EP. 22 IOWA - The Villisca Axe Murders, & The Most Haunted House In America
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He's the most terrifying serial killer you've never heard of. Haddon Clark has confessed to several murders, but investigators say he could have over 100 victims. At the center of the mayhem, a cellmate of Haddon's that was able to get key evidence into Haddon's murder spree across America,

because hadn't thought he was Jesus Christ. Born Evil, the Serial Killer and the Savior, an ID true crime event. Premieres Monday, September 2nd at 9. Watch on ID or stream on Max. Set your DVR. Warning, the following podcast is not suitable for all audiences. We go into great detail with every case that we cover and do our best to bring viewers even deeper into the stories by utilizing disturbing audio and sound effects. Trigger warnings from the stories we cover may include violence, rape,

murder, and offenses against children. This podcast is not for everyone. You have been warned. Imagine you're in bed. Your friends and their entire family are fast asleep in the rooms directly above you. You've had a long day and you're ready to call it a night and go to sleep. When all of a sudden you hear a creak coming from above. It's the movement of the floorboards echoing down from the attic.

And you tell yourself that it's nothing. Everyone's asleep, aren't they? But deep down, you know that there's somebody up there, moving around, gliding through the darkness. Then suddenly, you hear footsteps coming down the stairs. Then, darkness. It's impossible for you, the listener, to truly put yourself into the situation that we just described. Because if you really were to, you would have to die.

We were just describing the point of view of Lena Stillinger, most likely the only victim of the Villisca axe murders who awoke before they were murdered. Eight victims, six of which were children, one house forever stained, and one bloody axe. This is the story of the Villisca axe murders, and you're listening to Murder in America. ♪♪

Villisca, Iowa. Just over 3 million people live in Iowa. But in 2010, the population of Villisca was listed at only 1,252 residents. And I'm sure that all 1,252 of those who live in the town know of the unsolved mass murder that occurred there back in 1912.

When driving through Villisca, one would never expect that this small village was once touched by such deep darkness. But when you arrive at that house at 508 East 2nd Street, now dubbed the Villisca Axe Murder House, that darkness, which still hovers over the community, seems to reach out and touch you. Let's go back in time.

7:00 AM, June 10th, 1912. A local resident who lived in Villisca named Mary Peckham has been hanging her wash to dry for the last hour or so. Birds are chirping and the people in the town are just beginning to wake up and start their week. However, as she sits outside of her home finishing her laundry, Mary notices that the Moore family, her neighbors, who are usually up and at 'em doing their chores, are not awake. So, Mary, concerned, makes the short walk over to the Moore residence and knocks on their door.

but after knocking for a while, Mary is met with silence. She is now growing concerned as the Moore family is large and she attempts to open the front door to the home, but it is locked.

Mary then lets the family's chickens out from their coop, heads home and calls Ross Moore, the brother of Josiah, the patriarch of the Moore family whose house she couldn't get inside of. Ross then quickly heads over to the house, once again knocks on the door and yells for the family, but receives no response. But for Ross this is no issue, for he is able to quickly locate a spare key to his brother's home. So he grabs the key, unlocks the door and heads inside.

While Mary waits patiently outside on the porch, Ross enters the Moore residence and notices that the house is very, very dark and overwhelmingly silent.

As he explores the first floor of the home, he notices that the family appears to be gone, and that, oddly enough, all of the mirrors in the house are covered with blankets. The shades have all been drawn as well, and all windows covered with fabric, so the darkness is penetrating. As he steps through the parlor area searching for signs of his brother and his family, questions and concerns are running wild through his head. Where are they? Did they just up and leave town? Are they alright?

But when Ross enters the guest bedroom, located right off of the parlor area, he stops in his tracks. This was when Ross realized that the family hadn't left for a vacation. In fact, as he was then probably assuming, the family was all still home in bed. But they weren't asleep. They were dead.

Ross runs out to the porch and immediately tells Mary Peckham to run home and call Hank Horton, Villisca's town marshal and most powerful law officer. While Ross was downstairs in the home, he had discovered the dead bodies of two young girls lying in bed next to one another. Not wanting to disturb the crime scene, he quickly exited the home and was now waiting for the law to show up.

Hank quickly arrives at the Moore residence and is granted access to the home by Ross. Hank was not prepared for what he was about to see. As one half of Villisca's police force at the time, Hank, around 50 years old in 1912, was used to keeping order, not solving homicides. He spent most of his time in town rattling on door handles to make sure that business owners in town hadn't forgotten to lock their doors at the end of the night. He shooed away hobos and vagrants out of town and made appearances at local events.

Montgomery County, the county in which Villisca sat, was a dry county at the time, so he never really even had to deal with drunks or disorderly individuals, as it was near impossible to get alcohol to Villisca. But as Hank entered the Morehouse that day, he was about to become the first witness of the worst crime scene in the history of the state of Iowa.

Now, just to be as factually accurate as possible, I want to include here that various sources describe the discovery of the bodies differently. Since this crime happened so long ago and there are a lot of different sources that we use to write every podcast, we have to include that disclaimer. For example, a Smithsonian article states that Hank Horton brought two doctors and a minister with him for the initial search of the house.

However, on the official website of the Villisca Axe murders, it states that Hank discovered these bodies alone, then called for assistance. It's hard to tell the specifics of exactly how this discovery went down, but according to most sources, this is what happened when Hank entered the residence.

So Hank heads inside of the house. Once again, it's dark and completely silent. He walks around the first floor of the home, through the kitchen and parlor, and comes across the dead bodies of the two young girls, exactly where Ross had told him that he would find them. They were lying next to each other in bed, bloody and beaten. Hank then walks over to the wooden staircase.

