The Courier from Waterloo, Iowa • 24

Iowa SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1991 WATERLOO COURIER PAGE C8 'Black October' homicides strain investigators at DCI 3 i I. i since 1984. Mather's wife, Dawn, 24, fled the house and has described the intruder to authorities. On Oct. 9, David Abens, 27, and his pregnant wife, Cina, 24, were found dead of shotgun wounds to the head in rural Plover in north central Iowa.

Authorities said Abens killed his wife, then turned the shotgun on himself. Betty Frieberg, a 43-year-old insurance agent, was charged Thursday with first-degree murder of her husband, Harold Frieberg. Bennett ruled the man was died of multiple gunshot wounds to the chest about a week before the Oct. 8 discovery of the body on their rural Batavia property in southeast Iowa. Jefferson County's first slaying since 1974 appeared more gruesome because parts of Frieberg's body had been cut off and strewn around the property.

Betty Frieberg admitted the slaying, Tinker said, and is being held in the county jail on $500,000 bond. The body of 6-year-old Kahla Lansing of Spring Valley, 111., was found Friday at an abandoned farm south of Sabula in east central Iowa. Jeffrey D. Rissley, 28, of Benton Harbor, drew a map to lead authorities theie, authorities said. Rissley is charged with murder and aggravated kidnapping.

Authorities believe the girl was killed at the isolated farm. GREG Balloons and tunes assigned to riverboat casinos, race tracks and the lottery. "In the last couple of weeks we've had to run people from Dcs Moines east on these homicides because there's nobody left over there," Tinker said. But he said the staff constraints have not hurt investigations so far, adding, "I hope it never gels to that point." The homicides seem more upsetting because the victims all have been found in rural areas rarely touched by such violence. "When something like this comes up, it shocks people back to reality that it's a pretty violent world out there," Bennett said.

"We're not all that experienced in Iowa with murder, not like Chicago or Miami where newscasters can tell the grisly details and smile afterward because they've gotten so hardened." The first case broke Sept. 29, when the body of Steven Rensink was found in woods south of Hawarden in northwest Iowa. Rensink, 18, of Ireton, had been missing since late July, but his car was found July 27 in a Hawarden cemetery. Bennett ruled Rensink was killed by a gunshot wound to the head. Thomas Mather, 32, was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head Sept.

30 at his home in rural Spring-dale in eastern Iowa. It was Cedar County's first homicide investigation More charges filed DES MOINES (AP) More sexual exploitation charges have been filed against the former leader of a paramilitary organization who was arrested twice in September. The Polk County attorney's office on Friday filed four more charges against Robert DePugh, 68, of Nor-borne, Mo. The charges accuse DePugh of taking, nude pictures of young women in Monona County in western Iowa and in Polk County in central Iowa. DePugh now faces five exploitation charges in Iowa and is being held on federal weapons indictments Jamie Stensgard, 1 12, of Westgate, keeps a band playing at Covenant Medical Center's grand tight grip on his balloon while he listens to the opening Saturday.

Black Hawk Lake being dredged LAKE VIEW (AP) A 16-inch pipe spewing thousands of cubic yards of muck into a former soybean field is a welcome sight around fjlack Hawk Lake these days. After more than a decade of discussions, plans, studies and paperwork, the promise of help for ailing Black Hawk Lake has arrived and is going full speed ahead. Dredging crews are working 24 hours a day, six days a week removing about four feet of sediment from the shallow lake bottom and depositing it into an earthen dike that will return clean water. About 100 acres of the 800-acre lake will be dredged from an average four-foot depth to eight feet. The dredging is long-awaited good news to residents of Lake View and the recreational users of the lake, who come from as far away as "Omaha, during the summer season.

Lannie Miller, fisheries biologist for the Department of Natural Resources office in Lake View, said the average depth of the lake is only 5.4 feet, with the deepest spot about BROWNCourier staff photographer cubic yards of earth cleared each hour, Taylor said. "Only about 22 percent of it is earth," he said. "The rest is water." The dredging operation is bigger than most in Iowa's lakes. "This is one of the largest dredges that have ever been this far inland in the state of Iowa," Taylor said. "By inland, I mean away from the Mississippi or Missouri rivers." The muddy mixture is pumped to a former soybean field where a 30-foot dike holds back the water and allows the dirt to settle on the bottom.

