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Villisca was a
close-knit community in those days but the peacefulness
here was shattered on June 10, 1912 with the discovery
of eight bloody corpses in a house along one of the
town's tree-lined streets. The J.B. Moore family,
respected and well-liked members of the community, along
with two overnight guests, were found murdered in
their beds. And now, more than 90 years later, the
crimes remain unsolved.
What happened on that dark night
in Villisca? And what occurred to cause at least some of the spirits
of this terrible crime to stay behind in this world?
Bloody Murder
It was a warm evening in southwestern Iowa and the town of Villisca
stirred quietly in the gloom of the setting sun. The dinner hour had
long since passed and many residents escaped to the cool of the
front porch after the heat of the day started to settle. Stores
locked up for the evening and lights began to appear in the windows
of homes along the darkening streets. At the Presbyterian Church,
music filtered to the street outside, along with laughter and polite
applause. The Children's Day Program came to an end around 9:30 p.m.
and soon the parishioners began trickling out into the street,
heading home for the night.
Sarah Moore, who had coordinated the program, gathered her family
around her as they started walking home. She was joined by her
husband Josiah, known popularly in town as J.B., and her children,
Herman, Catherine, Boyd and Paul. Two young girls, friends of the
Moore children who had also been in the evening's program, Lena and
Ina Stillinger, came home with the Moore's to spend the night.
The following morning, June 10, Mary Peckham, the Moore's next door
neighbor, stepped out of the back door of her home to hang some
laundry on the line. As Mary worked, some times passed and she
realized that not only had the Moore's not been outside to
start their own chores that morning but that the house itself seemed
unusually still. This was very strange as J.B. Moore always left
early for work and Sarah was always up at dawn to start breakfast
and the day's work. The Moore house was full of young children and
so the morning hours were always loud and boisterous. Could the
Moore's be sick? Mary waited for a few more minutes and then
approached the house and knocked on the door. It was still eerily
quiet inside. She waited for a few moments and then knocked again.
Once more, there was no answer and so she tried to open the door,
thinking that she could poke her head inside and call for Sarah. She
pulled on the door handle though and found that it was locked from
the inside.
Mary did go out to the small barn behind the Moore house and let the
chickens out into the yard. She felt it was the least she could do
to help Sarah, who she was convinced must be under the weather.
After she let out the chickens, Mary went back into her own house
but the more she thought about the silent home next door, the more
that she worried. Finally, when she could stand it no more, she
placed a telephone call to J.B.'s brother, Ross Moore, and he
promised to come over as soon as he could. This was the first step
in what would turn out to be one of the most bungled criminal
investigations of the era.
When Ross Moore arrived at the home of his brother, he was met by
Mary Peckham, who had continued to try and raise someone in the
neighboring home. Ross tried the door himself and then leaned up to
peer into a bedroom window. It was too dark to see anything, so he
returned to the door, banging on it and shouting for his brother and
sister-in-law. There was still no answer, so he produced his own set
of keys and looked through the ring until he found one that opened
the front door. As he pushed open the door, Moore stepped into the
parlor with Mary Peckham behind him. Moore looked around, seeing no
one in the kitchen. He called out but there was no answer. On the
opposite side of the parlor was a doorway that went into one of the
children's bedrooms. He carefully opened the door and looked into
the room. He nearly cried out when he saw two bloody bodies on the
bed and dark stains on the sheets. Moore never even looked to see
who was lying there. He ran back to the porch and shouted for Mary
Peckham to call the sheriff --- someone had been murdered!
The City Marshall, Hank Horton,
arrived a short time later and searched the house. The two bodies in
the downstairs bedroom were Lena Stillinger, age 12, and her sister,
Ina, age 8. The girls were houseguests of the Moore children. They
had come home with them after the church program the night before.
The remaining members of the Moore family were found in the upstairs
bedrooms. Every person in the house had been brutally murdered,
their skulls crushed with an ax. The victims included Josiah Moore,
age 43; Sarah Montgomery Moore, age 44; Herman, age 11; Catherine,
age 10; Boyd, age 7; Paul, age 5; and the Stillinger sisters.
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Almost as soon as the
murders were discovered, the news of the massacre
traveled quickly throughout Villisca. As friends,
neighbors and curiosity seekers descended on the Moore
house, the town's small police force quickly lost
control of the crime scene. It has been said that
literally hundreds of people walked through the house,
staring at the bodies, touching everything and even
taking souvenirs before the Villisca National Guard unit
arrived at noon to close off the scene and secure the
home for state police investigators. It's easy for us
now to blame this disastrous mismanagement on local
police officers but in 1912, such a crime still would
have been much more difficult to solve than it would be
today. At that time, fingerprinting was still a new
idea, crime scene photographs were rarely taken and DNA
testing would be unimaginable for decades to come. |
A newspaper photograph of the Moore family at the
time of the murders. (Courtesy of Darwin & Martha Linn) |
In short, investigators in rural
areas like this simply did not see crimes of this magnitude in 1912.
