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

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Moving on with our next episode in the playlist. This one's on a horrific and truly saddening multiple axe 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.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, 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.

Axe.

How many is this? Three?

We got Lizzie Borden. Yep.

Happy guy effect. 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 spin-off 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 X-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. Right before we recorded, I was like, are you sure it isn't Velissa? Josh called the town hall and lied.

Well, it was kind of a bet that she settled. Yeah, you said that.
We just never put money on it. So if you are, whoever answers the phone at the Villisca Town Hall,

first of all,

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 this axe murder. Well, yeah, the site villiscaiowa.com is entirely dedicated to this axe murder.

It'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 isn't a drop of blood coming off of the axe. Yeah, it says population not as much as it was on June 9th.
That's morbid. 1912.

Did you hear about this before? Well, I think after Hinter Kaifect, we had some emails from probably local

Iowanes.

Iowanes?

Iowans? Iowanianites.

Saying, hey, you guys should, if you're into the

not into X murders, but get a load of this. If you're into reporting on grizzly crimes, you should check out the one we had in 1912.
Yeah. They were right, man.
This is.

So before we get into it, I think it goes without saying, listeners, that this is a very horrific grizzly crime that we're going to talk about in some detail.

So listen at your own discretion. X 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.
All right.

Where was this from, by the way?

Well, one of the articles we researched was from Mike Dash of the Smithsonian magazine. They did great 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.

Guys 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 site.

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.

Yeah, one thing I realized in researching this was it was way easier to get away with murder than 1912. Yeah.

Yeah, but there's a lot of agreement that had this been done today,

they would have caught the guy very quickly. Sure.
But yeah, 1912, it was like, well, you wear gloves and you just confounded their only means of detection, basically, it's not from an eyewitness.

Pretty much. Yeah.

So we keep saying 1912, specifically, like you said, June 9th, 1912. Wow.
In the little town. 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. Potato, potato, Villisca, Villissa, right? Yeah.
But at 508 East 2nd Street in Villisca, Iowa, which is in the county of Montgomery, in the south.

east of the state, I believe. Not as far from here as I thought.
No?

I just looked on the 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. There 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.

And 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 Moores from the Children's Day Mass.

And by, I think, 10 or 10.30, they were all at home in bed, and the lights were out, and the house was settled and 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. Right.
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. That's up for debate.

Oh, yeah?

All right. Locked or unlocked.
They got in without raising suspicion.

Right, yeah. A 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.

It's 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.

had 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. Well, 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. Yeah.

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

chimney,

and 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. Chimney-less 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.

He 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.
And 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,

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, probably killed him instantly from that one blow. Yeah.

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 in.

There wasn't like the bedclothes weren't ruffled. There wasn't a diff their arm wasn't up to defend themselves.

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.
Yeah.

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, Linga, I believe, is the older one.
And then he dispatches with both of them in the same manner.

Yeah. Grisly, 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, 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. So 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. Yeah.

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. He covers windows with sheets and things.
He covers mirrors.

Yeah, all the mirrors in the house were 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. Yeah.

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. So 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.
So plenty of people were up at 5, 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 peck 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. And 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 is where things just kind of go berserk. It's such a small town, such a grisly crime.

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.

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.
J. Clark Cooper and Edgar Hough 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. Yeah.
So they go in and they know enough to not disturb things too much. Yeah.

Another guy gets brought in,

L.A. Linquist.
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 know to not disturb things as much as possible, or at least more than the townspeople knew. And F.S.

Williams allegedly came out of the house pretty shaken and said, Don't go in there, boys, or you'll regret it to 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 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.

And 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

Valesca, I almost said Vasila,

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 by that time. But

they didn't realize this until they had already released some bloodhounds. They searched the countryside.

There 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 axe 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.

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

very,

well, 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,

when that stuff mattered to those people.

And his name was Frank Jones. And

Methodists 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. But 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.

And 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 him.

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. From 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 to that. They 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. Jones' 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 on to 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 killed.
If you're building the 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.

Who 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 a suspect.

Well, no, that came a couple of years after, I believe. That was 1914 or 15, that he murdered his wife, her parents, and

their child, his child

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 record 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.

So even though, Chuck, that Mansfield was exonerated, and like you said, a lot of people thought that Jones, F.F. Jones, apparently went by FF

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. Right.

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.

It was like the good old days when you could be suspected of an axe 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 assume 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.
Be living 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.

He 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. Sometimes 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, and before you know it, their legs are around your neck and you're losing consciousness. Yeah, their thumbs are in your eyeballs, that kind of thing.
Right.

Yeah, so fair enough. But he was left-handed, and the coroner linquist did say that

from their analysis, as rudimentary as that might be in 1912, it could probably at least determine that it was a left-handed assailant. From the blood spatter, I believe.
Yeah,

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.

