February 17, 2018 • 38 mins
This episode revisits the Villisca murders. In 1912, a small Iowa town was the scene of a chilling and brutal crime. Eight people were murdered in their beds by an assailant who has never been identified.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, Happy Saturday listeners. We have gotten a number of
emails and tweets over the last couple of months asking
if we have seen an article about the Vliska As
murders as being solved. So first, yes, we have seen
the article. Uh. And seconds UH. This book, which is
(00:22):
called The Man from the Train Presents was really a hypothesis,
not like an ironclad solution. Uh. It's authors scoured old
records for similar crimes, and based on that research, they
concluded that the Veliska murders were the work of a
serial killer who traveled by train and struck families who
lived near the tracks. We talk about a number of
(00:43):
other times that people had thought they'd cracked this case
in our episode on the murders, including some leads that
were also connected to serial killers. So we thought, in
light of the recent book and questions, that it would
be a good time to reshare it. Welcome to Stuff
you missed in History Class from dot com. Hello the
(01:12):
podcast and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Uh. And today's subject
has been requested by multiple listeners, especially when we first
came on the podcast. We came on just after Kind
of the hundred, the anniversary of the event we're talking
about today, and so it had been covered by a
number of papers and had kind of been in people's
(01:33):
minds a little bit more. It's actually been on my
list for almost since the beginning, and we haven't had
an X Murderer episode in a little while, so we're
do I suppose, as do as one can be for
such things. Uh. This one has some haunting mythology around it.
It remains an unsolved case, so it's good for the
Halloween season, and it's probably no surprise based on the
(01:54):
fact that I've already said this is an X Murderer episode.
But just to be safe, here's the warning. This is
some graphic talk of some pretty brutal murders and particularly
the deaths of children, which I know can be really
difficult for some people to hear. So if you are
sensitive to violent subjects of this nature, or if you
listen with younger history buffs, this is maybe one to
(02:16):
proceed with caution or to pre screen. For example, I
can already tell you my best friend is not going
to partake of this one. She and I were talking
about it while I was researching, uh, and as a
parent for her, it's just too rough to listen to
this kind of stuff, and the story is incredibly tragic,
and even I mean, I'm I'm often quite open that
I'm not really a kid's person. Um. It took me
(02:37):
a long time to research because I would find that
I just had to get up and walk away for
a while, because it's just it's brutal and it's hard
to think about somebody doing the things that this person
or persons did. So we are talking about the Valiska
as murders, and before we get into the details of
the actual event, I will let Tracy set the scene
a little bit about the town of Vliska, Iowa. Yeah,
(02:59):
so Fliska, Iowa. This took place in nineteen twelve. Pliska
is in Montgomery County and it's only about four square
kilometers in size, so not not really big. Omaha, Nebraska
and des Moines, Iowa are the nearest large metro areas
and Vliska is roughly in between them and a little
bit south. Yeah, it's a little closer to one side
(03:21):
than the other. But for the purposes of this in
between and in the early nineteen hundreds, this was a
town that was on a growth trajectory. It was kind
of rural, but there was a budding business community. The
train depot was very busy. They had a lot of
trains coming and going and visitors and business people, and
it was a close knit community. Josiah B. Moore, who
(03:41):
was the father of the family at the center of
this whole unsettling crime, was forty three and nineteen twelve.
He's sometimes referred to as j. B. And he had
lived in Valiska for thirteen years when he died, and
was a respected businessman. He had married Sarah Montgomery on
December six, and Sarah had been born in Illinois in
(04:04):
eighteen seventy three and she moved to Iowa in eighteen
ninety four when the rest of her family moved there.
She was thirty nine at the time of the murders.
The Morris had four children. Herman was eleven and was
also really close to his father. Catherine was their second
child and she was aged ten at the time of
the attack. There were also two younger brothers, Boyd who
(04:26):
was seven and Paul, who was five, and there are
two other children that were victims in this case. So
on the morning of June nine of nineteen twelve, sisters Lena,
who was twelve, and Ainah, who was eight. Stillinger Uh
They were the daughters of Joseph and Sarah Stillinger attended
Sunday services at the Presbyterian Church, and the girls were
(04:49):
intending to visit with their grandmother for the day after
church had concluded and then. The plan for the rest
of the day was that the girls would then go
back to church to attend special Children's Day activities in
the evening before returning to their grandmother's house to spend
the night. But the evening's plans changed when Katherine Moore
invited her two friends to spend the night at the
(05:10):
Moor House after the Children's Day activities. Dabie Moore called
still at the Stillinger home. On the phone, he left
a message with Lena and I'na's older sister Blanche to
pass along to their parents that they would be spending
the evening with them. So, you know, one of those
parenting heads up calls, your kids are gonna stay over here.
If this was in part because the girls seemed a
(05:31):
kind of afraid to walk back to their grandmother's house
alone in the dark. Yeah. The Children's Day program, led
by Sarah Moore began at eight pm, so this was
an evening thing. It would have been quite dark when
they concluded at nine pm, and once the festivities were
all wrapped up, the entire More family and the two
young Stillinger sisters walked back to the More home and
(05:53):
arrived there is estimated somewhere between and ten pm. On
the morning of June tenth, the More's next door neighbor,
Mary Peckham, noticed that the house was unusually quiet. She
hadn't seen any of the family come outside or start
their normal morning chores. So sometimes shortly after seven am,
Mrs Peckham walked over to the Moor house and knocked
(06:15):
on the door. She got no response, and so she
tried the door and found it locked. And this is
one of those areas that there is some conflicting information
in various records, so many will say this was actually
pretty unusual for the door to have been locked. Uh.
The habitual locking of doors at night was not really
particularly common practice at this time in Valisca or in
(06:36):
fact many other places you know, in the early nineteen hundreds,
there just wasn't that sort of level of uh lockdown
at the end of the night. Mrs Peckham, who was
troubled and also wanted to help let the Moore's chickens out,
as the family would normally have done themselves in the morning.
And then she also telephoned Ross Moore, who was Josiah's brother,
(06:59):
and Rossmore arrived at the home of his brother's family.
He shouted and he knocked. He attempted to peer into
the house through the windows, but they were covered and
he got neither reaction nor information, like he couldn't there
was nothing. So eventually he went through his keys until
he found the one that unlocked the door. Like he
had a copy of their key, but it took him
(07:20):
a little while to sort out which one it was.
Mary Peckham was there with Rossmore, but she didn't venture
past the porch and into the house. The surviving Moore
brother didn't go past the second room of the house.
He opened the door to the bedroom off the parlor,
and he immediately saw the bodies of two children on
the bed, as well as an enormous amount of blood.
(07:43):
He went back to the porch and told Mary Peckham
to call the police. Yeah, and this is a very small,
i mean by today's standards home. So the bottom floor
was only three rooms. It was like the parlor or
the front room, this small bedroom and a kitchen. So
after they raised an alert, City Marshall Hank Horton responded.
(08:03):
He quickly arrived on the scene and his investigation of
the house revealed the in addition to the two bodies
Rossmore had seen the young Stillinger sisters, there were six
more bodies upstairs. The entire More family and their guests
had been killed in their beds. It was about nine
in the morning when the county coroner finally got there
and took a look at the situation. He later reviewed
(08:26):
his findings with the sheriff and the marshal, and then
he called a coroner's jury to the home. So once
words spread of what it happened, uh in a small community,
and these things do spread rather quickly, many townspeople made
their way to the scene, and this ended up being
a real problem. We've talked about similar things happening before
with crime scenes. So these people were all there, they
(08:49):
were very interested, and so keeping the crime scene intact
became something of an impossibility. There were accounts of dozens
of people at a time walking through the house kind
of with the you know, morbid curiosity trying to catch
a glimpse of the bodies or see what had happened.
