by Bill James
This set the stage for another grand jury to look into the case, this time looking not at William Mansfield but directly at Frank Jones. We’ll get back to that in a moment. In 1915, J. N. Wilkerson had begun a series of public meetings. The public meetings initially were small, informal, and infrequent. Over a period of three years they grew larger, more enthusiastic, and more frequent.
The small, private meetings he began conducting well before the Mansfield arrest, events that often included guards to keep out the unwanted, were now public events. He was a charismatic speaker and people wanted to hear what he had to say, and in 1917 they came in droves. The popularity of his meetings was enormous, attracting more and more people.
—Roy Marshall, Villisca
People were still excited about the case years after the murders. Wilkerson could fill a house with people anxious to talk about the murders, and fill another one two weeks later. These meetings are brilliantly described by Troy Taylor in Murdered in Their Beds:
The program went on for more than two hours. Eventually Wilkerson returned to the stage and spoke about the investigation he was conducting and how dangerous it was, what a great service it did for the people, how good he was at it and of course, how he needed money to keep it going. He claimed that many people were afraid to tell what they knew about the murders and would only come to him in secret. Because they would not talk publicly, he said he was unable to use what they told him, due to the fact that he was an impeccable and honest investigator. Anyone who claimed that he brought questionable evidence into the case, he told the crowd, was lying.
One meeting, in January 1917, drew 1,200 people—more than half the population of the town, although of course many of those who attended were not from the town itself. That meeting was organized in an effort to force Montgomery County to pay an unpaid bill for Burns’s services in investigating the case, about $2,800. The investigation had been funded by $250 from Sarah Moore’s father, a Villisca reward fund, and the Iowa attorney general’s office. The money from Sarah Moore’s father and the reward fund had long since run out, and after Wilkerson and Boyle charged the attorney general’s office with covering up the investigation to save Frank Jones, the attorney general’s office wasn’t paying their bills. The county had never agreed to pay for Burns’s investigation, although (after another large, loud public meeting lasting for several hours) they agreed to pay part of the bill. But during this battle over who would write the checks, a wealthy farmer started a “subscription list” of citizens who agreed to collectively underwrite the investigation. In a sense this was the worst-case scenario; it meant that Wilkerson had an unlimited line of credit to keep the investigation going—as long as he could keep people angry, as long as he could keep the public riled up and demanding justice.
Over the course of three years and more of these tent-revival-type meetings, Wilkerson built his case against Frank Jones. People who had told police investigators in the days after the murders that they had seen nothing and knew nothing now were willing to swear that they had seen things and knew things. A widow named Margaret Landers lived across the street from the murder scene. On the day after the murders, she had told Marshal Horton that she had seen nothing. Four years after the murders, under the guidance of Wilkerson, Mrs. Landers began to claim that she had seen things, important and meaningful things, on the night of the murders. Her son stepped forward to support her story. On the day after the murders he had said that he had seen someone walking near the house on Sunday evening, but didn’t know who it was, but now he knew who it was. It was Albert Jones, he said. He had known Albert Jones all of his life; they had grown up together.
Wilkerson had prepared a “dope sheet” outlining his case against Frank and Albert Jones. But after Wilkerson beat Jones in the slander suit at the end of 1916, Iowa officials decided that another grand jury was in order. That grand jury—the second grand jury to look into the case—was called in the last week of February 1917 and began hearing evidence on March 5.
The waters had now been flowing in favor of J. N. Wilkerson for almost three years. Animosity against Jones was at such a fever pitch, by early 1917, that there was a serious fear that he might be lynched (although lynching was unheard of in Iowa by this time) or that he could be shot by some justice-seeking farmer.
CHAPTER XVI
Villisca 4
Wilkerson will not be accused of being ashamed of himself. So much of his stuff is so utterly silly that it would not be given credence except by those who are living under the spell of extreme excitement. The situation in Villisca and Red Oak is as terrible as it is absurd.
—Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune,
July 1917, Storm Lake, Iowa
In late February 1917, J. N. Wikerson instigated an effort to burglarize Frank Jones’s store. This act would contribute somewhat to Wilkerson’s eventual undoing, but not right away.
Until 1917 Wilkerson had never lived in Villisca; he worked the case a few days at a time with other cases, in and out on the train. While in Villisca he stayed with a woman with whom he had developed a relationship; at least one woman, or at least one woman at a time. In the summer of 1915 a young schoolteacher named Nellie Byers was raped and murdered in central Kansas. It was relatively obvious who had committed the crime. The crime occurred in an isolated area but near a farmhouse, and a man who was staying in that house was a convicted felon with a history of violence against women. Although other people also lived at the house, the suspect acknowledged that he was there alone on the day of the murder. Nellie Byers had expressed a fear of him, and would try to avoid him. The suspect, Archibald Sweet, acknowledged being within two hundred yards of the spot where the crime had occurred, but claimed that he had seen and heard nothing. Men’s footprints at the scene of the crime were of the same size as Sweet’s shoes.