In spite of this, the investigators did manage to make some notes of
the scene or all of the clues would have been completely lost. As it
was though, any evidence left in the house was likely destroyed.
Thanks to this, the murders remain
unsolved to this day.
Blood On Their Hands?
While no one was ever convicted of the Moore / Stillinger murders,
there was never any shortage of suspects in the case. In the days
that followed the crime, there were at least four suspects mentioned
in every edition of the newspaper. However, leads were quickly
exhausted, alibis were established and possibilities began to
dwindle. The local police, state investigators, private detectives
who were hired, and even amateur detectives looking for the reward
that had been offered combed the town and the surrounding region,
following every clue that was presented. Dozens of theories were
pursued but each time the investigation seemed to be getting close
to something, it all fell apart again. As time wore on, the
possibility of solving the crime began to fade and eventually, the
trail went cold.
Today, historians, and those with an interest in the case, have
their own ideas of who committed the murders. There are many who
believe the killer was a local man, who was known to the victims,
while others believe a deranged preacher, a traveling hobo or
dangerous serial killer was responsible for the deaths of the
Moore's and the Stillinger girls. The leading suspects included:
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Frank F. Jones
(Courtesy of Darwin & Martha Linn) |
- Frank F. Jones, a
prominent Villisca resident and state Senator. J.B.
Moore worked for Jones for several years until he opened
his own implement company in 1908. According to many
residents, Jones was extremely upset that Moore left his
employ and managed to take the very lucrative John Deere
franchise with him. Jones was undoubtedly the most
powerful man in town during this era and it's not likely
that he would have suffered what he considered a
"defeat" lightly. But would this have been enough to
murder Moore and his family? Some believe that matters
were made even worse by the fact that J.B. Moore was
engaged in an affair with Jones' daughter-in-law, Dona.
Although no actual evidence of any affair exists, it was
a rumor that was going around at the time of the
murders. This may have enraged not only Jones but his
son, Albert, as well. |
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- William Mansfield was the man believed to
have carried out the crimes for Jones. After the Burns
Detective Agency from Kansas City got involved in the
case, their detective in charge, James Newton Wilkerson,
became convinced that Jones was involved in the murders.
He openly accused Frank and Albert Jones of hiring a man
named William Mansfield to carry out the crime. He
believed that J.B. Moore was supposed to be the only
target but Mansfield had killed everyone in the house
instead. Neither of the Jones' was ever arrested and
both of them vehemently denied any connection to the
killings.
Mansfield came from
Blue Island, Illinois. Wilkerson believed that
Mansfield, who was also known under the aliases of
George Worley and Jack Turnbaugh, was a cocaine fiend
and a killer who was also responsible for other murders.
His investigation revealed that all of these murders
were committed in precisely the same manner, which led
him to believe that one man was responsible for all of
them. Wilkerson managed to convince a grand jury to open
an investigation in 1916 and Mansfield was arrested and
brought to Montgomery County from Kansas City. However,
the accused managed to produce payroll records that
showed that he was in Illinois at the time of the
Villisca murders. Without any other evidence, Mansfield
was released. |
William Mansfield
(Courtesy of Darwin & Martha Linn) |
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Reverend George Kelly, a traveling preacher, became
another prime suspect in the murders. Kelly was described as a
"spidery little man" with protruding ears, a prominent nose, high
forehead and a wide mouth with large lips that seemed to turn down
at the corners even when he smiled. People recalled his dark eyes
and were disconcerted by his mannerisms. He was easily excited and
often ranted and spoke so fast that he was sometimes impossible to
understand. He was also said to drool excessively and sprayed spit
all over those who were close to him when he talked.
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Reverend George Kelly
(Courtesy of Darwin & Martha Linn) |
Kelly and his wife
settled in Macedonia, Iowa in 1912 after several years
of preaching throughout the Midwest. He continued as an
itinerant preacher and was present at the Children's Day
program at the Presbyterian Church on the night of the
murders. His presence here, and his departure from town
during the early morning hours on June 10, made him a
prime suspect in the killings. It was also said that the
minister confessed to the crime on the train going back
to Macedonia and that he had committed the murders
because he had a vision that told him to "slay and slay
utterly", a phrase that allegedly came from the Bible.
