On November 10, 2018, Amy Mullis was found dead in a machine shed on the family farm near Earlville, in Delaware County, Iowa, with puncture wounds from a corn rake. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Her husband, Todd Mullis, was convicted of first-degree murder in 2019 and sentenced to life without parole. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in 2022, and a judge denied his petition for postconviction relief in 2026. He remains in prison and continues to contest the conviction.
This page tests the alternative: that the six puncture wounds came from two accidental falls onto the rake. As the author of this reconstruction points out, the prosecution has never put forward a single sequence of events that accounts for all of the physical evidence as a homicide. Here one accident sequence is set out step by step, animated with a featureless mannequin, and checked against the autopsy findings. Body size, rake, clothing and shed measurements come from the defense’s 2023 incident-reconstruction report by Dr. Susan Bowley. The rake is treated as rigid, and its position at each fall is solved from the wounds, not placed by hand.
Case record: Court TV, June 2026 · Iowa Attorney General, June 4, 2026 · Iowa Court of Appeals, No. 20-1173 · KWWL · Bowley, S.M., incident reconstruction report, State of Iowa v. Todd Mullis, filed Delaware County District Court, April 6, 2023
For each fall, a solver finds the one rake position, relative to the body, that best runs the named tines through their wounds: matching the entry point, the recorded depth and the diagram's track angle, while keeping the rest of the rake out of the body. Parallel tines with level tips can't satisfy everything at once, so the leftovers are the test.
Dr. Susan Bowley’s incident reconstruction (filed April 6, 2023) also concludes the wounds came from falls onto the rake, and supplies most of the measurements used on this page. Her sequence assigns some tines differently. Both versions were run through the same solver.
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