by Bill James
Have you ever seen the 1962 movie The Music Man? It’s a delight, if you haven’t seen it, a movie in the tradition of It’s a Wonderful Life and Field of Dreams, rather than Psycho.
Villisca happened in the exact time and place depicted in The Music Man. The Music Man is set in a small city in Iowa, and the first scenes of the movie are in the last days of June 1912. The movie is useful for helping to understand the time and the place—for illustrating the way, for example, that the trains connected the small town to the world at large. The opening scenes of the movie are Harold Hill on the train and jumping off the train, and there is constant talk, throughout the movie, about getting back on the train and getting out of town. In The Music Man the tranquil lives of the half-sleeping burghers are disrupted by a roguish con man intent on making a few bucks and getting out before he gets caught; in Villisca the tranquil lives of the half-sleeping burghers were devastated by as evil a man as has ever walked the face of the earth.
But there was a con man who came to Villisca, too, not in June of 1912 but in April 1914, almost two years after the murders. His name was J. N. Wilkerson, James Newton Wilkerson. He was a private detective, in the employ of the Kansas City office of the Burns Detective Agency. We could not quite say that he was as reprehensible as The Man from the Train himself; that is an extraordinary standard. Wilkerson was intelligent, charming in one-to-one conversation, and charismatic from the stage. Wilkerson saw in the Villisca tragedy a chance to make some money.
The Burns Agency had been hired by the state of Iowa to investigate the murders in the first days after the crime. The Burns investigator assigned to the case was C. W. Tobie. Tobie preferred to work undercover, so the fact that he was a private detective was kept secret. He worked the case through the end of August 1912, filing daily reports with the agency, but in early September Tobie was promoted to head of Burns’s Chicago office, and the Villisca investigation was taken over by W. S. Gordon. He made no secret of the fact that he was a Burns detective employed by the state, and sometimes talked to the newspapers to explain what was being done. This was preferable, from the standpoint of the state, because Tobie’s secrecy had left the people of Villisca convinced that the state was doing nothing to help.
By the winter of 1912 to 1913 the Burns Agency had run out of leads and had stopped actively investigating the case. In late 1913, a year after the murders, the relatives of the victims met with the mayor of Villisca, a local dentist, who was in charge of the Villisca reward fund. The mayor set up a meeting with the county attorney and Iowa Attorney General George Cosson. The attorney general’s office still had the arrangement with the Burns Agency. It would cost $8 to $10 per day to put an investigator on the case, but Sarah Moore’s father had agreed to put up $250, the attorney general’s office could kick in a little bit of money, and the Villisca reward fund could be repurposed to pay for a detective. Montgomery County officials attended the meeting but did not agree to underwrite the investigation, which later became significant. Among the four parties, they decided to contact the Burns Detective Agency and get the investigation going again.
The Burns Agency now assigned J. N. Wilkerson to the case. Where others saw tragedy and horror, Wilkerson saw opportunity. Wilkerson heard the rumors about Jones’s involvement in the murders, as he heard similar rumors about many others, but he was much more interested in Jones because Jones had money. No doubt the rumors about Jones were included in the file that Wilkerson was given when he was assigned the case. Just like an advertiser or a salesman or a lawyer, Wilkerson studied the file that had been assigned to him, looking for an angle that he could play. Frank Jones was an angle. Wilkerson was in fact a lawyer, having been admitted to the bar in Texas in 1890, but let’s not dwell on that; the reputation of lawyers doesn’t need the hit.
Jack Boyle wrote crime stories for the Kansas City Post and other publications. In 1914 Boyle went to Villisca to do a story about the murders. He called the Burns Agency and asked to talk to whoever was in charge of the investigation. They denied that they had any connection to the investigation—standard practice, probably—but Boyle returned to Villisca and was able to make a connection with J. N. Wilkerson.
