SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: Who Committed the 1912 Villisca Ax Murders?

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Moving on with our next episode in the playlist. This one's on a horrific and truly saddening multiple acts murder in Iowa in 1912. To some, it looks like a random act of violence committed by someone who is a stranger to the victims. But some odd clues also point to it as the work of possibly someone who knew all of the people who died, which included children. This one is harrowing, interesting, and bizarre.

0:35Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

0:45Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. Put the three of us together. Add a little mystery. A lot of mayhem. You got Stuff You Should Know. And one axe. Yeah.

1:03How many is this? Three? We got Lizzie Borden. Yep. Hintzakai Fick. Yep. And then this one. I couldn't think of any more. Well, I looked. It's funny because I looked. I was like, I wonder if we could do a spinoff show just on ex-murders. And Wikipedia had 30 listed. I'm surprised that's it. There's like 10 mentioned in this article alone. Well, we'll see why there are so many ex-murders. This whole researching the Villisca axe murder kind of solved a question I've had that I didn't realize I knew had. How to pronounce Villisca? We just settled that by calling the Villisca Town Hall. I know. That was a pretty great moment.

1:46Right before we recorded, I was like, are you sure it isn't Villisca? And Josh called the Town Hall and lied. Well, it was kind of a bet that she settled. Yeah, you said settle a bet. We just never put money on it. So if you are whoever answers the phone at the Villisca Town Hall, first of all. Thank you. You got a call today. So congratulations. And second of all, you just spoke to an internet celebrity. I don't know, man. I think Villisca is on the map and it is 100 % because of this murder. Well, if you just type in Villisca, almost all you see is stuff about the Sachs murder. Well, yeah, the site VilliscaIowa.com is entirely dedicated to this axe murder.

2:33It's a pretty big deal. Yeah, no, it's just, it doesn't mention it at all, but all the copy is just in the outline of the shape of an axe. They just talk about like their boys club and stuff that they're doing, their 4th of July parade, but it's in the shape of an axe. Yeah. The population and elevation is in a drop of blood coming off of the axe. Yeah, it's his population not as much as it was on June 9th. That's morbid. 1912. Did you hear about this before? Well, I think after Hinterkaifeck, we had some emails from probably local Iowans. Sure. Iowans? Iowans? Iowinianites. Saying, hey, you guys should, if you're into the, not into axe murders, but.

3:19Get a load of this. If you're into reporting on grisly crimes, you should check out the one we had in 1912. Yeah. They were right, man. This is, ooh. So before we get into it, I think it goes without saying, listeners, that this is a very horrific, grisly crime that we're going to talk about in some detail. Right. So listen at your own discretion. Ex-murder is in the title, everybody. Yeah. Just want to make sure we cover ourselves there. This is one of the most brutal crimes in American history. Yeah. And a lot of people don't know about it. Man. Well, let's stop jabbering and get to criming, okay?

3:57All right. Where was this from, by the way? Well, one of the articles we researched was from Mike Dash of the Smithsonian Magazine. They do great work. Great work. There's another guy named Ed Epperly, who we have to give a shout out to, who has like a whole site called Ask Ed that's dedicated to this murder. Guy's researched it for like 55 years or something like that. Did he write one of the two books probably? Sure. Yeah. He's widely known as the expert on the Villisca axe murder. He knows everything there is to know. And he's got a really fascinating sight. If you're even remotely into true crime and this thing floats your boat, go check out Ed's site and you will just spend days poring over it.

4:40Yeah. One thing I realized in researching this is it was way easier to get away with murder. Yeah. In 1912. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of agreement that had this been done today, they would have caught the guy very quickly. But, yeah, 1912, it was like you wear gloves and you just confounded their only means of detection, basically, aside from an eyewitness. Pretty much. Yeah. So we keep saying 1912, specifically, like you said, June 9th, 1912. Well, June 10th. Well, it was one of those things where it crossed over into midnight. Right. So, June 9th, 10th. Depends on if you're still at partying.

