Retiring Urbandale Officer Shares His 20 Minutes of Fame and 34 Years of Service

Urbandale Police Chief Ross McCarty is trying to be happy for Lt. Doug Hobart, who is retiring Friday.

Hobart heads Urbandale's detectives unit and a team of six detectives who last year solved about 90 percent of Urbandale's violent crimes (robbery, rape, homicide, assault), compared with the national average of 64 percent.

The detectives also cleared 30 percent of property crimes (theft and burglary), compared to the national clearance rate of 19 percent.

"I attribute it to his leadership," said McCarty, of the department's outstanding clearance rate. "As detectives, they're not individually better than any other detective who's worked back there, but as a group they have a synergistic effort. So, instead of two plus two equaling four; two plus two equals six or ten."

Changes in the group - a new lieutenant to replace Hobart - and possibly a new detective as another detective also is looking at retirement, may change that, McCarty said.

"You hope that you can maintain that, but you also have to enjoy the fact that you got to have this special group work together while you did," he said.

"It's Going to Be Just Fine"

Hobart, who is retiring after 34 years with the Urbandale department to become an investigator with the Polk County Attorney's office, says he's not worried that Urbandale detectives will solve fewer crimes after he leaves.

"That's not working because of me. I'm part of it, but I know the quality of the people who are here. It's going to be just fine," he said.

"I've got a crew of dedicated, hard-working detectives," he said. "They're not doing a good job just because I'm telling them to. They're doing a good job because that's what they like to do."

Hobart started his a career in law enforcement right after high school. "I wanted to be a policeman ever since I was a little kid," he said.

He's done a lot of different things in his career - patrol, drug investigations, Capitol Police, but he said he "really fell in love with investigations."

His Most Famous Case

One case, in particular, stands out as a high point: in 1988, Hobart worked on the case of an Urbandale nurse whom doctors suspected was suffocating her two-year-old son so that she could revive him and get the accolades and praise for saving his life.

The woman, Tanya Reid, was one of the first criminal cases nationwide to be tried on a form of child-abuse involving an attention-getting behavior by the adult called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. 

During the investigation, police discovered that Reid had a daughter who had supposedly died of SIDS when the family lived in Texas and Hobart remembers the race to get enough evidence together to remove Reid's two-year-old son, Matthew, from the home.

"It was go, go, go," he recalls. "It took about a week to get him out of there. We were hoping nothing bad happened." 

At the time, Hobart had a 2-year-old son, as well.

Dateline NBC did a story on the case.

"When that broke, I had calls from all over the country from detectives wanting to know about this condition," he said.

Reid was convicted of child endangerment in Iowa and served 10 years in prison, he said. On the day she was released, she was arrested for the death of her daughter in Texas. She was convicted of that death and sentenced to 40 years in prison there.

Hobart was interviewed for a book on the case and has been interviewed for television programs about Reid. 

There will be a special retirement ceremony from 1 to 4 p.m. Thursday at the . Hobart's wife, Barb, will be there, as will as his two children: Katie Parmenter, a fraud investigator for US Bank, and Andy Hobart, an Iowa State Patrol trooper who lives in Hampton.