Wilkerson and Boyle became partners in the con, Newman and Redford in The Sting, Wilkerson in the lead and Boyle as his accomplice. In the summer of 1915 Boyle confronted Frank Jones, claimed that he was in possession of evidence that proved Jones was involved in the murders, and offered him a chance to tell his side of the story before the reports were published. He invited Jones up to his hotel room. Wilkerson was hiding in the hotel room, and had set up a Dictaphone (a recording device) to make a record of whatever was said. Jones was blindsided by the accusation—up to that point there had been nothing but some essentially innocuous rumors—but he refused to go to Boyle’s hotel room; he offered to talk to Boyle about the case, but not in the hotel room, they would have to go to his store. Boyle said No, it had to be the hotel room; Jones said No, it had to be in the store, and the interview never happened.
Weeks later, another newspaper reporter approached Jones with an offer; this reporter was named Bell, but he was using the name Daley. Bell/Daley said that he had come into possession of the reports from the Burns Agency concerning the murders. The reports were very damaging to Jones, said the middleman, but for $25,000 Jones could purchase the reports, and if he did, he could be assured that all investigations of him would never see the light of day. $25,000 in 1915 was roughly equivalent to $600,000 in 2017.
There is no doubt that this meeting took place; Bell said that it did, Jones said that it did, and Wilkerson acknowledged that he had cooperated in setting it up. But, Wilkerson insisted, it was not blackmail; it was merely an investigative ploy. If Jones expressed an interest in purchasing the packet, that would show that he had something to hide. This kind of “blackmail by newspaper” was quite common in that era. There were newspapers—dozens of them—which were essentially extortion rackets; their reason for publishing was to extort money for the stories they agreed not to publish. There is a very good book about the practice called Minnesota Rag: Corruption, Yellow Journalism, and the Case That Saved Freedom of the Press by Fred Friendly. Often, within that practice, a private investigator or a city cop would team up with a newspaper “reporter”; the private eye would dig up dirt, and the newspaper guy would offer not to publish it in exchange for money. Dividing the action between them, they were trying to create a situation in which neither of them could be shown to have committed a crime.
Wilkerson also did things like this in other cases; I’ll explain later. Jones knew that he hadn’t done anything, so he told Wilkerson, Boyle, and Bell what they could do with their threats. He wasn’t going to pay them a dime.
But Wilkerson was not making an idle threat. Wilkerson began a campaign to prosecute Jones for the murders, a devious, energetic, and resourceful campaign that he would sustain for several years. Perhaps he thought that Jones would succumb to the pressure and pay off the blackmail; perhaps he simply switched strategies and decided to play another angle. Wilkerson worked with the rumors, mined the gossip as if it were gold. He worked with the weak, the excitable, and the irresponsible. He ingratiated himself to the families of the victims, becoming their spokesman and their advocate. He loved the widows, and the widows loved him. He would sit and talk with the people who had no one else to talk to; he would talk to them for hours, waiting for them to say something he wanted to hear. You saw what?! Oh, my God; that’s incredible. That’s amazing. What else did you see? What else did you hear? Oh, you have to share this with the public. What you have told me is so tremendously important. You have to do the right thing here. You have valuable information about this terrible crime. I know this is hard for you, but I need you to talk about this at my next public meeting.
Wilkerson gave vulnerable people praise and reinforcement for telling ridiculous stories that would have drawn a scornful look from any legitimate investigator. When he had two facts, two cla
ims, he would go for three; when he had three witnesses, he would go for four. The fountainhead of Wilkerson’s case was a nutty woman from Marshalltown, Iowa, two hundred miles away, Vina Tompkins. Mrs. Tompkins claimed that she had been raised and had lived all of her life among a gang of criminals who committed terrible crimes from coast to coast, that her ex-husband, her current husband, and all three of her brothers were members of this gang. She claimed that she had spent time in Villisca (in fact she had not), that she knew the Moore family, that she had been in the Moores’ house, and that she knew the full story of the murders.
Wilkerson, a highly intelligent man, had to know that Vina (Vine-Uh) had no actual information about the case. But Vina Tompkins could be manipulated to say almost anything that he wanted her to say. He thus began to bolster her reputation for credibility, in the same way that he worked to destroy the reputations of those who opposed him. Vina Tompkins would ultimately deny that she had ever said most of the things that Wilkerson claimed she had said, but that was years later, and by that time Wilkerson had developed many other “witnesses.”
