Grant Rodgers

The Des Moines Register

Winning a conviction in a decades-old killing presents challenges for prosecutors: Memories wane, witnesses can be hard to find or dead.

On Monday, in Iowa, a trial starts with a rare, extra hurdle: The body of the victim, Cora Ann Okonski, has never been found.

Okonski was 23 in 2000 when she was reported missing from her Tama home. In December, a Tama County grand jury indicted her boyfriend, Tait Otis Purk, 50, on a first-degree murder charge.

Prosecuting a murder case without a body is almost unheard of in Iowa.

Bringing such a case means prosecutors go to trial without a key piece of evidence to establish guilt, said Robert Rigg, a criminal law professor at Drake University Law School. Without a body, a medical examiner cannot offer testimony about what caused the death, Rigg said. Jurors won't see the injuries or visceral crime scene photographs taken by investigators.

That testimony and evidence helps prosecutors argue that the killing was intentional and premeditated — elements required for a first-degree murder conviction.

"The remains generate so much evidence, especially today with modern forensics," Rigg said.

A 2003 search offered brief hope that answers would come in Okonski's disappearance. Investigators found bone fragments and clothing in a rural junkyard owned by Purk's cousin, but authorities later determined the bones were from an animal, according to the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.

Okonski's family members have said they believe Okonski is dead; they have had no contact with her since she went missing, and she stopped collecting her Social Security disability payments.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday at the Iowa County Courthouse, where the case was moved following a request by defense attorneys. Purk, who this month finished an approximately 14-year sentence in federal prison for methamphetamine and weapons charges, has denied involvement in the death. He's claimed that he last saw Okonski when she left their home to buy cigarettes.

Prosecutors believe she was killed sometime during a two-day period after she went missing on April 16, 2000.

Purk penned a letter from prison to the Tama News-Herald in 2010 in response to a story marking the 10th anniversary of Okonski's disappearance, writing that he'd never "given up hope" that she would resurface.

“I went everywhere I could think of her being the next day and everyone said she never came over to anyone's house,” he wrote.

An unofficial nationwide database of 469 murder prosecutions without a body between 1819 and November 2016 lists just one Iowa case, the 1998 first-degree murder conviction of Terry Patrick Andersen.

Authorities accused Andersen of dismembering the body of his victim before dumping it in the Missouri River near Council Bluffs, according to the database, which is maintained by a former federal prosecutor. Iowa Department of Corrections records show Andersen, 54, is serving a life sentence at the Clarinda Correctional Facility.

The case against Andersen hinged on the testimony of eyewitnesses who saw him shoot the victim, Douglas Churchill. Investigators also found physical evidence — blood and tissue — close to the river that matched Churchill in DNA testing, according to a WOWT 6 News feature.

Despite roadblocks, 88 percent of the cases listed in the "no body" database ended in conviction.

Another Iowa case nearly came to trial in April 2005 when a Wisconsin resident, Douglas DeBruin, was charged with the 2001 murder of an eastern Iowa antiques dealer and tattoo artist. But a break came before trial when a human head that was found years earlier in a bucket of concrete at a Missouri truck stop was identified as that of the victim, Gregory May, according to the Quad City Times. DeBruin's girlfriend testified that she helped him dismember May with a chainsaw, leaving parts of the body in the Mississippi River and the head at the truck stop, according to the paper.

Circumstantial evidence will factor heavily in the murder case against Purk, but the law allows jurors to place as much weight on it as forensic evidence or eyewitness testimony, said Steve Foritano, a retired assistant Polk County attorney who spent decades prosecuting murder cases.

The lack of a body is a "glaring hole," but jurors should be able to conclude that Okonski is indeed dead if prosecutors prove there's no trace of her, Foritano said.

Okonski's adoptive parents, Jerome and Cecelia Okonski, both testified in front of the grand jury that indicted Purk and they could take the stand in the criminal trial.

"I think anytime you're trying to prove that someone has died and you don't have the body, you could look at just the fact that they've been missing, there's been no contact with the people you would expect her to have contact with," Foritano said. "Friends, family, children."

Court records filed in the case indicate that witnesses told investigators and grand jurors that they saw bruises and other injuries on Okonski that were inflicted by Purk. One witness, a neighbor, said that Okonski and Purk were fighting on the day she went missing while both came down from a methamphetamine high. Okonski reportedly told the neighbor that she was afraid Purk could kill her and asked the woman to keep her windows open so she could hear any screams and alert police, court records show.

Okonski, whose son was a toddler when she went missing, worked as a waitress at the King Tower Cafe in Tama, a town of 2,877. She had moved to Iowa from Chicago approximately a year before vanishing, according to Iowa Cold Cases, a website that documents and profiles murder cases and disappearances.

Records filed in the case also show that people who knew the couple have offered investigators multiple theories about what happened to Okonski's body, ranging from a burial to Purk disposing of her in a Missouri rock quarry. But Foritano said that speculation about what exactly happened will likely be a small factor as long as jurors believe Okonski is dead.

"How the body was disposed of legally doesn’t make any difference," he said. "Obviously the jury will probably wonder about that, but I’m sure the lawyers will argue to the jury that it doesn’t matter.”

The trial against Purk is expected to last 6-8 days, according to court records.