss on Facebook at E.G. Voss Author. Both provide a variety of behind-the-scenes information as well as historical photos and upcoming book releases.
