Two and a half months before, in Washington, D.C., when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was informed of the sadistic nature of the murder of 18 month-old Donna Sue Davis, he was said to have responded simply, "Get him!"

And "get him" was what the police and the FBI were determined to do. The FBI regional office in Omaha joined the Sioux City police in directing the investigation, practically taking over a floor of the federal building downtown. Some 20 to 30 FBI officers came into town; agents were paired up with Sioux City police officers. (The FBI became involved because the body had been found across the state line in Nebraska.) "I never saw better police work than in the Donna Sue Davis case, not even the Lindbergh kidnapping," one Sioux City lawyer close to the case would say later....

Woodbury County Attorney (District Attorney) Don O’Brien had never seen the FBI more involved than in the Davis case. "They were constantly bringing people in," he said. "Richard Tedrow was the court reporter and the FBI had him taking statements. They took statements from half the people in town." Suspects who didn’t have a reasonable alibi were sent to Des Moines, the state capital, for lie detector tests; later a polygraph was set up in the federal building in Sioux City. Don Doyle, a state legislator from Sioux City at the time, noted that the police and the FBI "questioned every neighbor, anyone ever arrested for anything." Two years after the Davis murder, Doyle received a phone call from a constituent who told him that his son had been turned down for admission to Officer Candidates School because he had been questioned in the Davis case. There had been no evidence against the young man, and the police had only interrogated him on one occasion; it was just that practically everyone was questioned....

As the week dragged on, despite the zeal of the FBI and the Sioux City police and despite the large number of people brought in for questioning, the case was going nowhere. An Indiana man wanted on a parole violation was held for four days in Dubuque and then let go when it was confirmed that he hadn’t even been in Sioux City on the weekend of the kidnapping. Two other men who had been held in other cities were dismissed as suspects as well. In Sioux City, the police arrested a 19-year-old Kansas man and charged him with lascivious acts with a child. But since nothing was found to link him with Donna Sue’s murder, he was released on bond.

With the murderer still at large, the citizens of Sioux City and neighboring towns remained extremely tense. Parents refused to let their children out of their sight. Numerous people called the police to report neighborhood prowlers. When officers arrived to investigate, they were met by irate citizens carrying loaded off-safety shotguns and other firearms. There were several cases of Sioux Cityans firing guns into the air to "scare off" possible marauders. When a South Sioux City man returned home from a meeting that had kept him out until 11 p.m., he found his wife sitting anxiously in the living room, a rifle at her side....

In Sunday sermons, some Sioux City ministers used the murder of Donna Sue as a lesson in the evils of improper attire. One pastor asked women to avoid appearing on the streets in scanty dress that was appropriate "possibly only on the beach." Another urged parents to see that their children were properly dressed; certain types of attire created by "pagan designers" might arouse the passions and baser instincts of "sex maniacs." Whether the minister believed that Donna Sue Davis’ pink pajamas fit that category was unclear....

It wasn’t enough merely to find the killer of Donna Sue Davis. What was needed was a means of stopping such men before they murdered and raped and sodomized. And suddenly, talk of Iowa’s sexual psychopath law — a law few people had paid any attention to when the governor had signed it a few months before — was on everyone’s lips.

On January 31, 1955, five months to the day after the abduction of Jimmy Bremmers and five months before the murder of Donna Sue Davis, a group of legislators introduced a bill in the Iowa House of Representatives whose purpose was "to provide for the confinement of persons who are dangerous criminal sexual psychopaths." Two of the four sponsors — Representatives Jacob Van Zwol and Wendell Pendleton — represented counties near Sioux City and were obviously aware of the public outrage over the young boy’s death. Under the legislation, anyone charged with a public offense and who possessed "criminal propensities toward the commission of sex offenses" could be declared by the local county attorney to be a criminal sexual psychopath. The county attorney would submit a petition to that effect, a hearing would take place, and a judge could then commit the accused person to a state mental hospital. There, the person would be detained and treated indefinitely or until he was certified as "cured." The bill essentially amounted to preventive detention.

In introducing such a bill, the legislators proposed that Iowa join 25 other states and the District of Columbia, which had all enacted such legislation, usually in the aftermath of vicious sex crimes.

The term sexual psychopath was invented in the 1930s, according to Estelle B. Freedman, a historian who has studied and written on the subject. During this period, American criminologists became interested in the link between sexual abnormality and sex crimes. Increasingly, the male "sexual deviant" was a subject of social concern, particularly as a threat to children. It was the Great Depression, and jobless men roamed the countryside, hopping freights and wandering into unfamiliar towns in search of work or a free meal. The traditional social structures that had kept such men in check were crumbling. Enter the notion of the sexual psychopath. "From the origin of the concept, the psychopath had been perceived as a drifter, an unemployed man who lived beyond the boundaries of familial and social controls," Freedman wrote in her essay, " ‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960." "Unemployed men and vagabonds populated the Depression-era landscape, signaling actual family dissolution and symbolizing potential social and political disruption." The drifter had acquired a sexual dimension, and a new and sinister category of criminal was born....