5:21Potato, potato, Villisca, Villissa, right? Yeah. But at 508 East 2nd Street in Villisca, Iowa, which is in the county of Montgomery, in the southeast of the state, I believe. Not as far from here as I thought. No? I didn't map it. I just looked on a map and I was like, wait, Iowa's there? I thought Iowa was like basically in Canada. No. Huh. Where is it? It's right in the middle of the country. I did not realize that. Like it doesn't look further west than like Dallas. I can believe that, but it was the north that gets you, the northern, the northern direction. That's what gets you? Sure. So on this night, June 9th, 10th, 1912, in this little house, there were eight people sleeping.

6:10There were a mom and a dad, Joe and Sarah Moore. And then their four kids, what were their names, Charles? I believe Herman, Catherine, Boyd, and Paul. Right. And then downstairs, there were two additional people sleeping in the house, little Lena and Ina Stillinger. And they were just having a sleepover, right? Yeah, they were friends of Catherine, the oldest daughter, or the only daughter, I guess, of the Moors. And the whole group had been at church. They were Presbyterians. And they had been at church that day. It was Sunday for a special Children's Day mass that Mrs. Moore had helped put on and the kids had all participated in.

6:56And at that mass, Catherine had asked her two friends, Lena and Ina, the sisters, to spend the night. And so they came back home with the Moors from the Children's Day mass. and by I think 10 or 1030, they were all at home in bed and the lights were out and the house was settled in dark. Yeah, man, the Stillinger girls. I mean, this is all very sad, but anytime I hear of a fateful turn like, oh yeah, we just spent the night there that night and things go bad, it always, I don't know, bothers me more. Yeah, for sure. Twists of fate are terrible, especially when they result in terrible deaths. So very late at night, like you said, after midnight, someone crept in to the back of the house, which was not locked.

7:44That's up for debate. Oh, yeah? All right. Locked or unlocked. They got in without raising suspicion. Right. Yeah. Two-story house. And this is a small town. This is, there were, I don't even think, 2 ,000 people living there then, and I think even less now than there were back then. Yeah. One of those places. So this person, and I think by all accounts we can safely say it was a man, creeps in this house with an axe from the property. Yeah, it was Joe Moore's own axe. Yeah, and as we will see, apparently they call these weapons of convenience because back in the day, every single house in the U.S.

8:29had an axe, like in the front or backyard. That just explained it. That was the question I didn't realize I'd had. Why were there so many axe murderers at a certain period of time in American history? It was because everybody had an axe. Yeah, and you would leave it just, you know, like chopped into the stump that you used as the chopping block or whatever. It'd be like a weapon of convenience. Yeah, these days you would have to kill people with like a mailbox. Right. Just something that everyone has. Like a silicone spatula. Or a high-speed internet cable. There you go. Choke somebody with that.

9:05Yeah. Okay, all joking aside, so this dude creeps in there. He's got this axe. He gets, and this is very key here, he gets the lamp, an oil lamp, from the dresser inside the house. He takes off the chimney, the glass, you know, chimney. Yeah. Takes it off, bends the wick in half so the flame is smaller, lights the lamp and then turns it down really low, and then commences creeping. Yeah, with an axe in hand. And this low light oil lamp in the other. Chimneyless lamp, which we'll see is a big clue. Yeah. So he goes up the stairs. Apparently, so he passes the Stillinger girls first. Yep. Goes up the stairs.

9:48He passes the children's bedroom. And then opposite, I believe the landing from the children's bedroom, are Joe and Sarah's room. Or is Joe and Sarah's room. They're sleeping. And he sets the oil lamp down, I believe at the foot of the bed, and he raises the axe over his head. And using the flat end, flat side of the axe, not the sharp blade side, but the other side, he delivers a blow to Joe's head. Joe, I believe, was lying on his back, even though the Smithsonian article says something different. Yeah, raised it so high he even gouged the ceiling, correct? Yeah. Brought it down hard on Joe's head.