In early July 1914, a family was murdered with an axe in Blue Island, Illinois. As nearly as we can tell that case was unrelated to The Man from the Train, although we can’t be certain of that. William Mansfield had been married to a woman murdered in the Blue Island massacre, and had abandoned her and her family. Mansfield got his wife and another woman pregnant at about the same time, and abandoned his wife to live with the other woman. He was a suspect in the murder of his wife’s family.
J. N. Wilkerson traveled to Blue Island, looked into the case, and adopted Mansfield as part of his case against Frank Jones. Wilkerson claimed that he could prove that Mansfield was in Villisca on the night of June 9, 1912, and that he was in Paola on the night the Hudsons were murdered, and also that he could tie him to another murder. None of this had any foundation in fact; Wilkerson was just making it up as he went along.
Frank Jones’s son, Albert Jones, was married to a young woman named Dona. Dona was quite a looker, and she had a reputation; she had been around the block a few times. A rumor spread that Dona had been involved in a secret relationship with J. B. Moore, and that this had provoked Frank Jones to set up the murders.
No evidence for any of that, really; Dona Jones had almost certainly been a little bit free with her embraces, and perhaps had married Albert Jones, who was basically a walking pumpkin, to share in the family’s money. To me, this is just like the stories about Anna Hudson’s lover, and Alice Schultz’s lovers, and May Alice Burnham’s lover. Sex is always suspected of inspiring every dark and secret act—for good reasons; sex is at the origin of many murder plots; every cop will tell you that. Sex was at the root of this case—but not the kind of inappropriate-but-normal sexual impulse that leads a man to sleep with his neighbor’s wife; rather, it was sexuality of a horribly twisted kind.
I am of necessity leaving out steps and stages; Wilkerson’s case against Frank Jones et al. evolved from one set of accusations to another. Con men talk in circles. To present these accusations as a cohesive, logical case would be inaccurate, since they never were, and to present them in the stages that Wilkerson presented them would require years, since Wilkerson shifted his narrative constantly over a period of years. But in short form: Frank Jones was allegedly upset at J. B. Moore not only because of business competition, but also because Moore was canoodling his son’s wife. Jones hired Mansfield to murder the family; Albert Jones helped them do it, and a vast network of city and state officials were involved in a conspiracy to cover it up and obstruct prosecution.
Through the second half of 1915 and the first half of 1916 Wilkerson worked to indict Frank Jones, but the county attorney, Ratcliff, wouldn’t hear it; he knew that Jones had nothing to do with the crime. In the summer of 1916 Frank Jones was running for reelection to the state senate, in a hard-fought Republican primary contest against the same Ratcliff. In early June, days before the Republican primary, someone mailed a flyer to hundreds of potential voters, showing large pictures of William Mansfield and Frank Jones, and bluntly accusing Mansfield of the murders and Frank Jones of setting up the murders. There is no doubt that Boyle and Wilkerson were behind the flyers, although there is no direct proof of this. Ratcliff, the “beneficiary” of the smear, was horrified by it. The flyers were mailed from Kansas City, where Boyle and Wilkerson both operated, and used a photo of Mansfield that was a part of the Burns file on the case. On learning of the flyers Ratcliff went immediately to Villisca, went to Jones’s home, and met with him.
Following that meeting, Frank Jones denounced the libel and stated that he would file suit against anyone who publicly accused him of being involved in the murders. He had said the same thing before, but that was private, and off the record. This was public, and in the newspapers.
Jones lost the primary election, although Villisca still voted for him. (The Villisca area had a population of three to four thousand people, including farmers near the town; the senate district that Jones represented had a population larger than thirty thousand.) The purpose of the flyers was not merely to impact the election but also to set the stage for other actions. The fact of the flyers broke down the resistance of other publications to publishing the allegations. The year 1916 is four years after the murders; not a lot has happened within the legal system in those four years. The next two years would see an avalanche of lawsuits, arrests, and prosecutions. A week after the Republican primary, Jack Boyle published a story in the Kansas City Post directly alleging that William Mansfield was connected to sixteen murders, and that warrants had been issued in Red Oak, the county seat, for his arrest in connection with the Villisca murders. The second half of that was true; warrants had been issued for Mansfield’s arrest in connection with the Villisca murders.
