The Murder of Anna Anton | USA
The morning of December 27th, 1986 dawned crisp and clear in Thurston County, Nebraska. A local farmer was hauling hay along County Road G, an unmaintained dirt road that cuts through the Ho-Chunk Reservation about twenty miles north of Lyons. As his truck bounced over the rough terrain, something caught his eye in the high grass beside the road.
At first, he thought it might be debris blown by the winter wind. But as he got closer, his blood ran cold. What he saw sticking out of the brown grass wasn't debris at all.
It was a human arm.
Today we're diving into a case that shattered the quiet of a small Nebraska town and exposed the dark secrets lurking beneath the surface of a community where everyone thought they knew everyone else.
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Lyons, Nebraska, in 1986 was the kind of place where people didn't lock their doors. With a population of just 1,200, it was a farming community where neighbors helped neighbors, and the biggest excitement was usually the high school football game on Friday nights. In fact, the town had only recorded one murder in its entire history.
Located sixty miles from Omaha, Lyons was so quiet that Burt County didn't even have a jail. Crime was such a rarity that when something serious happened, investigators had to come from surrounding counties or the state patrol.
The community was built around agriculture, with corn and soybean fields stretching as far as the eye could see. Main Street consisted of a few essential businesses – a grocery store, a diner, a bank, and not much else. It was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone else's business, or at least thought they did.
The town's police force consisted of exactly one man: Police Chief Gregory John Webb. At 6-foot-5 with what one sheriff would later describe as "a Lurch-like appearance," Webb was hard to miss. He'd been the town's police chief for nine years, and by most accounts, he was good at his job. He was professional, competent, and kept the peace in a town where nothing much ever happened.
In October 1986, Anna Marie Anton made the unusual decision to move to Lyons. The 34-year-old divorced woman was nobody's idea of a typical small-town Nebraska resident. As the mayor would later tell investigators, people only moved to Lyons if they had family there, a job waiting, or were returning to their childhood home. Anna had none of those reasons.
Born on July 23, 1952, Anna was noticeable with her pronounced limp from a car accident that had severely damaged her leg. She walked with a cane and relied on the kindness of strangers more than most people her age. Despite her physical limitations, Anna was determined to make a fresh start in this quiet farming community.
She rented a first-floor apartment in a duplex on Pearl Street, just a few blocks from Lyons' tiny downtown. The house was painted pink, and it had one feature that Anna found particularly appealing: the town's police chief, Greg Webb, lived in the apartment upstairs.
To Anna, having a police officer living in her building felt like protection. She'd told several people that she was afraid of her ex-husband, claiming he was involved in drug dealing and that she'd testified against him. The presence of Webb's patrol car parked outside gave her a sense of security that she desperately needed.
Anna quickly became a familiar face around town. She attended St. Joseph's Catholic Church whenever she could find a ride, and her neighbors described her as deeply religious with high moral standards. She didn't drink, they said, and she carried herself with the dignity of someone who'd been through hard times but hadn't let them break her spirit.
Shirley Edgecomb, who lived across the street from Anna's duplex, became her closest friend in Lyons. Shirley would often give Anna rides to the grocery store on Main Street and help her with other errands. During their conversations, Anna would sometimes hint at a past she preferred to keep buried. She gave Shirley a sealed envelope with strict instructions: if anything ever happened to her, Shirley was to open it and call the number inside.
That envelope contained allegations against her ex-husband—allegations that would later prove to be fabricated for reasons that remain unclear to this day.
On December 17th, Shirley Edgecomb stopped by Anna's apartment with groceries. This was also routine: Shirley often helped Anna with shopping and would bring supplies over when she couldn't make the trip herself.
But when Shirley arrived at the duplex, she found the back door locked. This was unusual - Anna rarely locked her door during the day, especially when she was expecting visitors. Shirley knocked on the windows and called Anna's name, but there was no response.
Concerned, Shirley returned several times that evening, but each visit yielded the same result: silence from Anna's apartment. Finally, worried that something might have happened to her friend, Shirley did what seemed natural in a small town - she called the police chief who lived upstairs.
Webb agreed to help, and together they entered Anna's apartment. What they found was puzzling. Anna's personal belongings were still there, including her purse, her coat, and most tellingly, her shoes. An outfit was laid out neatly on the bed, as if Anna had been planning to wear it the next day.
But Anna herself was nowhere to be found.
Webb told Shirley he would look into the matter and filed a missing person report. He made calls to numbers in Anna's address book, he said, but found no trace of her. To all appearances, Webb was doing his job, investigating the disappearance of a woman who lived in his building.
They were able to determine that the last day anyone saw Anna, was December 15. She made her usual trip to the grocery store, walking slowly with her cane, picking up supplies for the week ahead. It was a routine trip in what had become a routine life, with no indication that anything was wrong. But two days later, there was no sign of her.