10:30probably killed him instantly from that one blow. Then apparently he didn't disturb Sarah at all because he did the same thing to her and both of them were found in a position that they would have been sleeping and there wasn't like the bedclothes weren't ruffled, their arm wasn't up to defend themselves. Right. They died in their sleep it appeared, right? Yes. So he kills the parents either immediately or they die probably pretty quickly. Right. leaves the room and goes next door, and this is really just almost too awful to talk about, but he kills all the children in their sleep. One by one, but again without waking any of them.

11:11Yeah. By the time he got to the Stillinger girls downstairs, it seemed evidence points to the fact that they may have awakened finally. One of them, the older one, Lingna, I believe is the older one. And then he dispatches with both of them. in the same manner. Yeah. Grizzly, awful, awful murder. So that's bad enough, right? This guy just went around and murdered eight people, six of them children under the age of 12. Yeah. Or 12 or under, with the blunt end of an axe. That's bad enough. But then it just gets a million times worse, and this is probably why this axe murder is just part of American history, whether we like it or not.

11:56So what the guy does next is, well he took the axe and he flips it over and he takes the sharp side and he goes around and he starts bashing everybody's head in one by one. Apparently Joe was later found to have been struck as many as 30 times in the head with the axe. Just one by one he went around and completely caved in the head and face of all of his victims methodically throughout the house after they were dead, which is a bizarre, horrible thing to do. Yeah. So then it gets a little bit strange. He goes around to the rooms and all over the house, really, and does different things in each one.

12:46He covers windows with sheets and things. He covers mirrors. Yeah, all the mirrors in the house are covered. He covered the faces of, I believe, all the victims, right? Yeah. One way or another. I believe all of their faces were covered. With either sheets or pillowcases, or I think in the case of the girls, he pulled their dresses up over their faces. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a second. Yeah, it's very... I think in the serial killer or psychopath mode, though, I've heard of stuff like that before, though. Right, like you get the idea that the murderer doesn't want the victim looking at him.

13:25Yeah. which may also explain why he bashed their faces in. Who knows? So the guy apparently hangs out for a little while. He does other weird things, though. The bacon? He grabbed a two-pound slab of bacon, and I saw elsewhere that there was another slab of bacon found in the house, but there was at least one two-pound slab of bacon that he wrapped in a dish towel and then left on the floor of one of the bedrooms. So weird. There was a bowl of bloody water that was later found. He washed himself off. He washed off the axe, although he left it behind. And he apparently hung out for a little while in the house before leaving, sometime before 5 a.m.

14:10So the murders took place around midnight. Yeah. And then come 5 a.m., the house is dark still. It's 5 a.m., so that's not the weirdest thing, although we're talking about Iowa. was. So plenty of people were up at five, including the neighbor, a woman named Mary Peckham. And she noticed that there wasn't anybody up at the house, which was a little odd. It was a Monday morning now. And by seven, she thought it was just downright eerie that there was no sign of life at the house. She went over and let the Moore's chickens out so that they could pick around and feed, she called Joe Moore's store and said, hey, has Joe showed up and found from the employee that he hadn't?

14:57And finally, one of those two gets in touch with a guy named Ross Moore, Joe Moore's brother. And Ross comes over and unlocks the door. The front door is locked. And he goes inside and he comes almost immediately rushing back out, calling for the local marshal to be called. Yeah. basically he gets Hank Horton is the marshal's name. He gets him on the scene. And this, this is where things just kind of go berserk. It's, it's such a small town, such a grisly crime. Um, any chances of preserving a crime scene? And this is 1912. I don't even know how much a small town like this knows about preserving a crime scene at the time.

15:41Um, but any hopes were lost within those first few hours after the discovery, because by all accounts, there were a hundred or more people that went through that house, from doctors to coroners to investigators to just townspeople that were allowed to just go in there and check things out. Yeah, so the first group that comes with the marshal, Hank Horton, right, was two doctors and a minister. J. Clark Cooper. Right, great doctor name. Jay Clark, Cooper, and Edgar Huff and Wesley Ewing, who was the minister of the church. They were the first contingent to make it into the house after Ross Moore came running out.

