44 years ago, an unidentified woman was found on the shoulder of a county highway in rural Iowa wearing a goldass ring that did not belong to her.
She was given a number, a plot in a county cemetery, and a small evidence tag that described the ring in four lines of typewritten text.
Gold oval face, dark stone, initials engraved inside the band.
The ring stayed in the case file.
The woman stayed in the ground without a name.
And for 44 years, no one connected those initials to a living person, to a family, to a story that had been waiting its entire length to be told.
Until a retired school teacher in Cedar Rapids opened a genealogy website on a Sunday afternoon in the winter of 2025, searching for something entirely unrelated and found herself looking at a photograph of a ring she recognized.
She had seen that ring before.
She had seen it on her brother’s hand the last summer he was alive.
That is not a story about an accident of the internet or a coincidence of search terms.
That is a story about a woman who was never supposed to be found and a man who was never supposed to be missing.
And the 44 years that passed between the moment someone tried to erase them both and the moment a gold ring on a computer screen made that eraser impossible.
But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to the autumn of 1981.
Because to understand what was lost, you first have to understand who both of them were.
Harland County sits in the southwestern corner of Iowa, corn and soybean country, where the land runs flat to the horizon, and the horizon runs into a sky so large it can feel like a physical weight on clear days.
In 1981, it was the kind of place where the grain elevator’s seasonal hours determined the traffic on Main Street, where the volunteer fire department’s annual fish fry was a social event that people planned around.
And where the CB radio in your truck was how you talked to your neighbors on the roads between farms because mobile phones did not exist and the party line at home was going to be occupied by someone.
Reagan had just taken office.
The news on the radio was about interest rates and the hostages who had come home.
The towns of the county, Aoka, Shelby, Tenant, were quiet and self-contained and held together by the kind of trust that comes from knowing your community is too small and too watched for secrets to survive very long.
Gary Pullman was 26 years old in the summer of 1981.
He had grown up on his family’s grain farm outside Shelby.
Graduated from Shelby Tennant High School in 1973.
Spent two years at Iowa Western Community College studying agricultural management and then come back as the oldest son in a farming family almost always does to work the land with his father.
He was a large, quiet young man who fixed things without being asked.
The neighbor’s fence, his mother’s oven, the engine on the volunteer fire department’s second truck, and who coached youth baseball every summer with what his players described decades later as an unnerving and completely earnest belief that every child was one correct fundamental away from being good at the game.
He had a dog named Buster who rode everywhere with him in the cab of his truck.
He had a goldclass ring from Iowa Western that he wore on his right hand everyday with a dark blue stone and his initials engraved inside the band, GWP.
He had told his mother in the summer of 1981 that he had been thinking about asking a woman he had been seeing to marry him.
He had not yet said her name.
Gary Pullman was last seen alive on the evening of September 23rd, 1981.
He had driven into Aoka that afternoon to drop off a parts order at the farm supply and had stopped for a meal at the counter of the Aoka diner where the waitress would later remember him because he tipped a dollar on a $3 meal which in 1981 was more than 30% and because he had asked her if she knew anyone who sold a decent used hay rake.
He left the diner at approximately 6:15.
His truck was found 3 days later on a gravel turnout off County Road F58.
Doors unlocked, key in the ignition, buster sitting in the passenger seat.
The dog had been there long enough that the floor of the cab was wet.
The farm supply receipt was on the dashboard.
Gary Pullman was not in the truck and was not anywhere near it.
And the ground around the turnout on the gravel road showed signs of disturbance that the Harlem County Sheriff’s deputies documented in photographs that would stay in a file for four decades.
Two weeks later, on October 8th, 1981, a woman’s body was found on the shoulder of Iowa Highway 59, approximately 11 miles from the gravel turnout where Gary Pullman’s truck had been located.
She was found by a farmer named Dale Hendris, who was driving his combine home from a neighbor’s field at early morning and noticed something in the long grass at the highway’s edge.
She had been there for some time.
She could not be identified.
She carried no purse, no wallet, no identification of any kind.
She wore jeans and a flannel shirt and a pair of work boots and a gold ring on the middle finger of her right hand too large for her finger, worn over the knuckle as if it had been placed there deliberately or had slipped there from a smaller finger during some period of movement.
The ring had a dark blue stone and initials engraved inside the band GWP.
The Harlem County Sheriff’s Office connected the initials to the open missing person’s report on Gary Pullman within 24 hours.
The connection was noted in the file.
What it meant was not immediately clear.
Had the woman known Gary?
Had she taken the ring?
Had someone given it to her as a form of cruel identification or by accident or because something had happened to both of them in the same place at the same time.
She could not tell them.
She had no name.
Deputies canvased the county and the surrounding area.
A composite drawing was distributed to neighboring counties and to the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation.
No one came forward who recognized her.
No missing person’s report in Iowa or the adjacent states matched her description.
She was given the designation Jane Doe 8114 and buried in the Harland County Cemetery in November of 1981 under a stone that read unknown female found October 1981.
