The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  1911

  Ardenwald, Oregon

  Hill family

  4

  June 9

  1911

  Rainier, Washington

  Coble couple

  2

  July 11

  1911

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Wayne family

  3

  September 17

  1911

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Burnham family

  3

  September 17

  1911

  Monmouth, Illinois

  Dawson family

  3

  September 30

  1911

  Ellsworth, Kansas

  Showman family

  5

  October 15

  1911

  Paola, Kansas

  Hudson family

  2

  June 5

  1912

  SECTION II

  — Summer 1912 —

  CHAPTER XIV

  Villisca 2

  June 9, 1912, was a Sunday, and the lights were out. Villisca, Iowa, was a town of 2,000 to 2,200 people; it was technically a city, and in 1912 such a place was normally referred to as a city. Villisca had installed streetlights in 1888, but the streetlights had been turned out due to a dispute between the city and the power company over the cost of electricity. Overcast skies had returned Villisca to a medieval darkness.

  There was a Children’s Day service at the Presbyterian church, starting at 8:00 p.m.; the family of Josiah and Sarah Moore attended and participated in the service, which Sarah had organized. Two little girls who were friends of Katherine Moore, Ina and Lena Stillinger, spent the afternoon playing at the Moore house. They lived outside of town and were supposed to spend the night with their grandmother, who lived in Villisca, but before the service Joe Moore called their house and asked if the girls could stay the night with Katherine. The Stillingers’ parents were not in the house, but an older sister gave permission for the change of plans.

  The service ended about 9:30 p.m. At about the same time the city marshal, Hank Horton, was standing in the city park, talking to one of the night watchmen, when a man they did not recognize passed by a little distance away. Horton spoke to the man, but the stranger did not reply. The night watchman was holding a flashlight, and Horton said, “Why don’t you throw your light on that man, and make him face around?” But the man was disappearing rapidly into the darkness, and the moment passed.

  Joe Moore, also known as J. B. and more formally as Josiah, was the owner of the local John Deere store. He was a moderately prosperous small-town businessman raising a large family in a small, plain house. Joe was a cheerful, well-liked, simple man who, in the words of the Iowa attorney general, was “at peace with everybody.”

  About 7:00 a.m. Monday morning a neighbor noticed that no one was stirring outside the Moore house. The Moores had two horses, two cows, and some chickens, all of which needed attention, but the chickens had been left squawking in their coop. The Stillinger girls had not called home after daybreak, as they had been instructed to do. The neighbor knocked on the door, but the door was locked and there was no answer. She let the chickens out of their coop and called Joe Moore’s brother, Ross Moore. Ross then called the John Deere store, where he was told that Joe had not come to work that morning. The clerk who answered the phone, the second-in-charge, walked to the Moore house, banged on the door, but then walked back to the store, the house still locked up tight. Ross Moore had a key to his brother’s house, and by a little after 8:00 a.m. Ross was concerned enough that he went to the house.

  There was no one around, the neighbor and the store clerk both having given up and gone home. Ross Moore checked on the livestock and then circled the house, banging on windows, trying to see in the windows and yelling out to see if anyone would answer. The neighbor returned. Ross unlocked the front door and/or forced it open. The house inside was very neat and entirely clean, but tainted with a foul odor and a terrible stillness. Across the parlor there was a small bedroom, called the parlor bedroom, where Katherine Moore normally slept, although on this night she was upstairs with her brothers. Ross Moore opened the door to the parlor bedroom, saw blood everywhere and the dead bodies of two young girls, obviously bludgeoned to death. He staggered back across the parlor, and moments later, sitting on the steps of the front porch, would utter the exact words that appear in countless crime books: Something terrible has happened.

  The Villisca police force consisted of the city marshal, Horton, and a staff of at least two night watchmen. In support of these was a county sheriff, eighteen miles away in Red Oak, which was the county seat of Montgomery County. None of these men had any training to be a police officer, and none of them had any experience in dealing with any situation remotely like this.