Ten days after Shirley discovered Anna was gone, on December 27th, a Thurston County farmer located Anna's body. He immediately called authorities. Within hours, investigators from multiple agencies had converged on the scene: Thurston County Sheriff's Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Nebraska State Patrol.
What they found was a crime scene that told a story of careful planning and deliberate concealment. Anna's body was unclothed, and it appeared to have been cleaned before being dumped. She had been shot three times in the torso with a .38-caliber revolver. The body had been there for days, partially covered by frost, hidden in an area so remote that it might never have been discovered if not for the farmer's sharp eyes.
Nebraska State Patrol investigator Jerry Krieger took the lead on the case. A seasoned investigator, Krieger immediately recognized that this wasn't a random killing. The careful cleaning of the body, the removal of all clothing, and the choice of such a remote location suggested someone with knowledge of forensic procedures - someone who understood how to minimize evidence.
The location itself was significant. The body had been dumped on the Ho-Chunk Reservation, which created jurisdictional complications that might have been chosen deliberately to slow down the investigation.
There was another detail that stood out to Krieger: Anna's blood alcohol level was 0.22—more than twice the legal limit. This surprised investigators, as those who knew her said she rarely, if ever, drank.
A few days after the body was discovered, law enforcement officials met to discuss the case at the Hi-Way Diner in Lyons. Those present included investigators from the Nebraska State Patrol, Thurston County officials, Burt County Sheriff Leonard Canarsky, and Greg Webb.
Jerry Krieger used the meeting as an opportunity to question Webb about his relationship with the victim. His first question was direct: Had Webb and Anna been intimate? Webb's answer was immediate and definitive: No.
But Krieger wasn't satisfied. A few minutes later, he asked the same question again. This time, Webb changed his story. Yes, he admitted, they had been intimate once - on the night Anna moved into the duplex.
The inconsistency was a red flag. To test Webb further, Krieger showed him a black-and-white photograph of Anna's face taken at the crime scene. Webb looked at it and claimed he couldn't confirm it was Anna.
This response shocked the other investigators. Shirley Edgecomb, when shown the same photo, had immediately recognized her friend. But Webb, who had lived above Anna for two months, claimed he couldn't identify her.
On December 29th, investigators obtained permission to search Anna's apartment. The results of a Luminol test were immediate and damning. Blood traces appeared everywhere, but most significantly, there was a clear blood trail leading from Anna's apartment up the stairs to Webb's door.
The blood evidence was compelling, but investigators needed a search warrant to examine Webb's apartment. The warrant wasn’t executed for five more days—reportedly due to jurisdictional confusion between local, tribal, and state authorities, compounded by the Christmas holidays.
When investigators finally executed the search warrant on Webb's apartment on January 3rd, 1987, what they found was described by one prosecutor as lighting up "like the Fourth of July."
There were blood stains throughout Webb's apartment - in the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, and the shower. A particularly large stain was found on the living room floor, and there were spatter patterns that suggested violence had occurred in multiple rooms.
In the bedroom closet, investigators found a military-style coat with several spots of blood. Testing would later confirm that the blood was the same type as Anna's. They also found a mop that contained traces of blood consistent with Anna's type. This was 1986, when DNA testing was not yet standard procedure, so the closest determination was blood type, not proof that it belonged to a specific victim. However, this was considered strong investigative evidence.
But by the time investigators made these discoveries, Greg Webb was gone.
On December 23rd, 1986, four days before Anna's body was found, Webb had withdrawn $3,500 from his savings account at the First National Bank of Lyons. It was all the money he had, and he took it in cash. By December 30th, Webb had vanished.
In his final acts before fleeing, Webb had traded in his personal vehicle for another car at a Fremont dealership and consulted with a travel agent about trips to Central and South America. The new car was later found abandoned in a parking lot at Houston's airport.
On January 6th, 1987, a first-degree murder warrant was issued for Gregory John Webb.
What investigators would later discover was that Webb and Anna had a far more complicated relationship than anyone in Lyons had known. The religious woman who attended church and the professional police chief had been leading double lives.
Webb's background was far from ordinary for a small-town police chief. He claimed to have served as a mercenary in Rhodesia and had worked as a police officer in Oakland, California. But what his neighbors didn't know was that Webb had another side - one that emerged when he left the quiet streets of Lyons for the bars and nightlife of Arnolds Park, Iowa, near Lake Okoboji.
It was in one of these bars that Webb met Anna Anton. To the people of Lyons, Anna was a religious woman who didn't drink. But investigators discovered that she, like Webb, had a double life. At Arnolds Park, she was known as something of a party girl who enjoyed the company of men.
When Anna mentioned she was looking for a place to live, Webb made the suggestion that would prove fateful: why not move into the vacant apartment downstairs in his duplex?
The dynamics in the pink duplex were complicated from the start. Anna had moved in with romantic expectations, infatuated with Webb and hoping their relationship might develop into something permanent. But Webb was already involved with another woman - a girlfriend who would regularly visit his upstairs apartment.