Some reports even put it at close to a hundred
(09:09):
people at one point that we're all in the house,
which again was not that large structure, so you can imagine,
like keeping evidence intact was completely out the window at
that point. Irritated by these looky loose yes, Eventually the
Valiska National Guard had to come and clear the area
and keep onlookers out of the house. By that time,
(09:31):
several hours had passed and a lot of the evidence
was damaged or compromised, which just infuriates me. I want
to take all the lucky lose first. Stern a stern
lecture about how not to be terrible. Yeah, and I
mean I have read some uh there was I forget
which account it was that I was reading where they
were kind of pointing out like, yes, this was terrible.
(09:54):
But even so, there's maybe wouldn't have been that much
more evident that was really garnered in the investigation. Um,
but we don't know. So the corner's jury did not
finish their investigation of the home until after ten pm,
and it was at that point that the undertaker was
given clearance to remove the bodies. Uh. Those were taken
(10:15):
to a local fire station which was being used as
kind of a makeshift morgue because it was so many
people at once uh and the undertakers did not finish
moving the victims until roughly two am. Despite the herd
of looks who had passed through the crime scene, there
(10:38):
were some solid facts that they were able to glean
about these murders. Yes, so the doors to the house,
all of the doors were locked, and as we mentioned earlier,
many people believed that this was not a normal state
of affairs. The curtains in every room of the house
had been closed, and in the case of two windows
that had no curtains, Mrs Moore's clothing had been used
(11:00):
to cover them. Uh and I left it out of
these notes, but her clothing had also been used to
cover all of the mirrors in the house. Well that
now I'm scared. Don't be scared. I don't. I don't
mean to laugh at his tragic and creepy but I
don't want Tracy to be scared. No, genuinely, And you
said that I had a shutter. Sorry, So to get
(11:22):
more serious, all eight of these victims have been bludgeoned,
apparently in their sleep with an ax, and each victim's
head had been covered with bed linens or articles of
clothing after their skulls had been crushed. Based on the
medical examination of the bodies, it's believed that the murders
took place shortly somewhere between shortly after midnight and three am,
(11:42):
so it's kind of a three hour window. In the
two rooms where Josiah and Sarah Moore and Lena and
Ailis Aina Stillinger had been killed, kerosene lamps were found
at the ends of the beds, with their chimneys removed
and their wis turned back, as though the killer had
wanted to dim the ights. The murder weapon had been
Josiah Moore's. It was found in the room with Lena
(12:05):
and Aina, and the ceilings in several of the rooms
had been hit during the killer's upswing as he raised
the axe. On the kitchen table, there was a plate
of food and a pan of water, and the water
had blood in it. The downstairs bedroom where the still
injured girls were slain, contained a number of clues and
sort of odd aspects. Uh Aina was sleeping on the
(12:29):
portion of the bed closest to the wall when she
was killed, and a coat had been used to cover
her face. Afterwards, h Lena was situated part way down
the bed. This led to some speculation that she may
have been struck and then shifted or wiggled down the
bed a little bit initially before she died. She was
wearing no undergarments and her nightgown had been shifted upward.
(12:52):
There was blood on the inside of one of her
knees and injuries to one arm, which appeared to be defensive,
as though she had tried to protect herself against the attacker.
She's the only one that exhibited any sort of defensive injury.
There was a two pounds slab of bacon on the floor,
wrapped in what was either a rag or a dish towel,
(13:12):
and there was a nearly identical slab of bacon in
the kitchen ice box. And additionally, there was part of
a key chain on the floor. And I know what
some of you people are probably thinking based on a
couple of these details, and I promise you we are
coming back to them now. We will get to sort
of the coroner's inquest. The day after the Grizzly discovery.
(13:33):
So on June eleventh, the coroner's jury began their official
inquest into the murders and they eventually called fourteen witnesses
for testimony. So their first witness was Mary Peckham, who
you know was the first woman, the neighbor that discovered
that there was something not quite right, and she stated
that the last time she saw the family was when
(13:54):
they were leaving for the children's day activities at the
church on the evening of the ninth. She was already
in d when the family returned home, and she said
that she didn't hear any noises during the night. She
related how she came to be curious about the family's
whereabouts in the morning because of the unusual stillness of
the house uh and that she had seen Mr Moore's
employee Ed Selly arrive and head to the barn to
(14:17):
tend the horses not long after she contacted Ross Moore.
The second witness was Ed Selly, and as we just said,
he was an employee at J. By Moore's store, and
his testimony indicated that he had opened the store as
normal the morning of the discovery before being contacted by
Ross Moore. About the suspicious situation. After speaking with the
(14:39):
victim's sister in law, Jesse Moore, Selly contacted the Moore's
parents and Sarah's parents to see if the family had
gone to visit any of them. So at that point
they were trying to figure out where they were, not
realizing they were in the house. He was then contacted
by Mrs Peckham about the Moore's livestock, so he left
the store to tend to the horses and then went
(15:01):
back to work. Not long after, Mrs Peckham called again,
this time to tell him to get the Marshal and
come back to the house. And Selly's testimony, Uh, contradicts
Mary Peckham's just a little bit, and it's not really
anything terribly important. I just wanted to point it out.
He indicated that he had joined Mrs Peckham and Ross
(15:22):
Moore in entering the house, whereas Mrs Peckham indicated that
she had never gone past the porch. After the Marshal
had a preliminary look at the scene, Selly indicated that
the house was blocked and that he went to the
store to contact business associates about the situation. Yeah, he
wanted to let the people that they had business dealings
with know that uh, Mr Moore had been killed and
(15:45):
that they were gonna have to make some arrangements. Sally
was asked if J. B. Moore had any enemies he
knew of, and he indicated that JB had told him
that his brother in law, Sam Moyer had it in
for him. The third witness was Dr. J. Clark Cooper.
Cooper was the first physician on the scene after the
bodies were discovered. Cooper described his first access to the bodies,
(16:10):
first encountering the Stillinger girls who he didn't recognize. He
also mentioned the lamps without their chimneys. Cooper indicated that
he didn't touch the bodies on site. He sort of
performed just a visual assessment at that point. Yeah, he
didn't do uh any real hands on examination. His statement
also included that estimated time of death that we talked about,
(16:32):
and that was based on his observation of the blood
and brain matter on the scene and the level of
dryness and congealment it had achieved. Uh. He was also
the one that introduced the detail that the faces he
believed had been covered after the bludgeoning, and this was
based on the fact that none of the covering fabrics
were stuck to the wounds, They just kind of been
(16:54):
draped over afterwards. And none of those fabrics or articles
of clothing had any holes or damage of any kind
other than normal wear and tear. Witness for was Jesse Moore,
who was Rossmore's wife. Jesse spoke with Mrs Peckham when
she first called for Ross and her statement echoed ed
Sally's regarding what their conversations were like. She also mentioned
(17:16):
that she later entered Josiah's and Sarah's home to retrieve
photographs of the family for the local paper, and she
didn't know of any possible enemies that the family might
have had. Yeah, there are some accounts that suggests that
she had gone in and kind of like posed for pictures,
but those seem like embellishments. She did go in, but
she was trying to get pictures from the household for
(17:38):
the press um so that they could be used in
news stories. Witness number five was Dr F. S. Williams,
and whereas Dr Cooper that we mentioned just a few
moments ago had only done a visual inspection on the
bodies at the crime scene, Dr Williams was the one
that actually examined the bodies. Um. His testimony described the
crushed heads of each vic them and their positions in
(18:01):
their beds. Uh. And he was the one to introduced
the idea that Lena Stillinger had squirmed on the bed
after having been struck. Some people have theorized over the
years that Lena had been sexually assaulted, but Dr Williams
testimony runs really counter to that. He indicated that he
had investigated the possibility of a rape, but he didn't
find any evidence of that kind of violation. Yeah, she
(18:24):
was the one we mentioned she didn't have any undergarments
on and that her night dress had been shifted up.