16:27Yeah. So they go in and they know enough to not disturb things too much. Yeah. Another guy gets brought in, L.A. Lindquist. He's the coroner. Yep. He tries to take some notes about the crime scene. But the person who got the most information was another doctor. His name was... F.S. Williams. Yeah, F.S. Williams was the one who examined the body. And at a later inquest, he had the most details to offer about the bodies, the positions, all that stuff. So when those guys walked in, they were at least well-versed enough to not disturb things as much as possible, or at least more than the townspeople knew.

17:08And F.S. Williams allegedly came out of the house pretty shaken and said, don't go in there boys or you'll regret it till your last day. Yeah. And the townspeople said nuts to you we're going inside we want to see some dead bodies. And they all regretted it probably till their last day. Yeah. Because they not only messed with the crime scene they poked around there was supposedly the town drunk took fragments of Joe Moore's skull as mementos. Like the crime scene was toast like you said. If it could have ever been preserved it was toast. And even the local druggist showed up with his camera to help preserve the crime scene because he heard that the townspeople were tramping all over it.

17:49And Ross Moore, not understanding what he was doing, threw the guy out, thought he was just being a ghoul trying to get pictures. So the crime scene is utterly and completely lost. Yeah, and one of the things about Valeska, I almost said Vassila, is that it was a train town. There were about 30 trains every day that went through there. And so by this time, unless this person was local and maybe hiding out locally, by all accounts, the murderer had probably hopped a train and was out of there at that time. But they didn't realize this until they had already released some bloodhounds. They searched the countryside.

18:28There was like a pretty big search to find whoever did this, and they didn't find anybody. So the town was just terrified. town of 2 ,000 people, eight, including six children, had just been murdered with an ax in your town. And now the sun's starting to go down and nobody's been caught. All right, so let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about suspect number one right after this.

19:17Okay, so suspect number one might be a little surprising when you first hear that he was a state senator.

19:27Very well respected by some as a local businessman. and a very prominent Methodist, it seems the town was pretty sharply divided between Methodist and Presbyterian, you know, those days. And that stuff mattered to those people. And his name was Frank Jones. And Methodist immediately said, no, he's got to be innocent. This is a fine upstanding member of our church. Presbyterians are like, no, it's got to be him. And at first I was like, well, why would it be the state senator? None of this makes sense. There were a couple of big things that made people believe that he could be the guy. Joe Moore worked for him for seven years and was one of his best salesmen on his farm equipment team.

20:19And apparently he left in 1907 and was not too happy with the work hours, which were 16-hour days, six days a week. Who would be? It's like us. And then set up a rival business and even took one of the clients, the John Deere Company. Yeah, that was a big one. I'm sure. So big that when Sarah Peckham called Joe Moore's employee to tell him the news. Joe Moore's employee called the John Deere people in Omaha to let them know. Oh, sure. They were like the third people called after the bodies were discovered. So he takes John Deere with them. So this set up an obvious rivalry. And worse than that, apparently, and I don't know if this is super confirmed, but at least the rumor was that Joe Moore had slept with Jones's daughter-in-law.

21:11From what I understand, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that's understood as true. That's true. Yeah. So slept with his daughter-in-law, who apparently kind of had several affairs in town and was not very discreet. Yeah, apparently, according to Mike Dash at Smithsonian, she used to set up her meet and greets over the phone. I think it's called a liaison. Oh, that's right. Over the phone, and this was at a time when there was a switchboard operator running the phones in the town. Yeah, they could listen in on everything. Who just sat there and listened, yeah. And this lady obviously didn't care. So apparently it was pretty well known that Joe Moore had had an affair with F.F.

21:53Jones' daughter-in-law, which is huge. She put those two things together. They were not friends. The fact that apparently they used to cross to the other side of the street to keep from encountering one another. Yeah. That's a big deal in that town, a small town, right? So suspicion fell onto FF apparently, from what I understand, within a couple hours of the bodies being discovered. Yeah, and suspicion not that he may have done it, that Jones was actually the killer, but maybe Jones, because he was 57 years old and probably had some pretty good money, clearly. Oh, yeah, he was wealthy. He was building a bank, overseeing his new bank being built when he got the news that the bodies were discovered.

