The Iowa Axe Murders

The Moore house on Second Street in Villisca, Iowa, was the kind of home a small town builds its memory around — a two-story frame house with a porch, a parlor, and a door that, on most nights, was simply locked. Josiah Moore was a well-liked implement dealer; his wife Sarah kept the house. On the evening of June 9, 1912, they returned from a Children's Day program at the Presbyterian church with their four children and two visiting friends, Lena and Ina Stillinger. They put out the lamps and went to bed. No one in the house woke again.

It was a neighbor, Mary Peckham, who noticed the silence first. The next morning the house was still; the blinds were drawn; no one came to the door. She let the Moore chickens out, then called Josiah's brother Ross. When they entered the house together, they found what the town would spend the next century trying to understand.

The thing I could not explain was not the violence itself, but how completely the house had gone quiet — as though the night had simply closed the door behind it.

— Paraphrased from early county depositions, 1912

All eight had been killed in their beds with the blunt back of an axe taken from the Moore home itself. The weapon was left leaning against the wall. The killer had covered the mirrors and the faces of the dead with cloths, and had left a piece of uncooked bacon on the floor. There was no sign of forced entry. Later examination showed a panel of a door had been cut away so a hand could reach through and turn the key.

What followed was less an investigation than a public unraveling. Within days the town had its suspects, and within months it had tried — and acquitted — more than one of them. A traveling preacher, Reverend George Kelly, confessed in 1917 and was tried and acquitted. A business rival of Josiah's, Frank Jones, was suspected but never charged. William "Blackie" Mansfield, a suspect in a string of similar Midwest axe killings, was investigated and released. Each name closed a door without opening one.

The case did not fail for lack of a suspect. It failed for having too many, and not one of them quite enough.

— Roy Marshall, The Villisca Axe Murders

In the decades since, the Moore house has passed through private hands and become, for better or worse, a place people travel to stand in. The rooms are restored to the morning of June 10. Visitors report the sounds and impressions that an old, grief-soaked house tends to gather around itself. None of it has solved the case. The axe was never matched to a hand that mattered, and the town of Villisca, which once locked its doors at sundown for a generation, has kept the file open in the only way a place can — by remembering.