Episode 16: Covered Mirrors

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I can still remember the first time I saw a nightmare on Elm Street as a child. Those tense moments in the dark, the thumping of my heart in my chest, the screams.

The decades have reduced much of those memories down to simple impressions and flashes of key images. And the most important of those, of course, was the glove.

Freddy Krueger's glove was iconic. All leather and metal and fish knives.
Just a glimpse of it was enough to send shivers down the spines of millions.

And it was one of a handful of weapons weapons that became foundational to a new wave of horror movies that started 30 years ago. There were others, of course.

The chainsaw, with its screaming motor and biting teeth, filled many nightmares. The machete always takes me back to the hockey mask wearing Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th.

There are many stories of a killer who uses a hook, from I Know What You Did Last Summer to an Early Episode of Supernatural.

And who could forget the wooden stake that makes an appearance in almost every vampire movie?

But no tool of destruction has been more prolific, more horrific, than the axe.

It's the stuff of nightmares, equal parts passion and skill. It's a near-mythic weapon that instantly inspires fear.

But a little over a century ago, those nightmares became reality.

I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore.

Between January 1911 and April 1912, a killer traveled across western Louisiana and eastern Texas, and whoever they were, A trail of bodies was left on a scale beyond anything we can imagine today.

They were crimes of intense passion and brutality. They were calculated and merciless.
They were hate crimes to the core, focusing on victims of mixed race. And they were all committed with an axe.

The first murder took place in Rain, Louisiana, in January 1911.

While a young mother and her three small children were asleep in their beds, someone entered their home and brutally killed them all with an axe.

Shortly after that, and just 10 miles to the west in the small town of Crowley, the killer struck again.

While Walter Byers and his wife and their six-year-old son slept in their beds, their lives were ended.

There was a pattern forming, something beyond the victims' profiles and the murder weapon. But it was still too early for the authorities to notice.

This was an age age before the internet, after all. Before 24-hour news networks.
Most information traveled along the railroad and took days or weeks to spread effectively.

Which was unfortunate, because that allowed the killer to move on and continue his work.

Just a quick note. I'm going to use the male pronouns when referring to this killer.
It's not an effort to be anti-feminist, believe me.

I just have a hard time imagining a woman would brutally murder small children with an axe. If that assumption offends you, I apologize.

Whoever he was, he didn't wait long before making his next appearance. On February 23, 1911, someone entered the home of the Cassaway family in San Antonio, Texas.

and slaughtered everyone in their sleep. The husband and wife and their three children.

There were never any signs of robbery, no vandalism or other evidence of a reason for the murders. Whoever the man was, he entered each home with one horrific purpose, and then he moved on.

The killer took a long break after San Antonio, but when he reappeared, he was back in Louisiana.

On Sunday, November 26th of 1911, in the city of Lafayette, all six members of the Randall family were butchered while they slept.

The authorities said that each had been killed with a single blow to the back of the head near the right ear, and the weapon, they claimed, was an axe.

The police arrested a woman named Clementine Bernabette, who claimed to have committed the crimes in Rain, Crowley, and Lafayette.

Her story was an odd mixture of voodoo superstition and cult mentality due to her involvement in something called the Sacred Church.

But in the end, the true killer proved her innocence by continuing with his spree while she was behind bars. In January of 1912, Crowley experienced yet another tragedy at the hands of the Axe Man.

Marie Warner and her three children were brutally killed in their beds, following the pattern of the previous murders.

Two days later, in the Louisiana town of Lake Charles, Felix Broussard and his wife and their three children became the next victims. One blow to the head for each, just behind the right ear.

But this was the moment the killer went off script.

He left a note. It wasn't incredibly helpful, but it did lend a small amount of humanity to the man behind the axe.

The note read,

When he maketh the inquisition for blood, he forgetteth not the cry of the humble.

Human 5

No one knew what it meant. No one does to this day.
But it helped the towns along the Southern Pacific Railroad line understand that it wasn't some mythological beast that was hunting them.

No,

the killer was a man.

Still a monster, but of the human variety.

The death toll continued to climb. On February 19, it was Hattie Dove and her three children in Beaumont, Texas.
On March 27th, it was the Monroe family in the town of Gladden.