She may have been the object of some um you know,
visual stimulation for the killer, but her body was not
in any way um molested to the best of this
doctor's knowledge. UH. Witness number six was Edward Landers, and
(18:46):
Landers was a neighbor. He was actually the son of
a neighbor. He was staying a few houses down from
the moors at his mother's house for the summer, and
he stated that he had gone to bed shortly after
nine pm on the night of the murders, but he
had heard a noise during the night that to him
at the time sounded like people hooting to one another outdoors,
(19:07):
and he was kind of pressed by the examiners over
what time this might have been, and he guessed it
was probably around eleven PM, but he wasn't certain uh,
And after the news of the murders broke the next morning,
he began to wonder if the noise that he had
heard had not been people hooting but in fact a
woman moaning. The seventh witness was rossmore so besides brother,
(19:27):
and he relayed the events of the morning of the
tenth and how he had come to discover the bodies
of the two style inser girls before exiting the home.
He mentioned that before opened opening the bedroom door and
making the discovery, nothing in the home seemed like it
was out of place, and he also couldn't offer any
information about possible enemies that the family may have had.
(19:50):
Witness number eight was Fenwick More and this was another
More brother. There were several brothers in the mix here.
His testimony was not particularly illuminating. He aicated that he
really didn't know anything about his brother's business or if
he had any enemies, and he was dismissed from the
stand pretty quickly. The ninth witness was Marshall Hank Horton,
and the Marshall's testimony was really brief. He basically said
(20:11):
he had been contacted by Seally to go into the
More home. He corroborated entering the house with Sally and
then again with the doctors. Witness number ten was Levin
Gilder and this was Josiah's nephew, but he also did
not have a whole lot of information to impart. He
had briefly been considered a suspect because he had some
kind of shady uh happenings in his background. His record
(20:35):
was not entirely clean, but he was cleared pretty early on.
Witness eleven was another More brother, Harry More, and he
also had really nothing new to add in the proceedings.
Like Finnwick, his other brother, he had neither knowledge of
Jabe's business nor of any possible ill intentions against him.
(20:55):
Witness twelve was Blanched Stillinger and remember this was Lena
and his older sister. She was the one that had
spoken with Jsiah over the phone about the girls sleeping
over at the Moorhouse, and she was the one that
kind of said, yeah, I think that will be fine.
I will tell my parents. And the thirteenth witness was
Joseph Stillingser so Lena and i Aina's father. He also
(21:16):
didn't know of anyone who might commit such a crime,
and he indicated that his wife had phoned the Moors
several times in the morning, uh, the morning that the
bodies were found, because she had expected the girls to
be back before school time. Yeah, this had happened on
a Sunday night into the Monday morning hours, and so
she thought the kids were going to come home and
get ready for school, but they didn't, so they were
(21:36):
trying to contact them and getting no answer. The lapst
witness was Charles Moore. This is yet another more brother.
Charles testified to the coroner's jury that he knew Josiah
kept an AX, but when he was questioned, he couldn't
say with certainty that the murder weapon was the one
that Josiah owned. He just wasn't sure. Uh. He also
indicated that it was in fact his brother's habit to
(22:00):
lock the house from the inside at night. Um. One
thing that always kind of rings odd to me and
is not really discussed all that much in a lot
of these is that the whole house was locked, but
somehow the killer or killers got out. So that's always
stayed a little bit of a mystery. Whether they had
a key or not is unclear. Yeah. Well, and then
(22:22):
that gets into me super wondering what lock technology was
like at the time, Like now we have door kodd
locks that you just plupt the thing and then you
go out. Well, and there was also you know, uh,
skeleton keys that could open multiple doors were a little
more common still than uh, you know, it just wasn't
quite the same as what we're dealing with today. So
and that may be one of the reasons that it's
(22:42):
not really talked about that much. It's not that insane
a thing. It's not like, uh, even in some of
the and I'll talk about them briefly at the end,
but even in like some of the sort of supernatural
investigations of it, it doesn't really seem to come up
as like a weird thing, like an entity locked all
the doors. Uh, doors were just locked. They don't really,
(23:02):
it doesn't get embellished a whole lot. But before we
start talking about suspects and what may have driven someone
to do this, let's have another quick word from a
sponsor will take a break from all of this sort
of dark material for just a moment, so to return
(23:24):
to this horrifying subject. There were many early leads in
this case and really no shortage of suspects, but nothing
ever panned out, and this horrific crime is still unsolved.
It's not possible in the scope of a podcast episode
to cover every single suspect, but we're going to talk
about the more high profile ones. Yeah, this really sort
(23:45):
of turned this town on its head, and a lot
of people characterize it as basically making a place where
people would invite a stranger into their home for a
meal and you know, be very open and very friendly,
into a place where suddenly everyone was suspicious of everyone
else and you know, sort of fear driven suspicion kind
of led their behavior beyond that And as a consequence,
a lot of different people were accused of participating in
(24:07):
this crime. But one of the primary suspects that comes
up in almost any discussion of this case is Frank F. Jones,
and he was an Iowa state senator. He had been
Josiah Moore's boss for many years, but in nineteen eight
more had struck out on his own opening a farming
implement company, and he took several of their lucrative business
(24:29):
partners with him, including the John Deer Company, so Jones
was a little i rate with him from that point on.
There were also rumors that Josiah had had an affair
with jones daughter in law, so Frank Jones and his son,
so the husband of this daughter in law. We're even
accused quite publicly by a detective agency of having hired
(24:51):
a killer named William Mansfield to take out the More family.
And William Mansfield was arrested for the murders in nineteen sixteen,
four years after they had taken place. According to Detective
James Newton Wilkerson, who had been the one that had
leveled those accusations against the Joneses, uh, he asserted that
(25:12):
Mansfield was in fact a serial killer and that he
also had a cocaine habit. Mansfield was also linked via
Wilkerson's research, to other brutal murders, including those of his
own wife, child, and his wife's family in nineteen fourteen,
so that would have been a couple years after Bliska,
as well as murders in Kansas and Colorado and in
(25:33):
all of these cases, the victims were bludgeoned with an
axe in homes where the windows and mirrors were all covered,
similar to the morselings. Detective Wilkerson was so convinced that
Mansfield had been hired by Jones that he posted flyers
all over town with Mansfield's face on them that read,
this is the axe murderer he murdered the more family
(25:55):
at Bliska. The hypocrite whose dirty money paid for the
hellish job wants your support for the state Senate. Will
he get it? So? I'm sure delighted Jones. Uh, And
I have to say, I think if you have just
accused a man of hiring someone to kill a man
who has made you angry, making him angry and this
(26:19):
way seems like a really bold and foolish move. Um.
But while Mansfield does seem like an obvious solution to
who killed the Moors, and while Detective Wokerson really seemed
for the rest of his life that he was certain
that what that Mansfield was the killer Uh. Mansfield had
an art alibi for the time of the Veliska murders
(26:40):
that placed him in Illinois. There was some payroll happenings
that indicated that he had had been working there at
the time. There were some eyewitnesses that placed Mansfield in
Veliska and not Illinois, but none of those uh eyewitness
accounts were ever substantiated, and Mansfield was eventually set free.
(27:00):
After his release, Mansfield sued Wilkerson for slander, and he
was awarded more than two thousand dollars. Wilkerson alleged that
Jones had in fact managed to use his position of
power to secure Mansfield's release. Yeah, he also kind of
blamed Jones for orchestrating the decision in Mansfield's favor during
(27:23):
the slander case, and he suggested that Frank Jones set
up the next suspect to kind of take the fall,
and that next suspect was Reverend George Kelly, who was
a preacher who had moved to Macedonia, Iowa in nineteen twelve.
