The Villisca Axe Murder House

The last good evening the Moore family ever had ended with applause.

It was Sunday, June 9, 1912, and the Presbyterian church in Villisca, Iowa, was holding its Children’s Day program — a summer tradition of recitations, hymns and nervous little speeches delivered to rows of proud parents fanning themselves in the heat. Sarah Moore had helped organize it. Her four children took part. So did two sisters from a farm outside town, Lena and Ina Stillinger, twelve and eight years old, who were friends with ten-year-old Katherine Moore.

When the program let out around half past nine, the Stillinger girls were supposed to go to their grandmother’s house. Katherine begged instead for them to spend the night. Somebody — no one can now say who — agreed. A telephone call home wasn’t made. It didn’t seem necessary. Villisca was a town of about 2,500 people, with two railroads, a busy main street, and the kind of neighborliness where children slept over without a fuss.

The eight of them walked the few blocks home together in the warm dark: Josiah Moore, a hardware merchant of forty-three; his wife Sarah; their children Herman, Katherine, Boyd and Paul; and the two Stillinger sisters. They went into the white frame house at 508 East Second Street. The door closed.

No one inside ever came out again.

The Morning

Mary Peckham lived next door, and by seven o’clock on Monday morning she knew something was wrong.

The Moore house was always busy at that hour. Sarah would be in the yard, the children would be running out to do chores, Josiah would be heading to his store. But that Monday the house was silent. The curtains were drawn. Nobody let the chickens out. Mrs. Peckham knocked on the door and got no answer. She tried it. It was locked.

She telephoned Josiah’s brother, Ross Moore, who came over, found his own key on his ring, and let himself in. He went no farther than the downstairs bedroom just off the parlor. What he saw on the bed there sent him stumbling back onto the porch, where he told Mrs. Peckham to call the town marshal.

The two girls in that bed were Lena and Ina Stillinger. Upstairs, in their own beds, were Josiah, Sarah, and all four of the Moore children.

Every one of them had been killed with an axe. The axe belonged to Josiah. The killer had used it, then left it in the downstairs bedroom, propped against the wall. Someone had tried to wipe it clean.

The Things He Left Behind

What has haunted investigators for more than a century is not only the violence, but the strange, almost ritual care the killer seemed to take afterward.

Every face in the house had been covered — with a sheet, a dress, a piece of clothing. Every mirror in the house had been draped with cloth. The two windows that had no curtains had been covered with garments. The kerosene lamps had their chimneys removed and their wicks turned down. In the kitchen, investigators found a bowl of bloody water, as if the killer had washed his hands. On the table was a plate of untouched food. Near the axe in the downstairs bedroom lay a slab of uncooked bacon, roughly two pounds, wrapped in a cloth. A second piece was found in the icebox.

The coroner believed the murders happened between midnight and two in the morning. Investigators thought every victim had been asleep — except, possibly, Lena Stillinger, the oldest of the two sisters. The position of her body and a wound on her arm suggested that she may have woken. She may have seen him.

Then came the second horror of that morning, the one that destroyed any real chance of solving the case.

Word spread through Villisca within the hour. People came. And because it was 1912, and because no one had ever seen anything like this, they did not stay on the lawn. Townspeople walked through the house. They walked through the bedrooms. They touched the beds and the walls. By some accounts, at least one man left with a piece of the skull. By the time the National Guard was called in to hold the crowd back, the crime scene had been trampled into uselessness. Fingerprinting was still new, but it existed. There was nothing left to print.

The Suspects

Over the next decade, the Villisca case consumed the state of Iowa. There were repeated grand juries, a slander suit, private detectives, a state senator accused of murder, and a minister who confessed.

The first name on many lips was Frank F. Jones, a powerful local businessman and state senator. Josiah Moore had once worked for him before leaving to open his own competing hardware store, and taking the lucrative John Deere franchise with him. A private detective named James Wilkerson became convinced that Jones had hired a killer to wipe out the family. Wilkerson named a drifter called William “Blackie” Mansfield as the man who swung the axe. A grand jury looked at the evidence and declined to indict Mansfield; his payroll records seemed to place him in Illinois that night. Jones sued Wilkerson for slander, the town split down the middle, and friendships of thirty years ended over dinner tables.

Then there was Henry Lee Moore — no relation — who was convicted of murdering his mother and grandmother with an axe in Missouri in December of 1912. A federal investigator came to believe Henry Moore was responsible for a whole string of nearly identical axe murders across the Midwest in 1911 and 1912: Colorado Springs, Monmouth, Ellsworth, Paola. In several of those cases, the killer had used the victim’s own axe, struck at night, and covered faces or windows. It is one of the earliest theories of an American serial killer, and some researchers still find it the most convincing.

But the man who actually stood trial was the strangest of them all.

The Reverend

The Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly was an English-born traveling preacher — small, nervous, odd in his manner. He had come to Villisca for the first time on the very day of the murders. He had been at the Children’s Day service. He had watched the Stillinger girls perform.

And early Monday morning, before the bodies were found, he boarded a train out of town.

According to later testimony, Kelly told fellow passengers on that train that there were eight dead people back in Villisca, killed in their beds while they slept. In the weeks that followed, he wrote letters to investigators and to the victims’ families, asking questions about the case. He visited the house posing as a detective. He had, it emerged, a history of disturbing behavior, including an arrest for sending obscene material through the mail.

In 1917, five years after the murders, Kelly was arrested. Under long interrogation he signed a confession, saying God had told him to “slay utterly.” At trial, he took it back. He said he’d been coerced and exhausted. Whatever the truth, the jury in his first trial could not reach a verdict. The second jury acquitted him.

No one else was ever tried. The Villisca axe murders remain officially unsolved.

The House That Kept Its Secret

For decades the Moore house was simply a house. Families lived in it. Children grew up in it. It changed hands, it was remodeled, it was painted. Then, in 1994, a couple named Darwin and Martha Linn bought it and did something unusual: they restored it to how it looked in 1912. They removed the indoor plumbing and electricity, tracked down period furniture, rebuilt the outhouse. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

And that was when the stories started being collected in earnest.

People who have taken the tours or stayed the night — the house has been rented for overnight stays for years — report a remarkably consistent set of experiences. Children’s voices, faint, coming from upstairs when the house is empty. The sound of something heavy being dragged. Footsteps in the attic, where some believe the killer hid during the Children’s Day program, waiting. Doors that close by themselves. A lamp that dims. Visitors have described a sudden, crushing sadness that comes over them in the children’s bedroom and lifts the moment they step into the hall.

Some guests have brought home recordings of what they insist is a small voice answering their questions in the empty upstairs rooms.

I’m not going to tell you what to make of that. I’ve read the accounts of the inquest and the trial, and what stays with me is not any ghost story. It’s the cloth over the mirrors. Of everything the killer did that night, that is the detail I can’t put down — a man who had just done what he did, moving through a dark house, room by room, covering every reflecting surface he could find. As if he couldn’t stand to be seen. As if he couldn’t stand to see himself.

Whatever walked into 508 East Second Street that night, it walked away into the summer dark and was never caught. Some people think it’s still the most important thing about the house.

Some people think it never left.