Tanner Jon King, 30, was convicted by a Story County jury on Dec. 4, 2019, for the murders of brothers Marion and El Dominic Rhodes, of Fort Dodge, after a three-week-long trial. The jury deliberated for about 14 hours. He was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and has been incarcerated at the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison.

The Rhodes brothers were gunned down in downtown Fort Dodge on Oct. 22, 2018. The brothers’ bodies were found in an alley behind King’s apartment building near Second Avenue North and North Ninth Street.

King was identified as a suspect, questioned and eventually charged with double murder.

King is appealing his conviction on the grounds that law enforcement failed to follow up on leads that would have led them to conclude another person committed the murders — Cletio Clark.

Both Clark and King were suspects early in the investigation, records show. Eventually, Clark “flipped” on King during the investigation of the murder. After initially denying being present at the scene of the crime, Clark admitted to investigators that he was present and that King had also shot at him. King was then charged with the two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. The attempted murder charge was eventually dropped before the start of trial.

Eyewitness Margaret Seiler, 19, testified during the trial that she saw King “full sprint running” after she heard gunshots that night. The defense argued that the person she saw running couldn’t have been King because prior to the shooting, King was involved in an incident where he jumped from the third floor of the Webster County Law Enforcement Center in 2014 and had suffered injuries to his legs that made him unable to run at full speed.

A search of King’s apartment did result in the seizure of .40-caliber ammunition and magazines — the same caliber of ammunition used to kill the Rhodes brothers — but no gun was ever recovered.

“The state candidly admitted they had a circumstantial case, no motive, were not sure what happened and didn’t know why the Rhodes brothers were murdered,” Jack Bjornstand, King’s appellate lawyer wrote in the appeals brief.

The theory of the defense at trial was that Johnny Young, a gang member from Kansas City, had put out a hit on the Rhodes brothers because Marion Rhodes had snitched on him and got him sent to prison.

Young was a member of the same gang as Clark, the Vice Lords. A witness, Jeremy Mack, told investigators that Clark and Young were involved in the murders. Mack was Marion Rhodes’ fiance’s brother.

In King’s appeal, he argues that the trial court misapplied the “Bowden defense” during trial by not allowing testimony from barbershop owner Priest Wilson about the “word on the street” rumors he had heard in his barbershop about the hit Young had put out on the brothers.

“Counsel couldn’t effectively present its defense because Wilson’s testimony was excluded,” Bjornstad wrote.

In its brief in response to the appeal, the state argued that Wilson’s testimony was not offered to support a Bowden defense because it did not identify a lead that investigators failed to investigate. Iowa State Assistant Attorney General Louis Sloven wrote that “these rumors could not possibly be relevant to show that police ‘failed to reasonably act on the information’ and failed to investigate Clark’s potential involvement.”

Sloven wrote that both Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Special Agent Ray Fiedler and Fort Dodge Police Department Detective Larry Hedlund testified that Clark was a “person of interest” and was an early focus of the investigation.

Sloven called King’s Bowden-defense appeal a “sleight of hand,” arguing that King was not offering Wilson’s testimony to establish that police should have investigated Clark’s involvement, but to use the rumors as evidence that investigators reached the wrong conclusion and charged the wrong person.

The Iowa Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in this case on June 3 at the Arrowwood Resort in Okoboji. The arguments are open to the public.