So after the trail went cold with Mansfield, Kelly was
arrested and charged with the more murders in nineteen seventeen,
(27:44):
and he was in Baliska for the Children's Day activities
and he left town the next morning. He was even
alleged at one point to have spoken of the murders
on the train out of town, which is early in
the morning, before the bodies had even been discovered. He
also returned to Veliska a week after the murders and
he pretended to be a detective from Scotland Yard to
(28:06):
gain entry into the More home. He actually had some
mental problems that were on record, and Kelly was considered
to be a sexual deviant, obsessed with sex and known
to have been a peeping tom. There have been some
theories about the rolled up bacon slab that was found
downstairs in the bedroom had been used as a sexual
(28:28):
aid by the killer, and that made people really willing
to connect the dots to to Kelly, who had this reputation.
Unlike Mansfield, Kelly actually did confess to the murders, and
in his confession he wrote, I killed the children upstairs
first and the children downstairs last. I knew God wanted
(28:49):
me to do it this way. Slay utterly came to
my mind, and I picked up the axe, went into
the house and killed them. So that makes it seem
like an open and shut ace. But it all fell apart.
He wound up recanting his confession, and the witnesses that
initially claimed he talked to them on the train about
the murders before it was public knowledge. I'll change their story.
(29:12):
He was also a really small man, at five ft
two inches tall, and he weighed less than a hundred
and twenty pounds, So the idea of him being able
to deliver the crushing blows that killed the family was
a little difficult to support. I imagine at that height
it might have been also difficult for the upswings of
the axe to hit the ceiling. Yes, I couldn't find anything.
(29:35):
I thought about that as well, and I couldn't find
anything substantial. I'm sure we could do it if with
a little bit more time to find out what the
height of the ceilings were in the length of the axe.
But I did not have time to work out the
math on that. And while somebody that size could probably
easily until children, Mr Moore was like six ft tall
and weighed about two hundred pounds, you know, he was
(29:57):
a full grown man, So it it seemed like that
would have been a little bit more of a stretch
for Kelly to be able to manage. Kelly was actually
tried twice for this crime. The first trial resulted in
a hung jury, and in the second trial, the jury
freed him because there was really no evidence other than
(30:18):
sort of the suspicion that he was weird and deviant
and might be the kind of person to do these things.
The third suspect was Henry Lee Moore, and in May
of nineteen thirteen, almost a year after the murders, a
federal investigator on the case named m W. Mccloudy, announced
that he had solved it, as well as twenty two
(30:39):
other similar cases. Mcclardy believed all of the slings to
be the work of serial killer Henry Lee Moore, who
was not actually relation to the More family. It was
not yet another More brother. Yeah, it was just coincidental
that they had the last name. Uh. A few months
after the Valiska incident, Henry More was convicted of murdering
(31:02):
his mother and grandmother in Missouri. The brutality of the
victims was quite similar. They were legend with an AX
and UH. It should be pointed out that one of
the things that differs is that he was allegedly motivated
by money. In this he was hoping to gain their
assets after they died. As the Valiska investigation had gone on,
(31:25):
multiple similar acts murders were uncovered in Colorado, Illinois, and Kansas,
and some of these were crimes Mansfield had also been
linked to by other investigators, but McClary thought they were
all Henry Morris doing more actually served thirty six years
of his life sentence for the deaths of his mother
and grandmother. UH and then he was paroled in nineteen
(31:48):
forty nine. UH. He ended up having his sentence commuted
some years later when he was in his eighties. UM.
He kind of falls off the public record after that.
No one really knows like or he went or how
he died. But he was never formally charged for the
murders in Valiska, despite mccloudy's insistence that he was clearly
the one who had done it. In addition to these
(32:11):
three high profile suspects, there were so so many others,
And initially it was because of the shocking nature of
the hot side. Citizens of Aliska suspected anyone who wasn't
from around there. Some of them were legitimately suspect, although
not not ever actually linked to the murders, and some
of them were simply guilty of being strangers. And I
(32:34):
wanted to make a note about the similarities among the
murders UH that were discovered in other states and other areas,
and the use of an AX as the murder weapon.
It's worth considering just food for thought that this was
a time when almost every home would have an X,
often readily accessible UH. Mike dash who was a writer
(32:54):
that wrote an article for the Smithsonian in twelve about
the Valiska killings, makes the point that this sort of
could be considered a weapon of convenience for the times,
Like in the Midwest, if you just wanted to go
on a killing spree, an access pretty easy to get
ahold of. Additionally, as is the case often with high
profile crimes, confessors came out of the woodwork for decades.
(33:18):
People were confessing to the crime well into the nineteen thirties,
although many of these confessions got details wildly wrong. Yeah,
you know that that happens with any big UH murder case.
Or there are people that confess that could not have
done it for whatever reasons, but those, of course, we're
(33:40):
pretty easily dismissed in most cases. Um So, jumping to
sort of the modern day UH in the house where J. B.
More and his family were killed was purchased by Darwin
and Martha Lynn and the Lins restored the house to
its nineteen twelve condition, and the residents was placed on
the National Historic Places Registry in nineteen. Prior to the
(34:02):
Lens purchase, the house had passed through many hands of
ownership and it had been repeatedly renovated, so it was
really quite a significant restoration effort. Today you can tour
the home. It's actually a museum, and for a little
less than five hundred dollars a night, you can book
sleepovers in the murder House. It's actually one of the
main draws of Valisco, which is a pretty rural town.
(34:25):
If you want to book on the anniversary of the murders, though,
there's a lottery. And there have been many discussions and
debates through the years about whether it's right for a
business to grow out of such a tragedy and so
much brutality. These debates probably go on for as long
as the museum is open. Yeah, I mean a lot
of articles if you search for this that talk about
(34:46):
it kind of from the modern standpoint. They really do
discuss kind of that this is a problem and something
that continues to be debated, and and they kind of
look at like the Valisca murder houses. This odd money
making machines of but you know that's something that you
can draw your own conclusions and have your own opinions of. UM.
(35:06):
Paranormal investigators and ghost hunters have of course kind of
flocked to this house hoping to get some activity that
they can record or discuss. It's been featured on a
lot of numerous television reality and making the air quotes shows, uh,
and there have been several documentaries made about the murders
that are less about sensationalizing it and making a haunted
(35:26):
house ghost story, but really just trying to break down
the actual crime. UM. I kind of feel like a
broken record when I do this wrap up, because we
do it for almost any of the cases where they're
go unsolved. But odds are that this one is not
ever going to be solved. And the further away we
get from the date of when it actually happened, the
(35:47):
less and less evidence there will be to go on.
So it will remain a draw for crime history buffs
and visitors to the Valiska Murder House. Uh, probably for
quite some time. But that is the Valiska Murders, which,
as I said, we're requested by a large number of people.
Very unsettling and disturbing to think about. Uh, but you know,
(36:09):
good Halloween fodder. And again it is a huge tragedy.