She wore the ring in the ground because the ring was evidence and the evidence had not been solved and there was no one to return it to.
Detective Calvin Marsh of the Harlem County Sheriff’s Office was 35 years old when the case landed on his desk, and he was the kind of investigator who kept a separate legal pad for cases he could not close.
Not a professional habit so much as a personal one, a way of insisting that a case was still open, even when it was formally inactive.
He interviewed Gary Pullman’s family repeatedly in the first two years.
He identified three potential persons of interest.
A transient who had been reported near the F-58 turnout around the time Gary disappeared.
A former farmand who had worked the Pullman operation two seasons earlier and left under circumstances that nobody would fully explain.
And a man from Council Bluffs with a prior assault conviction who had no alibi for the week of the disappearance.
He pursued all three.
The transient could not be located and was eventually eliminated when a man matching his description was arrested in Nebraska on an unrelated charge and fingerprinted.
No match to anything from the Harland County scene.
The farmand had been in De Moine the week in question with documentation.
The council bluffs man was interviewed twice, denied involvement, and was never charged.
The case did not move.
What it also could not resolve was the identity of Jane Doe 8114.
The two cases, Gary Pullman’s disappearance and the unidentified woman’s death, were clearly connected through the ring, but the nature of that connection remained opaque.
Had she been with Gary when something happened to both of them?
Had the same person killed her and taken Gary?
Had she witnessed something and been silenced?
Nobody in Harland County recognized her from the composite.
Nobody in the region reported a woman missing who matched her description.
That invisibility was itself a clue that Marsh noted on his legal pad.
She is invisible because someone made her invisible.
Or because she came from somewhere she was not expected to return to.
That note sat on the legal pad for over 30 years.
Gary’s family did not disintegrate, but they bent.
His mother, a woman named Lorraine Pullman, a farmer’s wife who had survived the hard years of the late 70s without complaint, told neighbors in 1982 that she had decided Gary was dead because not knowing was heavier than knowing.
She said this with a matter of factness that frightened some of the women she said it to.
She said she was not giving up on him.
She was refusing to pretend something that was not true.
She kept his room exactly as it was for two years, and then she cleaned it out carefully and gave his clothes to the church rummage sale because she said she thought Gary would find it wasteful to let good flannel sit in a drawer.
She kept one thing.
She kept the photograph of him wearing the ring taken at his community college graduation because it was the clearest photograph of him and because the ring was still out there somewhere and she wanted to remember what it had looked like on the hand it belonged to.
Lorraine Pullman kept one ritual.
Every September 23rd, the evening Gary had last been seen, she drove the county road to the turnout on F-58 and sat in her car for 20 minutes.
She did this alone.
She did not tell her other children she did it.
Her daughter Karen found out only in 2019 when she happened to call while Lorraine was driving home from one of those visits.
And Lorraine mentioned it the way she mentioned everything that mattered to her.
Matterof factly, without performance, as though it were the obvious thing to do.
Lorraine had done it 37 times before Karen knew about it.
By 1990, 9 years had passed.
Gary’s father had reduced the farm operation significantly.
Without Gary, certain things became too large to manage, and the younger siblings had lives in other counties.
The Pullman’s were still in Shelby, but the farm was quieter than it had been in 1981.
In 1997, 16 years after Gary disappeared, his younger sister Karen had filed a death declaration on his behalf so the family could settle certain legal matters.
She had cried through the entire process and apologized to the clerk for it, and the clerk had told her there was nothing to apologize for.
In 2003, Calvin Marsh retired.
He gave the Pullman family his personal legal pad before he left.
He told Karen that he had never stopped thinking it was going to break open.
She told him she believed him.
She kept the legal pad.
The Harlland County cold case unit that was established in 2015 with grant funding had three active investigators and a backlog of 14 cases.
Gary Pullman and Jane Doe 8114 were cross-referenced as a single case entry.
The unit submitted Jane Doe’s DINA profile to NAMOS, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System in 2016, which generated no immediate matches.
They resubmitted with improved extraction in 2019.
Still no match.
The ring photograph was uploaded to several online cold case communities that had grown up in the internet era.
The kind of amateur research groups made up of retired law enforcement, genealogologists, forensic enthusiasts, and families of the missing who found each other across geography and poured their weekday evenings into cases the official system had set aside.
The photograph lived in those forms for 5 years before anyone made the connection that mattered.
Then in January of 2025, something happened in Cedar Rapids that the Harlem County cold case unit had not anticipated.
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Now, let’s get back to what that school teacher found.
Her name was Patricia Grunwald.
She was 68 years old, recently retired from 31 years of teaching middle school English in Cedar Rapids, and she had taken up genealogy research the way some people take up woodworking with complete absorption and no particular agenda.
On a Sunday afternoon in January of 2025, she was researching a collateral line of her family tree when she clicked through to a cold case forum that had appeared in her search results.
She was not looking for cold cases.
She was looking for a death record from Podawatami County in 1923.
But the forum page had loaded and there on the sidebar was a photograph of a ring, a gold glass ring with a dark blue stone.
