Family of 6 Found Bludgeoned to Death by Ax in Iowa
Usually, we think of ax murders as a trope of horror films like The Shining, or American Psycho, but ax murders were and are a very real thing, and a serious issue, especially in relatively wooded areas. On the evening of June 9, 1912, The six members of the Moore family – two parents and four children – along with two house guests were bludgeoned to death. All eight victims showed the telltale sign of severe ax wounds on their heads.
The Moore family consisted of parents Josiah (43) and Sarah (39), and their children, 11-year-old Herman Montgomery, 10-year-old Mary Katherine, 7-year-old Arthur Boyd, and little Paul Vernon who was 5. They were fairly affluent, and well known and liked by their community in Villisca, Iowa. On June 9, Mary invited two friends, Ina Mae (8) and Lena Gertrude Stillinger (12) to spend the night. That day, the family attended their local Presbyterian church, where they participated in the Children’s Day program coordinated by Sarah. That evening, the Moores and the Stillinger sisters went home to spend the night.
Disaster Strikes!
The next morning, June 10, The Moores’ neighbor Mary Peckham grew concerned as she hadn't seen the family commencing their early-morning chores. She knocked on the door and found it to be locked. She then went to the back of the house to let out the family’s chickens, after which she phoned Ross Moore, Josiah’s brother. He received no answer at the door either, after both knocking and shouting, and so let himself in with a copy of the house key. He went into the parlor and opened the guest bedroom where he found the bodies of Ina and Lena Stillinger, and immediately told Peckham to call Henry Hornton, the local Peace Officer.
Hornton arrived on the scene soon after. His quick investigation of the house yielded that the entire family, along with the Stillinger girls, had been bludgeoned to death, and the murder weapon, which he found in the guest room with the guests, was Josiah’s own ax. Medical examiners concluded that the murders had taken place between 12:00 and 5:00 am. And two cigarette butts found in the attic indicated that the killer(s) had waited in the home for the Moores to return and fall asleep.
The killer likely started in the master bedroom. Josiah had received many more blows, which were dealt using the ax’s cutting edge. His face had been cut and mutilated to the extent that his eyes were missing. The rest of the victims had been bludgeoned with the blunt back of the ax head. The likely course of events is that the killer bludgeoned the parents, then the kids, and then came back to inflict more damage on Josiah. After that, they went to the guest room and killed the Stillinger girls, where the murder weapon had been left. The investigators believed that all of the victims had been murdered in their sleep except for Lena Stillinger. They believed she had tried to fight back, as she lay on the bed crosswise with a wound in her arm. Her nightgown had been pulled up to her waist, and she wore no undergarments, leading investigators to believe that the killer either tried to or succeeded in, molesting and raping her before killing her.
The Investigation and Attempts at Conviction:
Over the years, many suspects were named in the case as it went cold, including Rev. George Kelly, Frank F. Jones, William Mansfield, Loving Mitchell, Paul Miller, and Henry Lee Moore (not related). Among the possible suspects was one Andrew Sawyer, who was one of a number of transients and unaccounted-for strangers in the area. He was interrogated and released without being charged.
The suspect that police believed most likely to have committed the murder is Reverand John Kelly, who was tried twice for the murder. An English-born traveling minister, Kelly had come into town the day before the murder in order to teach the Children’s day sermon that the Moores had attended. He left town on the 10th, just hours prior to the discovery of the bodies. During the first trial, he confessed to the murder, but the jury did not believe his confession, and the trial ended in a hung jury. In the weeks after the trial, he took an increased interest in the case, making numerous phone calls to police and Moore’s family members.
Suspicion aroused, a private investigator wrote back to Kelly asking for details the minister might know about the murders. He recalled the murder in great detail, claiming to have heard the sounds and even witnessed the crime, but authorities questioned this testimony due to Kelly’s known mental illness. Apparently, he’d suffered a mental breakdown in his teen years. As an adult, he was accused of peeping, even asking numerous women and girls to pose naked for him. Police wondered if Kelly knew the details because had actually committed the murders or if he’d imagined his account of the affair.
In 1914, Kelly was arrested for sending obscene material in the mail, and sexually harassing a woman who applied to be his secretary. He was committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. on account of his mental illness. In 1917, he was retried for the murder of the Moore family. Police had interrogated him and gotten a confession, which Kelly later recanted. He was acquitted after the second trial.
Frank Jones was a Villicia Resident and Iowa State Senator. Josiah was at one point an employee of Frank’s in his implement store, until he left to open his own store, reportedly taking business away from Jones, including a successful John Deere dealership. Moore had also allegedly had an affair with Jones’ daughter-in-law, but this rumor has no supporting evidence.
William Mansfield was the subject of a law enforcement theory, which alleged that Jones had hired Mansfield to kill the Moores. This is due to a striking similarity between this case and another ax murder case from Colorado Springs, only 9 months before. Two other ax murders followed the Colorado Springs incident, in Ellesworth and Paola, Kansas. The cases were so similar, that law enforcement believed the crimes could have been committed by the same person. James Newton Wilkerson, a Kansas City detective, believed that Mansfield was responsible for the ax murder of his wife, infant son, and his parents in law a few years after the Colorado Springs incident, and tied him to the Moore case because of the similarity of the murder to the Colorado Springs and Villisca cases. In fact, all of his investigations into the numerous cases revealed that the murders had been committed in the exact same way: clothes had covered the windows and victims’ faces, and the murder weapon had been wiped off. A basin where the murderer washed was found in the kitchen, and a lit oil lamp with the chimney off sat at the foot of the bed. In each case, the murderer took care to wear gloves so as not to leave fingerprints.
Mansfield was arrested and brought to trial in 1916, where an alibi placed Mansfield in Illinois at the time of the Villisca murder. He was released on lack of evidence, as won a lawsuit against Wilkerson, in which he won $2,225 ($57,382.75 today). However, R. H. Thorpe, the owner of a restaurant in Shenandoah, Iowa claimed he saw Mansfield the day after the murders. The man Thorpe identified as Mansfield said he had walked from Villisca. If proven true, the testimony disproves Mansfield’s alibi. Wilkerson believes that the release of Mansfield had to do with pressure from Frank Jones, as did the subsequent reinvestigation of Rev. Kelly.
Henry Lee Moore was a suspected serial killer who was convicted of the ax murder of his mother and grandmother and was subsequently considered a suspect in the Moore murder due to the same similarities in the murder that linked Mansfield as a possible suspect in the Villisca case.
Sam Moyer, Josiah’s brother-in-law, often threatened to kill Josiah, but his alibi cleared him of the crime. Paul Mueller, a German immigrant, was also considered a suspect due to a longstanding manhunt where he was suspected in the murder of a family in West Brookfield, MA, in 1897. To date, however, despite the trials of the suspects and the suggestive evidence against some of them, the crime remains unsolved.