She had won in 2023 for a triumph class display. By the spring of 2024, she was the most decorated amateur tulip grower in the state of Iowa. She had announced in February of 2024 that she would be entering the Tulip Time 16,000 tulips garden of honor. A single integrated display planted on her own property and judged the first Saturday of Tulip Time in May. 16,000 bulbs, four years of cultivation, the headline event of the festival.
Berkeley's cultivation techniques became a small subject of speculation in the Pella Garden Club between 2021 and 2023. Three-time grand champion was a rare achievement at Tulip Time. The previous record had been held by a dairy farmer's wife from Knoxville named Merritt Halverson, who had won twice in the 1990s. Berkeley had beaten the record in her second consecutive season. Her public explanation had been soil amendment innovation and high-frequency low-volume irrigation.
She had given a halfhour talk at the 2023 Iowa State Garden Conference on her irrigation regimen. The talk had not mentioned, of course, that the high-frequency low-volume irrigation was being delivered through a buried unauthorized PVC line from her neighbor's well. The Pella Garden Club newsletter had run a feature on her in March of 2024 titled the Berkeley method, a closer look at a champion's discipline. The newsletter had used 471 words of column space to praise her water management. The newsletter editor, a 70-year-old Pella native named Alchea Beamster, no relation to Merritt Beamster, the tour committee chair, just another Pella surname overlap, would later write a personal letter of apology to me after the case closed.
She had written, "Edmund, I should have asked her where the water came from. I did not. I will not make that mistake again. Thank you for telling the truth in a quiet way that the rest of us were not strong enough to demand on our own. " I framed the letter. It hangs in the wellhouse, too.
I started noticing the irrigation meter readings climb in the late summer of 2022. The increase had been small at first, 6% over the comparable July from the previous year. I had not thought much of it. I had assumed I had not adjusted the drip lines for the new dahlia rose. By July of 2023, the increase had been 13%.
By July of 2024, it was 18%. The water bills were not the issue. My well water cost me nothing. But the flow rates concerned me. Wastewater engineers are particular about flow rates.
Flow rates that drift upward without a corresponding agricultural justification are in our trade a sign of either a measurement error or a leak. I checked the meter calibrations in March of 2024. They were correct. I walked the irrigation lines with a hand sensor on the second weekend of April. I found no leaks.
The trunk line was holding pressure overnight at 112 PSI without dropping more than 2 PSI between midnight and 6:00 a.m. within normal tolerance for a properly installed system. There was no leak. I called the Marion County Sheriff's Office on the 14th of April. I asked Sheriff Aldrich Vandermir to come out for a non-urgent water meter consultation. Aldrich had been the Marion County Sheriff since 2014.