I mean, like I said, I'm not a kids person,
but reading these testimonies about what happened to these children
was so rough for me. Yeah, I kept I kept
going like, let's go hug a kitty. I'm having to
go out to cartoon for fifteen minutes, just anything to
kind of break the intensity of that. Well, and in
addition to how I got genuinely creeped out sitting here
(36:31):
when you said all the mirrors were covered up with
their clothing, Um, the part about their you know that
the parents of the children who were visiting the home
calling over there because they were expecting them to be
home for school, that really got to me. It's it's
very upsetting to think about. I mean, these were, you know,
kids that were part of someone's lives, and it was
(36:51):
just it could be it's one of those this could
happen to anyone kinds of things. UM. And I think
especially when these kinds of crimes happen in rural communities
that were very you know, friendly and and pretty free
of this kind of thing. It's really shocking. It kind
of reminds me of when I first read in Cold
Blood Patry as a kid, because it's kind of a
similar there's some parallels there. Um, it's hard to think
(37:14):
about what a mental shift that has to be for
the entire community to be Like, one day life is
one way and the next day you see it all
completely differently. Thank you so much for joining us for
this Saturday Classic. Since this is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
(37:34):
r L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete. Now, so here's our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media, that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
(37:57):
and thousands of other topics. House of stot comm
Hey, Happy Saturday listeners. We have gotten a number of
emails and tweets over the last couple of months asking
if we have seen an article about the Vliska As
murders as being solved. So first, yes, we have seen
the article. Uh. And seconds UH. This book, which is
(00:22):
called The Man from the Train Presents was really a hypothesis,
not like an ironclad solution. Uh. It's authors scoured old
records for similar crimes, and based on that research, they
concluded that the Veliska murders were the work of a
serial killer who traveled by train and struck families who
lived near the tracks. We talk about a number of
(00:43):
other times that people had thought they'd cracked this case
in our episode on the murders, including some leads that
were also connected to serial killers. So we thought, in
light of the recent book and questions, that it would
be a good time to reshare it. Welcome to Stuff
you missed in History Class from dot com. Hello the
(01:12):
podcast and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Uh. And today's subject
has been requested by multiple listeners, especially when we first
came on the podcast. We came on just after Kind
of the hundred, the anniversary of the event we're talking
about today, and so it had been covered by a
number of papers and had kind of been in people's
(01:33):
minds a little bit more. It's actually been on my
list for almost since the beginning, and we haven't had
an X Murderer episode in a little while, so we're
do I suppose, as do as one can be for
such things. Uh. This one has some haunting mythology around it.
It remains an unsolved case, so it's good for the
Halloween season, and it's probably no surprise based on the
(01:54):
fact that I've already said this is an X Murderer episode.
But just to be safe, here's the warning. This is
some graphic talk of some pretty brutal murders and particularly
the deaths of children, which I know can be really
difficult for some people to hear. So if you are
sensitive to violent subjects of this nature, or if you
listen with younger history buffs, this is maybe one to
(02:16):
proceed with caution or to pre screen. For example, I
can already tell you my best friend is not going
to partake of this one. She and I were talking
about it while I was researching, uh, and as a
parent for her, it's just too rough to listen to
this kind of stuff, and the story is incredibly tragic,
and even I mean, I'm I'm often quite open that
I'm not really a kid's person. Um. It took me
(02:37):
a long time to research because I would find that
I just had to get up and walk away for
a while, because it's just it's brutal and it's hard
to think about somebody doing the things that this person
or persons did. So we are talking about the Valiska
as murders, and before we get into the details of
the actual event, I will let Tracy set the scene
a little bit about the town of Vliska, Iowa. Yeah,
(02:59):
so Fliska, Iowa. This took place in nineteen twelve. Pliska
is in Montgomery County and it's only about four square
kilometers in size, so not not really big. Omaha, Nebraska
and des Moines, Iowa are the nearest large metro areas
and Vliska is roughly in between them and a little
bit south. Yeah, it's a little closer to one side
(03:21):
than the other. But for the purposes of this in
between and in the early nineteen hundreds, this was a
town that was on a growth trajectory. It was kind
of rural, but there was a budding business community. The
train depot was very busy. They had a lot of
trains coming and going and visitors and business people, and
it was a close knit community. Josiah B. Moore, who
(03:41):
was the father of the family at the center of
this whole unsettling crime, was forty three and nineteen twelve.
He's sometimes referred to as j. B. And he had
lived in Valiska for thirteen years when he died, and
was a respected businessman. He had married Sarah Montgomery on
December six, and Sarah had been born in Illinois in
(04:04):
eighteen seventy three and she moved to Iowa in eighteen
ninety four when the rest of her family moved there.
She was thirty nine at the time of the murders.
The Morris had four children. Herman was eleven and was
also really close to his father. Catherine was their second
child and she was aged ten at the time of
the attack. There were also two younger brothers, Boyd who
(04:26):
was seven and Paul, who was five, and there are
two other children that were victims in this case. So
on the morning of June nine of nineteen twelve, sisters Lena,
who was twelve, and Ainah, who was eight. Stillinger Uh
They were the daughters of Joseph and Sarah Stillinger attended
Sunday services at the Presbyterian Church, and the girls were
(04:49):
intending to visit with their grandmother for the day after
church had concluded and then. The plan for the rest
of the day was that the girls would then go
back to church to attend special Children's Day activities in
the evening before returning to their grandmother's house to spend
the night. But the evening's plans changed when Katherine Moore
invited her two friends to spend the night at the
(05:10):
Moor House after the Children's Day activities. Dabie Moore called
still at the Stillinger home. On the phone, he left
a message with Lena and I'na's older sister Blanche to
pass along to their parents that they would be spending
the evening with them. So, you know, one of those
parenting heads up calls, your kids are gonna stay over here.
If this was in part because the girls seemed a
(05:31):
kind of afraid to walk back to their grandmother's house
alone in the dark. Yeah. The Children's Day program, led
by Sarah Moore began at eight pm, so this was
an evening thing. It would have been quite dark when
they concluded at nine pm, and once the festivities were
all wrapped up, the entire More family and the two
young Stillinger sisters walked back to the More home and
(05:53):
arrived there is estimated somewhere between and ten pm. On
the morning of June tenth, the More's next door neighbor,
Mary Peckham, noticed that the house was unusually quiet. She
hadn't seen any of the family come outside or start
their normal morning chores. So sometimes shortly after seven am,
Mrs Peckham walked over to the Moor house and knocked
(06:15):
on the door. She got no response, and so she
tried the door and found it locked. And this is
one of those areas that there is some conflicting information
in various records, so many will say this was actually
pretty unusual for the door to have been locked. Uh.
The habitual locking of doors at night was not really
particularly common practice at this time in Valisca or in
(06:36):
fact many other places you know, in the early nineteen hundreds,
there just wasn't that sort of level of uh lockdown
at the end of the night. Mrs Peckham, who was
troubled and also wanted to help let the Moore's chickens out,
as the family would normally have done themselves in the morning.
And then she also telephoned Ross Moore, who was Josiah's brother,
(06:59):
and Rossmore arrived at the home of his brother's family.
He shouted and he knocked. He attempted to peer into
the house through the windows, but they were covered and
he got neither reaction nor information, like he couldn't there
was nothing. So eventually he went through his keys until
he found the one that unlocked the door. Like he
had a copy of their key, but it took him
(07:20):
a little while to sort out which one it was.
Mary Peckham was there with Rossmore, but she didn't venture
past the porch and into the house. The surviving Moore
brother didn't go past the second room of the house.
He opened the door to the bedroom off the parlor,
and he immediately saw the bodies of two children on
the bed, as well as an enormous amount of blood.
(07:43):
He went back to the porch and told Mary Peckham
to call the police. Yeah, and this is a very small,
i mean by today's standards home. So the bottom floor
was only three rooms. It was like the parlor or
the front room, this small bedroom and a kitchen. So
after they raised an alert, City Marshall Hank Horton responded.
(08:03):
He quickly arrived on the scene and his investigation of
the house revealed the in addition to the two bodies
Rossmore had seen the young Stillinger sisters, there were six
more bodies upstairs. The entire More family and their guests
had been killed in their beds. It was about nine
in the morning when the county coroner finally got there
and took a look at the situation. He later reviewed
(08:26):
his findings with the sheriff and the marshal, and then
he called a coroner's jury to the home. So once
words spread of what it happened, uh in a small community,
and these things do spread rather quickly, many townspeople made
their way to the scene, and this ended up being
a real problem. We've talked about similar things happening before
with crime scenes. So these people were all there, they
(08:49):
were very interested, and so keeping the crime scene intact
became something of an impossibility. There were accounts of dozens
of people at a time walking through the house kind
of with the you know, morbid curiosity trying to catch
a glimpse of the bodies or see what had happened.
