Victor Harry Feguer was a low-life nothing from the Midwest, and no one would give him a single thought today if it weren’t for two things — an olive and a mass murder that occurred more than three decades after his death.
Feguer holds the dubious distinction of being the last person executed under the federal death penalty until it was reinstated on June 11, 2001, for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Compared to the American terrorist, who killed 168 and injured more than 600, Feguer was small-time. He murdered one man and the case attracted little press interest.
He was born in St. Johns, Mich., in 1935 and had an ordinary life until 1941, when his mother died. His father became an alcoholic and the child bounced from one relative to the next. By 12, he was a wayward minor in a boys’ home with a history of petty thefts.
At 16, he stole a car and went to prison. Upon his parole, he took a second car and went back to jail. Released in April 1960, Feguer found it impossible to hold a job so he rattled around the Midwest, finally stepping off a bus in Dubuque, Iowa, on July 7, 1960. He found a room for rent and settled in.
Four days later, the phone rang at the home of Dr. Edward Bartels, 34, a well-respected doctor in the community. Bartels, a Dubuque native, had been a sports star in high school, served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, attended the University of Iowa medical school and interned in California. He returned home to become a general practitioner. In July 1960, he and his wife were awaiting the arrival of their fourth child.
The caller said that his wife, “Mrs. Stevens,” had just had surgery and was in pain. It was an era when doctors thought nothing of going off on an errand of mercy. Bartels left a note for his wife, telling her that he was heading to a house call at 1134 Locust St., to meet “Ed Stevens.”
Then he took off in his gray 1959 Rambler.
Three hours later, the phone rang again at the doctor’s house and a deep voice told Mrs. Bartels that the patient was sicker than anyone had thought, and that Dr. Bartels’ services would be needed overnight.
The doctor never returned.
Two days later, detectives searching for the missing man gathered clues that brought them to a room recently rented by a drifter. There, they found one of Feguer’s unemployment forms.
A day later, a man calling himself Dr. Bartels tried to trade in a 1959 Rambler in Gary, Ind., but when he failed to produce the title, the salesman refused. The man later took up with another crook, Jack Hoard Hale, and embarked on a tour of the region, passing bad checks and trying to unload a stolen car.
The law caught up with Feguer in Birmingham, Ala., on July 20, when a used-car salesman reported a stranger trying to sell a Rambler.
A few hours after Feguer’s arrest, searchers found the doctor’s decomposed body in the woods about 10 miles east of Dubuque, just across the state line into Illinois. He had been shot in the back of the head.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told reporters that federal kidnap charges would apply in the case because Feguer had stepped over the line into Illinois. That meant possibility of the death penalty.
Feguer offered investigators details of how he had chosen the doctor (at random, the second name under “physicians” in the phone book) and what he was after (drugs).
Feguer’s attorneys brought in a parade of psychiatrists to prove that he was not responsible for his actions, but the strategy failed. After he was found guilty and sentenced to death, his lawyers appealed to the governor of Iowa, an opponent of capital punishment who brought the matter to the President of the United States himself.
About 30 minutes before the hanging, for which a gallows had to be constructed in the Iowa State Penitentiary auto shop, Feguer said, “Well, John F. Kennedy, if you’re going to make any sudden moves you had better be quick about it.”
No word came from the White House.
“I sure hope I’m the last one to go in Iowa. … It would be too much to expect that I will be the last one anywhere. But I sure hope I’m the last one in Iowa,” he told a priest shortly before he began his walk to the gallows on March 15, 1963.
Feguer showed no emotion, except for a marked acceleration of the rate at which he was chewing gum, as the hangman covered his head with a black hood. Ten minutes later he was dead. No one claimed the body, and he was buried in an unmarked grave.
Two years later, Feguer’s dying wish came true when Iowa abolished its death penalty. Then, in 1972, federal executions were put on hold until a bombing in Oklahoma brought Feguer’s name back into the public eye.
And what about the olive?
For his final meal, Feguer asked for a single olive with a pit, and said that he hoped that an olive tree, a symbol of peace, would sprout from his grave. This request has given him his sole measure of immortality, mentioned anytime anyone puts together a list of the weirdest last suppers on death row.
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