For Anna, who could hear everything through the thin walls, this was a source of constant torment. Her religious convictions made the situation even more difficult. She believed that Webb and his girlfriend were living in sin, and she would sprinkle holy water on the stairs and doorknobs, as if she could cleanse the building of what she saw as moral corruption.
According to investigator Jerry Krieger, Anna had begun to suspect that Webb's girlfriend was leaving her child alone while visiting Webb. This created a potential problem for Webb - if Anna reported this to child welfare services, it could create serious legal issues for both him and his girlfriend.
Webb later claimed he fled to Belize, planning to start a new life in Central America, though this was never independently verified. But he quickly became disillusioned with the conditions there. After a brief stay in Guatemala, Webb decided to return to the United States. He crossed back through Mexico and eventually settled in Florida, where he would remain hidden for the next seven years.
In Florida, Webb created a new identity for himself. He altered his birth certificate, changing his name from Gregory John Webb to Gregory James "Jim" Webber. With this new identity, he obtained a Florida driver's license just three months after fleeing Nebraska. Using false social security numbers, Webb found work in the construction industry. He moved from job to job, always ready to disappear if questions arose about his background. He eventually met and moved in with Pam Gilroy, whom he would later marry while awaiting trial.
In February 1993, "Unsolved Mysteries," hosted by Robert Stack, aired a segment about the Anna Anton murder case. It featured interviews with investigators, reenactments of key scenes, and photographs of the wanted suspect, Greg Webb.
John Brereton, a construction company owner in Orlando, Florida, was watching the show that night. As he watched the segment about the Nebraska police chief turned fugitive, something clicked. Brereton recognised the man immediately—it was the same man who had worked under the name Jim Webber.
Webb had worked for Brereton's company under the name Jim Webber. There had been issues with his social security number not matching records, and Webb had eventually quit when questions arose. But Brereton remembered him clearly—after all, it's hard to forget someone who's 6-foot-5 with such a distinctive appearance. The next day, Brereton called police.
On February 23rd, 1993, Webb was summoned to his construction company's office for what he thought was a routine meeting. Instead, he found two police officers waiting for him. Jerry Krieger had flown to Florida for the arrest and insisted on being present when Webb was taken into custody.
As Webb entered the office, a local officer handcuffed him. Then Krieger walked in. Webb's response was telling:
"What took you so long?"
After seven years as a fugitive, Webb seemed almost relieved to be caught.
When Webb was extradited back to Nebraska, he faced a first-degree murder charge that could have resulted in life in prison. The evidence against him was substantial, but the case also presented challenges for prosecutors. The jurisdiction issues, the delay in searching Webb's apartment, and the passage of time all created potential complications for a trial.
Rather than risk a trial, Webb chose to accept a plea deal. He pleaded no contest to manslaughter and tampering with evidence. Webb was sentenced to 10 years in prison but would serve only 8 years before being released in August 2002.
In 2017, more than 30 years after Anna's death, Greg Webb agreed to a phone interview with reporters from the Flatwater Free Press. According to Webb, he and Anna had been drinking heavily on the night she died. He claimed that he woke up to the sound of two gunshots and found Anna's body, but insisted he didn't kill her. He said he was still drunk when he made the decision to dispose of her body.
Webb claimed that, fearing he would be blamed for Anna's death, he cleaned her body in the bathroom, wrapped it in a sheet, and carried it to his car. He said he originally planned to dump the body on the Iowa side of the Missouri River to throw off investigators, but changed his mind when he saw blood on his face in the rearview mirror.
He threw the gun in the Missouri River and hid Anna's cane in an abandoned farm building, he said. Then he drove to the remote field where Anna's body was found.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Webb claimed that a few days after dumping the body, he realized he had made a mistake. He said he planned to retrieve the body, bring it back, and "get things straightened out" with authorities. But when he returned to the field, he said, he couldn't find the body and realized he was "totally screwed."
Jerry Krieger, the investigator who built the case against Webb, doesn't believe any of this story. He points out that the location where the body was found was on an unmaintained road that you wouldn't drive down "on a whim." Krieger believes Webb knew exactly where he was going and why.
Webb was released from the Nebraska State Penitentiary in August 2002, after serving eight years of his sentence. He returned to Florida, where he had built his false identity, and resumed his life as a free man.
Today, Webb lives in the Daytona Beach area, where he has remarried and lives quietly in retirement. He continues to maintain his innocence, telling reporters that he doesn't believe he killed Anna Anton, despite pleading no contest to manslaughter.
Anna Marie Anton was a 34-year-old woman trying to rebuild her life in a small town where she thought she'd be safe. Her physical disability made her vulnerable, and her trust in the police officer who lived above her ultimately cost her life.
Despite Webb's conviction, many questions about the case remain unanswered. The extent of Anna's relationship with Webb, the role of his girlfriend, and the fabricated stories Anna told about her ex-husband may never be fully understood. But what is clear is that a vulnerable woman seeking safety found only death at the hands of the very person sworn to protect her.
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