Shadows in the Creaking House: The Unsolved Villisca Axe Murders of 1912
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In the pre-dawn hours of June 10, 1912, a shadowy intruder slaughtered eight people inside a modest home in Villisca, Iowa. The victims included Josiah Moore, 43, his wife Sarah, 39, and their four children—Herman, 11, Mary (Katherine), 10, Arthur (Boyd), 7, and Paul, 5—along with two young guests, Ina Stillinger, 8, and Lena Stillinger, 12, who had stayed overnight after a church event.
That Sunday evening, the Moore children and the Stillinger sisters attended the Children’s Day program at the Presbyterian church, which Sarah Moore helped coordinate. The program ended around 9:30 p.m., and the group returned home roughly 30 minutes later. They settled in for the night, unaware of the horror that awaited.
The next morning, neighbor Mary Peckham noticed the family had not emerged for their usual chores. Concerned, she knocked on the door. No one answered. She found the door locked, released the chickens, and summoned Ross Moore, Josiah’s brother. When Ross arrived, he forced entry with a spare key while Peckham waited outside. Inside the guest bedroom, he discovered the Stillinger sisters dead in their bed. He immediately called for Hank Horton, the town’s night watchman and peace officer.
Horton arrived quickly. Together, the two men searched the house and uncovered a nightmare: the entire Moore family lay bludgeoned to death. The killer had used Josiah’s own axe, which investigators found in the guest room—undoubtedly the murder weapon. The assailant struck only Josiah with the blade; he killed the others with the blunt end.
A chilling scene awaited in the kitchen: someone had removed a 4-pound slab of bacon from the icebox and placed it beside the axe. A two-pound piece of bacon was found in the living room on the floor. Some have suggested it is symbolic or ritualistic. Uneaten food and a basin of bloody water sat on the table.
Investigators concluded that all victims except Lena had died in their sleep. Lena showed a defensive wound on her arm. Her body lay face down with her nightgown pulled up and underwear removed, legs positioned to expose her genitalia. A later examination confirmed the killer had not molested her, even though there has been debate concerning the veracity of this finding.
The murderer performed strange rituals throughout the house. He covered every mirror with blankets or clothing. He left a gas lamp burning faintly upstairs, its glass chimney removed and wick turned low. Downstairs, investigators found a fragment of a keychain that belonged to no one in the Moore family.
The small, creaking house should have betrayed any intruder, yet the killer moved silently. Evidence suggests he hid in the attic or barn beforehand. Investigators discovered cigarette butts in the attic and an imprint in the hayloft near a knothole—likely where he spied on the family. The back door stood unlocked, and several windows remained open.
News of the massacre spread rapidly. Within an hour, the town’s central telephone office issued an “all-call” alert. Townspeople rushed to the scene, trampling evidence and turning the house into chaos. Some morbid onlookers even stole fragments of Josiah’s skull as souvenirs and passed the bloody axe around. Police struggled to secure the scene for hours. Coroner Dr. Linquist arrived at 9 a.m., joined by Horton and Sheriff Oren Jackson. He complained bitterly about the contamination. Authorities eventually called in the National Guard, who established a perimeter by 10:30 a.m. Not until 10 p.m. did the county attorney authorize removal of the bodies to a temporary morgue at the fire station.
An inquest followed on June 11, during which 13 potential witnesses were interviewed. Despite the small-town setting, a parade of suspects emerged: traveling minister Rev. George Kelly, prominent resident and Iowa State Senator Frank F. Jones, ex-convict William “Insane Blackie” Mansfield, and others, including Loving Mitchell, Paul Mueller, and Henry Lee Moore (no relation to the victims).
Newspapers linked the killings to a string of similar axe murders across the Midwest, dubbing the phantom “Billy the Axeman.” The case dragged on for nearly a decade, spawning repeated grand jury hearings, a sensational slander suit, a high-profile murder trial, and ruined political careers.
The Suspects and Lingering Shadows
Rev. George Jacklin “Lyn” Kelly, an eccentric English-born traveling preacher with a history of mental instability and inappropriate behavior toward young girls, topped the list. He attended the Children’s Day program that evening and fled town the next morning. Kelly later confessed to the murders, yet juries doubted him. He knew disturbing details about the crime scene, leading some to believe he had witnessed rather than committed the act. His first trial ended in a hung jury; the second resulted in an acquittal. Years later, authorities committed him to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital after he sent obscene materials through the mail.
Frank F. Jones, a wealthy senator and Josiah’s former employer turned business rival, also drew heavy suspicion. Rumors swirled of a deeper grudge, including an alleged affair between Josiah and Jones’s daughter-in-law, Dona. Some theorized that Jones hired a hitman.
That alleged hitman was William “Blackie” Mansfield (also known as Gleydson William Mansfield or “Insane Blackie”), a cocaine-addicted ex-convict with a violent past. Detective James Newton Wilkerson of the Burns Detective Agency linked Mansfield to Villisca and several other axe murderers that shared eerie signatures: victims hacked in their beds, mirrors covered, lamps left burning with chimneys removed, and bloody washbasins in kitchens. The killer in those cases wore gloves to avoid fingerprints—knowledge Mansfield possessed from his prison record. A grand jury investigated in 1916, but payroll records provided an alibi placing him in Illinois. Later testimony from witnesses who claimed to see him near Villisca cast doubt on that alibi, but he walked free and even won a lawsuit against Wilkerson.
Henry Lee Moore (unrelated), convicted of axing his own mother and grandmother months later, also fell under suspicion. Paul Mueller, a German immigrant with a dark history of family murders in Massachusetts and possibly Germany, represented another theory of a wandering serial killer.
The murders echoed other unsolved axe slayings in Colorado Springs, Ellsworth, and Paola, Kansas—cases with similar brutality and ritualistic elements.
To this day, the identity of the killer—or killers—remains unknown. The case destroyed lives, contaminated evidence, and left a town forever haunted.
Ironically, Dona Jones, who it was suspected might have been a motive for the murders, outlived all those involved. Albert Jones, her husband, died in 1935, and she married Wilbur Tetrick Kelley, who died in 1961. She passed on in 1984 at the age of 93. She had no children.
The house passed through a series of hands until it became a museum in the 1990s.
Even the house itself carries a dark legacy. On November 7, 2014, a ghost hunter and his elderly parents checked into the preserved Villisca Axe Murder House for an overnight investigation. Caretaker Johnny Houser showed them in before heading home. Hours later, the middle-aged son, Robert Steven Laursen Jr., 37, lay in a pool of blood, a hunting knife buried in his chest. He had stabbed himself—for no apparent reason—inside the very rooms where eight innocent souls met their brutal end over a century earlier. Laursen recovered from his injuries but has never spoken publicly about what occurred that day.
Some houses remember. Some evil lingers. In Villisca, the axe still whispers in the dark.