And I can't imagine what this was like for him. Not only did he not know who was in the house and who was dead or alive, but at this point, the killer could have still been lurking upstairs in the darkness, possibly waiting for someone to walk up so that they could claim another life. Hank gathers himself and he walks up the creaky stairs, step by step to the second floor.

And what he sees upstairs is a sight that Hank Horton would never forget. At the top of the stairs was the master bedroom, and there, in the bed, lay the bodies of Josiah Moore, the father of the family, and Sarah Moore, the mother. Both had suffered extremely gruesome injuries to their heads. Allegedly, a later examination of the corpses revealed the fact that Josiah's face had been beaten so badly that both of his eyes were missing.

As he stumbles through the upstairs of the home and walks past the attic entrance and into the children's room, Hank makes another horrific discovery. There were the four more children: Herman, Mary, Arthur, and Paul, all still laying in their beds, all dead. This was a gruesome crime scene. The children's and parents' beds were soaked with blood.

The victims that day included parents Josiah Moore, aged 43 years, and Sarah Moore, aged 39 years. Their four children Herman Montgomery, aged 11, Mary Catherine, aged 10,

Arthur Boyd, aged 7, and Paul Vernon, aged 5. The two girls downstairs were later identified as local girls from another local family who were friends with the Moore children, who had been at the house that night for a sleepover, Ina Stillinger, aged 8, and Lena Stillinger, aged 11. The faces on almost all of the bodies had been beaten so savagely that they were virtually unrecognizable. Immediately, Hank exited the house and allegedly said to Ross Moore,

My God, Ross, there is someone murdered in every bed. This was only the beginning of what would grow to become an extremely chaotic day in the history of Villisca. Three different doctors were summoned to the Villisca house that day. Men by the names of J. Clark Cooper, Edgar Huff,

and S.F. Williams. Another man named Wesley Ewing, who was the Moore family's minister, also headed to the home. Hank had allegedly left to go get Dr. Cooper, but by the time that they arrived back at the crime scene, a crowd was growing outside of the home. Word had quickly spread throughout Villisca, and the locals had their morbid fascination captured. Quickly, Hank and the doctors entered the home and began investigating the crime scene.

According to them, this is how the scene looked. Each member of the family had been murdered in their beds. It seemed like none of the victims had awoken before they were killed, save for Lena Stillinger, who appeared to have a defensive wound on her arm and was lying lengthwise across the bed, as if she had kicked her legs and fought back after being struck once by the axe before she received the ultimate death blow. Lena's nightgown had also been pushed up to her waist, revealing that she had no undergarments on.

She had also been left in a somewhat obscene position, with her bare buttocks protruding from the sheets. This initially led some to question if she had been sexually assaulted, and although the possibility hasn't been definitively ruled out, the general consensus is that she was not molested. The blood of the victims had soaked into the pillows and mattresses underneath them,

But strangely, there was barely any blood on the floors. Brain matter at the time, which was strewn about the victims' heads, had remained gelatinous.

and yet the blood on the bedsheets and pillows had hardened, which led Dr. Williams, the first doctor to actually examine the bodies, to conclude that the victims had been killed between the hours of midnight and 5:00 a.m. that morning. There was a plaster chipped from the walls above the bed of Josiah and Sarah,

plaster that had crumbled when the killer swung the axe up over their heads with tremendous force. This left plaster dust covering the bed.

Now, all of that is gruesome enough, but one of the reasons why the Villisca axe murders have remained seared into the minds of true crime fanatics is the strange details surrounding the murders.

For one, the killer, after murdering their victims, went back and covered the face of every corpse with a piece of clothing or other cloth material, and then covered the entire body with the bedsheet that they had been sleeping under at the time of their death. It's almost as if they couldn't bear to witness the fruits of their bloody labor. Or maybe they felt some sort of remorse after the killings, and had some sort of twisted respect for the dead that they wanted to show.

Either way, the faces of the victims were so battered that they were unrecognizable. After killing each member of the Moore family, the killer had apparently returned to the bodies of Sarah and Josiah and dealt their faces even more blows in some sort of expression of maniacal rage. Like we said before, Josiah's head had been beaten in so badly that his eyes had simply disappeared. Either the killer had wanted to make sure that the adults were fully deceased, or Josiah

they harbored some sort of deep rage against them that came out in the gruesome act of corpse desecration. The reason why officials believe that the killer returned to Josiah and Sarah's bodies to defile them further was the fact that at one point, one of Sarah's shoes, which was lying on the floor directly next to the bed,

had filled with blood. And at one point, the killer had knocked it over and spilled this blood across the floorboards. There were also wounds from the blade of the axe across Sarah's face, but they weren't bloody like the others. This led investigators to believe that these additional wounds had been inflicted after Sarah's blood had stopped circulating.

The killer was obviously disturbed, but it was their behavior during and after the killings that was truly bizarre. At some point, the killer had gone through and covered every mirror and reflective surface in the house with cloth and fabric. But why?

Could it be that the killer didn't want to see their own reflection as they committed these atrocious acts? Were they honoring the Victorian funeral custom that mirrors must be covered while a body is laying in a house? Or could it be that they didn't want to see the ghosts of their victims in these reflections, as many people during the Victorian era believed that spirits could be trapped in mirrors?