  Hank Horton rushed to the scene. The house, he said, was as dark as night. Lighting matches and holding them in front of him and armed only with a nightstick, Horton crept carefully from room to room, not knowing whether a madman might still be lurking somewhere in the house. In the match-lit darkness he found the bodies of the rest of the family, eight dead in all: Joe Moore (aged forty-three), Sarah Moore (forty), Herman (eleven), Katherine (nine), Boyd (seven) and Paul (five), and Lena Stillinger (eleven) and Ina Stillinger (nine). I apologize for the need to write this sentence, but the heads of all of the victims had been beaten to a pulp; it appeared that all had been hit in the head repeatedly with the blunt side of an axe, and that Joe Moore, in particular, had been hit many times. Sarah Moore had been hit at least once with the sharp side of the axe. A rusty axe, taken from the family’s coal shed, was left in the parlor bedroom with the Stillinger girls. A kerosene lamp without its chimney was found on the floor of the upstairs bedroom where the parents slept; on the ceiling above there were marks made by the backswing of the axe, apparently by someone who was very short, as the ceiling was low, and a man of average height would have difficulty swinging an axe in the room. A second kerosene lamp, also without its chimney, was on the floor of the parlor bedroom. Multiple mirrors in the house had been covered with cloth or clothing, and all of the windows in the house not already covered with window shades had also been completely covered with cloth. Every outside door had been locked or wedged shut. A washbasin with bloody water sat on the kitchen table, and a slab of bacon, taken from the ice box, was on the floor of the parlor bedroom, where it had apparently been used as a masturbatory aid.

  When Horton exited the house there were neighbors gathering near the door, including one of the night watchmen. Horton pulled the door shut and spoke to Ross Moore, saying, “My God, Ross, there’s somebody murdered in every bed.” He instructed the watchman not to allow anyone into the house, then ran for the center of town, looking for a doctor, Dr. Cooper. Pausing briefly at city hall to ask a clerk to call Red Oak and ask for help, he found Dr. Cooper in his office, finishing his morning coffee. Cooper and Horton returned to the house before 9:00 a.m., but a crowd was already gathering. Neighbors had called friends and relatives of the Moores, and their minister was there. After escorting Dr. Cooper around the house Horton returned to city hall, where he called a private detective he knew who had experience in investigating murders (Thomas O’Leary, of the Kirk Agency), called the county attorney, the coroner, and a couple of other local doctors. He located city officials, informed them of what had happened, and got authorization from them to call out the National Guard, and order them to surround the house, and to send for bloodhounds.

  A local drugstore owner who had expensive photography equipment took the equipment to the house to document the scene, but after taking some pictures he may have been ordered out of the house by the coroner. (Sources conflict on this point.)

  Horton’s instructions to keep unauthorized people out of the house were not zealously enforced. Horton estimated in a subsequent hearing that at least twenty people had been through the house before the National Guard arrive
d about noon; others have estimated that the number could have been fifty to a hundred. Horton canvassed the local hotels, asking about any strangers in town, and met with the other people who had been through the house to document what they had seen. Volunteer posses were organized to search through all the outbuildings in town, looking in particular for bloody clothes that may have been discarded.

  The bloodhounds were ordered from Beatrice, Nebraska, 134 miles to the west; the Nofzinger bloodhounds were regionally famous. It took hours for them to arrive. On Monday or Tuesday Horton questioned every neighbor who lived within sight of the Moore house and made notes of what they had to say, which in every case was that they hadn’t seen anything unusual.

  The bloodhounds didn’t arrive until about 9:00 on Monday evening, a little more than twelve hours after the murders were discovered. They picked up the scent of someone at the scene of the crime, trailed it down the block, stopped briefly at the house of a neighbor, Frank Jones, and then, with hundreds of people trailing behind them, led the mob out into the country, where they lost the scent at the Nodaway River, which is more accurately described as a creek. It being nightfall the operation was shut down until the morning, when the bloodhounds repeated the process and traced the same route.

  A coroner’s jury went through the house and viewed the bodies late on that day. The coroner called undertakers from several nearby towns, and the bodies were removed to a makeshift morgue at the fire station late that night.