The story told by the Kansas City Post article was essentially the Vina Tompkins story. The story was preposterous on its face, and embroidered with elements literally lifted from fiction. Boyle had published a series of fictional detective stories under the pen name Boston Blackie. Now Boyle claimed that Mansfield had long been called Blackie—totally untrue—and he dubbed Mansfield “Insane Blackie Mansfield.” Boyle’s story was picked up by dozens of other newspapers, and thousands of people now came to believe that the Villisca murders had been solved.
With Ratcliff running for the Iowa senate, the county attorney’s job had been filled by a young, inexperienced lawyer who was heading into an election of his own. A resolution to the Villisca mystery might secure his reelection. Wilkerson persuaded the rookie prosecutor to charge Mansfield with the Villisca murders, promising him evidence to be produced later. Mansfield was arrested by Wilkerson and other Burns operatives in Kansas City two days after Boyle’s story was published. They spent the night trying to sweat a confession out of him; according to a lawsuit later decided in Mansfield’s favor, Wilkerson and other Burns detectives on the day of the arrest punched Mansfield repeatedly, loosened several of his teeth, threatened his life, held an axe over his head, and while driving over a bridge, threatened to pitch him into the river. Mansfield was a tough guy who had spent time in Leavenworth; he wasn’t giving anything up, and, in fact, he had no knowledge of the murders.
The Mansfield case went to a grand jury in Red Oak in mid-July 1916. The county attorney presented the case with J. N. Wilkerson sitting at his side, staging the witnesses; they were asking for indictments of William Mansfield and another man not named by the newspapers. They got nothing. Numerous witnesses refused to say what Wilkerson had promised they would say; others told stories so improbable it was hard not to laugh. The jury returned no indictments, and Mansfield was released on July 21. Mansfield’s legal involvement with the Villisca case from the time he was accused until the time he was legally cleared was just a few weeks.
Villisca citizens had read in the newspapers a month earlier that the case was solved. Now the accused murderer was free, and the man supposed to have been pulling the strings re
mained in the clear. The young county attorney lost his reelection bid. Undaunted, Wilkerson told everybody who would listen that Frank Jones had fixed the grand jury. He just needed another grand jury, he said; he needed another shot at it.
Frank Jones now hired his own detectives and began to fight back. On August 3, 1916, Wilkerson held a public meeting of his supporters on a farm near Villisca. Numerous speakers accused Jones of arranging the murders. Jones had said that he would sue any man who said this in public, and he followed through, filing a slander suit against J. N. Wilkerson and numerous other people, including Joe Moore’s brother, Ross, who had discovered the first bodies. Later the suit was refiled to dismiss Ross Moore and all of the other defendants, leaving Wilkerson as the lone defendant.
Filing that slander suit, Jones would say, was the worst mistake he would ever make. The reputation of the Burns Agency was under attack, and the Burns Agency would send in the marines. The agency rushed an expensive and experienced lawyer to Villisca, backed by a squadron of private detectives. Out-lawyering Jones’s team ten to one, they converted the slander suit into a prosecution of Frank and Albert Jones. Witness after witness now came forward with stories to tell about Frank Jones—all of them later discredited, but Jones and his attorneys were caught off guard by the charges, and were unprepared to rebut them. Every seat in the courtroom was filled. People stood in the back of the courtroom and flowed into the hallway. Every hotel room in town was sold; every newspaper in the region was represented. Wilkerson had organized a group of his followers to sit in the center of the courthouse, to murmur appreciatively at points made in his favor and to laugh aloud at statements made by Jones’s attorneys. The first vote of the jury was six to six. Gradually they swung toward Wilkerson. The slander suit not only failed, it left large sections of the public convinced that Frank Jones had in fact arranged the murders.