Before his "confession" though, Kelly wrote a number of
letters to the authorities about the Moore / Stillinger
deaths. In the letters, Kelly appeared to be obsessed
with the murders and supposedly wrote things that only
the killer would know. His uttering on the train ("slay
and slay utterly") was said to have been overheard by
witnesses and he spoke to other passengers about the
killings --- before they were even reported, some said.
True or not, Kelly did send a bloody shirt to the
laundry in Council Bluffs but it was never recovered.
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In 1914, Kelly was arrested but
not for the murders. He was jailed in South Dakota for sending
obscene materials through the mail and was sentenced to prison.
Instead, he ended up in a mental hospital in Washington D.C. By 1917
though, suspicions had fallen onto Kelly in Iowa and he was arrested
for the Moore / Stillinger murders. Kelly supposedly rambled a
nearly incoherent confession and the fact that it was accepted at
all had led some to call this a "mockery of law enforcement
practices at the time". Kelly withdrew the confession before his
trial began. His first trial resulted in a hung jury and he was
finally acquitted by the second.
- Andy Sawyer: Despite what many
believed was strong evidence against some of the principals in the
case, detectives were unable to ignore other similar murders that
occurred in the Midwest around the same time as the Villisca
murders. There remains a very strong possibility that a serial
killer, before anyone even knew what a "serial killer" was, could
have been at work during this time. Although every hobo, transient
and otherwise unaccounted for stranger became a suspect in the
Villisca murders at one time or another, there were a few of these
travelers who stood out from the others. One of them was a man named
Andy Sawyer. Although no real
evidence ever linked Sawyer to the crime, his name was often
mentioned during the grand jury proceedings. He was fingered by his
boss on a railroad crew, who claimed that he seemed to have more
information about the murders that he should have had. In addition,
he slept with, and carried on conversations with, his ax. Sawyer was
arrested and brought in for questioning but was apparently dismissed
as a suspect in the case when it was discovered that police records
had him in Osceola, Iowa on the night of the murders. He was
arrested for vagrancy and the Osceola sheriff recalled putting him
on a train out of town at approximately 11:00 p.m. on the night of
June 9. Could he have still made it to Villisca to carry out the
murders that night? His railroad crew boss, and the other nervous
men on his crew, believed that he could but his concerns were
dismissed and Sawyer vanished into history.
- Henry Moore (no relation to
the family) was perhaps the most likely suspect in the "drifter"
category. who was no relation to the murdered family. Although
accused of some of the same crimes as William Mansfield, Moore was
actually convicted of ax murders a short time after the events in
Villisca. Some believe that he was responsible for a bloody spree of
murder that wreaked havoc across the Midwest and included the
murders of the Moore family and Stillinger girls in Iowa. Moore was
prosecuted in December 1912 for the murder of his mother and
maternal grandmother in Columbia, Missouri. He had slaughtered both
of his victims with an ax and while this was horrific enough, it was
just the final act in a bloody rampage that may have spanned 18
months, five states and more than 20 murders. It is thought that the
Villisca murders were what finally put federal authorities on
Moore's trail.
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The discovery of the
killing spree might never have been realized if
authorities in Villisca had not requested federal
assistance in the solution of their local massacre in
June 1912. The police had the savaged bodies of the
Moore's and the Stillinger girls but had no clues or
direction for their investigation. A federal officer,
M.W. McClaughry, was assigned to the case and his
investigation revealed that the Villisca murders were
not unique. Nine months before, in September 1911, a
similar massacre had occurred in Colorado Springs,
taking the lives of H.C. Wayne, his wife and child, and
Mrs. A.J. Burnham and her two children. A month later,
in October, another massacre claimed the lives of the
Dewson family in Monmouth, Illinois and then a little
more than a week later, the five members of the Showman
family of Ellsworth, Kansas were also murdered in their
beds. In every case, the killer had broken into their
homes late at night and had killed everyone with an ax.
On June 5, 1912 --- just days before the carnage in
Villisca --- Rollin Hudson and his wife were murdered in
Paola, Kansas. The murders were carried out in the same
way as the earlier crimes, and just as would occur a
short time later in Villisca. McClaughry was convinced
that a transient maniac was responsible for all of the
murders. And while he was a hard-working investigator,
it would be coincidence and good luck that would point
him in the direction of Henry Moore. McClaughry's father
was the warden of the federal penitentiary at
Leavenworth and was a man with many contacts within the
prison system. When he heard about the case of Henry
Moore, who was serving a life sentence in Missouri for
the December 1912 murders of his mother and grandmother,
he informed his son. After comparing the evidence in all
of the cases, capped by interviews with Moore,
McClaughry announced, on May 9, 1913, that the books had
been closed on 23 Midwestern homicides. |
As the person guilty of the Villisca Axe Murders was
never arrested nor convicted, the reward fund was used
by the citizens of Villisca to purchase gravestones for
the Moore family. |
Unfortunately, no one took his
findings seriously and most were happier to believe that the real
killer was Reverend George Kelly, who had "confessed" to the
Villisca murders. Kelly publicly recanted as the trial approached
and his ramblings seemed to bolster pleas of mental illness. He was
later acquitted after two trials.