  Roy Marshall, the most authoritative source on the events of the day, says that the crowds that arrived on the day of the tragedy were mostly local people and were of manageable size, but the crowds swelled enormously on the following days. Reporters came from many newspapers, of course, as well as thousands and thousands of people from out of town, drawn to the spectacle, and, again according to Marshall, dozens and dozens of private detectives. Photos taken later in the week show the streets of Villisca swarming with people, no doubt many times more people than actually lived in the town.

  At the same time, we should point this out: that there were people living twenty miles from Villisca who heard nothing of the murders for at least some weeks, and knew nothing about them. Certainly the events in Villisca were a huge statewide sensation, but it was a different world: no television, no Internet, no radio. Many people either never read the newspaper or skipped disinterestedly over stories about out-of-town murders. Some people were illiterate. Farmers spent long days in the fields, particularly in midsummer, and went irregularly into town. Not everybody got the news.

  The coroner’s jury began hearing testimony (which was properly recorded) beginning on Tuesday, one day after the discovery of the bodies. The funerals were on Wednesday, June 12, attended by an estimated seven thousand people. The coroner and the other doctors who had been to the scene all believed that the victims had died shortly after midnight on Sunday night. All of the victims had been murdered in their sleep except perhaps Lena Stillinger, aged eleven; according to the testimony of Dr. F. S. Williams, Lena “lay as though she had kicked one foot out of her bed sideways, with one hand up under the pillow on her right side, half sideways, not clear over but just a little. Apparently she had been struck in the head and squirmed down in the bed, perhaps one-third of the way.” Lena’s nightgown was pushed up and she was wearing no undergarments. It appeared that the killer had used her underpants to wipe the blood off of his hands and off of the axe handle, as there was lint clinging to the handle of the axe. There was a bloodstain on the inside of her right knee, probably a handprint, and a defensive wound on her arm. Although the coroner did not say this as part of the official record, he would tell a private investigator (C. W. Tobie) that Lena Stillinger had been sexually molested after she was dead. All of the bodies had been completely covered with blankets, except that Lena’s arm protruded out from beneath the blanket.

  The Moore house had a barn. Found in the barn was a depression in a pile of hay that looked as if someone had made a bed there, and if you lay down exactly where that depression was, there was a knothole in front of your eye that enabled you to watch the Moores’ house. It is presumed that the murderer lay quietly in that spot and watched the house go dark. Some people have theorized that the murderer entered the Moore house during the church program and hid in a closet until the family returned and went to bed. The authors, however, believe that this is enormously unlikely.

  The Villisca murders remain famous in the Midwest. Almost everyone from Iowa knows the general story. The Moore house is on the National Registry of Historic Places. It is used today as a haunted house for Halloween and for similar macabre events, a sort of low-level blood tourism like the famous Jack the Ripper walking tour in London. The county historical society has said that 80 percent of their requests for information concern the murders. The axe with which the murders were committed could be seen in the city hall from 1987 to 2004, although it is not currently on display. Books have been written about Villisca, and still are.

  The doctor(s) who examined the bodies believed that each had been hit repeatedly in the head with an axe. We question whether this is true, and frankly believe that it probably is not. Our opinion is that these doctors had never seen anyone who had been hit hard in the head with a heavy axe before, and they had no idea how completely the human head could be destroyed by one blow from a heavy axe.

  But as to the actual facts of the case, what I have told you is really all that is known. There is another story about Villisca, a rich and complicated story that goes on for years, goes on for decades, and we will tell you that story in chapters XV through XVII, because it is an interesting story that we believe you will enjoy reading, and also because that story has never been told in print the way that it deserves to be told. But as to the actual facts of the Moore case, we’re pretty much done here.

