![]() |
Nick Grba fell in love with his best friend’s wife, Big Anna. A year later, Big Anna’s husband was blown to bits after parking his taxi in his garage. (Dubuque Telegraph Herald. November 11, 1923) |
A year later, Anna’s
husband, Mike Baldizar, got blown to bits after parking his car in the garage.
Investigators found a
wire strung from an electric battery in a patch of nearby woods connected to a
dynamite stick under Baldizar’s garage steps. When Baldizar left the garage,
the killer detonated the dynamite.
Newspaper accounts said,
“Baldizar was a mass of bleeding flesh and bones when picked up.” Doctors
amputated his right hand and left leg. But his internal injuries were so severe
that doctors said it would be a miracle if he lived.[1]
Baldizar died at the Park
Hospital in Mason City, four days later from the injuries he sustained in the
explosion.
Suspicion quickly turned
to Nick Grba.
Grba admitted buying a
sixty-foot roll of copper wire from the Mason City Electric Company, just days
before the murder. He insisted he used
it to blow up fish in a pond near the Lehigh Cement Plant.
Witnesses saw him buy four sticks of dynamite at a local sporting goods store. He had first tried to get dynamite sticks and blasting caps at the Lehigh Cement plant where he worked, but employees there refused to sell it to him.