Murder in a Small Town - Villisca Axe Murders

Villisca murder house in 1912

June 10, 1912. The Moores—Josiah, his wife Sarah, and their four children—had spent the evening at church. Children’s Day. Laughter, hymns, homemade pie. Two friends, Lena and Ina Stillinger, came home with them for a sleepover. Eight people under one roof. Safe. Ordinary.

Sometime after midnight, the killer arrived.

He came through the back door. Quiet. No signs of forced entry. In his hand, an ax—Josiah’s own.

He started upstairs. Josiah first. Then Sarah. The children next. Room to room. Blow after blow. By the time he reached the Stillinger girls, the house was a slaughterhouse.

He covered their faces. Draped clothing over mirrors and windows. As if ashamed, and trying to hide what he’d done. Then he left the ax in the guest room. Nothing stolen. No footprints. No sound.

Next door, Mary Peckham started her morning the same as always—five o’clock, feed the chickens, sweep the porch. Something was wrong. The Moore house was still. Curtains drawn. Too quiet.

She knocked. Nothing. Tried the door. Locked. That was strange—nobody locked doors in Villisca. She walked to the barn, fed the chickens again, trying to calm the unease. When she came back, the silence still pressed against her.

She called Josiah’s brother, Ross. He arrived a little after eight, key in hand. Mary waited on the porch. Ross stepped inside. A minute later, he stumbled back out. Pale. Shaking.

“There’s something terrible in there,” he whispered.

Josiah (Joe) Moore

Marshal Hank Horton arrived next. He lit a match as he moved through the dark house. Eight bodies. Every bed soaked in blood. Curtains drawn tight. He called for the sheriff. Then the detectives. By noon, the whole town was gathered outside, whispering, praying, staring.

And then they came inside.

Neighbors. Strangers. Dozens of them. Some cutting bits of bedding. Some took locks of hair. One woman fainted. Another took a piece of the bloody wallpaper. The evidence, if there was any, was destroyed before the investigation even began.

Bloodhounds were brought from Nebraska. They sniffed the ax handle, took off down the street, across the fields, through the timberlands along the Nodaway River. Then, nothing. The trail vanished.

It was as if the killer had disappeared into thin air.

Doctors said the murders happened between two and three in the morning. The weapon swung with both sides of the blade—sharp edge to kill, blunt end to destroy. It was over quickly. Then came the rage.

No robbery. No fingerprints. No motive. Just carnage.

Theories spread like wildfire. A stranger. A drifter. Maybe someone from the church.

The first suspect was a tramp named Joe Ricks. He’d asked a girl for directions the day before. That was enough to get him arrested. Then another man, Charles Soward—a talkative oddball who liked to brag about murder. Reporters described him as “shifty-eyed, nervous, and half-mad.” He was just another ghost of suspicion.

Then came the town’s own elite. State Senator Frank Jones. Josiah once worked for him, selling farm equipment, then left to start a rival John Deere store and stole his best customers. Rumors flew—Josiah had been seeing Jones’s daughter-in-law. Scandal. Betrayal. A motive?

Did Jones hire someone to do the job? Some thought so. Others said it was small-town jealousy, nothing more.

Then, in 1916, headlines screamed: “Great Crime at Villisca Solved!”

William “Blackie” Mansfield—a drifter, an addict, a man with blood on his hands from other ax murders in Illinois and Kansas. Detectives said he rode the trains from town to town, slaughtering families near the tracks. He fit the profile.

Witnesses placed him near Villisca that night. But when it came time to identify him in court, nobody could. The case fell apart, and Mansfield went free.

A year later, another suspect. Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly. A preacher. Small, soft-spoken. Five foot two, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds. But strange. People said he was a peeping Tom, a pervert, obsessed with the murders. He’d been at the Children’s Day service that night.

Detectives hauled him in. Days later, he confessed.

Kelly said a voice told him to do it. “Go in,” it said. “Slay utterly.”

He described walking through the house. The whisper returned—“Suffer little children to come unto me.” He lifted the ax. Obeyed.

Sara Moore

Eight bodies. One voice.

Then, the next morning, he denied everything. Said he didn’t remember the confession. The jury didn’t believe it.

After that, the trail went cold.

There were whispers of a cult. A secret sect traveling the Midwest. They called it “blood atonement.” Members who killed were said to be blessed. Detectives in Colorado said the same group slaughtered families in Colorado Springs, Kansas, and Oregon. Entire households were erased in a single night.

The pattern was uncanny. Curtains drawn. Faces covered. Ax wiped clean. Windows unlatched.

Every murder happened on a Sunday night. Always near the railroad.

A traveling killer. A ghost on the rails.

Years later, crime writer Bill James gave him a name—the Man from the Train. Others called him the Sunday Night Murderer. Whoever he was, he seemed to vanish just as suddenly as he appeared.

The Moores were gone. The Stillinger girls too. The killer moved on. The story stayed.

The house sat empty. Over the decades, people came looking for answers—or for ghosts. TV crews. Paranormal investigators. Tourists. They brought recorders, cameras, night-vision lenses. Some swore they heard footsteps. A child’s voice. A whisper that said, get out.

Others said the darkness followed them home.

The town learned to live with it. The murders became a brand. A festival. Tours. Ghost hunts. You can even spend the night—if you dare.

The suspects are still debated. Frank Jones, the jealous ex-senator. William Mansfield, the drifter. Reverend Kelly, the mad preacher. Take your pick. There were no convictions.

Some believe Jones hired Mansfield. Others say Kelly’s confession was too vivid to ignore. The preacher knew things only the killer could have known. Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe he just watched.

No one will ever know.

So why does Villisca still haunt us? Maybe because it was so ordinary. A simple house. A quiet town. No warning, no reason. Evil didn’t come with thunder or lightning. It came with silence.

Over a century later, the case remains open. Files lost. Evidence gone. Theories endless. The Moore house still stands, a relic of horror and unanswered questions.

Some nights, they say, you can still hear it—the creak of footsteps, the faint cry of a child, the whisper of an unseen man dragging an ax across the floor.

Whoever he was, he’s still out there.

Waiting.

Watching.

Listening for another unlocked door.