On April 11th, the killer returned to San Antonio to take the lives of William Burton and his family. And two nights later, in Hempstead, three more lives were taken.

The killer appeared one final time in August of 1912. in the home of James Dashiel in San Antonio.
But something went wrong. Rather than never waking up again, Mrs.

Dashiel opened her eyes as the killer missed his target. She screamed, and he ran, slipping away into the night.

And then, as if it had been nothing more than a hot wind blowing off the gulf, everything just stopped. No more murders.
No more blood.

No more little coffins with no one left to weep over them. Just

gone.

But there's always another axe.

There's always another family.

And there's always

another monster.

Tucked in the southwestern corner of Iowa, between the middle and west branches of the Nottaway River, is the the sleepy town of Villisca.

In 1912, this was the sort of town where everyone knew each other, if not by name, then at least by face.

Local man Joe Moore had been the star salesman at a farm equipment business run by another Villisca native, Frank Jones, but had struck out on his own five years earlier starting his own business.

He and his wife Sarah had four children, ranging from 5 to 11 years of age, and all of them were well-loved around town.

On the night of June 10, eldest daughter Catherine played host to a pair of local girls, Lena and Ina Stillinger, for what we would call a sleepover today.

With a house full, the family retired to bed, and soon all eight of them were fast asleep.

Just after midnight, however, a stranger lifted the latch on the Moore family's back door and stepped inside.

Today, we don't think twice about locking all of our doors and windows before going to bed, but in Villisca in 1912, that would have been overkill. Crime wasn't a problem.
And everyone...

well, we've already covered how friendly they all were.

Whoever it was that entered the Moore house that night closed the door behind himself and then quietly picked up a nearby oil lamp.

This was the type of lamp with a glass chimney on top, which protected the flame from gusts of wind. But it was also prone to toppling out if the lamp was tipped too far.

Breaking glass makes noise, and that's probably why the intruder removed the chimney and set it aside.

He lit the lamp and turned the flame down as low as he could. Just enough light to see by, but not enough to wake anyone up.

And then, moving as quietly as he could, He walked past the room where the two Stillinger girls slept and slowly climbed the narrow stairs.

We know this because the town coroner did his best to later reconstruct the events of that night.

We're told that the man first slipped into the room of Joe and Sarah Moore, who lay asleep in their bed. He set down the lamp.

It would only get in the way when he started to use the other item he had brought with him, an axe.

He raised the weapon over his head. So hard that it scuffed the ceiling of the room, but neither of the occupants of the bed seemed to notice.

He brought brought it down, first on Joe, and then on his wife. Two quick swings, two sickening thuds, and then it was over.

He next visited the more children, asleep in the second upstairs bedroom. He quietly killed each of them with similar, quick blows to the head with the axe before returning to the stairs.

Back on the first floor, He entered the room where the two guests slept and completed his macabre mission.

No one awoke. No one screamed.
No one was allowed a chance to warn the others until it was all over.

But there are signs that one of the Stillinger girls woke up. According to the coroner, her body showed signs of movement prior to her death.
Perhaps the noises upstairs woke her.

Maybe her sister screamed or some other noise disturbed her sleep. But by the time she was awake, it was too late.
She quickly joined the others in their horrible fate.

I wish I could say that the night's events were over, but the intruder, the killer now, wasn't finished.

After killing all eight of the people inside the house, he returned upstairs and systematically brutalized their remains with his axe.

There are details I won't record. Details that most of us can do without, no matter how strong some of our stomachs might be.

But it's estimated that the killer struck Joe Moore's face at least 30 times before moving on to his wife. I think that gives you an idea.

When he was done with his work, the man covered each of the faces of the victims.

All eight victims, shrouded in clothing and bedsheets. And then he moved on to the mirrors in the house, draping each one in turn with more cloth.

Every reflective surface, every place where it might be possible to see eyes staring back at himself, he carefully and deliberately covered each of them.

I think the killer stayed in the house for a while after he was done.

He had taken a bowl and filled it with water, where it appears he washed his blood-soaked hands.

And a little before 5 a.m., the man picked up the house keys of the moors,

turned off the lamp, locked the doors, and then vanished into the red morning sky.