That is a question to which we will never have a definitive answer. Multiple oil lamps were also found in the home, which led investigators to believe that the murderer used these lamps to light their murder spree. They had walked from room to room with these dim lights, murdering everyone.

while enjoying every moment of their bloodbath. Now, obviously, the timetables of these murders are a little up in the air, but it is believed that the perpetrator first killed all of the Moore family upstairs and then moved down to the first floor to kill the Stillinger girls. The axe was found propped up against the wall in the guest room where the girls were.

and it appeared as though the killer had tried to clean it. But they didn't do a great job because the blood and hairs of the victims were still on it. And interestingly enough, it wasn't the killer's axe. The axe actually belonged to Josiah Moore. The killer had come to their house empty-handed

and used the family's own axe to murder them. And there it was against the wall of the guest room downstairs. And it was here in this room that one of the most bizarre pieces of evidence was found. On the floor in this room sat a four-pound slab of bacon. And this bacon had been wrapped in some sort of a cheesecloth or linen.

To this very day, nobody has been able to provide a solid answer as to why this bacon was brought by the killer from the icebox in the house into this room. I have heard theories that the killer used this bacon and cloth to pleasure themselves after the killings, but once again, there has never been a solid explanation given for this odd piece of evidence.

So we're just gonna leave it here as a mystery. - In the kitchen area, investigators discover a wash basin filled with bloody water and a half-eaten meal. It appeared as though the killer had committed the murders and actually hung out in the house for a while before leaving the scene. That's one eerie detail that stuck with us.

The thought that the person murdered everyone in the house, then proceeded to cover the mirrors, position the bacon in the guest room, and even took the time to clean themselves up and enjoy a meal. All while throughout the house there are eight corpses covered in blood while the house was lit by a dim light of the lamp.

So, that's what the doctors and those first on the scene at the house that morning discovered. But quickly, all of this evidence would be tampered with, and some key evidence destroyed.

Back then in 1912, crime scene tape wasn't a thing yet. Now remember how we told you about the group of locals that had begun gathering outside of the Moore House as word of the murders spread throughout town that morning? Well, curious members of the community had actually already begun to enter the house and were gawking and trampling throughout the crime scene. Yes, while the doctors and other officials were inspecting the bodies and gathering evidence from the home, locals were walking throughout the house, taking in the sight of the corpses and removing morbid souvenirs of their own.

At one point, Dr. F.S. Williams emerged from the house, distraught, and urged the growing crowd, Don't go in there. You'll regret it until the last day of your life. But alas, the townspeople could not be stopped. The crime scene had quickly become a huge spectacle for locals in Villisca. It was said by noon that day, an estimated up to 100 residents had entered the house and contaminated the scene.

These frenzied locals were walking through, leaving footprints, fingerprints, moving the family's possessions around, and shifting the way that Hank and Ross had found the home earlier that day. One local man by the name of Burt McCall had even removed fragments from Josiah's skull, which he would go on to keep in a box at his business for the years after the crime. By noon that day, the National Guard finally arrived and removed the crowd.

But not before these locals had irreversibly damaged the crime scene. We all know how important it is to conserve the scene. It's one of the main rules. And these locals didn't care.

They just wanted to see what had happened in their small town. And nobody had any idea who could have murdered the Moore family and the Stillinger girls. The Moores had no widely known enemies, and this act of violence seemed to be completely random. This confusion lasted well into the night.

Locals had already begun to form together, roaming through Villisca in search of anybody that they didn't recognize. They were going door to door, asking questions of their own.

attempting to locate the perpetrator so that they could carry out some vigilante justice of their own. And all the while, throughout the entire day, the bodies laid inside of the Moore residence. Why? Well, the county attorney, a man by the name of William Ratcliffe, was actually out of town that day in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about 200 miles away.

Local officials were afraid to release the bodies to local morticians because Ratcliffe and a few bloodhounds that were called in hadn't yet arrived at the scene. So there the deceased family and the two still-injured girls sat in the house in a state of dead limbo. Eventually, later that night at about 8:30 p.m., after a long afternoon of waiting, the bloodhound dogs arrived. They were called in to attempt to catch the scent of the perpetrator, but after an uneventful scent detection session, the dogs were not able to provide authorities with any leads.

Ratcliffe eventually showed up as well, but he was unable to release the bodies of the victims to morticians. Until about midnight that night. That evening, in Villisca, a crowd formed. They held torches, guns, and weapons in a scene straight out of Frankenstein and wanted ever so badly to identify who had committed this atrocious crime. But even though the crowd was intimidating, they did no good. No perpetrator was caught. No suspect was identified.

And it was on that day in 1912 when the small town of Villisca, Iowa lost its innocence. So let's briefly discuss the victims.

We couldn't find a lot of information on the Moores, but what we could gather, we can tell that Josiah Mort was born in 1868 and his wife Sarah, whom he died with, was born in 1873. The two married in Sarah's parents' house on December 6, 1899, and they had four children together.

Herman, Catherine, Arthur and Paul. Josiah Moore owned a successful hardware store in Villisca and was considered one of the more powerful people in the community at the time of his murder. Sarah was a children's director at the local Presbyterian church. But the question still remained for the townspeople in the time after the murders. How did they happen?

Did someone enter the house silently in the dead of night and eliminate the entire family before slipping back out into the darkness? In the wake of the murders, it was widely reported that there were cigarette butts found in the upstairs attic of the home, which opened directly into the hallway connecting the master bedroom and the children's room. Some have speculated that this phantom killer hid in the attic quietly on the night of the murders, waiting until the family fell asleep for the perfect moment to sneak out and commit the killings.

Well, I've read some articles that claim that the cigarette butts were never actually found inside of the attic and that those details were falsely reported by the press at the time. Either way, the killer had to get into the upstairs of the house at some point, so that's where we're going to drop in for that portion of the reconstruction of events. But first, let's go back to the evening of June 9th, 1912, just mere hours before the Moore family was annihilated with an axe.