And something in the shape of the oval face stopped her before she could click away.
She had seen that ring.
She had seen it in person on a hand at a family gathering.
The shape of the face was specific, slightly elongated, a small detail that was not standard in most class rings of that era.
She had thought it was unusual when she saw it, and she had asked about it, and the person wearing it had told her it was a ring he had found, and she had believed him because there was no reason not to.
She read the case description.
She read the initials, G WP.
She sat at her kitchen table for a long time.
Then she called her daughter and her daughter told her to call the Harlem County Sheriff’s Office in the morning and Patricia Grunwald did not sleep much that night.
The man she identified to investigators the following week was her cousin’s ex-husband, a man named Dennis Roy Ketman, who had lived in Council Bluffs in 1981 and had been identified as a person of interest in Calvin Marsh’s original investigation, but never charged.
He was 71 years old in 2025 and had been living in Omaha, Nebraska for 12 years.
Patricia had seen the ring on his hand at a family reunion in the early 1990s.
She had asked him about it because it was too large for his finger, and she had wondered idally where a ring like that came from.
He had told her he found it at a flea market.
She had thought nothing of it for 30 years.
Investigators from the Harlem County Cold Case Unit coordinated with the Nebraska State Patrol and the Omaha Police Department.
Dena from a water bottle Ketman discarded in a public location, retrieved without his knowledge under a court order, was submitted for analysis and compared against the forensic evidence from the 1981 scene.
The results came back in March of 2025.
The match was conclusive.
Ketman was arrested at his home in Omaha on March 19th, 2025.
He answered the door.
He looked at the badge.
He said nothing for a long time.
Then he said, “Which one?”
The detective who made the arrest said that those two words in the context of everything that followed were the most clarifying thing Ketman said in the entire subsequent investigation.
Because it turned out there were others.
There were two other cases in Nebraska and Kansas that investigators tied to Ketman through Deanna and circumstantial evidence over the following eight months.
The Harland County case had not been his first, and it had not been his last.
He was charged in Iowa with first-degree murder in the death of Gary Pullman, whose remains were located in the spring of 2025 on a parcel of land that investigators identified through records showing Ketman had briefly rented a rural property near Aoka in 1981.
Gary had been there for 44 years, 11 miles from where his truck was found, 2 miles from where the woman in his ring had been left on the highway.
The woman, Jane Doe 8114, who had worn Gary’s ring for those 44 years, was identified through genealogy Dena submitted to a public ancestry database and cross-referenced by investigators.
Her name was Deborah Anne Curts.
She was 23 years old in 1981.
She had been traveling from Illinois to visit a college friend in Nebraska and had been last seen at a truck stop in Missouri in September of that year.
Her family in Illinois had never stopped filing inquiries.
They had been told repeatedly that she was an adult who had left voluntarily.
Her mother had died in 2003 without an answer.
Dennis Roy Ketman pleaded guilty in October of 2025 to avoid trial and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He made no statement at sentencing.
He looked at the floor.
Gary Pullman was buried on his family’s land outside Shelby on a Tuesday in June of 2025.
His sister Karen, who was 63 years old and had driven from De Moine for the service, brought Calvin Marsh’s legal pad and read one page of it aloud at the graveside.
It was the page where Marsh had written in 1983.
Gary Pullman was 26 years old.
He fixed things without being asked.
He coached baseball because he believed every kid was one fundamental away from being good.
He had a dog named Buster and a ring with his initials in it and plans he never got to tell his mother about.
He deserves better than this file.
Karen said she wanted people to know that Calvin Marsh had written those words in 1983 and had meant them and that they were still true in 2025.
Deborah Curts’s family in Illinois received her identified remains in August of 2025.
Her brother, who had been 10 years old when she disappeared and was 54 at the time of the identification, said in a statement to the press that his family had spent 44 years wondering.
He said they were done wondering.
He said Deborah had been 23 years old and had been on her way to see a friend, and that was the kind of person she was, the kind of person who drove a long way to show up for someone.
And he wanted people to know that about her.
Gary Pullman never got to tell his mother the name of the woman he had planned to ask to marry him.
That plan, like everything else he had in the autumn of 1981, was taken before it could become a fact.
Deborah Curts never made it to Nebraska to see her friend.
She wore a ring that didn’t belong to her for 44 years in the ground in an Iowa county where nobody knew her name.
And that ring turned out to be the one thing Dennis Roy Ketman could not erase because he had taken it from a dead man’s hand and given it to someone else’s grave.
And 44 years later, a retired school teacher recognized the shape of it on a Sunday afternoon, and the eraser came undone.
How many cold cases do you think are sitting in file rooms right now that could be broken open by something as ordinary as a ring photograph on a website?
And what does it say about the system that Jane do 8114 wore an evidence tag for 44 years while her family in Illinois was told she had simply left?
And what do you think justice looks like for a victim’s family when the answer arrives decades after the people who needed it most have already died waiting?
Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Justice found Gary Pullman and Deborah Curts after 44 years because a ring kept a name that nothing else could take away.
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