They were actually at the children's service

that the Moores 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 likes 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. I really want to know what was in that letter.

Well, one of the things was that the lady would be required to type in the nude. Yeah.
This is the 1910s. No, that's what I'm saying.
I wonder how it would be judged by today's standard. Oh.

Although, I mean, by today's standard, if you sent a potential job candidate a letter that said we're going to require you to be typing in the nude yeah you would get in some trouble for that sure i just don't know that you would say it was obscene lewd and lascivious no i'm with you they'd say that's kink but i think the i so okay george kelly was a kinky traveling preacher who had his wife in tow and he was in villisca at the time of the murders and he left that next morning on a train right but there was supposedly a witness that said that he had a very incriminating um statement when he got off of that train that very morning.

Yeah, he apparently referenced the murders, but he had left town before they found out about the murders.

But then later on, those people recanted those statements, correct? Right. So when Frank Jones, F.F.
Jones, had a grand jury brought to hear evidence against him, he was exonerated.

Same thing.

Not with George Kelly, actually. I should say he was actually the only person to ever go to trial for these murders.
And he was tried twice. The first time, the jury found 11 to 1 in his favor.

The second jury acquitted him entirely.

The evidence against him was just too flimsy, and it probably wasn't him. Yeah, I mean, the idea was they were like, he was at that church service.
He's a pervert. He saw these kids in the service.

He went back and peeked into their house and camped out in their barn.

And the evidence there was there were some hay bales in the barn that had depressions as if someone had been laying on them.

And if you'd laid down in one of them, there was a peephole right there in the barn where you could see the house. This is all pretty flimsy.

There was also, though, I think one of the reasons why the case was brought against him, he was specifically tried for the murder of Lena Stillinger. And that's

noteworthy because although they don't say in the official court record directly

that she may have been sexually assaulted or that some sort of sex crime had been committed against her.

Supposedly, she had been found with her nightclothes hiked up over her waist, like above her waist.

Her undergarments had been taken off and stuffed under the bed.

And then her legs had been arranged so that her genitalia was prominent, right?

That was done after she had been murdered. And I think that's one of the reasons why they suspected George Kelly,

because to add a sexual dimension to this brutal murder, they said, well, this guy's just enough of a sex maniac for that to be possible. Yeah.
Oh, I forgot about this fact, though.

He actually returned a week later and posed as a Scotland Yard detective so he could get a tour of the house. That is so George Kelly.

Well, it's definitely one of those things that makes you go, wait a minute.

Return to the scene of the crime. You lied to get in there and look at the house.
Right. But apparently everyone wanted to to go look at the house.
Yeah. So it's

what's posing. You know, we've seen so many like cartoony movies that like somebody gets like the deer stalker hat and a pipe and says they're from Scotland Yard.

Posing could be like somebody saying like, oh, you must be from Scotland Yard and like grunting in the affirmative. Yeah, that's true.
I guess that technically constitutes posing in the real world.

Apparently signed a confession.

Oh, yeah, that was a big one, too. Yeah.

But I mean, the confession literally said, I killed the children upstairs first and the children downstairs last. I knew God wanted me to do it this way.
Slay utterly came to mind.

And I picked up the axe, went into the house and killed them.

But, you know, he took it back later. It's like, yeah, all that very specific stuff I said about killing this family.
I didn't really do it. So he was exonerated.

So so far, the little town of Villisca has looked around and said, we couldn't find any tramps. So who's the person that hated Joe more the most? FF Jones.
Well, it wasn't him.

Who's the weirdest pervert we can find who was in town at the time? Yeah, that Englishman. George Kelly.
It wasn't him. So they didn't know.

A lot of people went to their graves dying, not knowing what happened. And we still don't know what happened, but with the hindsight of,

I guess, modern forensic techniques, modern profiling, and the work of dedicated historians like Ed Epperly, we have something of a clearer picture emerging, and that picture seems to be centering on the serial killer.

We'll talk about that theory more right after this.

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All right, so we've ruled out these local

suspects, local-ish, I guess, in Kelly's case.

And now the modern take on this is that this was a serial killer because

in 1911 and 1912, there were a lot of axe murders

in the Midwest, at least 10,

everywhere from Colorado Springs to Ellsworth, Kansas.

And

many

of them had

similar traits. Yeah, like some very startlingly similar traits, right? But not all of them.

And some of them are like, and we'll go through these, but some are like, well, in five of them, these same things happen. In two of them, these same things happen.

So, it makes me wonder if it wasn't, if they're kind of grouping too many of these together.

This does. Ed Epperly actually whittles it down to five, including Villisca.
Oh, I thought it was three. Was it five? Five.
So, there's three that happened in 1911.

There was one that happened in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that supposedly kicked the whole thing off. Yeah.
Followed by Monmouth, Illinois.

