Summary
Sometime after midnight on 10 June 1912, eight people were killed with an axe as they slept in a house at 508 East Second Street in Villisca, Iowa. They were Josiah B. Moore, 43, his wife Sarah, 39, their children Herman, 11, Mary Katherine, 10, Arthur Boyd, 7, and Paul, 5, and two guests, sisters Lena and Ina Stillinger. A neighbor, Mary Peckham, noticed the morning chores had not started. Josiah’s brother Ross unlocked the door and found the sisters in the downstairs bedroom. Marshal Hank Horton found the rest. The axe was left in that downstairs room. No one has been convicted.
Background
Villisca is a small town in Montgomery County, in southwestern Iowa. On Sunday evening, 9 June 1912, the Moores went to a Children’s Day program at the Presbyterian church. Sarah had helped organize it. Lena and Ina Stillinger came home with the family to stay the night. The coroner’s reconstruction put the killing between midnight and about 5 a.m. The axe was Josiah’s, the one he kept for the coal shed, or one the family could not tell from it. The first blows were with the flat of the head. Josiah was struck many more times than the others. There is no sign the children woke. Lena, the elder Stillinger girl, may have. Doctors found her nightdress drawn up and no evidence of a sexual assault.
The killer covered the faces with bedclothes, and covered the mirrors and the glass with clothing taken from the drawers. A lamp had its chimney set aside and its wick bent down, and it was left at the top of the stairs. A basin of bloody water was in the kitchen. A slab of raw bacon, wrapped in a towel, lay on the floor of the downstairs bedroom near a short piece of key chain that was not the Moores’. The doors were locked and the keys were gone. Coroner L. A. Linquist also noted a depression in the hay in the barn and a knothole aimed at the house. That is his reading of a place someone could have waited. It does not name who waited.
Peckham had knocked, found the door locked, and let the chickens out before she called Ross Moore. Ross had a key. He opened the downstairs bedroom, saw blood, and sent her for Horton. With the marshal came doctors J. Clark Cooper, Edgar Hough, and F. S. Williams, and the Moores’ minister. Williams told the people gathering outside not to go in. As many as a hundred went through anyway. One of them carried off pieces of Josiah’s skull. Whatever prints were in the house that morning did not survive the crowd.
The town split over who had done it. Frank F. Jones was a state senator and a Methodist, and Josiah had been his implement salesman for seven years before leaving in 1907, taking the John Deere account, and setting up across the street. Town talk also said Josiah had been involved with Jones’s daughter-in-law. Jones was never charged. In 1916 James Wilkerson of the Burns Detective Agency said Jones had hired William Mansfield, who was already suspected in an axe killing of his own family in Blue Island, Illinois, in 1914. Payroll records put Mansfield in Illinois on the night of the Villisca deaths. A grand jury did not indict him. Jones sued Wilkerson for slander and lost. The grudge outlasted the investigation.
The man who was tried is Lyn George Jacklin Kelly, an English-born Presbyterian minister, about five foot two. He was in Villisca for the Children’s Day services, and he left on an early train on 10 June, before the bodies were found. He was left-handed. Linquist thought the blood suggested a left-handed swing. Kelly had been caught looking in windows in town. In 1914 he was arrested for obscene mail and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington. In 1917, after a long interrogation, he signed a confession: he had killed the children upstairs first and the children downstairs last, and the phrase in his mind was “Slay utterly.” He took it back and said the confession had been pressed out of him. He was tried twice that year. The first jury split 11 to 1 for acquittal. The second acquitted him. A couple who said he had spoken of the murders before the town knew of them changed their account. Bloody laundry in Macedonia and a later visit, in which he posed as a Scotland Yard man to get inside the house, were never enough to convict him.
Other axe killings of families in their beds, in 1911 and 1912, sit near the same pattern: a weapon left behind, faces covered, a lamp with the chimney off and the wick bent, a railroad close by. Bureau of Investigation agent Matthew McClaughry treated them as one series and named Henry Lee Moore, who was later convicted of killing his mother and grandmother in Columbia, Missouri, in December 1912. That conviction does not place him in Villisca. A 2017 book, The Man from the Train, gives the series to a transient named Paul Mueller. Mueller is that book’s suspect. He is not a name in the sheriff’s file from 1912.
The house was built in 1868. In 1994 Darwin and Martha Linn bought it and put it back to the 1912 rooms, without electricity or running water, and furnished it from photographs of the scene. They opened it to tours and to overnight stays. Guests report children’s voices, footsteps in the upstairs bedrooms, sudden cold, and toys that shift. Those are guest reports. The house does not record them, and they were not part of the 1912 investigation.
Research notes
Historical research: Eight deaths are on the record; the overnight voices are not.
The killing is documented. Eight people were dead in their beds on the morning of 10 June 1912. The marshal, three doctors, and the coroner were in the house that day, and the papers had it the next. What the scene cannot do is name the killer. A crowd walked through before the rooms were held, and one of them took bone. The axe, the covered faces, the covered glass, the bent wick, the basin, the bacon, and the strange key chain are all in that morning’s account. None of them identifies a hand.
Kelly is the only person brought to trial. He confessed under interrogation and recanted, and two juries refused to convict him. Jones was the town’s other story, a business hatred and a rumored affair, and the Burns theory that he had hired Mansfield died on an Illinois payroll. The look-alike axe murders in other railroad towns are a real pattern. They remain a pattern. Putting one man’s name on all of them, whether Henry Lee Moore in 1912 or Paul Mueller in 2017, is a reading, not a verdict.
The voices, the footsteps, and the toys belong to the years since 1994, when the house was opened as a dark overnight. Every guest already knows who died in which room. A report from a night in that house is not a new witness to 1912, and the coroner’s file is not a recording of a child speaking. The crime is unsolved. The haunting is what the guests say they heard.