The county attorney, however, knew that he needed more to secure a conviction. He contacted the Burns Agency, asking for a private detective, and the Burns Agency sent him J. N. Wilkerson.
Wilkerson, within hours of arriving on the scene, enquired as to whether there was a reward in the case. No, the prosecutor said; the suspect is already in custody. Why would there be a reward?
Well, said Wilkerson, what if it wasn’t him? If that suspect was released, could there be a reward then? After meeting with Archibald Sweet and “interrogating” him for about three hours, Wilkerson announced that Sweet was innocent, that another man had committed the crime, and that they needed to write to the governor and see if they could arrange for a reward fund for the proper solution of this case.
Over the next few weeks, it became clear that Wilkerson—being paid by the county—was actually working hand in glove with Archibald Sweet to try to manufacture a case against another man, and that this was being done in order to pursue a reward. On several occasions, Wilkerson generously offered to split the reward with the county attorney, if a reward could be arranged.
Within a few weeks, the county attorney fired the Burns Agency, but Wilkerson hung around and gave interviews to the local newspapers, insisting that Sweet was innocent and that he was being framed by the county attorney. The prosecutor was able to convict Sweet of the murder, despite Wilkerson’s interference, but refused to pay the Burns Agency for Wilkerson’s services.
In 1917, about the time that Wilkerson’s program in Villisca was finally collapsing, Archibald Sweet signed an affidavit confirming that Wilkerson had proposed that the two of them work together to frame an innocent man, and outlining at every step what Sweet should say and how he should act to help bring this about. When Frank Jones and those on his side finally had Wilkerson on the run, this affidavit (and others related to the Nellie Byers case) became one of their weapons.
* * *
Frank Jones had lived among the people of Montgomery County all of his life and had won election to the Iowa senate by carrying a huge percentage of the Villisca-area vote. He was quite astonished, at first, to find himself outmaneuvered by an outside
r, his reputation torn to shreds by a lowlife con man.
But after he lost the primary election in June 1916, Jones began to fight back, and in early 1917 the tide seemed to be turning. The town’s businessmen rallied around him. Jones hired his own private detective; that private eye, posing as a newspaperman, deeply infiltrated Wilkerson’s operation. By February 1917, Jones had a safe stuffed with affidavits about the Nellie Byers case and with other information damaging to J. N. Wilkerson. Wilkerson—who had almost certainly stolen files from the county attorney’s office in an earlier incident—now located a burglar who could break into Jones’s store and into the safe. It was a cloak-and-dagger operation; Wilkerson hired people through intermediaries, arranged to be out of the area and with an alibi at the time of the crime, and surreptitiously handed off the keys to the getaway car without actually going to the car, doing everything he could do to keep his hands clean.
Frank Jones’s spy within Wilkerson’s operation, however, had become one of Wilkerson’s trusted assistants, and was in on the plot. When the burglars showed up at Frank Jones’s store in the predawn hours of a bitterly cold February night, Frank Jones and Hank Horton were waiting for them inside the store with loaded shotguns. Horton’s shotgun misfired and the burglars escaped, but again, Jones had spies in Wilkerson’s nest; the escape was temporary. Wilkerson’s men ratted him out. Wilkerson acknowledged arranging the burglary but claimed that it had been merely an effort to recover evidence that would incriminate Jones in the murders.
The Burns Agency was now plagued by legal troubles around the nation. By early 1917 James Burns himself was under indictment for several different forms of illegal surveillance, and a judge in Florida had declared that the Burns Agency was “a menace to the public.” The Burns Agency lost $2,500 and got another black eye when William Mansfield successfully sued Wilkerson for assaulting him at the time of Mansfield’s arrest in June 1916. Wilkerson’s involvement in the break-in at Jones’s store was now suspected, although Wilkerson would not be charged with that crime until several months later. Jack Boyle, Wilkerson’s publishing partner, was arrested in Kansas City in January 1917 for possession of drugs, an offense with which he had a long acquaintance; that arrest took Boyle permanently out of the story.
Wilkerson hadn’t liked the previous grand jury, July 1916, which had failed to indict Mansfield or Frank Jones, but when Montgomery County and the state of Iowa took Wilkerson’s case back to the grand jury in late February 1917, there were two things that were significantly different—two things beyond this accumulation of hickeys. First, the second grand jury had access to Wilkerson’s dope sheet, outlining his case against Jones, explaining what each witness would say that would support the case. And second—in large part because of this case—the Iowa state legislature had authorized the Iowa attorney general’s office to hire a permanent staff of professional investigators.
Within days the members of the grand jury had begun to notice that witness after witness was saying things different from what Wilkerson’s dope sheet had promised they would say. In some cases they backed off what they had said before, in some cases witnesses flatly denied that they had ever said what Wilkerson claimed they would say, while in other cases they took what Wilkerson said they would say and ran on down the field with it, making new allegations that went well beyond the old. A man who was reported by Wilkerson to have seen Albert Jones and two other men standing outside the Moore house about midnight on the night of the murders now traveled back to Iowa from Montana to say that he had seen nothing of the kind and had never said that he had. Other recantations or denials were just as stark. The one constant was that the testimony never matched what was supposed to be said.
