He has, by his own count, screenshotted 17 of Berkeley's public posts in the month since. The screenshots have been useful. The defamation case will be a separate matter the following year. Freddy has not pressed it. She is waiting.
I drove the gator to the south fence line at 10:15 a.m. I walked along my fence to the southeast corner. I stood at the exact corner where the buried line would later be uncovered. I looked across the 8-foot HOA buffer strip onto Berkeley's property. I could see at the back of her garden infrastructure a small concrete utility box she had installed in 2021.
The box had no markings. The box was, I would soon learn, the destination of 3 years of stolen water. I drove back to the house. Sheriff Vandermir pulled into my driveway at 10:31. He had seen the Des Moines Register's photographs on his phone.
He had driven straight from his office. He stood in my kitchen with a cup of coffee. He said, "Edmund, get me the dye chain-of-custody record from Freddy. Get me your meter logs for the past 4 years. I am going to the Stratton property with a search warrant by lunch.
The dye is in her tulips. The dye came from your well. The arithmetic does not require imagination. " He served the warrant at 2:15 p.m. The unauthorized line, 312 ft of 2-in buried PVC running 36 inches deep from the southeast corner of Eddie's irrigation trunk under the HOA buffer strip to a tap at the back of Berkeley's utility box was located by a Pella Public Works ground penetrating radar crew the sheriff had borrowed for the afternoon. The line had been installed by Berkeley's brother-in-law, Casper Markham, a Cedar Rapids plumber who had retired in 2019.
Casper had charged Berkeley $4,000 for the installation. The work had been completed across two weekends in the summer of 2021 under cover of routine landscape construction, Berkeley had told the HOA was a perennial bed expansion. The line had been pumping approximately 210 gallons a night for 1,041 consecutive nights by the time it was discovered. Total stolen water volume 218,610 gallons at the city of Pella municipal rate of 6 cents per gallon. The theft was worth $13,116.
Under Iowa Code section 716.5, theft over $10,000 is a class C felony. I want to be clear about what I did next because Freddy had me write down every step in advance and run it past her for legal review. After the sheriff served the warrant and confirmed the unauthorized line, I told him I intended to make my well water unusable for any unauthorized recipient. He looked at me. He said, "Edmund, it is your water. " I told him I plan to add a second round of fluorescein dye and approximately 50 pounds of solar salt to the main irrigation trunk over the next 48 hours.