It was Children's Day at the Presbyterian Church where the Moores and Stillingers attended. It was a day of celebration and an exciting beginning to the summer for everyone in the community. That day, Ina and Lena Stillinger left their family's farm early in the morning to head to church. They had planned on attending the morning service, then heading to their grandmother's house for the rest of the day.

However, at some point, the girls were invited over to the Moore's house by Sarah Moore herself. She placed a call to their house and spoke to Blanche, their older sister, and asked permission for the girls to spend the night at their family's home.

Blanche told Sarah that her parents were outside at the moment, but she would let them know that the girls would not be returning home that night. The annual Children's Day program commenced at 8 p.m. that evening and, once again, was coordinated by Sarah Moore.

All of the Moore children, along with the Stillinger girls, participated in the program that night, while Josiah Moore attended, sitting in the audience. The program concluded at about 9:30 p.m., and after some small talk after the production, the Moore family, along with the Stillinger girls, walked home to the Moore house and arrived at roughly 10 p.m. The family then chatted for a bit, said their goodnights, and headed to bed for a goodnight's rest after a long day.

Now, once again, we don't exactly know how or when the axe murderer entered the Moore residence, but let's jump to the time of the murders. Sometime between midnight and 5:00 AM, the murderer either enters the home or emerges from the attic where they had been hiding. Slowly and methodically, they then begin their killing spree. First, the killer approaches the bed where Josiah and Sarah are fast asleep. Silently, they raise the axe.

and bury it into Josiah's head. Incredibly, Sarah doesn't seem to awaken while her husband is slaughtered. The killer then approaches Sarah's side of the bed, raises the axe, and dispatches her in the same way. The murderer then, still holding Josiah's axe, enters the children's bedroom and murders the siblings one by one.

while the others remained fast asleep. It's hard to believe that none of the kids were awakened by the sounds of their siblings being killed in the same room, but according to all reports, they all remained asleep while the killings were carried out. The murderer then walked down the stairway and entered the room where Ina and Lena Stillinger were sleeping, where they killed the two of them with the same axe that had been used to murder the entire Moore family on the floor above.

After killing the Stillinger girls, the murderer then returned to the upstairs of the house to deliver more blows to the faces of Josiah and Sarah, and possibly the children too. After the bloodbath was over, the killer prepared themselves a meal, cleaned off the axe, washed the blood from their hands and possibly their clothing, and enjoyed their late night snack. It was during this time frame when the perpetrator also most likely engaged in their business with the raw bacon and covered the mirrors with cloth.

After all was said and done, the killer then extinguished the lamps that they were using to light their way and quietly departed from the home, leaving eight dead bodies in their wake.

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So who would have wanted to kill the Moors? Well, as it turns out, there were a number of colorful suspects attached to the Villisca axe murders at one point or another. We're going to quickly try and cover them all.

But we can't go into extreme detail into all of their backgrounds and stories because the podcast would be hours long if we did that. So here are a few of our suspects. First, let's take a look at the only man ever tried for the murders, a traveling preacher by the name of Reverend Lynn George Jacqueline Kelly.

Kelly was an English immigrant who had arrived in Villisca just a few days before the murders to take part in the children's services that the Moore family fatefully attended and participated in on the night of the murders. Kelly, although a preacher, was a known sexual deviant and peeping tom.

Two days before the killings, he was caught in Villisca peering through the windows of unsuspecting local women. And in 1914, two years after the murders, while living in South Dakota, Kelly took out ads in newspapers claiming that he was looking for a "girl stenographer" to do "confidential work" and that this stenographer must be willing to "pose as a model."

Apparently, a woman named Jessamine Hodgson, who responded to the ad, claimed later on that after she wrote to Kelly, she quickly received a letter back that was, according to a judge, "...so obscene, lewd, lascivious, and filthy as to be offensive to this honorable court and improper to be spread upon the record thereof."

Apparently, amongst other things, Kelly had wanted her to type completely in the nude. There were a lot of suspicious pieces of evidence that linked Kelly to the murders. First and foremost was the fact that Kelly had attended the Children's Day services on the night of the murders. People in the community were convinced that Kelly may have spotted the Moores and the Stillinger girls that night and become immediately obsessed with them. A

A depression found in the hay at the Moore's barn outside of their home and a peephole that could have been used by the killer to spy on them on the night of the murders led some to believe that Kelly had seen the family, followed them home, and waited out in the barn until they had fallen asleep.

to enter the residence and end their lives. In another suspicious twist, Kelly actually left Villisca early in the morning on June 10th on a 5.19 a.m. train, immediately after when investigators believed that the murders took place. On board the train, Kelly allegedly told fellow passengers about the murders that had just taken place in Villisca, three hours before they were discovered by Mary Peckham.

He had also, shortly after the murders, turned some bloody clothing into a laundry service in the nearby town of Macedonia. In addition, a week after the murders happened, Kelly returned to Villisca, impersonated a foreign detective visiting the investigation from the reputable Scotland Yard, and was granted an official tour of the Morehouse crime scene with investigators present.

before he was eventually found out to not be a foreign detective and was in fact Reverend Kelly. Kelly was eventually arrested and tried for the murders of Lena Stillinger. And in an interesting twist, Kelly confessed to the murders, stating, "...I killed the children upstairs first and the children downstairs last. I knew God wanted me to do it this way."

Sleigh utterly came to my mind and I picked up the axe, went into the house and killed them.

