Sioux City Attorney Brian Vakulskas first heard about the murder case of Jerry Mark as a 12-year-old.
“My dad, a young lawyer, happened to be in the courtroom as the guilty verdicts were read, and he told me about the trial and it kind of just stayed in my head,” Vakulskas said. “I thought it might make for a good book someday.”
The crime that Vakulskas couldn't stop thinking about read like a horror story. On Halloween in 1975, someone gunned down Leslie "Les" Mark, his wife and their two children as they slept in their farmhouse outside of Cedar Falls.
A jury in Woodbury County convicted Jerry Mark of the murders the next year. Prosecutors stated Jerry, the older brother, felt slighted after not inheriting the family farm. Because of the shocking nature of the crime and the prominence of the Mark family, the trial took place in Woodbury instead of Black Hawk County. Throughout the decades, Jerry Mark proclaimed his innocence.
“Years later, after I became a lawyer, I started looking at the case closer and studying the transcripts and I realized all the problems with the original trial and the prosecutorial misconduct that came with that,” Vakulskas recalled.
Vakulskas reached out to Jerry Mark behind bars to share his findings.
“And he told me, ironically, he had heard from the Wrongful Conviction Unit of the State Public Defender, who was now looking into his case,” Vakulskas added.
Support for Jerry Mark's legal plight
This certainly looked like a mafia hit.Attorney Brian Vakulskas
The state public defender’s office filed an application for post-conviction relief in late October on behalf of Jerry Mark. More than 100 pages detail why their client deserves another chance with the legal system — including new evidence unknown to investigators at the time surrounding a family friend from Brazil who testified against a major drug smuggling cartel. They now believe the Leslie Mark family wasn't the intended target.
“This certainly looked like a mafia hit. The four brutal slayings were by shotgun to the head and heart of all the victims,” Vakulskas said. “But, the investigation focused on Jerry from nearly the beginning. He was a hippie, a draft-dodger and a lawyer. He worked for the Peace Corps at one time and was living in Berkeley, Calif.”
At the time of the killings, Mark claimed to be on a cross-country motorcycle trip in Nebraska — hundreds of miles away.
“When they realized that he was closer to the farm than California, police took a single photograph of Jerry to hundreds of places along a presumed route between Berkeley and Iowa,” Vakulskas said. “And as you would imagine, you show that photograph to enough people, and out of 100, a few of them are going to say, ‘Yes, I did see him at this particular time.’”
Court documents also share details that his legal team believes point to Mark’s innocence, including the state presenting false testimony, relying on junk science, and violating his due process rights to a fair trial.
“The fact that they never developed any suspect other than Jerry, this is a classic case of tunnel vision for prosecutors — 'If you find a person, we can put a crime to it,' and you can make all the evidence point to one person if you can, and that’s the argument on appeal.”
A conviction overturned, then reversed
Previously, a federal judge in 2006 threw out Mark's conviction. But the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling.
“It was based essentially upon prosecutorial misconduct. Several documents were suppressed from the original trial, documents that tended to show Jerry's innocence,” Vakulskas said. “Jerry has been wrongfully convicted. There were no eyewitnesses, and no fingerprints ever matched up to Jerry being at the farmhouse.”
Vakulskas said evidence during the original trial tied ammunition Mark bought in California to the shootings, which the FBI now considers unreliable. Plus, retested DNA evidence from cigarettes did not link Mark to the crime scene.
“Frankly, you had to wait for the science to catch up with the law," Vakulskas said. "And so, as the new science has been developed, he's a lot more hopeful this time he will have a chance at exoneration based upon the fact that the science is now showing that the conviction was based upon essentially faulty science.”
Vakulskas now considers Mark a friend after their first meeting about seven years ago. He hopes the legal system moves quickly since Mark is 81 years old.
“He's learned to deal with the ups and downs of going through the appellate process because, for the last 50 years, he's had a court case going at one time or another,” Vakulskas said. “It's been a difficult slog for him — keep in mind, he's been in prison since 1976, and so his life is what it is.”
Iowa Public Radio contacted the Black Hawk County attorney and the original prosecutor in the case for comment on the new filing and will update this story with future developments.