Some reports even put it at close to a hundred
(09:09):
people at one point that we're all in the house,
which again was not that large structure, so you can imagine,
like keeping evidence intact was completely out the window at
that point. Irritated by these looky loose yes, Eventually the
Valiska National Guard had to come and clear the area
and keep onlookers out of the house. By that time,
(09:31):
several hours had passed and a lot of the evidence
was damaged or compromised, which just infuriates me. I want
to take all the lucky lose first. Stern a stern
lecture about how not to be terrible. Yeah, and I
mean I have read some uh there was I forget
which account it was that I was reading where they
were kind of pointing out like, yes, this was terrible.
(09:54):
But even so, there's maybe wouldn't have been that much
more evident that was really garnered in the investigation. Um,
but we don't know. So the corner's jury did not
finish their investigation of the home until after ten pm,
and it was at that point that the undertaker was
given clearance to remove the bodies. Uh. Those were taken
(10:15):
to a local fire station which was being used as
kind of a makeshift morgue because it was so many
people at once uh and the undertakers did not finish
moving the victims until roughly two am. Despite the herd
of looks who had passed through the crime scene, there
(10:38):
were some solid facts that they were able to glean
about these murders. Yes, so the doors to the house,
all of the doors were locked, and as we mentioned earlier,
many people believed that this was not a normal state
of affairs. The curtains in every room of the house
had been closed, and in the case of two windows
that had no curtains, Mrs Moore's clothing had been used
(11:00):
to cover them. Uh and I left it out of
these notes, but her clothing had also been used to
cover all of the mirrors in the house. Well that
now I'm scared. Don't be scared. I don't. I don't
mean to laugh at his tragic and creepy but I
don't want Tracy to be scared. No, genuinely, And you
said that I had a shutter. Sorry, So to get
(11:22):
more serious, all eight of these victims have been bludgeoned,
apparently in their sleep with an ax, and each victim's
head had been covered with bed linens or articles of
clothing after their skulls had been crushed. Based on the
medical examination of the bodies, it's believed that the murders
took place shortly somewhere between shortly after midnight and three am,
(11:42):
so it's kind of a three hour window. In the
two rooms where Josiah and Sarah Moore and Lena and
Ailis Aina Stillinger had been killed, kerosene lamps were found
at the ends of the beds, with their chimneys removed
and their wis turned back, as though the killer had
wanted to dim the ights. The murder weapon had been
Josiah Moore's. It was found in the room with Lena
(12:05):
and Aina, and the ceilings in several of the rooms
had been hit during the killer's upswing as he raised
the axe. On the kitchen table, there was a plate
of food and a pan of water, and the water
had blood in it. The downstairs bedroom where the still
injured girls were slain, contained a number of clues and
sort of odd aspects. Uh Aina was sleeping on the
(12:29):
portion of the bed closest to the wall when she
was killed, and a coat had been used to cover
her face. Afterwards, h Lena was situated part way down
the bed. This led to some speculation that she may
have been struck and then shifted or wiggled down the
bed a little bit initially before she died. She was
wearing no undergarments and her nightgown had been shifted upward.
(12:52):
There was blood on the inside of one of her
knees and injuries to one arm, which appeared to be defensive,
as though she had tried to protect herself against the attacker.
She's the only one that exhibited any sort of defensive injury.
There was a two pounds slab of bacon on the floor,
wrapped in what was either a rag or a dish towel,
(13:12):
and there was a nearly identical slab of bacon in
the kitchen ice box. And additionally, there was part of
a key chain on the floor. And I know what
some of you people are probably thinking based on a
couple of these details, and I promise you we are
coming back to them now. We will get to sort
of the coroner's inquest. The day after the Grizzly discovery.
(13:33):
So on June eleventh, the coroner's jury began their official
inquest into the murders and they eventually called fourteen witnesses
for testimony. So their first witness was Mary Peckham, who
you know was the first woman, the neighbor that discovered
that there was something not quite right, and she stated
that the last time she saw the family was when
(13:54):
they were leaving for the children's day activities at the
church on the evening of the ninth. She was already
in d when the family returned home, and she said
that she didn't hear any noises during the night. She
related how she came to be curious about the family's
whereabouts in the morning because of the unusual stillness of
the house uh and that she had seen Mr Moore's
employee Ed Selly arrive and head to the barn to
(14:17):
tend the horses not long after she contacted Ross Moore.
The second witness was Ed Selly, and as we just said,
he was an employee at J. By Moore's store, and
his testimony indicated that he had opened the store as
normal the morning of the discovery before being contacted by
Ross Moore. About the suspicious situation. After speaking with the
(14:39):
victim's sister in law, Jesse Moore, Selly contacted the Moore's
parents and Sarah's parents to see if the family had
gone to visit any of them. So at that point
they were trying to figure out where they were, not
realizing they were in the house. He was then contacted
by Mrs Peckham about the Moore's livestock, so he left
the store to tend to the horses and then went
(15:01):
back to work. Not long after, Mrs Peckham called again,
this time to tell him to get the Marshal and
come back to the house. And Selly's testimony, Uh, contradicts
Mary Peckham's just a little bit, and it's not really
anything terribly important. I just wanted to point it out.
He indicated that he had joined Mrs Peckham and Ross
(15:22):
Moore in entering the house, whereas Mrs Peckham indicated that
she had never gone past the porch. After the Marshal
had a preliminary look at the scene, Selly indicated that
the house was blocked and that he went to the
store to contact business associates about the situation. Yeah, he
wanted to let the people that they had business dealings
with know that uh, Mr Moore had been killed and
(15:45):
that they were gonna have to make some arrangements. Sally
was asked if J. B. Moore had any enemies he
knew of, and he indicated that JB had told him
that his brother in law, Sam Moyer had it in
for him. The third witness was Dr. J. Clark Cooper.
Cooper was the first physician on the scene after the
bodies were discovered. Cooper described his first access to the bodies,
(16:10):
first encountering the Stillinger girls who he didn't recognize. He
also mentioned the lamps without their chimneys. Cooper indicated that
he didn't touch the bodies on site. He sort of
performed just a visual assessment at that point. Yeah, he
didn't do uh any real hands on examination. His statement
also included that estimated time of death that we talked about,
(16:32):
and that was based on his observation of the blood
and brain matter on the scene and the level of
dryness and congealment it had achieved. Uh. He was also
the one that introduced the detail that the faces he
believed had been covered after the bludgeoning, and this was
based on the fact that none of the covering fabrics
were stuck to the wounds, They just kind of been
(16:54):
draped over afterwards. And none of those fabrics or articles
of clothing had any holes or damage of any kind
other than normal wear and tear. Witness for was Jesse Moore,
who was Rossmore's wife. Jesse spoke with Mrs Peckham when
she first called for Ross and her statement echoed ed
Sally's regarding what their conversations were like. She also mentioned
(17:16):
that she later entered Josiah's and Sarah's home to retrieve
photographs of the family for the local paper, and she
didn't know of any possible enemies that the family might
have had. Yeah, there are some accounts that suggests that
she had gone in and kind of like posed for pictures,
but those seem like embellishments. She did go in, but
she was trying to get pictures from the household for
(17:38):
the press um so that they could be used in
news stories. Witness number five was Dr F. S. Williams,
and whereas Dr Cooper that we mentioned just a few
moments ago had only done a visual inspection on the
bodies at the crime scene, Dr Williams was the one
that actually examined the bodies. Um. His testimony described the
crushed heads of each vic them and their positions in
(18:01):
their beds. Uh. And he was the one to introduced
the idea that Lena Stillinger had squirmed on the bed
after having been struck. Some people have theorized over the
years that Lena had been sexually assaulted, but Dr Williams
testimony runs really counter to that. He indicated that he
had investigated the possibility of a rape, but he didn't
find any evidence of that kind of violation. Yeah, she
(18:24):
was the one we mentioned she didn't have any undergarments
on and that her night dress had been shifted up.