However, this coerced confession was thrown out before the trial, and the grand jury ended up hung 11-1 in favor of refusing to indict Kelly. The second grand jury freed him, and he was never connected to the crimes again. Kelly then left Villisca, moved around the country, and apparently ended up in New York and basically disappeared.

No one knows exactly where he ended up, what he ended up doing with his life, or where his final resting place is. It still remains a mystery.

And I know anytime we see a confession, we want to immediately place blame, but you have to understand that false confessions are a real thing. And even back then when false confessions weren't super accepted, even a jury back then did not believe that he actually committed these crimes. There were also local migrants and drifters accused of the crimes. A man by the name of Andy Sawyer was at one point believed to have been the axe-wielding killer.

According to a bridge foreman for the Bullington Railroad, on the morning that the bodies were found in the Moore residence, Andy approached the railroad crew, clean-shaven, wearing a brown suit with muddy pants that were wet up to the knees. He was given a job on the spot, but upon seeing the Villisca axe murders in the local paper, he immediately developed an obsession with the crime. He constantly asked other workers if they had apprehended a suspect yet.

talked incessantly about the murders, and even confessed at one point that he had been in Villisca on the night of the crime and was forced to flee town so he wouldn't become a suspect.

The foreman of the crew turned Andy Sawyer into authorities in Villisca shortly after, and according to the foreman, while he was waiting for the sheriff to arrive while he was turning Andy in, Andy suddenly jumped into the air, screamed, and made a chopping motion with the axe that he held in his hand before slamming it down into the woodpile in front of him.

Andy also allegedly told the foreman's son at one point that he could show him exactly how the murderer slipped away from Villisca and proceeded to describe a creek and a tree where he claimed that the murderer had washed off in the river and escaped. The foreman's son did indeed find the tree and creek where Andy had claimed he would find them, but it was proven that Andy was in a different town on the night of the murders and that his alibi really did check out, and he was released.

But shockingly, the main suspect in the crimes, aside from Reverend Kelly, of course, was a man by the name of Frank Jones, a successful local businessman, a highly respected member of the community, and a powerful Iowa State Senator. And Frank had personal connections to the Moore family.

First of all, years before he was killed, Josiah Moore had actually worked for Frank as a salesman at his farm equipment business. Josiah had apparently been a star salesman and was making Frank a lot of money. But reportedly, because he was fed up with working 7am to 11pm shifts six days a week, at one point Josiah left Frank's business, started his own, and took the insanely profitable John Deere farm equipment account with him.

In addition, it was rumored around town that Josiah had been having an affair with Frank's daughter-in-law, a woman by the name of Donna. Donna was infamous in Villisca for apparently setting up her extramarital affairs over the phone during a time when phone calls had to be made through the community's operator. It was impossible to keep those sorts of things quiet back then.

especially when these sexual rendezvous were made over the phone with another townsperson listening in. Apparently, people in town knew that Frank and Josiah hated each other. In public, in front of the entire community, the two would physically cross the street in order to avoid crossing each other on the sidewalk.

But Frank, who was almost 60 years old at the time of the murders, surely couldn't have been the one swinging the axe, right? Well, enter into the picture a man named Willie Blackie Mansfield.

In the years after the murders, many private detectives were brought in to provide their expert opinions on who may have committed the killings, and at one point a man named James N. Wilkerson, a detective, was assigned to the case. Detective Wilkerson was convinced that Frank Jones and his son Albert had hired a man named Willie "Blackie" Mansfield to kill his business competitor Josiah Moore, and that during the murder Blackie Mansfield had snapped and ended up murdering everyone inside of the house.

Detective Wilkerson alleged that Blackie Mansfield was a cocaine addict and a serial killer, who two years after the Villisca murders had slaughtered his very own wife, infant child, father-in-law, and mother-in-law in Illinois in a similar manner. Detective Wilkerson was absolutely convinced that Blackie Mansfield was the one who swung the axe in Villisca. In his research, he had apparently been able to connect Blackie to a number of other axe murders in the Midwest in the years before and after those in Villisca.

Detective Wilkerson even claimed that he would be able to definitively prove that Blackie was at almost all of the crime scenes if given the chance. And so, in 1916, four years after the murders, Blackie Mansfield was indicted by a grand jury, brought to Villisca from Kansas City where he lived, and investigated.

However, an alibi placed Blackie in Illinois on the night of the murders in Villisca, and he was ultimately cleared and released. Some have said that his release may have been due to political pressure laid on by Senator Frank Jones himself, that the alibi was weak and easily forged, and that investigators were basically coerced by Jones into letting Blackie go. There was also allegedly a witness who was supposed to show up that would prove that Blackie was in Villisca on the night of the murders, but the witness simply never appeared.

Strange, right? Either way, here is when the story really gets weird. Detective Wilkerson's investigation seemed to point to the existence of a serial killer. A serial killer who was operating in the Midwest. Wilkerson, in his investigation, identified a few similar murders that had occurred.

and linked them through the train lines and dates that they happened on and drew a conclusion. However, many have come to conclude that Wilkerson was onto something with his serial killer theory, but that he pointed the finger at the wrong man at the end of the day. Really quickly, we're going to describe a few of these other similar crimes that Wilkerson linked to the same killer. September 17th, 1911, 266 days before the Villisca axe murders.

Six people are axed to death in two neighboring houses in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in a very similar manner. The victims included an infant and almost an entire family. Once again, just like at Villisca, the murders occurred late on a Sunday night, and the victims' heads were crushed with the blunt end of an ax. All the victims had been killed in their sleep, in their beds, and only one victim seemed to awaken before they were killed. The others' lives were ended before they even knew what was happening.

