Decades after murders at the Iowa State Fair, a daughter returns to further her parents’ legacy

Courtney Crowder | The Des Moines Register

Show Caption Hide Caption Iowa State Fair concessionaire returns to continue family tradition Jada Smith returns to the Iowa State Fair as a concessionaire for the first time since her parents were murdered at the fair in 1996.

With almost 200 food stands at the Iowa State Fair, vendors use every method available to entice hungry visitors.

Some pack their counters with lights that blink and shimmer, others fly banners and flags. A few give their booth a theme, hanging a fake log cabin patina for their “Tex-Mex” display or putting up a 1950s-era scalloped awning to amp up nostalgia for ice-cream sundaes.

Jada Smith’s neatly maintained yellow stand on the east end of Grand Avenue gets right to the point with a marquee that screams, in clear bright letters, FUNNEL CAKES.

Her family's legacy is the concoction of sweet, fried dough, perfectly topped with powdered sugar. She’s toured the Midwest fair circuit for decades — satisfying bellies and fair food judges with her saccharine servings.

But she’s never had the courage to sign up for the biggest event of the fair calendar: The Iowa State Fair.

Until this year.

For her, the daughter of longtime concessionaries Bobie and Marilyn Blewer, Des Moines is a place of fond childhood memories, but also great tragedy.

In 1996, when Smith was 16, her parents were murdered in their converted charter bus as she and her 18-year-old brother, Beau, worked the funnel cake stand through the lunch rush.

Wondering what was keeping their normally prompt parents from joining them, Beau ran back to the bus and found them bound, gagged and shot to death.

Over the next year, police would uncover a cold-blooded, murder-for-hire plot involving Jerimy Sneed, a former employee turned hitman who was enlisted by the couple's eldest daughter, Jamie Borushaski, and her husband, Rodney Borushaski.

All three are serving life sentences. Jamie and Rodney, who were convicted of murder in the plot, still proclaim innocence.

The tragedy left Jada and Beau without the foundation of family. They've chosen to cope with the tragedy in distinctly different ways.

Beau tried to keep up his parents’ funnel-cake business, traveling the same roads the family frequented each summer. But the memories eventually became too painful and he left the concession circuit for rodeo.

Today, he can’t really bring himself to attend fairs at all, he told me.

Where Beau left off, Jada, now 37, has picked up. She’s spent her life dedicated to her parents’ dream: Selling funnel cakes and receiving smiles along the way.

But she’s also reclaiming their legacy, changing the narrative to make sure people know that the Blewers were more than the unfortunate victims of the Iowa State Fair's most notorious crime.

They were her parents, and they were loved.

From her father’s funnel cake recipe to the date on her trailer — 1977, the year the Blewers first came to the State Fair — their presence is felt in Smith's every move.

"I want to follow in my parents’ footsteps," she said. "I want to follow their dreams, follow my dreams, and continue the family business."

"When you love your job, it’s not really a job," she added, "and I love what I am doing."

And she’s beginning to understand that it’s here, at the Iowa State Fair, where she just might feel the closest to the family she's desperately missed for 22 years.

Murder at the Iowa State Fair:

A five-part Des Moines Register series

Growing up on the concession circuit

On the day her parents were killed, Jada Smith, 16 at the time, was getting ready to go back home.

Normally, her parents would make her stay to the end of Iowa State Fair. But Smith wanted, for the first time in her life, to start with her classmates on the first day of school.

But it wouldn’t happen that year either.

For the most part, Smith enjoyed being the child of concessionaires; it was all she knew. She started traveling with her parents to smaller fairs when she was 6 or 7, and at about 10, she joined her parents on the road full time.

As she worked her way up from cashier to funnel cake fryer, she slowly realized her life was different than that of her friends. She didn’t play summer ball, and her family didn’t go on family vacations.

But she said their life was an adventure.

“Growing up in this business there were other people that had kids our age, and so we ran around with them and played games and compared stories,” Smith recalled. “It was like summer camp on the road.”

The Blewers spent nearly every minute together during the fair season, from June through October. They slept in the old bus, Beau and Jada taking turns on the couch, and fried funnel cakes all day.

At the height of their concession business, the Blewers owned four or five stands, selling everything from their famous funnel cakes to onion straws and hot dogs.

Though it was hard work and demanded an entirely different lifestyle, Bobie Blewer loved the fair life, his brother Arnold Blewer said.

“He was the first one to carry funnel cakes on the road, as far as I know,” Arnold said. “And you would see lines of people all around that red wagon waiting for their funnel cakes.”

A son makes a horrific discovery

On Aug. 12, 1996, Jada and Beau woke up early to open the stand. Their parents were supposed to meet them later to help with the midday scramble.

Hours ticked by. They never came.

On the first day of the fair, Sneed, a former employee and friend of Jada's sister, Jamie, showed up offering to help. The Blewers could always use an extra hand, so they opened their trailer to him and set him to work.

They didn’t know that Sneed was having an affair with Jamie, and that her husband, Rodney, had convinced him to steal the Blewers' money and split the take.

When Jada and Beau's worry reached a fever pitch, Beau ran back to the trailer and discovered his parents' bodies.

“I was just two trailers down from them when they got killed,” said Eddie Westmoreland, a longtime concessionaire and friend of the family. "I was doing laundry, and I came back and there were troopers everywhere."

