On September 24, 2021—exactly 50 years to the day after two boys found Maureen Brubaker Farley’s body in a wooded ravine near Cedar Rapids, Iowa—police finally confirmed who killed her. The answer was a name that had been on investigators’ suspect list since the very first weeks of the case. George M. Smith, a diner regular more than three decades older than Maureen, was identified as the source of DNA recovered from her body in 1971.
He had died in 2013 at age 94, so there would be no arrest, no trial, and no conviction. The case was closed through certainty, not punishment. Maureen Ann Brubaker was born on July 4, 1954, in Sioux City, Iowa, the oldest of seven children. She grew up helping her parents, Mary Ann and David Brubaker, care for her six younger siblings, a role that shaped her into a patient and steady young woman.
In her late teens, she married and made a significant move, leaving Sioux City for Cedar Rapids, more than 100 miles east. She found a small apartment on 10th Street Southeast and quickly took a job as a waitress at a diner on 1st Avenue Northeast, where she was building a new life one regular customer at a time. One of those regulars was George Smith, a man in his 50s who came by often enough that diner staff recognized his face. No one thought anything of it at the time.
On the morning of September 17, 1971, Maureen left her apartment planning to go about her regular routine. She was seen that morning. Then she wasn’t. Her apartment sat empty, and her car stayed parked in the lot behind her building.
When she didn’t show up for her shift on Monday, September 20, her boss called the Cedar Rapids Police Department. Officers searched her apartment and found nothing disturbed. There was no sign of a struggle. On Friday, September 24, two boys hunting in a wooded ravine off Ely Road found a body lying across the trunk of an abandoned junk car.
It was Maureen. She was partially dressed, her shoes missing entirely, and her bare feet were clean—with no scratches or mud that would suggest she had walked through that rough terrain herself. Someone had killed her elsewhere and brought her there. An autopsy showed Maureen had died from a massive blow to the right side of her head, hard enough to fracture her skull.
She had also been sexually assaulted. Investigators estimated she had been dead between two and four days before the boys found her, meaning she was likely killed not long after she vanished. Detectives interviewed dozens of people: co-workers from the diner, neighbors, friends, family, and men who had crossed paths with Maureen in the few months she had lived in Cedar Rapids. One name kept surfacing: George Smith.
Smith ran a hauling business that took him near landfills and dump sites around the edges of Cedar Rapids, including the area where Maureen’s body was found. He had also worked at a liquor store sitting right next to her apartment building. Detectives brought him in and questioned him extensively, but he declined a polygraph test. Then came a detail that would stick with the case for 50 years.
In the weeks after the murder, Smith repeatedly showed up at the Cedar Rapids Police Department, asking how the investigation was going. Investigators noticed. Most people who are actual suspects stay away from the police station. Smith walked back through its doors again and again.
None of it was enough. Without physical evidence tying him to the crime, prosecutors couldn’t move forward. The case went quiet but not dead. In 2006, Cedar Rapids detective Doug Larison pulled Maureen’s case file back out.
He found a swab collected during the original examination of her body, preserved all those years in evidence storage. It produced a complete male DNA profile—the first hard physical evidence the case had ever had. Running the profile through CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, produced no match. In 2017, the Cedar Rapids Police Department’s Cold Case Unit picked the file back up.
Investigators tracked down every man ever listed as a possible suspect and asked each one for a DNA sample. By spring 2021, they had eliminated more than 15 men through direct comparison. One name had never been cleared and could not be tested the same way: George Smith had died in 2013. Investigators found a confirmed living relative and obtained a search warrant to collect that relative’s DNA.
Family members share enough genetic material that a comparison can point investigators toward the right person even when the original suspect is no longer alive. Both samples were sent to DNA Labs International in Deerfield Beach, Florida, for advanced comparison. On September 24, 2021, Cedar Rapids police reviewed the results. The profile matched.
George M. Smith was confirmed as the source of the DNA recovered from Maureen’s body in 1971. Maureen’s mother, Mary Brubaker, was 86 years old when investigators finally had an answer. Her husband, David, had passed away years earlier without learning who killed his daughter.
When detectives called Mary, she didn’t express shock. “I told you guys,” she said. “I told you it was George Smith. ”
“They kind of knew it,” she said, “but they couldn’t prove it.
We can rest, and we know he did it. ”
Maureen’s sister Lisa Shenzel said the case showed the importance of never giving up, even though the killer was gone by the time the truth came out. Cedar Rapids police were direct about the resolution: there would be no prosecution because George M. Smith was deceased.
The case was officially closed, not through a conviction, but through certainty. Police Chief Wayne German said that no matter how much time passes, Cedar Rapids officers remain committed to seeking justice for every victim of violent crime and their families. He credited the generations of officers who touched the case over 50 years. Justice in this case didn’t come as punishment.
It came as truth. For a family that had waited 50 years, sometimes the truth is the only kind of justice still available.