An intake on the dike allows the clean water to return to the lake after about four days of meandering through a stream. A second phase of dredging will begin in the spring of 1992. Plans call for dredging the area from a depth of about eight feet to about 12 feet. The DNR also plans to dig two 25-foot deep holes about 150 feet long and fill in the bottom with rock to create a better fish habitat, Miller said. The deep spots are especially attractive to walleye, he said.

Navy. At the time of his disappearance, Paul was a salesman for a gourmet foods company based in Boise, Idaho. His job took him to Las Vegas. In January, the company called the Beals to say their son had not reported in from Las Vegas, and that a missing persons report had been filed with Las Vegas authorities. A few days later, Paul's employer called the Beals to say Paul had been found.

But shortly after that, and before the Beals were able to talk to him, he disappeared again. His whereabouts remained unknown until the television program. DES MOINES (AP) State investigators are being strained by five homicide cases in the last two weeks, a spurt Iowa's medical examiner is calling "Black October." But an executive of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation said the caseload crunch has not hindered the work of his agency. The stress of the heavy caseload is compounded by state budget cuts and the increase of legalized gambling, which has reduced the number of DCI agents available for criminal cases. "It's tearing them apart," Dr.

Thomas Bennett, the medical examiner, said of the homicide investigators with whom he closely works. "The crime lab people going to work these cases are spread so thin. I know for a fact that the DCI is stretched to the breaking point. Something has to be done and I hope the Legislature addresses it this year," Bennett said. John Tinker, assistant DCI director, agreed his agents have been overloaded by the cases, which include one of a rural Batavia woman accused of shooting her husband and dismembering his body.

"It is straining our forces," Tinker said. "We're pretty thin as far as manpower." He said budget cuts have cost his agency 1 1 positions since July, while 25 of the state's 59 agents are Juvenile violent crime jumps 19.1 DES MOINES (AP) The number of Iowa youngsters arrested for violent crimes last year jumped 19.1 percent on the heels of eight years of steady increases, a legislative study group on gangs was told. In addition, a showcase law making gang activity a crime hasn't made much of a dent yet, according to the report. The Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice said there were just four people convicted under that law. The interim committee looking for ways to curtail youth gangs got the generally gloomy report Friday as it opened its study.

The panel also was warned there's a growing shortage of detention facilities to handle young offenders, and the study group's chairman predicted the Legislature would expand those youth jails. The report was released at the initial meeting of a House-Senate panel studying gang activities and youth crime. "Arrests for violent crimes have steadily increased over the last eight years, including a 19 percent increase from 1989 to 1990," the report said. "Although this is somewhat alarming one must keep in mind that arrests for violent offenses still only account for a small percentage of all arrests." There were 517 arrests reported for what are classified as violent crimes during 1990, compared with 434 in 1989. Cedar Falls nine feet.

That is based on a study done it 1979, Miller said. The shallow condition of the lake hasn't caused major wildlife problems such as fish kills, Miller said, but the dredging will make a big improvement in water quality. "There are tremendous amounts of suspended silt in the lake and a lot of nitrogen and ammonia that cause huge algae blooms in the summer," Miller said. "The boaters don't like it, the skiers don't like it and it's not good for sight-feeding fish. It makes (fishing) real difficult." Dredging about 580,000 cubic yards of sediment from the lake bottom will be a major improvement.

"I think we will see a huge difference in the water quality after next spring," Miller said. Dredging began in September and is running about 30 percent ahead of schedule, said Larry Taylor, DNR construction inspector. The dredging, contracted by L.W. Matteson Co. of Burlington at a cost of about $921,000, pumps 10,500 gallons of water and sediment each minute.

That comes out to about 600 "It's like a weight lifted off your shoulders that you've been dragging around for seven or eight months," Paul's stepfather, Pat Beal, said. He said the family had been frantic with concern, and although the mystery concerning Paul's whereabouts has been solved, the cause of his memory loss has not. Pat and Lynn Beal are natives of southern California. They moved from Montana to Burlington about five years ago when Pat was transferred by his employer, Burlington Northern Railroad. Paul Beal lived in Burlington only a couple of months before joining the IIP against DePugh in Missouri.

DePugh first was charged last month with sexual exploitation of a minor after authorities found hundreds of photographs of young girls in nude or semi-nude poses at his Soldier studio. He later was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. A revolver was found during. a search of his home in Nor-borne, Mo. Deputies in Carroll County, also found live high-explosive mortar rounds, practice rockets and rocket fuses and smoke grenades at his Norborne residence.

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