IOWA CITY, Iowa – An anonymous letter with $500 and a plea for forgiveness sheds some light on a long-forgotten crime at an Iowa Catholic college.
The writer admitted stealing a portable radio from a teacher's lounge at Clarke College in Dubuque in 1955. The writer tried to make amends by slipping five $100 bills into the mailing sent last week to college president Sister Joanne Burrows.
It seeks forgiveness, saying the money was to be used by current faculty.
The letter bears few clues to the writer's identity: It has a fake return address and a Chicago postmark.
Burrows says no one is around at Clarke who would have remembered the theft. She says "good Catholic guilt" probably weighed on the writer's conscience all these years.
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