She may have been the object of some um you know,
visual stimulation for the killer, but her body was not
in any way um molested to the best of this
doctor's knowledge. UH. Witness number six was Edward Landers, and
(18:46):
Landers was a neighbor. He was actually the son of
a neighbor. He was staying a few houses down from
the moors at his mother's house for the summer, and
he stated that he had gone to bed shortly after
nine pm on the night of the murders, but he
had heard a noise during the night that to him
at the time sounded like people hooting to one another outdoors,
(19:07):
and he was kind of pressed by the examiners over
what time this might have been, and he guessed it
was probably around eleven PM, but he wasn't certain uh,
And after the news of the murders broke the next morning,
he began to wonder if the noise that he had
heard had not been people hooting but in fact a
woman moaning. The seventh witness was rossmore so besides brother,
(19:27):
and he relayed the events of the morning of the
tenth and how he had come to discover the bodies
of the two style inser girls before exiting the home.
He mentioned that before opened opening the bedroom door and
making the discovery, nothing in the home seemed like it
was out of place, and he also couldn't offer any
information about possible enemies that the family may have had.
(19:50):
Witness number eight was Fenwick More and this was another
More brother. There were several brothers in the mix here.
His testimony was not particularly illuminating. He aicated that he
really didn't know anything about his brother's business or if
he had any enemies, and he was dismissed from the
stand pretty quickly. The ninth witness was Marshall Hank Horton,
and the Marshall's testimony was really brief. He basically said
(20:11):
he had been contacted by Seally to go into the
More home. He corroborated entering the house with Sally and
then again with the doctors. Witness number ten was Levin
Gilder and this was Josiah's nephew, but he also did
not have a whole lot of information to impart. He
had briefly been considered a suspect because he had some
kind of shady uh happenings in his background. His record
(20:35):
was not entirely clean, but he was cleared pretty early on.
Witness eleven was another More brother, Harry More, and he
also had really nothing new to add in the proceedings.
Like Finnwick, his other brother, he had neither knowledge of
Jabe's business nor of any possible ill intentions against him.
(20:55):
Witness twelve was Blanched Stillinger and remember this was Lena
and his older sister. She was the one that had
spoken with Jsiah over the phone about the girls sleeping
over at the Moorhouse, and she was the one that
kind of said, yeah, I think that will be fine.
I will tell my parents. And the thirteenth witness was
Joseph Stillingser so Lena and i Aina's father. He also
(21:16):
didn't know of anyone who might commit such a crime,
and he indicated that his wife had phoned the Moors
several times in the morning, uh, the morning that the
bodies were found, because she had expected the girls to
be back before school time. Yeah, this had happened on
a Sunday night into the Monday morning hours, and so
she thought the kids were going to come home and
get ready for school, but they didn't, so they were
(21:36):
trying to contact them and getting no answer. The lapst
witness was Charles Moore. This is yet another more brother.
Charles testified to the coroner's jury that he knew Josiah
kept an AX, but when he was questioned, he couldn't
say with certainty that the murder weapon was the one
that Josiah owned. He just wasn't sure. Uh. He also
indicated that it was in fact his brother's habit to
(22:00):
lock the house from the inside at night. Um. One
thing that always kind of rings odd to me and
is not really discussed all that much in a lot
of these is that the whole house was locked, but
somehow the killer or killers got out. So that's always
stayed a little bit of a mystery. Whether they had
a key or not is unclear. Yeah. Well, and then
(22:22):
that gets into me super wondering what lock technology was
like at the time, Like now we have door kodd
locks that you just plupt the thing and then you
go out. Well, and there was also you know, uh,
skeleton keys that could open multiple doors were a little
more common still than uh, you know, it just wasn't
quite the same as what we're dealing with today. So
and that may be one of the reasons that it's
(22:42):
not really talked about that much. It's not that insane
a thing. It's not like, uh, even in some of
the and I'll talk about them briefly at the end,
but even in like some of the sort of supernatural
investigations of it, it doesn't really seem to come up
as like a weird thing, like an entity locked all
the doors. Uh, doors were just locked. They don't really,
(23:02):
it doesn't get embellished a whole lot. But before we
start talking about suspects and what may have driven someone
to do this, let's have another quick word from a
sponsor will take a break from all of this sort
of dark material for just a moment, so to return
(23:24):
to this horrifying subject. There were many early leads in
this case and really no shortage of suspects, but nothing
ever panned out, and this horrific crime is still unsolved.
It's not possible in the scope of a podcast episode
to cover every single suspect, but we're going to talk
about the more high profile ones. Yeah, this really sort
(23:45):
of turned this town on its head, and a lot
of people characterize it as basically making a place where
people would invite a stranger into their home for a
meal and you know, be very open and very friendly,
into a place where suddenly everyone was suspicious of everyone
else and you know, sort of fear driven suspicion kind
of led their behavior beyond that And as a consequence,
a lot of different people were accused of participating in
(24:07):
this crime. But one of the primary suspects that comes
up in almost any discussion of this case is Frank F. Jones,
and he was an Iowa state senator. He had been
Josiah Moore's boss for many years, but in nineteen eight
more had struck out on his own opening a farming
implement company, and he took several of their lucrative business
(24:29):
partners with him, including the John Deer Company, so Jones
was a little i rate with him from that point on.
There were also rumors that Josiah had had an affair
with jones daughter in law, so Frank Jones and his son,
so the husband of this daughter in law. We're even
accused quite publicly by a detective agency of having hired
(24:51):
a killer named William Mansfield to take out the More family.
And William Mansfield was arrested for the murders in nineteen sixteen,
four years after they had taken place. According to Detective
James Newton Wilkerson, who had been the one that had
leveled those accusations against the Joneses, uh, he asserted that
(25:12):
Mansfield was in fact a serial killer and that he
also had a cocaine habit. Mansfield was also linked via
Wilkerson's research, to other brutal murders, including those of his
own wife, child, and his wife's family in nineteen fourteen,
so that would have been a couple years after Bliska,
as well as murders in Kansas and Colorado and in
(25:33):
all of these cases, the victims were bludgeoned with an
axe in homes where the windows and mirrors were all covered,
similar to the morselings. Detective Wilkerson was so convinced that
Mansfield had been hired by Jones that he posted flyers
all over town with Mansfield's face on them that read,
this is the axe murderer he murdered the more family
(25:55):
at Bliska. The hypocrite whose dirty money paid for the
hellish job wants your support for the state Senate. Will
he get it? So? I'm sure delighted Jones. Uh, And
I have to say, I think if you have just
accused a man of hiring someone to kill a man
who has made you angry, making him angry and this
(26:19):
way seems like a really bold and foolish move. Um.
But while Mansfield does seem like an obvious solution to
who killed the Moors, and while Detective Wokerson really seemed
for the rest of his life that he was certain
that what that Mansfield was the killer Uh. Mansfield had
an art alibi for the time of the Veliska murders
(26:40):
that placed him in Illinois. There was some payroll happenings
that indicated that he had had been working there at
the time. There were some eyewitnesses that placed Mansfield in
Veliska and not Illinois, but none of those uh eyewitness
accounts were ever substantiated, and Mansfield was eventually set free.
(27:00):
After his release, Mansfield sued Wilkerson for slander, and he
was awarded more than two thousand dollars. Wilkerson alleged that
Jones had in fact managed to use his position of
power to secure Mansfield's release. Yeah, he also kind of
blamed Jones for orchestrating the decision in Mansfield's favor during
(27:23):
the slander case, and he suggested that Frank Jones set
up the next suspect to kind of take the fall,
and that next suspect was Reverend George Kelly, who was
a preacher who had moved to Macedonia, Iowa in nineteen twelve.