I forgot the S is silent. You're right.
Yeah. And then Ellsworth, Kansas.
Then there was one in Peola, Kansas.

And then the last one in Villisca. And those five crimes have some similarities that make them really, really suspicious.

The idea of just

like five different people or even a couple of different people

separately committing these crimes.

And as Ed Eppersley puts it kind of dismissively, the idea that these were local vendettas or yeah you know um that that people were like an argument over farming or something right yeah that's not what these these crimes reflect at all they reflect the work of a like just a straight-up nut job psychopath yeah who um

are few and far between so that the fact that these things occurred between october of 1911 and june of 1912 um suggests strongly that that there was one person doing them yeah well there was that final one in columbia missouri in december 1912

um and one of the theories is that a man named henry lee moore uh killed uh georgia moore in columbia missouri who was his mother and mary wilson um

so

is that the guy no that would be weird to commit a series of murders and then finish up with your own family. Right.
Usually it's the other way around. Yeah, right.

So like if you're going to go off on a killing spree, usually you practice on your family first. Yeah, like a real family.
You can get a feel for it, right?

This guy, Henry Lee Moore, aside from having three names, is not a good suspect for the serial killer, right?

He apparently wanted the deeds to his family house. And like you said, it's very rare for a serial killer to go back.
You know the deal with the three names. They don't all have three names.

No, I know, but so many of them do.

Well, no, the news reports it that way to distinguish them from every other Henry Moore in the world. Gotcha.
So, like, everyone's always like, serial killers have three names.

No, they're just reported that way. That's awesome.
Yeah. I love it when things are just explained.
Yeah. They're wrapped up in a nice little bow.
Thanks for that. Like Lee Harvey Oswald.

He, I think, went by Lee Oswald.

I think you're right. Yeah.

Yeah.

So if anyone ever writes a story about Charles Wayne Bryant, we're in trouble.

Oh, yeah. I'm in trouble.
No.

I wouldn't kill you. Thanks, man.
I wouldn't kill you either. Hey, you want to shake on it?

Jerry Witness? Yeah.

So the Henry Lee Moore thing, he's almost like a red herring. Like a lot of people say, well, he was the one.
He was the serial killer behind it. Because

the serial murders started

right after he got out of prison in Kansas. Yes.
And then they ended right after he got caught in Columbia, Missouri with his family. Yeah, I mean, kind of makes sense.

It does, but that's where the whole thing really begins and ends. So a lot of people say, well, it wasn't Henry Lee Moore, so it wasn't a serial killing.

Well, plus, sorry, but his killing his own family was about obtaining the deeds to his family house. Yeah, that's what I was saying.
Oh, so that was greed-motivated? Right. Okay, sorry.

Not a serial psychopathic sex-based serial killing spree, right? This guy was just a jerk.

So since Henry Lee Moore is associated with the serial murder theory, once somebody then finds out that it wasn't Henry Lee Moore, they stopped thinking it was a serial murderer. Right.

Ed Epperley says, not so fast. Wait, wait, wait.

Just because Henry Lee Moore's out of the equation doesn't mean there's not a serial killer involved. He's like, consider the similarities between these five cases.
And

they're pretty thick, right? In a couple of the cases,

there were oil lamps found where

the chimneys were removed and set aside, and the wicks were bent in half to keep the light low. Yeah, that's a big one.

Axes were used in four of the five, but he says that's just probably a matter of convenience.

A pipe, I think, was used in the Monmouth, Illinois case, which is, again, an implement of convenience too, right? Sure. Don't have an axe handy? Go for a lead pipe, right?

Yeah, you probably didn't bring that with you. Right.

There were,

tell them about the, tell them about the mirrors, Chuck. Well, I mean, at several of these places, the mirrors were covered up.
I mean, that's a big one. Yeah.
Mirrors and windows.

And in one of the places, the telephone was covered. And

the thought there is, is that

like you said earlier, like they don't want the victims to be watching them even after death or to be seen and the mirrors and windows being covered.

But the phone, it was one of those old box phones on the wall that you crank. And it has the two, two, it sort of looks like a face.
Right.

When you look at it, it has like, it looks like two eyes and a nose. And so the thought was that that even looks like a face to the deranged serial killer.
So they'll cover that up as well. Right.

Because

nothing else makes much sense. You know, you're not going to, in 1912, you're not getting phone calls after midnight.
You probably, probably don't get more than a couple of phone calls a week in 1912.

Right. Most people only have phones.
Yeah, and throwing a sheet over it wouldn't like disable it anyway. No.

There was

another female victim, a young female victim in Monmouth, who was found basically the same way that Lena Stillinger was found. Yeah.

With her nightgown thrown up over her waist and her undergarments removed.

And

apparently there was a similarity in, I believe, Monmouth and Villisca, where, and one other town, too, where the killer was went on to try to kill again. Yeah, this was the most interesting to me.