As it goes with so many small-town tragedies, The people of Villisca quickly went in search of someone to blame for the murders.

One of the first suspects to be considered was Iowa Senator Frank Jones. If you remember, Jones had been Joe Moore's boss at the farm equipment business just a few years before.

When he left to strike out on his own, though, Moore had taken one of the most lucrative clients with him, a company called John Deere.

There was no love between these two men. In fact, they used to cross over to the opposite side of the street to avoid passing one another on the sidewalk.

There was also a rumor that Joe Moore had been having an affair with Frank's daughter. The theory, around town at least, was that Frank hired a killer to get rid of Moore.

He was never formally charged with the murders, but the news coverage ruined his political career forever.

Another suspect was local man Lynn George Kelly. Aside from being the town's Presbyterian minister, he was also known as a sexual deviant with mental problems.

This is a guy who had placed an ad in the local newspaper looking for a receptionist receptionist and when women responded, he would instruct them that they would be required to type in the nude.

Super nice guy. If by nice, you mean crazy.
But crazy or not, he quickly admitted to the murders and to leaving town on the train the morning of their discovery.

He was also left-handed, something the coroner had determined was characteristic of a killer. But there were some problems, too.
Kelly was 5'2 ⁇ and weighed a little over 100 pounds soaking wet.

Not the beast people would have expected to find swinging an axe in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, Kelly later recanted his confession and complained about police brutality.

One final suspect was William Mansfield. It was believed by some that Frank Jones had hired Mansfield to do the killing, while others just believe the man worked alone.

Mansfield had a criminal record, and at one point one of the detective agencies hired to investigate the murders claimed that he was even a cocaine addict. No one liked Mansfield.

And it seemed like he was really the guy. Mansfield had been suspected in two other murders prior to Villisca, which didn't help his case.

One in Kansas had happened just four days before, and another in Aurora, Illinois. The locations of both of those murders were easily accessible by train, and both had been committed with an axe.

That's not all. Each of those previous murder scenes were eerily similar to Villisca.

In both homes, investigators found a lamp burning at the foot of the bed, glass chimney missing.

Mirrors in both homes had been covered, and bowls of water used to wash bloody hands that were found near the kitchen.

No prints were found, though, suggesting a killer who was worried about being identified by prison records, something Mansfield would have understood.

In the end, however, Mansfield was able to provide an alibi.

His name was apparently on the payroll records for a business several hundred miles away, making it difficult to believe he could have traveled to Villisca to swing the axe.

Someone did, though, which means the killer got away,

caught a train, skipped town, and landed somewhere else.

Who knows where that train might have taken him?

The axe is about as iconic as it gets. Some of the oldest man-made tools that scientists have discovered are hand axes, suggesting that their form and function is somehow part of our subconscious.

They fit our needs, and perhaps they fit our nature as well.

In Villisca, like countless communities around the world at the turn of the last century, the axe was about as commonplace as the hand-pumped well or the wooden outhouse.

Everyone had one, and everyone took them for granted. It was incredibly common to see them laying on a person's porch or protruding from a large piece of firewood in the yard.

which means that there never would have been a need for the Villisca axe murderer to carry his weapon with him. It was a weapon of convenience.
It was the easy and logical choice.

The perfect tool for the perfect crime.

As a result, our scary stories are full of these brutally sharp iconic weapons. Their vicious arc is the stuff of nightmares.
And for the Moore family, those nightmares became real.

We encounter William Mansfield one more time in the historical records. Shortly after after his trial and release, a man named R.
H. Thorpe from nearby Shenandoah came forward with a story.

According to him, he saw a man fitting Mansfield's description board the train the morning of the murders within walking distance of town.

Maybe it was someone else. Maybe it was Mansfield himself, caught in his own lie.
There's no record that the authorities followed up on this lead, but other things followed him in the years to come.

In June of 1914, two full years after the events in Villisca, Mansfield was arrested one more time, this time in Kansas City.

The reason was his former wife, along with her parents and her infant child, had been found dead in their home in Blue Island, Illinois.

According to the authorities, they had been brutally murdered in their sleep.

The killer had used an axe.

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This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey. Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place. theworldoflore.com slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.
When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.