  CHAPTER XV

  Villisca 3

  After a day or two the tourist ghouls went home, leaving Villisca in meltdown shock. Children long accustomed to running all over the innocent little town with minimal supervision were suddenly on a three-foot leash, never again out of their parents’ sight; those children would say decades later that Villisca was never the same. For the rest of the summer families would bunk together so that one father or the other could sit up through the night with a loaded shotgun. The words gossip and speculation no longer describe the conversations that followed; this was Terror. Gossip is a rapier, slicing quickly and leaving its victims to bleed from small cuts; this was more on the scale of a bomb, creating a crater where the heart of the town had once been.

  But let us call it gossip; Who do you think it was? What did you see? What do you know? What have you heard? Who do you suspect? There is a contrast here between Villisca and Paola, the two atrocities unquestionably committed by the same man in essentially the same manner, only days apart. Paola buried the event and moved on immediately; two months after the murders you can’t find much interest in them in the local papers. The body count was much higher in Villisca and the town not as large, but more to the point, the victims in Villisca were well-loved members of the community, people everybody knew, whereas the Hudsons were barely acquainted with Paola. Some people decided the Hudsons had been murdered by someone who knew them before they came to town; others, that it had been someone from the train. In either event it was over. It was never over in Villisca; it hung around the town like a wounded monster, an unwelcome guest at every gathering. The reporters and most or all of the police had instantly connected the Villisca murders to those in other towns, but the people of Villisca never accepted that. It was the connection to the other murders which made an immediate sensation of the Villisca crime; it was the realization that these crimes were part of a series that sent the press running to Villisca. When the murders happened the police immediately sent for bloodhounds, but when the bloodhounds told them that the killer had left town, they just ignored that and went on. The private detective who was called by Marshal Horton hours after the disc
overy of the bodies, Detective O’Leary, clearly and absolutely believed the murders had been committed by what we would now call a serial murderer (page 46, Roy Marshall; Villisca sources explained in chapter XVII). That wasn’t enough to make the townspeople feel safe. The Montgomery county sheriff, Oren Jackson, believed that the crime was committed by outsiders, not by people from Villisca (page 79, Roy Marshall). It didn’t get through.

  What happened in Paola was on the fringe of town, and what happened in Villisca was at the heart of the town, but more than that, the people of Paola did not know the Hudsons, mostly had never met them and never heard of them, whereas Joe Moore—a business owner in the center of town—was known to everyone, liked by almost everyone, and loved by many—as was his wife, as were his children, as were the Stillinger girls. The people of Paola thus naturally perceived what had happened as coming to them from the outside, whereas the people of Villisca perceived what had happened as coming from within. They never accepted that they had been hit by a moving force; they saw themselves as betrayed by someone within, someone who was still there.

  Frank Jones was perhaps the most successful man in Villisca at the time of the murders. Beginning modestly, he had built a substantial fortune based around a hardware and farm implements business, and then later, a bank. At the time of the murders he owned a car dealership as well—not a big deal in 1912, when not so many cars were sold. In 1912 he represented Montgomery County (in which Villisca sits) in the Iowa state legislature, and he was among the leaders of the state legislature. At the time of the murders he was running for the state senate; he would win the seat. I’m not saying that without the murders he would have been governor in ten years, but I wouldn’t have bet against it, either.

  Jones was a leader in his church and in the community. He had never taken a drink of liquor, even a sip of beer, and people who had known him for decades would say that they had never heard him use a curse word. When terror was the bread of Villisca and gossip was the wine, however, Jones became one of the targets of the gossip; one among many, but one of them. Joe Moore had been Frank Jones’s assistant in his hardware and farm implements store, his right-hand man. Moore had left to start his own business, becoming Jones’s competitor. Moore was more likeable than Jones, friendlier and more approachable, and he had taken a good many of Jones’s customers with him when he left. There may have been some ill feeling between them, or not, and the bloodhounds did stop briefly at Jones’s house as they were trailing the scent, but there is no real evidence that Jones ever disliked Moore or was ever angry at him for leaving and starting his own business; Jones, after all, had done the same thing to his employer years earlier. In any case some years had passed since Moore had left Frank Jones’s employment, and normalcy had settled over their long relationship. Small-town business rivals are often friends.