Robbery was ruled out as a motive in the crime, as all of the valuables were left untouched in both houses. The blinds had been drawn, the house's doors were locked, and just like in the Villisca murders, one of the victim's family members discovered the bodies after grabbing a spare key. In addition, there were sheets covering the bodies and clothing placed over the victims' faces. And in another striking similarity, the killer also used an axe that they had found on the property that night to end their victims' lives.

left the bloody axe at the scene and after the murders used a bowl of water to wash the blood from their hands which they also left in the house.

It should be noted that these people lived close to the railroad in Colorado Springs, just like the Moore family did in Villisca, and the perpetrator of this specific massacre was never caught. September 30th, 1911, 253 days before the Villisca axe murders, Monmouth, Illinois.

Once again, a family fails to appear in the small community for their routine duties, and some locals are sent to check on the family's house. They find that the front door is locked, but they enter through the back door. Once again, all of the curtains are drawn and the windows are covered, and inside they find the bodies of three family members, bludgeoned to death and covered in bed sheets. There is no sign of the killer.

Interestingly though, the murder weapon is thought to have been a metal pipe, as there was a pipe found nearby the crime scene covered in blood and human hair. Once again, this family lived near the railroad. October 15th, 1911, 238 days before the Villisca axe murders. By now, this is a familiar story.

The Shoman family, who lived in the small community of Ellsworth, Kansas, weren't picking up their phones on a Monday morning. When friends investigated the house, they found the door unlocked and discovered the two parents and their three children all butchered in their beds. Most appeared as though they had not awoken before they were killed. A bloody axe and a lamp were found inside of the house near the bodies. All the family members' faces were savagely beaten and chopped up to a pulp, rendering them unrecognizable.

and Mrs. Shulman had been posed allegedly after her death in some sort of a sexual position.

A bloodhound picked up the scent of the murderer and chased the scent to the nearby railroad tracks. June 5th, 1912, four days before the Villisca axe murders. The bodies of Roland Hudson and his wife Anna Hudson are discovered in their home in Paola, Kansas, a short ride from Villisca, Iowa. They had been brutally slain with the blunt side of an axe.

The bodies of the couple are discovered in their darkened home, and their corpses had been covered with a sheet. An extra material had been placed over their battered faces. Sound familiar? Also, a lamp was discovered at the scene as well. So, what do you think, the listener? Could the Villisca axe murders have been only a small piece of a larger puzzle?

Could one man have been responsible for all of these savage killings that we just listed? There have been suspects over the years connected to those crimes, but nobody has ever been formally convicted. However, when you look at the bigger picture, you examine the timeframe of these killings, the bizarre similarities between the crimes, and the brutality and randomness of them all, it seems to point to the work of a single man. But that's just our thoughts.

Nobody was ever formally convicted of the Villisca Axe murders, and to this day there are no real suspects. Whoever committed those murders simply walked out of the Moore House that day, into the early morning air, and walked away a free man. These murders are still a mystery that continue to haunt Iowa and all of America to this day.

Oh yeah, and did we mention that the Villisca Axe Murder House is thought to be one of the most haunted places in America? Let's dig into that for a moment before we end this podcast. So, as you guys know, I'm a paranormal investigator. I've been doing this for years. It's my full-time career. And in last week's episode, we covered Gitche Manitou. If you haven't watched that video on YouTube yet of Courtney and I out there investigating Gitche,

We had literally one of the freakiest nights you could possibly imagine, and that's on my YouTube, The Paranormal Files. But I just have to explain to you guys that in the paranormal world, the Villisca Axe Murder House is one of those crown jewel locations that everybody wants to go to. It's known to be so active, so dark, so negative.

that people are literally dying to go there. A couple of years ago, a group of ghost hunters who were actually there in the Moore residence encountered a negative sort of entity as they described it, and one of the investigators ended up stabbing themselves with a knife. He claimed later on that something in the house made him do this. I actually was just at the Villisca Axe Murder House back in November of 2020.

and I spent the night there. I actually slept in the house, in the Stillinger girls' room. If you want to watch my actual video documentaries, you just type in the Paranormal Files Villisca Axe Murder House on YouTube, you'll see that. But...

In the meantime, I interviewed Johnny Hauser. He was a guy who has worked at the house for years. He was on the Ghost Adventures episode that they filmed there. He knows the ins and outs of the property. And real quickly at the end of this podcast, I'm going to play you a little snippet of the interview that I conducted with Johnny there on the property. And I'm going to let him explain some of the ghost stories to you guys.

Hey guys, Johnny Hauser here at the Villisca Axe Murder House. We're going to go inside and show you some hot spots and tell you a little bit about what happened. So come on in. So right here we have the kitchen. Not a whole lot happened, of course, in here. Right against the corner was that morning when they found him the bloody pot of water where whoever washed his hands. Mirrors covered. Also had half-eaten food left at the table.

So, throughout the night, the main idea is this person was probably already in the attic hiding, crept out, killed the parents, got the kids, got the two downstairs, went back, got them again, again, again, left the axe, made himself a meal, covered mirrors, whatnot.

As far as activity, it seems like this room and the living room, which we'll go in right now, are almost kind of safe zones. Stuff happens, but not to the extent as upstairs. Upstairs is probably 90% of everything. Reverend Kelly, the only guy that ever confessed to it and was ever tried, he was acquitted of all charges because he's just insane, said that voices told him, "Rise, Peter, slay and eat." A shadow came out of the backyard, gave him an ax,

He said he walked in this door here at 1:00 a.m. and voices told him to slay utterly. He said he killed everyone. Then he said he didn't. Then he said he worked for the Queen of England. I mean, he was just all over the place. This is Catherine's bedroom.

