Eight killed in 1912, never solved; the house is preserved as it was
On Sunday evening, 9 June 1912, the Moore family of Villisca, Iowa, came home from the Children's Day program at their Presbyterian church, which Sarah Moore had organised, with two guests for the night: Lena and Ina Stillinger, friends of ten-year-old Katherine. Josiah Moore, known as Joe, was 43 and a well-liked businessman in a town of no more than 2,000 people. Sometime after midnight a killer, who may have waited in the attic or watched from the hayloft through a knothole in the barn, took Joe's own axe and killed all eight people in the house as they slept: Joe, Sarah, their children Herman, Katherine, Boyd and Paul, and the two Stillinger girls.
The killer's next acts made the case notorious. He covered the victims' faces with bedclothes and garments, hung cloth over every mirror and pane of glass in the house, took a slab of uncooked bacon from the icebox and left it by the axe, and set out a bowl of water, perhaps to wash his hands. He turned a lamp's wick down to a glimmer, its chimney set aside, and left before dawn, locking the doors and taking the keys. The crime was discovered at about seven the next morning, when a neighbour, Mary Peckham, noticed no one was up to do the chores and called Joe's brother Ross.
Then the scene was lost. After an "all call" over the town telephone exchange, as many as a hundred people tramped through the house, handled the axe and carried off pieces of Joe Moore's skull as keepsakes, until the National Guard closed it off. By sundown there was not a dog to be bought in Villisca at any price.
Suspicion fell first on Frank Jones, a state senator and businessman whom Joe had left in 1907 to set up as a rival, taking the John Deere account with him. A Burns Detective Agency man, James Wilkerson, claimed Jones had hired a killer named William Mansfield, but Mansfield's payroll records put him in Illinois that night. The Reverend Lyn Kelly, a peculiar English-born preacher who had been at the Children's Day service and left town on the 5:19 train that morning, signed a confession in 1917 and then recanted, and two juries in turn refused to convict him. A federal agent, Matthew McClaughry, tied the killings to a chain of Midwest axe murders along the railways in 1911 and 1912, with covered faces, abandoned weapons and lamps with bent wicks.
Nobody was ever convicted. The house still stands, restored in the 1990s, and it has become the town's best-known attraction, where visitors can pay to spend the night.
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