The Time Capsule: Remembering another sensational local murder

This afternoon I drove by the house and wondered if those living there know about the murder or are aware of the headline that appeared in our paper 80 years ago next week. On Feb. 28, 1936, in what must have been the biggest and boldest print available, an anxiously-anticipated decision was announced:  
Arch Breeding would hang.  
A year and a half earlier, after a high school football game, Breeding stole a .38 revolver and walked to the house he’d previously shared with his wife and daughter. Standing on the porch, separated from the two women by a latched screen door, he fired five shots. Florence Breeding, struck in the temple, fell dead.  
Breeding was charged, confessed and received the sentence he publicly proclaimed to be what he wanted and deserved.  
Breeding was in cellblock 98 — death row — at Fort Madison only a few days before deciding the execution he requested was no longer his first choice. His appeal, claiming an unfair trial, would be heard by the State Supreme Court. Twice, with the date looming, the gallows ready and waiting, the hanging was delayed. In the end the ruling went against Breeding. In a majority decision the Supreme Court upheld the verdict and the sentence. The lone dissenting opinion was written by a recently elected justice from Red Oak.  
Breeding’s last chance was in the form of a petition for clemency, which Gov. Clyde Herring received in December 1935. Herring deliberated for several weeks. In mid-February, he summoned Breeding’s daughter to the statehouse. Bernice had been 18 years old, a high-school senior, standing at her mother’s elbow when her father raised the gun. Her statement had been a key part of the evidence used to demonstrate premeditation.  
A swarm of reporters, thinking she might be the first to know, waited on the steps of the Capital. Herring had the girl slipped in through a side door on the lower level. He and his attorney general spent about 45 minutes with her, after which she was returned to the railroad depot without being detected.
Herring’s press release was forceful and seemed irrevocable. In it he said if the death sentence fit anyone, it fit Breeding. Herring cited wedding vows; wrote that Breeding had committed the worst of crimes by killing with malice aforethought the one person he had sworn to honor and protect. He would hang on April 27.
I expect at least a few newspaper reporters made private comments on the hypocrisy of the governor’s reference to the sanctity of marriage vows. George Mills, veteran of the Des Moines Register, later wrote about Herring’s blatant womanizing and drunkenness, depicting a governor’s wife who, like the press, chose to ignore his string of indiscretions.  
Breeding, interviewed in his cell, said the decision was what he expected. He seemed resigned to his fate. But, as he was counting down the days of March and April, Breeding’s attorney and a group of Red Oak citizens opposed to the death penalty remained active.   
There were no new arguments, no new evidence. Herring, aided by his legal staff, had spent two months reviewing the case and the dissenting opinion before directing that the execution be carried out. Yet, over the next few weeks, he wavered. With the hanging less than seventy hours away, the governor reversed himself. Exactly what pressures, political or otherwise, led Herring to his change of heart I do not know.  
Another governor later amended the life sentence to 50 years, making Arch Breeding eligible for parole. He was released in 1960, returned to Red Oak, and died in 1971.  
The only person ever to receive a death sentence in the Montgomery County courthouse lived out his life and was buried beside his wife in Evergreen Cemetery.