During all of the publicity
surrounding the trial, the information collected by M.W. McClaughry
had been largely forgotten. In spite of this, McClaughry remained
convinced of Moore's guilt and always believed that he had solved
the Villisca murders.
Officially however, the case remains open to this day.
The Haunting of the Moore House
During the hours before dawn on June 10, 1912, a small frame house
in Villisca, Iowa became the site of one of the grisliest massacres
in Midwestern history when the family of J.B. Moore and two
overnight guests were murdered as they slept. The house earned a
place in American crime history that morning and a place in the
annals of ghostly legend as well.
The house had many owners and tenants over the years but in
1994, a real estate agent approached Darwin and Martha Linn,
local farmers, about the possibility of them purchasing the
house. At the time, the Linn’s already owned and operated the
Olson-Linn Museum located on Villisca’s town square and they
felt that purchasing the house would give them the opportunity
to preserve more of the area’s history. Because of its
deteriorating condition, the Moore house was in danger of being
razed. If the Linn’s had not purchased it, it’s likely that it
would have been destroyed. They soon set about obtaining the
necessary funds to restore the home to its condition at the time
of the murders in 1912.
Using old photographs, the Linn’s began the renovation work in
late 1994. The restoration included the removal of vinyl siding
and the repainting of the original wood on the outside, the
removal of the enclosures on the front and back porch, the
restoration of an outhouse and chicken coop in the backyard and
the removal of all of the indoor plumbing and electrical
fixtures in the house. The pantry in the original house had been
converted to a bathroom years before and this room was now
restored to its 1912 condition. Then, using testimony and
records from the coroner’s inquest and grand jury hearings, the
Linn’s placed furniture in approximately the same places as it
was located at the time of the murders. Unfortunately, the
furniture that had belonged to the Moore’s had vanished many
decades ago but antiques were used to replace what was lost.
The Moore home was added to the National Register of Historic
Places in 1998 and remains today as a colorful time capsule of
1912, the ghastly murders that occurred here and the mystery
that followed. The walls of the place hide many secrets ----
from the identity of the murderer to just how he managed to
carry out his dark deeds without awakening the occupants of the
house ---- and these secrets still bring many visitors to the
door. Some come looking for the history of the place but most of
them come looking for the ghosts.
Ever since the Moore house was opened to overnight visitors
several years ago, ghost enthusiasts, curiosity-seekers and
diehard paranormal investigators have come here in droves, all
seeking the strange, the unusual and the haunted. Some have
stayed here alone, like the Des Moines disk jockey who awoke in
the night to the sounds of children’s voices when no children
were present. Others have come in groups and have gone away with
mysterious audio, video and photographic evidence that suggests
something supernatural lurks within these walls. Tours have been
cut short by falling lamps, moving objects, banging sounds and a
child’s laughter, while psychics who have come here have claimed
to communicate with the spirits of the dead.
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If even a fraction of the stories circulating
about this place were true, I reasoned when I
first heard about the so-called “Villisca Ax
Murder House”, then this would have to be one of
the most haunted places in America. The history
of the place certainly provided a possibility
for the story of the haunting to be true --- but
was it? I would find that out for myself in May
2005, when I hosted an overnight stay at this
legendary house. What happened that night, which
was detailed in the book
So, There I Was,
made me a believer when it comes to the ghosts
of this eerie old house.
But is the Moore house in
Villisca really haunted? There are many who maintain
that it's not. They say that many people lived in
the house over the years and none of them ever
mentioned ghosts or mysterious activity. It was not
until the renovations began that visitors began to
say that strange events were occurring within the
walls of the "Ax Murder House". |
Are these events merely the products of overactive imaginations
or wishful thinking? That's what some would like you to believe but
don't be fooled --- and don't take my word for it either.
I have come to believe that this
house is haunted because of my own experiences here. I hope the
reader will reserve his own judgment until the time comes when he
can spend his own night inside of this house. It's not a place for
the faint of heart but if you are looking for a place where you
might be able to experience paranormal phenomena on your own, then
search for Villisca, Iowa on the map and make your own plans to step
back in time to this historic ---- and haunted --- place.
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