Wilkerson’s witnesses could be sorted into two groups. One group—70 percent of the witnesses, and more—seemed reliable enough but testified about matters peripheral to the case, not really damaging to Jones. The other group, the truly damaging witnesses, consisted of obviously and fantastically unreliable witnesses—notorious liars telling remarkable stories about how they happened to witness Jones and his partners plotting and carrying out the murders. In every case except one (Warren Noel) these people had withheld crucial information about a terrible and infamous crime for years after the fact, in almost every case denying at the time that they had seen or heard anything. None of these witnesses had ever reported having any information about the crime until interviewed by J. N. Wilkerson.
And when the professional investigators from the Iowa attorney general’s office checked out details from their stories, nothing checked out; nobody seemed to have been where they claimed to have been at the crucial times.
As the slander suit filed by Frank Jones against Wilkerson had switched poles and become a trial of Frank Jones for the murders of the Moore family, the grand jury proceeding looking into Frank Jones now flipped and became an investigation of J. N. Wilkerson. Noting remarkable discrepancies between the dope sheet and the testimony of one witness, Wilkerson was called to the witness stand to explain the discrepancies. Wilkerson refused to answer questions and was ordered to spend twenty-four hours in the county jail for contempt of court. His legion of supporters stormed around town demanding his release, but Wilkerson did his twenty-four hours in jail.
The grand jury report excoriated Wilkerson and debunked his allegations. The report stung Wilkerson, but he still had hundreds of passionate supporters in the small town. Wilkerson submitted a bill to the county for his investigation, $595.29; there was another contentious public meeting about whether the bill should be paid, but it was paid. The Burns Agency fired Wilkerson, apparently in April 1917. That didn’t finish him, either. He stayed in town and continued to hold public meetings.
A bill was passed by the Iowa legislature, the Thompson Bill, aimed directly at putting an end to Wilkerson’s operation. Wilkerson and a troupe of his supporters traveled to Des Moines and met with the governor, William L. Harding, pleading with him not to sign the bill. Wilkerson told the governor that the bill was aimed at him, in particular, and would restrict his freedom of speech. All of that was true, but on April 26, 1917, Harding signed the bill into law.
* * *
This was the same era in which Rasputin was murdered, and J. N. Wilkerson was harder to stop than Rasputin. Under attack, Wilkerson attacked. In court on charges of arranging the burglary, Wilkerson filled the courtroom with his supporters, who cheered for him and snickered at the points made against him, just as they had during the slander litigation. He accused the attorney general’s office of stealing his investigative file, which he had worked on for years. He referred to Iowa Attorney General Horace Havner as a shyster, and began to mock him and deride him in his public meetings—just as he had done to Senator Jones, to Marshal Horton, to the previous attorney general, and to anyone else who opposed his operation.
It is a poor idea, for a con man, to make a mortal enemy of the state attorney general. If you are in the con man business, I would not recommend that you should do this. But Wilkerson had become a very serious problem. Theoretically banned from holding his public meetings in Iowa, Wilkerson moved his operation across the state line into Nebraska, at one point booking a special train to take people from western Iowa over to Nebraska to see the show; Wilkerson’s operation sold tickets for the excursion. He drew large crowds, but after a couple of meetings Wilkerson realized that the Nebraskans were just there to watch and wouldn’t give him money to support the investigation, so he moved back into Iowa; the Thompson Bill, aimed at stopping the public meetings, was unconstitutional and unenforceable, and Wilkerson just ignored it.
By now Wilkerson had convinced a large share of the area’s population—almost certainly over half of them—that the elected officials were conspiring to hinder the prosecution of Frank Jones. Rather than discontinuing his public meetings, Wilkerson increased their frequency. He held court in every little town and small city in the area. His supporters organized themselves as the “Citizen’s Investigative Com
mittee,” also known as the Montgomery County Protective Association. They had dues, they had officers, they had committees, they had projects. They had an oath. I hereby promise under oath that I will not disclose the secrets of this organization, and that I will assist every effort this organization may make to uphold the law and further the cause of justice. I further pledge myself to defend this organization and its members against injustice of any kind. Wilkerson no longer had to reserve the hall and post flyers about his upcoming meetings; that was done for him by his support group. His organization collected dues, passed the money to him, and kept records of how much money was raised at each event. Wilkerson had a list of “100 questions” that he wanted to ask Frank Jones; the list was a regular feature of his meetings. His organization got copies of the questions bound into a pamphlet and sold copies at his rallies, giving the profit to Wilkerson. He no longer needed the Burns Agency or the county; he no longer dreamed of extorting a payoff from Frank Jones. He was living off the land.
