There is a small white house on East Second Street in Villisca, Iowa, with no electricity and no running water. Both were taken out on purpose. The people who restored it wanted the building to be exactly what it was in June 1912, down to the outhouse and the chicken coop in the yard.
Eight people went to sleep in that house on a Sunday night and none of them woke up. Six of them were children. Nobody has ever been convicted, and after more than a century nobody ever will be.
This page covers what happened, who was suspected, and why the case collapsed. It does not describe the injuries. That material is in the coroner’s record for anyone who needs it, and it does not belong here.
The short answer
The Villisca Axe Murder House is the former home of Josiah and Sarah Moore at 508 East Second Street in Villisca, Iowa, where the Moores, their four children and two young guests were killed during the night of 9 June 1912. The weapon was an axe taken from the family’s own yard. The case was never solved. The house was restored to its 1912 condition in the 1990s and now runs daytime tours and overnight stays.
The night of 9 June 1912
It was Children’s Day at the Presbyterian church, and Sarah Moore had organised the programme. Her children took part in it. Two sisters from the neighbourhood, Lena and Ina Stillinger, were there too, and Sarah’s daughter Katherine invited them back for a sleepover. Their parents said yes.
The programme finished at half past nine. The group walked home and were inside by ten. At some point after that, somebody came into the house, took the axe from the yard, and killed everyone in it.
At seven the next morning a neighbour called Mary Peckham noticed that nobody had come out to do the chores. She knocked, got no answer, found the door locked, and let the chickens out herself before telephoning Josiah’s brother Ross. Ross had a key. He went in, came straight back out, and told Peckham to call the marshal.
By the time the day was over, half the town had been through the building.
The eight people who died
| Name | Age | Who they were |
|---|---|---|
| Josiah B. Moore | 43 | Farm implement dealer, well known in the town |
| Sarah Moore | 39 | His wife, who ran the church programme that night |
| Herman Montgomery Moore | 11 | The eldest of the four Moore children |
| Mary Katherine Moore | 10 | Invited the Stillinger sisters to stay over |
| Arthur Boyd Moore | 7 | The third Moore child |
| Paul Vernon Moore | 5 | The youngest in the house |
| Lena Gertrude Stillinger | 12 | A guest for the night, from the neighbourhood |
| Ina Mae Stillinger | 8 | Her younger sister, also a guest |
They were buried together three days later. The funeral was held in the town square because no building in Villisca was big enough. Thousands came. The National Guard held the street, and the procession behind the wagons ran to fifty carriages.
The details nobody has ever explained
Strip out everything to do with the violence and what is left is still one of the strangest scenes in American criminal history.
Every mirror in the house had been covered. So had a piece of glass in a door. The keyhole on one door had been plugged with a piece of cloth. The faces of the dead had been covered with bedclothes. The axe was found inside the house, wiped, propped against a wall, and it belonged to the Moores.
In the downstairs bedroom there was a slab of uncooked bacon on the floor, wrapped, next to the axe. A four pound piece of it. In the kitchen there was a bowl of bloodied water and a plate with uneaten food on it. Two cigarette ends were found in the attic, which suggested to investigators at the time that somebody had waited up there while the family came home and went to bed.
The lamps in the house had their glass chimneys removed and the wicks turned low. Whoever did this moved through the building in near darkness and was in no hurry about it. That is the detail that unsettles people most, and it is the only one that is completely uncontested.
Why the case fell apart in the first day
Modern forensics would not have saved this investigation, because there was nothing left to examine by lunchtime.
Word went round Villisca within the hour and people simply walked in. Neighbours, the curious, souvenir hunters. By the time the Villisca National Guard unit was called out to seal the house, hundreds of people had been through the rooms, touched surfaces and moved things. Bloodhounds arrived hours late. The axe had been handled repeatedly.
There was no state investigative body in Iowa in 1912. Villisca had a marshal and a town of a few thousand people, and the case that landed on it pushed the sinking of the Titanic off the front pages two months after it happened. The murders directly prompted the legislation that created the forerunner of Iowa’s state criminal investigation bureau. The reform came out of the failure, which is cold comfort.
The suspects
Six names have carried real weight over the last century. Not one of them was ever convicted.
| Suspect | Connection to the case | Why it went nowhere |
|---|---|---|
| Rev. Lyn G. J. Kelly | Travelling minister, present at the church programme | Confessed, recanted, two trials, acquitted |
| Frank F. Jones | State senator, Moore’s former employer and rival | Never charged. Nothing beyond the feud |
| William Mansfield | Alleged by a private detective to be Jones’s hired man | Payroll records placed him in Illinois |
| Andy Sawyer | Drifter who talked about the case oddly and often | Jailed for vagrancy elsewhere that night |
| Henry Lee Moore | No relation. Convicted of similar axe killings | Nothing ever tied him to Villisca |
| Paul Mueller | Drifter linked to a run of axe murders nationally | Named in 2017, far too late to test |
The Frank Jones theory made the town fight against itself for decades. Josiah Moore had worked for Jones, quit in 1907, established competition and took the John Deere dealership with him. Also, there was the persistent rumor about Moore and Jones’s daughter-in-law. Those two crossed the street to avoid each other, and that in such a small town is a public statement. A private detective working for Jones’s rival compiled the case against Jones and proved he had bribed William Mansfield to kill. Mansfield had alibi and sued back. The real proof is how much that small town needed to know that its killer is someone that it dislikes anyway.
The reverend who confessed and then recanted
Lyn George Jacklin Kelly is the closest thing that this case has to a solution, and he is also the reason why it will never have one.
Kelly was a traveling English-born minister who had come to Villisca the day before the killings. He had attended the Children’s Day program and seen the Moore children and the Stillinger girls perform. He had left the town by 5:19 train the next morning and was seen telling fellow passengers that eight people lie dead in Villisca, killed in their beds.