22:33Yeah, when you're building a bank, you're rolling in it. Yeah. So everyone thought that he probably hired somebody out to kill him. And there was a very, the Burns Detective Agency, there was a detective named James Wilkerson who said, you know what, I think you're right, I think he hired someone, I think that man's name was William Mansfield. William Blackie Mansfield. He was already, no, he wasn't already. He would later be, I believe, convicted of an axe murder himself. Yeah, which is probably one of the chief reasons he was suspect. Well, no, that came a couple years after, I believe. That was 1914 or 15 that he murdered his wife, her parents, and their child, his child.

23:15Yeah, that's good. With an axe, right? Yeah. This guy was a bad dude. But there was one problem with James Wilkerson's theory. Blackie Mansfield had an airtight alibi. He was in Illinois hundreds of miles away when the crimes occurred. Not only did the foreman vouch for him, but the payroll records showed very clearly that he had not been in Villisca that day and couldn't have done it. Yeah, so he was exonerated, but a lot of townspeople still thought that, you know, how it was back then and still is today to a certain degree. Sure, especially in a small town. Yeah, people were convinced that he was the guy and a lot of people probably went to their graves thinking that.

23:56So even though, Chuck, that Mansfield was exonerated and like you said, a lot of people thought that Jones, FF Jones apparently went by FF. Yeah. Did have something to do with it. The Stillinger girl's father and Ross Moore, Joe Moore's brother, both thought F.F. Jones was behind this. And Wilkinson made it like his personal mission to take Jones down and apparently ruined his political career, cost him re-election to the state senate. I would think that probably happened anyway, just from suspicion. Maybe, but I think there's something between townspeople suspecting you and a detective bringing evidence against you and getting a grand jury to indict you.

24:42It was like the good old days when you could be suspected of an ex-murder and still win a Senate seat. Right, exactly. But Jones, he didn't win re-election. No. And yeah, apparently to their dying day, some people assumed that it was him behind it. Another candidate. Candidate? Suspect. Sure. I think candidate's not the right word. Lynn George Jacqueline Kelly, the man with four names. He went by George Kelly, though. He was an Englishman, which was probably a little weird at the time. Sure. He lived in there. No one had ever seen an Englishman in Iowa. Maybe. He was a preacher, though, and it says in this Smithsonian article, a known sexual deviant.

25:29He definitely had some mental health problems, but there were some things in his case where it sort of were suspicious and others that made him not a great suspect, one of which he was a little guy. He was 5 '2", 119 pounds. So maybe not the best suspect for... Swinging an axe like that? Yeah. Yeah. Although, you know, he could have been strong as an ox. You never know. Sure. Thumbs those little guys, you know. Yeah, but they're usually good with, like, jujitsu sleeper holds rather than axe swinging, you know? They just scramble up on top of you before you know what their legs are around your neck and you're losing consciousness.

26:07Yeah, their thumbs are in your eyeballs. Right. That kind of thing. Right. Yeah, so fair enough. But he was left-handed, and the coroner, Lindquist, did say that, you know, from their analysis, as rudimentary as that might be in 1912, that he could probably at least determine that it was a left-handed assailant. From the blood spatter, I believe. Yeah, that's how you do it. On the walls. So good for them for being that advanced. So there were some other things that implicated George Kelly. One, he was in Villisca. He was a traveling preacher. He and his wife toured around. And they were in Villisca the day of the murder.

26:45They were actually at the children's service. Yeah. That the Moors and the Stillinger girls were at. Again, this guy was a sex maniac is what he was known as. Yeah, I kind of wonder about that. Does that mean he liked to have sex? I guess. He placed an ad, and this is in the 1910s. He placed an ad in the Omaha World Herald looking for a stenographer who would be willing to pose as a model. And when one woman named Jessamine Hodgson replied to his ad, He sent her a letter, and apparently it was quite lewd, so much so that the court that heard the case against him said that it was so obscene, lewd, lascivious, and filthy as to be offensive to this honorable court and improper to be spread upon the record thereof.