Two men who lived in a home in Council Bluffs are now accused of living in recent days with the dead body of the home’s owner. Council Bluffs Police Sergeant Jerry Mann says a tip sent investigators to the home Friday afternoon.
An anonymous woman called on the CrimeStoppers line to say she’d heard two men were living with a dead body in a home at 233 South 4th Street. Police who checked it out found the body of 93-year-old Violet Christensen on a bed in a bedroom there. The two men found at the home had been living there, the Sergeant says.
It’s a three-story home, and he says “One was living upstairs, one was living downstairs, and the victim was in the middle floor.” He says the two weren’t supposed to be living there but the woman had let them stay, apparently in exchange for doing odd jobs. He’s waiting for final results from an autopsy done over the weekend, but this morning first-degree murder charges were filed against 48-year-old Ross James Holford.
The second man who’d also apparently been living in the dead woman’s house has not yet been charged. Until they got the tip, police hadn’t known anything was amiss, though Sergeant Mann says the woman hadn’t been dead for an extremely long time. He figures it was somewhere between a couple of days and at most two weeks.
Mann says police really want that anonymous caller to call back so they can talk to her some more. The Council Bluffs police CrimeStoppers number is (712) 326-2509.