So after the trail went cold with Mansfield, Kelly was
arrested and charged with the more murders in nineteen seventeen,
(27:44):
and he was in Baliska for the Children's Day activities
and he left town the next morning. He was even
alleged at one point to have spoken of the murders
on the train out of town, which is early in
the morning, before the bodies had even been discovered. He
also returned to Veliska a week after the murders and
he pretended to be a detective from Scotland Yard to
(28:06):
gain entry into the More home. He actually had some
mental problems that were on record, and Kelly was considered
to be a sexual deviant, obsessed with sex and known
to have been a peeping tom. There have been some
theories about the rolled up bacon slab that was found
downstairs in the bedroom had been used as a sexual
(28:28):
aid by the killer, and that made people really willing
to connect the dots to to Kelly, who had this reputation.
Unlike Mansfield, Kelly actually did confess to the murders, and
in his confession he wrote, I killed the children upstairs
first and the children downstairs last. I knew God wanted
(28:49):
me to do it this way. Slay utterly came to
my mind, and I picked up the axe, went into
the house and killed them. So that makes it seem
like an open and shut ace. But it all fell apart.
He wound up recanting his confession, and the witnesses that
initially claimed he talked to them on the train about
the murders before it was public knowledge. I'll change their story.
(29:12):
He was also a really small man, at five ft
two inches tall, and he weighed less than a hundred
and twenty pounds, So the idea of him being able
to deliver the crushing blows that killed the family was
a little difficult to support. I imagine at that height
it might have been also difficult for the upswings of
the axe to hit the ceiling. Yes, I couldn't find anything.
(29:35):
I thought about that as well, and I couldn't find
anything substantial. I'm sure we could do it if with
a little bit more time to find out what the
height of the ceilings were in the length of the axe.
But I did not have time to work out the
math on that. And while somebody that size could probably
easily until children, Mr Moore was like six ft tall
and weighed about two hundred pounds, you know, he was
(29:57):
a full grown man, So it it seemed like that
would have been a little bit more of a stretch
for Kelly to be able to manage. Kelly was actually
tried twice for this crime. The first trial resulted in
a hung jury, and in the second trial, the jury
freed him because there was really no evidence other than
(30:18):
sort of the suspicion that he was weird and deviant
and might be the kind of person to do these things.
The third suspect was Henry Lee Moore, and in May
of nineteen thirteen, almost a year after the murders, a
federal investigator on the case named m W. Mccloudy, announced
that he had solved it, as well as twenty two
(30:39):
other similar cases. Mcclardy believed all of the slings to
be the work of serial killer Henry Lee Moore, who
was not actually relation to the More family. It was
not yet another More brother. Yeah, it was just coincidental
that they had the last name. Uh. A few months
after the Valiska incident, Henry More was convicted of murdering
(31:02):
his mother and grandmother in Missouri. The brutality of the
victims was quite similar. They were legend with an AX
and UH. It should be pointed out that one of
the things that differs is that he was allegedly motivated
by money. In this he was hoping to gain their
assets after they died. As the Valiska investigation had gone on,
(31:25):
multiple similar acts murders were uncovered in Colorado, Illinois, and Kansas,
and some of these were crimes Mansfield had also been
linked to by other investigators, but McClary thought they were
all Henry Morris doing more actually served thirty six years
of his life sentence for the deaths of his mother
and grandmother. UH and then he was paroled in nineteen
(31:48):
forty nine. UH. He ended up having his sentence commuted
some years later when he was in his eighties. UM.
He kind of falls off the public record after that.
No one really knows like or he went or how
he died. But he was never formally charged for the
murders in Valiska, despite mccloudy's insistence that he was clearly
the one who had done it. In addition to these
(32:11):
three high profile suspects, there were so so many others,
And initially it was because of the shocking nature of
the hot side. Citizens of Aliska suspected anyone who wasn't
from around there. Some of them were legitimately suspect, although
not not ever actually linked to the murders, and some
of them were simply guilty of being strangers. And I
(32:34):
wanted to make a note about the similarities among the
murders UH that were discovered in other states and other areas,
and the use of an AX as the murder weapon.
It's worth considering just food for thought that this was
a time when almost every home would have an X,
often readily accessible UH. Mike dash who was a writer
(32:54):
that wrote an article for the Smithsonian in twelve about
the Valiska killings, makes the point that this sort of
could be considered a weapon of convenience for the times,
Like in the Midwest, if you just wanted to go
on a killing spree, an access pretty easy to get
ahold of. Additionally, as is the case often with high
profile crimes, confessors came out of the woodwork for decades.
(33:18):
People were confessing to the crime well into the nineteen thirties,
although many of these confessions got details wildly wrong. Yeah,
you know that that happens with any big UH murder case.
Or there are people that confess that could not have
done it for whatever reasons, but those, of course, we're
(33:40):
pretty easily dismissed in most cases. Um So, jumping to
sort of the modern day UH in the house where J. B.
More and his family were killed was purchased by Darwin
and Martha Lynn and the Lins restored the house to
its nineteen twelve condition, and the residents was placed on
the National Historic Places Registry in nineteen. Prior to the
(34:02):
Lens purchase, the house had passed through many hands of
ownership and it had been repeatedly renovated, so it was
really quite a significant restoration effort. Today you can tour
the home. It's actually a museum, and for a little
less than five hundred dollars a night, you can book
sleepovers in the murder House. It's actually one of the
main draws of Valisco, which is a pretty rural town.
(34:25):
If you want to book on the anniversary of the murders, though,
there's a lottery. And there have been many discussions and
debates through the years about whether it's right for a
business to grow out of such a tragedy and so
much brutality. These debates probably go on for as long
as the museum is open. Yeah, I mean a lot
of articles if you search for this that talk about
(34:46):
it kind of from the modern standpoint. They really do
discuss kind of that this is a problem and something
that continues to be debated, and and they kind of
look at like the Valisca murder houses. This odd money
making machines of but you know that's something that you
can draw your own conclusions and have your own opinions of. UM.
(35:06):
Paranormal investigators and ghost hunters have of course kind of
flocked to this house hoping to get some activity that
they can record or discuss. It's been featured on a
lot of numerous television reality and making the air quotes shows, uh,
and there have been several documentaries made about the murders
that are less about sensationalizing it and making a haunted
(35:26):
house ghost story, but really just trying to break down
the actual crime. UM. I kind of feel like a
broken record when I do this wrap up, because we
do it for almost any of the cases where they're
go unsolved. But odds are that this one is not
ever going to be solved. And the further away we
get from the date of when it actually happened, the
(35:47):
less and less evidence there will be to go on.
So it will remain a draw for crime history buffs
and visitors to the Valiska Murder House. Uh, probably for
quite some time. But that is the Valiska Murders, which,
as I said, we're requested by a large number of people.
Very unsettling and disturbing to think about. Uh, but you know,
(36:09):
good Halloween fodder. And again it is a huge tragedy.
I mean, like I said, I'm not a kids person,
but reading these testimonies about what happened to these children
was so rough for me. Yeah, I kept I kept
going like, let's go hug a kitty. I'm having to
go out to cartoon for fifteen minutes, just anything to
kind of break the intensity of that. Well, and in
addition to how I got genuinely creeped out sitting here
(36:31):
when you said all the mirrors were covered up with
their clothing, Um, the part about their you know that
the parents of the children who were visiting the home
calling over there because they were expecting them to be
home for school, that really got to me. It's it's
very upsetting to think about. I mean, these were, you know,
kids that were part of someone's lives, and it was
(36:51):
just it could be it's one of those this could
happen to anyone kinds of things. UM. And I think
especially when these kinds of crimes happen in rural communities
that were very you know, friendly and and pretty free
of this kind of thing. It's really shocking. It kind
of reminds me of when I first read in Cold
Blood Patry as a kid, because it's kind of a
similar there's some parallels there. Um, it's hard to think
(37:14):
about what a mental shift that has to be for
the entire community to be Like, one day life is
one way and the next day you see it all
completely differently. Thank you so much for joining us for
this Saturday Classic. Since this is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
(37:34):
r L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete. Now, so here's our current contact information.
We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media, that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
(37:57):
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