But this is where Ina and Lena Stillinger were staying that night. So in this room you had the Ina and Lena, and they weren't neighbor kids, they lived like seven miles outside of town. They were in this room, the raw bacon was on the floor, mirrors covered again, the axe was left right up against the doorframe there. And as far as this room, it has a very Amityville quality to it. It's kind of a mental manipulation type thing going on. And this is where the guy stabbed himself.

two or three years ago. Said he was just in here provoking, woke up in the emergency room, didn't know what happened, but evidently he took the hunting knife that was on his side and just right through the chest. So I just tell people that story just because if you're in this room and you start getting weird, go outside, get some fresh air. Don't push the issue in this room for sure. The crime scene when the doctor, physician, minister came in, basically you had Ina and Lena in this bed

The oldest one was on the outside and her leg was kind of dangling off the bed and her arm was up like that. She had a defensive wound on her arm. Well, they say a defensive wound. She had a mark on her arm where they said she went up to block. So you just had those two here. Of course, blood is just going to be everywhere. And again, mirrors covered. This actually had a door on it with an oval window cut out into the door. That was covered with a sheet. Mm-hmm.

These two doors out here, this one and the one in the kitchen had one of Sarah's nightgowns torn in half and now it's just kind of draped over. The forensics guys say, oh, well, they'll cover the mirrors because they don't want to see themselves committing the crime indicating they know the people.

people other people talk about souls being trapped in mirrors but why would he cover that piece of glass on a door inside the house like they're going to find the bodies at that point was it him not seeing his reflection in anything you know I think these are little things that could unravel the whole mystery but also you can't rationalize crazy the guy thought it'd be a good idea to kill eight people and eat a meal and leave raw bacon on the floor like

None of it makes sense. We'll go up the steps. This is where River and Kelly thought he was climbing Jacob's ladder to heaven in his confession.

So this is the parents bed. The dad was on the outside, the mom on the inside. Mirrors covered throughout the night. This is one of the ax marks left behind on the back of the wall that was wallpapered over. A lot of people think the killer was hiding in the attic. Came out just boom, boom. Walked over to the top of the steps there and heard something. It just froze because there's a big pool of blood there that wasn't connected with this blood over here. So it's like he took a few steps and just

Stood there like that went in got those kids the two downstairs got them again again again, but

That's just a guess. - And once again, gruesome up here, pretty. - On the 100 year anniversary, a forensics team came in and luminoled throughout the house, ran cameras under floorboards and stuff. I came in, I mean, it was just everywhere. And I was skeptical at first, like, man, it's been 100 years. And they're like, well, they would have just wiped it visibly clean. You know, you can paint it, whatever, we'll find it. And I'm like, show me this blood. So they did it and it was all over the place. And it was interesting for about 10 minutes. And then it's like,

I don't want to see this. And I love horror movies, you know, I'm big into that, but this is six little kids, this happened. And I was just like, man. So in here is what we call the attic.

And most likely the guy was hiding in here waiting. The cigarette butts were found in this room. And it just makes sense. You know, just straight shop for the parents. And nobody's going to look in here. And of course the good old Amityville windows. And those are original too. So if you ever go buy or rent a house that has those windows, just...

Don't do it. Just run. This is probably the epicenter of everything that happens up here. It seems to stem out of this room. - Really? - And just kind of flow into the entire upstairs. Which if you figure, if the guy was here, it's June.

It's hot. He's sitting in here for a long time, just thinking about what he's gonna do. That negative energy just had to have soaked into every fiber of this wood and everything. This place had like an atom bomb of negative energy dropped on it that night, which I think is still here at that point. So this is where Herman, Paul, Boyd, and Catherine

were all found. The ax marks in the ceiling up here were just everywhere. I mean this whole ceiling was about destroyed with them. So to come in, look at these little kids while they're sleeping and hit them that many times with an ax is just

I don't know. I don't even know what to say, you know. A lot of the toys and stuff in this room go off. One of the creepier things I've ever had happen happened up here. Friday night and the overnight's canceled so I thought well I'll fix some stuff and clean up a little bit. Locked the kitchen door so nobody would walk in. Trying to figure out how to fix this thing. Pretty soon somebody walks in the house. I'm just like come on people. We're not open.

So then I'm like, they have no idea I'm up here. So I'm going to have fun with this. So I hide in the closet. Plane was scared the crap out of this kid and just be like, why are you breaking in? If you want to see it, I'll just show it to you. I'm in the closet walking downstairs. It comes upstairs into this room. I kick that door open, do the big blah. Nothing. I couldn't even move. I couldn't even talk. I was just like, ugh.

And then I went back home. I checked the whole house. Door was still locked. Watched a surveillance video. There's nothing. Come back about three days later, and I'm just trying to rationalize this in my mind. And I'm looking at the door. I'm like, when I kicked that thing, I kicked it right here.

which then split that all the way up. So I kicked that door hard enough to break it. Like something happened. - Mm-hmm. - At that point, I'm like, I gotta work here, guys. Leave me alone. I'll leave you alone. We gotta have some boundaries. Like screw with the overnights all you want, fair game. - Wow. - But leave me out of this. - Have you ever had people leave in the middle of the night? - Oh, for sure. All the time. - Or not?

So when I first came here, I was kind of about the ghost stuff. Like I believed in it, but I hadn't seen anything. I had my first experience and then I started staying the night and I've done over 400 overnights alone in the house at this point. And I started looking for patterns and birthdays, anniversaries, moon phases, storms, the eclipse. Like, is there a word I can say? Nothing.