Either successfully did kill again. There was one where he went to an adjacent house whose backyard connected the first murder house and then went in and killed another family right afterward.

That was Colorado Springs. And then in Villisca, the telephone operator who was like sleeping in the telephone switchboard headquarters.
Because no calls were coming through. She reported

the doorknob being tried about two hours after the Moore House

members were murdered. Yeah, like heard footsteps come up to the door, try to open it, and then heard the footsteps leave.
Yep.

That's a little shaky, but the last one was the one that kind of sent the chill up my spine. It was the one in Kansas.
Specifically, you said Paola.

I bet you there are people there laughing because it's probably pronounced Paola or something. Probably.

But who knows? P-A-O-L-A, Kansas. There was a second family,

Mrs.

Longmire, the Longmire family.

They were awakened.

She and her daughter at about midnight to the sound of broken glass went downstairs and saw a dude in their dining room who had just broken an oil lamp chimney and then got the heck out of there through a window.

So they actually saw a guy. So think about that, Chuck.
Think about that. They saw, they woke up and saw the man who was about to probably bludgeon them all to death with an axe.

Um, this probably leaving the house, yeah. And these were all train towns, yeah, so they were all linked by train depots.
So, by all accounts, there was a train-going serial killer

for a couple of years in the Midwest, yeah, killing people, hopping trains, yeah, never ever caught. Isn't that nuts? It is nuts, and the Villisca axe murders were probably one of his

crazy,

but we'll never know.

No, you know, when you say stuff like that, or when you see stuff like that in print, too, like, we'll never know who it was.

It makes you wonder, like, what kind of technology are we going to have in the future? Like, will we never know?

Or are we going to come up with something one day where we're like, oh, it was this guy? Yeah. Like, now we know.
You know?

Who knows?

The future knows. That's who knows.
We should do one on Ed Gein. Okay.
That's like kind of one of the big

ones we haven't covered. Okay.

I got a couple more too. Oh, yeah?

I don't want to even tease them yet. Okay.
Okay.

True crime. Maybe we'll do one in

like this October. Okay.
We used to do multiple kind of creepy episodes. I think we did last time, too.
Last October, yeah. All right.
We'll look forward to another

ghoulish

serial killer type thing. Okay.
Yeah, we did Hinter Kfeck, I think. Oh, was that last October? I think so, yeah.
Okay.

If you want to know more about the Villisca X murders, well, again,

strongly recommend you go look up Ed Epperly. You can read the Smithsonian article, The Axe Murderer Who Got Away, which is great.

And there were plenty of other articles that we relied on that we love. Thank you for those.

In the meantime, you can also hang out with us on HowStuffWorks.com and our famous search bar. And since I said search bar, got it in there.
It's time for listener mail.

Hey guys, love the show. And now I have even more reason to promote your podcast to everyone I know.

I work in a small family business with my cousin, and this previous January, started experiencing severe gastrointestinal issues. Oh, I love this email.
Yeah, remember this one?

It was like from yesterday. Yeah.

I won't go into detail,

but for months afterward, he saw specialist after specialist, hoping to find out the route, tested for Crohn's, ulcers, IBS, everything under the sun, none of which had a positive result or diagnosis.

Couldn't focus on anything, no energy, took a ton of time away from work.

He felt totally lost and even sought the help of a psychologist because of his diminished work ethic, deteriorating quality of life. You see where this is going, people?

I think listeners might know. And he was southern.

One day last month, he was southern, actually. He came in after a doctor's appointment and said he developed an iron-deficient anemia to add to his list of issues.

At first, it sounded disconnected until, and I kid you, this is in all caps, I kid you not, Josh and Chuck. I was listening to your hookworm episode that day

man

when you got to the part about the aggressive iron deficient anemia i lost my mind i looked up hookworm infection symptoms immediately brought it to my cousin and he had every last symptom His doctor prescribed a medication and he is currently being dewormed.

Oh man. From the first day he started his treatment, he had a noticeable increase in both mood and energy.

I don't know how these symptoms could have slipped by a half dozen GPs and specialists, but I truly can't thank you you both enough for your podcast and its wide range of topics. That is James in St.

Pete, Florida. That is so awesome, man.
Dude had hookworm. Can you believe it? Man.

Man. Thank you, James.
And good luck to you, cousin. Way to go for being so smart to connect the dots, too.
I think your cousin owes you a pizza or a beer or whatever you want. Maybe both.
Yeah. Yeah.

Trip to Chuck E. Cheese, drunk.

If you want to get in touch with us to tell us an amazing story like James did, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Um Clark and SYSK Podcast.
Chuck's at Charles W.

Chuck Bryant and Stuff You Should Know on Facebook. And you can send us all an email, including Jerry at stuffpodcast at houseuffworks.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyushouldknow.com.

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