It was nearly 10 p.m. Thursday while I was deep into writing the weekly Tempe Kiwanis Club newsletter at home when Keith Olbermann on Countdown on MSNBC uttered, Stout, Iowa. What! Olbermann had immediately grabbed my attention. I grew up on a farm just a mile west and a mile north of Stout, a tiny, tiny rural hamlet. Stout has been an obscure spot on a blacktop road that much of the world has passed by, especially once they ripped out the railroad tracks 30 years ago.
The MSNBC news story, moreover, involved the daily newspaper where I worked for nearly 12 years, and if I were still there doing the same duties, I could have been the fool who let the whole thing happen — who let the fake obituary get into the newspaper. For most of those years with the Waterloo Courier, I routinely took obituary information over the telephone or from a fax from communities like Stout — those communities outside of the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area. Funeral home staff primarily called them in. Occasionally, I wrote feature articles from Stout. Stout is the first place I ever voted in an election, where we went for quick groceries, to see fireworks or to fix a tire. But there wasn’t much in Stout. The 2000 census showed it having 216 residents in 78 houses. The Stout Reformed Church there marked its 100th anniversary this year.
But the fact that the story was about Stout, about the newspaper where I once worked and about a phony obituary from my old territory of work made me jump. Seems one James Snyder, 36, of Stout was given a one-year jail time after pleading guilty to a charge of tampering with records. All but seven days of his term were suspended. Seems Snyder and his girlfriend colluded so that Snyder could get funeral leave from work. Last Dec. 30, an obituary was produced that said Dan Reddout, a 17-year-old Waterloo boy, had died from complications of surgery Dec. 24 in Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Reddout is the son of Snyders girlfriend, Mary Jo Jensen. Snyder dropped off the printed notice at the newspapers office, and the paper ran it the next day. Burial was said to be a graveside service in Osage, Iowa.
Things unravelled, however, when several people saw Dan Reddout out and about — and fully alive. A woman who had once worked with Reddout in a restaurant notified police and the Courier on Jan. 3. Mayo Clinic was contacted, and it confirmed there had been no Reddout dying in surgery. Later, Jensen said her son had, in fact, been in a hospital, but she said the whole thing was a matter of miscommunications. Yet, interestingly, both Snyder and Jensen took funeral leaves from Tyson Food plant where they both worked, according to press reports. The obituary had asked people to direct memorial funds “to the family,” and the newspaper had to check out whether anyone had actually made such donations. If they had, it would have resulted in an added charge of fraud. Jensen pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact, was given a suspended sentence and was fined $50 in Black Hawk District Court (yes, I used to be a court reporter who covered that court).
In the end, the Courier adopted a policy that if family members opt to directly submit obituaries, bypassing a mortuary, they must first provide official documentation or identify the funeral home for verification. Besides the quirky story making MSNBC, it was posted on the ABCs web site and a host of weird-story Internet sites.
By the way, Olbermann, who daily picks the “Worse,” Worser and Worst persons in the world, gave the “Worser award Thursday to Snyder for his hoax.
Theres just something special about news “from home, about those people who put the place on the map. You just think theres nothing folks back there could do to make national news. I was wrong.