The Sac and Fox Native Americans were here way before us. And there's no Villisca's anywhere. This is like the only Villisca on planet Earth. It's because it's Wallisca, which in the Meskwaki language means evil spirit. So like I taught myself some Meskwaki to go that route. I found no rhyme or reason to any of it. I'd watch overnights. Oh, we rolled a ball. The kids rolled it back to us. We had such a great night. Next night, the people are running out of here at 11 p.m. Left half their gear. I got to mail it back to them. I don't think the family's here.

which may be controversial to Axe House purists, but I've been here over 15 years, you know. I think the Axe House is haunting itself. It's like Rose Red and it's constantly evolving and constantly changing and constantly morphing. I think it just loves new people coming in, scaring them. So it's hard for people to be in here. Yeah, oh for sure. It's the hardest. Yeah. Have you seen many people do it? You will be one of five.

That's what I'm gonna do tonight. You'll be on the...

on the Axe House Hall of Fame. Yes! But you definitely think it's going to be kind of spooky being in here? Oh, no doubt. No doubt about it. And I'll never do an overnight again. I've swore off overnights at the Axe House. I'll go other places, but a lot of times people will leave and like if it's summertime Friday or Saturday night and I'm out doing stuff, I'll drive by and they left and I'll see like a lantern on.

up here. Awesome. Guess who gets to go upstairs and shut the lantern off? So yeah, it's man, good luck tonight at

I don't know what else to say, but good luck. And I had one group been here, like we get a lot of repeat people. They were here probably 20, 30 times and they lasted an hour. I'm like, did you guys leave? They're like, yeah, it just felt weird. They were like, nothing happened, but it just felt like something really bad was about to happen. So we just didn't even want to push it. Wow.

The craziest, freakiest story I've ever heard involves me. So I wanted to recreate what happened that night. We wanted to push the house to its breaking point to get a definitive answer for who did this. So I'm with the axe up in the attic and I have eight friends just randomly come in. I have no idea when they're coming. They're kind of hang out for a while. Okay, we're going to bed. You know, they get in the beds. I wait for a while and I also want to see...

"How did this guy do this?" You know? So I creep out with the axe. We had cameras, audio going everywhere. And I just hit the floor at the parents' bed. Well, they start screaming. I'm like, "This is weird." And we're kind of just loopy because it's like 3:00 AM. Went to the kids' room. Boom, boom on the floors. Well, the two down in Aina and Lena's room thought I was really like doing it. One of them starts bawling, which the video is priceless. He bolts out of the house.

and the other guy's like come on what are you doing he goes out of the house as i'm walking to the staircase i start feeling like i'm half drunk like i'm just out of it i snap out of that and i'm standing in the living room and i look up at one of the ir cameras and i like squint we don't see infrared well what am i squinting at

and i thought i heard a voice and i'm like guys i'm done we can't this is bad this is too much well going over the video as i'm walking from the kids room to the staircase the kids room closet opens and shuts the attic door slams open this door opens up it shows me walk down here i'm just standing there for i don't know how long and i'm just like doing this and then you see me kind of shake it off i go to that door and when i thought i heard a voice the audio caught it and the voice goes do it

like to actually do it, which that's some Amityville stuff I want nothing to do with. So it's kind of like a pattern of people sometimes kind of tapping into that energy. Not like it's a conscious thing, but it's almost like in the guy that wounded himself, you having that experience.

What do you think that is? So Reverend, I think that's something that was here before the murders even happened. Reverend Kelly is talking about a shadow giving him the axe. Nobody's talking about shadow figures in 1918. I can remember in the 80s when they were aliens and then they were interdimensional time travelers. Now they're the spookiest of ghosts and who knows, you know? But...

Also in his confession, he said he would cry and say he'd never hurt anyone, he'd never do anything like that. But then he'd say something to the effect of he felt like he was being forced out of his own control, like he was out of his mind. Then he'd go back to saying he'd never do anything. Then he would add these little tidbits

So I think something was here before that even happened. Maybe if you're not mentally strong or grounded in whatever you believe in for protection, that can latch on to somebody. And that's what scares me about this place. That's why this place scares me, but I also respect that to where, shadow dude, I want nothing to do with you.

Because if you don't have me here doing tours, you can't mess with overnighters. You need me. So, like, leave me out of this. - Villisca. Everybody in the true crime world knows that town. And for a good reason. Those murders on that fateful night in 1912 were brutal. They were seemingly random and they remain unsolved. And it has us both wondering who could have carried them out?

Was it the preacher? The local politician? A completely random serial killer? We don't know. We'll have to chalk it up as a complete and utter mystery. Hey everybody, it's Colin here. And Courtney. Shit, my voice kind of cracked there. Thank you guys for listening to another episode of Murder in America. I wrote this one because I've been to Villisca and the story matters a lot to me. But Courtney, you wrote the next episode that we're airing and who are we doing next?

Jeffrey Dahmer. So if you guys are serial killer fans, next week we have a huge case coming up. If you want to follow us on Instagram, follow us at Murder in America. You can follow me at Colin Brown and Courtney. Court Shan. If you also would like to become a patron, we have bonus episodes on there. We just did the Minnesota vampire murder. Just look up Murder in America on Patreon. And a place like Villisca. Sorry, fucked up. A place like Villisca. I've been there. I know that it's haunted. And it's truly a place like this.

where Courtney and I can both sit and wonder the same old question. The dead don't talk. Or do they? All right. See you on the next one, everybody.