Jada has blocked out most of what happened in the immediate aftermath, a small part of the way her brain dealt with the trauma caused by the worst day of her life.

About four days after the murder, investigators cleared the youngest Blewers, and Beau drove the pair back home. Smith moved in with some family friends and lived with them for the final two years of her schooling.

"They were lovely," she said, but her life was in chaos. She was lonely and there was a piece of her missing — one fragment of her heart she feared would never heal.

"You don’t have that connection with other people’s parents like you would with your parents,” she said. “I still go to their house for Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays here and there, but it’s not like your mom and dad.”

“There’s always that bond that you’ll never find with anyone else,” she continued. “Nobody can fill that.”

The difficulties of learning the family business

As the Blewer family made funeral plans and figured out living arrangements, the concessionaires at the fair took it upon themselves to keep the family’s food stands operating.

Some of the longtime vendors organized a volunteer army to make funnel cakes and sling sodas in the family’s stead. They even put out a bucket so people could donate to Beau and Jada.

“They were absolutely amazing,” Arnold Blewer said. “There were concessionaries who left their stand in the hands of some of their helpers and opened and manned Bobie’s trailer. And remember, they were our competitors.”

As much as Jada thought the concession business ran in her blood, she didn’t know a lot of the details her parents took care of, like how to order ice and water to the trailer or deliver “percentages” back to the fair at the end of the night.

As the weeks and months after the murder unfolded faster than she could keep up, she realized her parents had sheltered her more than she knew.

She had to learn how to write checks and buy car insurance and land a job — everything teenagers normally get an assist from the parents on, she did alone.

“It was like growing up overnight,” she said.

In 1997, the year after the murders, Smith and Beau came back to the Iowa State Fair with their parents’ funnel-cake trailer.

The Blewers' circumstances were obviously unprecedented, but pulling together is normal in the concession industry, Iowa State Fair CEO Gary Slater said.

“Here they are a very close-knit group of people,” Slater said. “If somebody runs out of cups, somebody will loan them cups, and I think that’s because all of them know how hard it is to be on the road and to be in different communities all the time.

"They know what it is like to be slammed and need a hand.”

The year after her parents' death was emotional for Smith, too emotional, really. In hindsight, the difficulty of seeing her parents in the cakes and the customers and the old charter bus stopped her from coming back for two decades.

But she also remembered the comfort she felt as customers lined up down the street, offering her a kind word, a hug or a compliment on her cakes.

Most importantly, she held on to the stories that people shared of her parents.

“Those meant a lot to me,” she said. “It told me that we were still important and people hadn’t forgotten about us.”

A 'painful and happy' reunion at the Iowa State Fair

On Thursday, the opening day of this year's Iowa State Fair, Smith woke promising to make her first hours back on Grand Avenue positive, a celebration of her parents’ life.

As she’d been setting up, a host of concessionaires who knew her family offered advice. Westmoreland and his wife, Phyllis, dropped by to offer suggestions on making her sign look just right.

“She will always be part of the family,” Westmoreland said. “We are going to take care of her.”

Though Beau has decided to stay away from fairs, he’s “proud” and “supportive” of his sister, who he calls “a tough cookie.”

“She’s as strong an individual as I have ever seen,” Arnold said. “She can handle it. It may be emotional. She may lay awake and cry once in a while, but she will be back in the trailer first thing in the morning.”

For Jada, her return has been both “painful and happy,” she said.

Every time she enters the fairgrounds gate, all the memories come flooding back. It’s just a matter of weeding out the good from the bad.

Her parents’ famous red and gold wagon-wheeled stand, which Beau got after their death, is parked at a friends house, but Jada still has her parents’ second trailer, which she was gifted when they passed.

She uses it sparingly but makes a point to bring it to the Mississippi Valley Fair in Davenport every year.

That was where Sneed was supposed to rob her parents, but he couldn’t bring himself to go through with it. Instead, he showed up at the Blewers’ charter bus in Des Moines days later.

“That’s my little way of remembering them,” she said. “That’s an emotional fair, but it’s not like here.”

Smith is clear that she believes justice was done, but she has tried to push memories of the trials and her testimony from her mind. At this point, she said, she has to let that chapter close.

So instead, she flips funnel cakes, hoping her parents would be proud.

She’s happy, but “how could you not be?” she offered. She gets to serve sweets and meet new people all day.

“People come up to you and you get to talking while the funnel cake’s cooking, and before you know it you know where they come from and where they lived and just a small part about their life history,” she said.

“You don’t go into McDonald's and hear about somebody’s life like that.”

If her customers ask Smith about her life, she'll tell them about her parents, Bobie and Marilyn Blewer. She’ll chat about working in the red and gold wagon-wheeled stand and reveal why the math doesn’t work given her age (37) and the date the stand was established (1977).

Most importantly, she’ll urge them to take a bite of a hot, fresh funnel cake made using her parents’ recipe.

Because that’s how they’d want to be remembered.

COURTNEY CROWDER travels the state as the Register’s Iowa Columnist. She is an avid Iowa State Fairgoer. Her normal must-haves include a 27-degree beer, cheese curds and one (OK, fine, two) peppermint bars from Bauder’s. Reach her at (515) 284-8360 or ccrowder@dmreg.com. Follow her on Twitter @courtneycare.