If that account is true, it is almost undeniable. The problem is that the information came years after and in a town where the case was saturated in rumors, coming from witnesses recalling their conversation from many years ago.
Kelly was arrested in 1917 and confessed in detail. Then he recanted his confession and stated that it had been beaten out of him in a prolonged interrogation. He had a documented history of mental illnesses from his teens and the records of erratic behavior. His first trial ended with hung jury, while the second ended in acquittal and he went free.
You can understand him in two ways and both are quite unpleasant. Either a guilty man convinced himself to come to the court and get out of it or a vulnerable one was put under pressure to confess to eight murders he had nothing to do with. Nothing in the records proves it.
The man from the train
The most serious modern theory of the murder was published in 2017 in quite an unexpected place. Bill James, statistician famous for his analysis of baseball, spent years researching American newspaper archives for murders that could match the same signature.
What they found was a pattern of murders of families at nights in houses close to the railway, spanning several years and states. In each scene, the same details were repeated – the axe taken from the property, the mirrors covered, lamps treated in the same manner. The case of Villisca fits perfectly. Their conclusion is that it was committed by German immigrant drifter Paul Mueller who had killed before and moved around by rails.
It is the best-argued theory yet, and it is impossible to test. There is no physical evidence left from any of those scenes. All it does is refines the case of Villisca. For a hundred years, the town has torn itself apart searching the answer inside – in a senator, a minister, a neighbor. The most probable one is that the person responsible had no connection to Villisca at all, appeared there by train, and left.
What the house is today
By the early 1990s the building had had seven owners and was ready to be demolished. Darwin and Martha Linn bought it in 1994 and did something unique with it. Instead of renovating, they reversed the house.
They stripped it of plumbing and wiring. They replaced the vinyl siding, painted the original boards, opened the enclosed porches, returned the indoor bathroom into a pantry, reconstructed the outhouse and chicken coop. For placing the furniture, they relied on the old photographs, memories of neighbors, and testimony from the coroner’s inquest and the grand jury hearing. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.
The Linns opened the house for visitors in 1998 and during their time never advertised it. Darwin Linn died in 2011 and Martha kept running it until 2023, when she retired at 87 and sold it. Now it is run as a tour attraction by the company that runs historic properties.
Is the Villisca Axe Murder House haunted
Visitors report children’s voices, footsteps on the stairs, objects moving and falling temperatures. The Villisca Axe Murder House has been filmed by most of the paranormal television industry at one point or another, and the overnight bookings sell out months ahead.
There is no evidence of anything supernatural in the building, and there is a great deal of evidence about what happens to people who sit awake in an unlit 1,200 square foot wooden house at three in the morning, knowing what they know. Old timber contracts and settles all night. Without electricity there is no ambient hum to mask any of it. Every guest has arrived primed by the story. Under those conditions the brain reliably produces voices out of noise, and there is nothing wrong with a brain that does it.
Where this house differs from something like Robert the Doll, which is an odd object with a folklore attached, is that here six children really did die, and their families lived in that town for generations afterwards. That is worth carrying into the building with you.
Visiting, and how to do it decently
The house offers day tours during warmer months and overnight tours throughout the year, both on a reserved basis. One should check whether accommodation and tickets are available before making a trip. Villisca is a small city in southwest Iowa, situated in about a two-hour drive from Des Moines and Omaha. One cannot accidentally drive through this place.
There are Moore and Stillinger graves in the Villisca cemetery, and the majority of overnight tours are likely to include it. Go. It is the one stop on the tour which makes everything else possible.
It seems to be a single request, and I can guarantee that nobody will enforce it upon you. There are still families related to those who lived in that house in that county. No matter what you come to the place to see, do not use names as decorations.
What possibly could happen?
This is my take on the event, presented as my own version of the story.
The locals never managed to solve their suspicions about who could commit such crimes. The theory about the senator was a commercial conflict turned into a conspiracy by the locals. The reverend could be a man with psychological problems who had been talking too loud in front of police officers. In order to solve the crime, the locals needed someone to do some incredible things in Villisca, and they preferred that variant.
However, the truth was worse and more accurate. Someone came, spent several hours in an attic, took an axe in the yard, put some towels on the mirrors and went back to the train. The person had already killed before and did it again. This man had never met anyone from that family, and his murders were completely random. It is the lack of motive that made the crime famous for more than a hundred years.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the Villisca Axe Murder House?
At 508 East Second Street in Villisca, a small town in Montgomery County in southwest Iowa. It is signposted from the state highway and there is a marker in the front garden.
Was anyone ever convicted of the Villisca murders?
No. Only one person was ever tried. Reverend Lyn Kelly faced two trials in 1917, the first ending in a hung jury and the second in acquittal, and the case remains formally unsolved.
Can you stay the night in the Villisca Axe Murder House?
Yes, overnight stays are available by reservation and run through the year. The house has no electricity or running water by design, so it is a genuinely basic stay rather than a themed hotel room.
Why was the bacon there?
Nobody knows, and that is the honest answer. A wrapped slab of uncooked bacon was found on the floor of the downstairs bedroom beside the axe. Theories have ranged from the mundane to the elaborate for a hundred years without any of them being demonstrated.
Is there a film about the Villisca murders?
There is a 2016 horror film called The Axe Murders of Villisca, which uses the house and the case as a starting point rather than telling the real history. The documentaries and the podcast coverage stick far closer to the record.
How many children died in the Villisca case?
Six of the eight victims were children, aged between five and twelve. Four were the Moore children and two were the Stillinger sisters, who were only in the house because of a sleepover arranged that evening.