Eight Beds, One Axe: The Villisca Murders That Iowa Never Solved
Villisca, in the southwestern corner of Iowa, was a prosperous railroad town of about twenty five hundred people in the summer of 1912. On the evening of Sunday, June 9, the family of Josiah Moore spent the last hours of the day at the Presbyterian church, where Josiah had helped organize the Children's Day program and where his four children took part. Walking home with them were two guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger, sisters of twelve and eight, who had asked to stay the night rather than return to their own house. By about eleven o'clock the lamps in the white frame house on East Second Street had gone dark.
The next morning the house stayed shut. A neighbor, Mary Peckham, noticed that the Moores had not come out to do their chores, that the shades were down, the animals unfed, and that no one answered her knock. She telephoned Josiah's brother, Ross Moore, who came with his own key, stepped into the downstairs guest bedroom and walked straight back out, telling her only to call the sheriff.
Eight people were dead inside. All of them had been struck in the head with an axe while they slept: Josiah, 43; his wife Sarah, 39; their children Herman, 11, Katherine, 10, Boyd, 7, and Paul, 5, in the upstairs bedrooms; and the two Stillinger sisters in the ground floor room. A local doctor placed the time of death between midnight and five in the morning. Nothing suggested that any of the eight had been awake. The weapon was an axe that belonged to Josiah himself, taken from his own woodpile, and the killer had left it behind, its blade wiped, propped against a wall downstairs.
The condition of the house was as strange as the crime. Every mirror had been covered with cloth, as was the custom during a wake, and the faces of the dead had been covered with bedding and clothing. The windows were draped with aprons and skirts. A kerosene lamp stood with its glass chimney removed and the wick turned low, as though whoever used it had wanted only the faintest light to work by.
In the kitchen investigators found a plate of uneaten food and a bowl of bloodstained water in which someone appeared to have rinsed his hands. A four pound slab of bacon leaned against the wall beside the axe, and a second piece, wrapped in a towel, lay on the floor of the downstairs bedroom next to a fragment of a keychain that did not belong to the Moores. In the attic there were two spent cigarettes. In the barn there was an impression in the hay beside a knothole that looked out toward the house.
Almost nothing was done to preserve the scene. Word raced through the town, and within hours curious neighbors were walking through the rooms; by some accounts as many as a hundred people passed through before the Iowa National Guard sealed the house. Objects were handled and moved. Fingerprinting was in its infancy and was barely used in rural Iowa, and whatever trace the killer had left was walked over and lost. Within a day the physical case had effectively dissolved.
Two findings survived the confusion. There was no sign of forced entry and nothing of value had been taken, which ruled out robbery and suggested that the killer had either been admitted or, more likely, had slipped into the empty house while the family was at church and waited there. And the axe was Josiah's own, which meant the killer had arrived without a weapon and used what the house provided.
The investigation ran for years and produced no conviction. Bloodhounds were brought in, private detectives were hired, and grand juries met more than once. Andrew Sawyer, a drifter who had behaved oddly in the days after the killings, was cleared when a sheriff in Osceola confirmed that he had jailed him for vagrancy and put him on a train away from Villisca that same night. Sam Moyer, connected to Josiah Moore through family and business, was questioned about rumored friction and produced an alibi. Henry Lee Moore, no relation to the family, killed his own mother and grandmother with an axe later that year, but nothing was ever found to connect him to Iowa.
One line of inquiry reached into the town's own leadership. Frank F. Jones was a state senator and Villisca's most powerful businessman, and Josiah Moore had worked for him before leaving to open a competing farm implement dealership, taking the profitable John Deere franchise with him. A private investigator named James Wilkerson, working for the Burns Detective Agency, publicly accused Jones of paying a man named William Mansfield, known as Blackie, to kill the Moores. Payroll and travel records placed Mansfield in Illinois on the night of the murders. A grand jury refused to indict him, Mansfield sued Wilkerson for slander and won 2,225 dollars, and a later civil suit brought by Moore relatives against Jones failed. Jones was never charged.
The only person ever brought to trial was Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly, an English born traveling preacher who had been in Villisca for the Children's Day service the Moores attended and who left town on an early train, at about 5:19 on Monday morning, hours before the bodies were found. In the years afterward he wrote letters to investigators and to the victims' families. He was arrested in 1917, and after a long interrogation he confessed, describing a voice that had told him to kill. He recanted soon afterward, saying the statement had been forced out of him. He was tried twice. The first jury deadlocked, reportedly eleven to one in favor of acquittal, and the second found him not guilty in 1918. Kelly had a documented history of mental illness.
No one has ever been convicted of the murders and the case remains formally open. The Moore house still stands on East Second Street, restored to its 1912 appearance and run today as a museum, and the town has lived with the question for more than a century.
Conclusions and Open Questions
What is documented is narrow. Eight people were killed in one house between midnight and five in the morning, with a weapon taken from the property; nothing was stolen; no one broke in; and the physical evidence was walked over and destroyed within hours. Everything beyond that is interpretation, and no interpretation has ever been proved in court.
The state's own theory was Kelly. Prosecutors rested it on his presence in town, his departure at dawn, his later preoccupation with the case and finally his confession. Its weakness is that the confession followed a long interrogation, its details changed between tellings, and two separate juries declined to convict on it. Kelly was also a small, frail man, which sits awkwardly with eight killings by axe. He was acquitted, and the allegation against him remains unproven.
The murder for hire theory was proposed by the private investigator James Wilkerson and pressed for years in the local press. It is the only theory that supplies a clear motive, the business rivalry between Frank F. Jones and Josiah Moore. Its weakness is evidentiary: the records placing Mansfield in Illinois were never overturned, a grand jury refused to indict, and a court found the accusation slanderous. Jones was never charged with anything, and the claim against him has to be treated as an accusation that failed in law.
The theory with the most support today came from outside criminology. In their 2017 book The Man from the Train, the statistician Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James argued that Villisca was one of a series of family killings committed by a single traveling murderer along American rail lines around 1912. They point to recurring features: whole households killed while asleep, the blunt side of an axe used, mirrors and windows covered, the weapon left at the scene, and houses within walking distance of a railway. Its weakness is that it identifies a pattern rather than a person; the man they describe was never caught or named with certainty, and the links between the cases are circumstantial.
Some argue for a simpler local explanation, that the killer was someone from Villisca who knew the house, knew the family would be at church late that Sunday, and knew he had the whole night undisturbed. One theory holds that this accounts for the unhurried behaviour at the scene better than a stranger would. It has never advanced beyond argument, because no local suspect was ever tied to the house by evidence.
What remains unexplained is mostly physical. No one has accounted for the covered mirrors and faces, the lamp burning at its lowest setting, the two slabs of bacon, the cigarettes in the attic, or the keychain fragment that did not belong to the household. Nor is there an accepted explanation for how eight people, six of them children, could be killed in a small wooden house without a neighbour hearing anything on a warm night with windows open.
The open questions are still the ones first asked in 1912. Who waited in the barn, and for how long? Were the Stillinger sisters, who decided only that evening to stay over, an accident of timing or part of the reason? And could any of it be answered now, when the evidence was gone before the first trained investigator arrived? Villisca is not unsolved because it was too complicated. It is unsolved because the one chance to solve it was spent in a single morning.