October 16, 2026 | Waterloo, Iowa. After more than three decades, investigators announced the first murder charge in the 1995 killing of Angela Renee “Angie” Buck. The Iowa Attorney General’s Office confirmed that Kelly Grant, 59, of Bertha, Minnesota, had been arrested on October 15 and charged with first-degree murder. An arrest is an accusation, not a finding that Grant committed the crime.

Angie was 37 when two hunters found her body in rural Black Hawk County on August 11, 1995. The Iowa State Medical Examiner later ruled that she had died from a gunshot wound and classified her death as a homicide. For Angie’s family, the announcement came after 31 years of waiting for the case to reach this new stage.

Why It Matters

A decades-old homicide investigation can become active in court without all of its old questions being answered. The new charge meant prosecutors were formally accusing a person and that the accusation could be tested in legal proceedings. It did not establish who fired the gun, prove a motive, authenticate every historical interview, or resolve the case by a jury verdict. Preserving that distinction matters to Angie’s family and to anyone following the investigation.

Go Deeper | The Official Announcement and Record

What the state confirmed

In its October 16 release, Attorney General Brenna Bird’s office identified Grant and the first-degree murder charge. The release said Black Hawk County sheriff’s deputies and agents of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation worked with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and Todd County Sheriff’s Office to make the October 15 arrest. The Iowa Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit assisted during the later stages of the investigation.

The statement also confirmed Angie’s name, age, August 11, 1995 discovery date and the medical examiner’s conclusion. Those are official details. The release did not publish a full criminal complaint, trial exhibit list, interview recordings, warrant return or forensic inventory. It expressly said the investigation was ongoing and that no more details were being released at that time.

Thirty-one years between the discovery and the charge

Archival profiles from Iowa Cold Cases and Cedar Valley Crime Stoppers preserve details about Angie as a person, including her family, interests and her hope of working in radio. They also preserve historical newspaper citations from the days after her death. Those older accounts are worth studying, but they should not be treated as a modern prosecutor’s official findings without examining the original documents.

Local television reports on October 16 repeated the arrest announcement and described the location where Angie’s body had been found, along a creek near Pilot Grove Road east of Waterloo. The reported location is part of the case’s recorded history, not proof of a suspect’s movements or involvement.

What the first charge did not establish

One charge did not mean a jury had heard evidence or that a judge had ruled on disputed witness accounts. At the time of this first announcement, neither a trial date nor final jury instructions were established by the materials used for this report. Grant retained the presumption of innocence and the right to challenge the prosecution’s evidence.

The official statement did not identify a publicly authenticated murder weapon or release a certified 1995 search-and-evidence ledger. The complete charging papers and any hearing minutes must be checked in their own court docket, rather than reconstructed from news summaries or speculation.

What happened afterward

This is the record of the first arrest announced October 16. On October 29, Iowa’s Attorney General confirmed a second first-degree murder charge, this one against Lindell Jackson of Waterloo on October 28. That was a later development in a separate prosecution, not part of the original October 16 announcement. Both defendants are presumed innocent unless convicted.

Read the separately dated October 29 report on the second charge.

What Happens Next

Our continuing case file tracks the two defendants separately. It will distinguish the complaints and affidavits obtained from court, reports of what witnesses said, any later hearings or motions, and any actual jury instructions if a jury trial takes place. The next research task is to obtain and compare those original filings, not to claim that news coverage alone contains the complete evidence.

Read the current jury-trial status on Angie’s case page. Follow the complete dated chronology.