October 31, 2025 • 40 mins
"The slaying of the entire family promises to become a mystery which will take much time to unravel..."
By the first anniversary of the Villisca murders, the Moore house stood shuttered. The local sheriff had nothing new to add to the case file. Evidence had spoiled, witnesses had drifted, and rumor had begun to harden into folklore.
In the years that would follow, several suspects would be presented to local officials, including drifters and men with a prior history of violence. But one after another, all were compared to the evidence and found lacking, resulting in a case that remains unsolved more than a century later...
Part 2/2
Research, writing, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan
Additional writing by Amelia White
Learn more about this podcast at http://unresolved.me
If you would like to support this podcast, consider heading to https://www.patreon.com/unresolvedpod to become a Patron or Producer
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unresolved--3266604/support.
By the first anniversary of the Villisca murders, the Moore house stood shuttered. The local sheriff had nothing new to add to the case file. Evidence had spoiled, witnesses had drifted, and rumor had begun to harden into folklore.
In the years that would follow, several suspects would be presented to local officials, including drifters and men with a prior history of violence. But one after another, all were compared to the evidence and found lacking, resulting in a case that remains unsolved more than a century later...
Part 2/2
Research, writing, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan
Additional writing by Amelia White
Learn more about this podcast at http://unresolved.me
If you would like to support this podcast, consider heading to https://www.patreon.com/unresolvedpod to become a Patron or Producer
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unresolved--3266604/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
This episode contains graphic content that may not be suitable
for all ages. Listener discretion is advised. If you or
someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available,
call or text nine eight eight, or chat with someone
at nine eight eight lifeline dot org. Those outside of
the US, reach out to someone at your local crisis
(00:24):
center or hotline. Please do not suffer in silence. Morning
(00:56):
light came late to Veliska, Iowa, on June tenth, nineteen
twelve twelve. The sky was clear, the air already warming,
and yet the Moorhouse sat still and sealed, as though
the night had not passed at all. Curtains drawn, doors
locked from within, no sound. When Rossmore finally forced the
door and stepped inside with Marshall Hank Horton, they were
(01:17):
met with a silence that felt wrong, the kind that
seems to listen back. The parlor smelled faintly of kerosene
and something heavier beneath it, the scent of iron and
rot and day's old heat. They climbed the narrow staircase first,
the marshal leading revolver drawn. In the front bedroom, they
found Josiah and Sarah Moore in their bed. The coverlet
(01:40):
was pulled up neatly, almost politely, but the shape beneath
it told the truth. The axe had struck Josiah first,
splitting through flesh and into the ceiling above him. He
had been hit with such force that his eyes, jaw,
and nose were gone. Sarah lay beside him, struck again
and again. The ceiling above them bore the marks of
(02:02):
each swing, small circular dens of blood and wood grain
that no one would ever scrub out. In the room
down the hall, the children all slept together, Catherine twelve,
Boyd seven, Hermann ten, and Paul five. The killer had
moved methodically, one bed at a time. Each child's face
(02:22):
was covered after death, the bedding drawn to their chins,
as though to restore the peace that the killer had taken.
There were no signs of a struggle. None of the
children had woken, or not long enough to cry out.
Their father's axe had silenced the house before a single
scream could cross the threshold. Downstairs, in the small guest
room near the front parlor lay the Stillinger sisters Lena
(02:45):
and Aina had been invited to stay the night after
the children's day programmed the day prior The older girl,
Lena eleven years old, seems to have stirred. Her body
was turned slightly, one arm raised across her pillow, a
defensive mark along her fore arms. Her nightgown was pushed up.
Her undergarments were found to the foot of the bed.
It has never been clear whether the killer assaulted her.
(03:07):
The evidence was ambiguous. The examination hurried, but there is
little doubt that she woke and saw him. One of
her eyes was open when they found her, fixed toward
the door. Everywhere the killer moved, he imposed order after chaos.
Mirrors were covered with cloth, as though to hide the
sight of what he had done. The shades were drawn tight.
(03:29):
Every lamp in the house had been disassembled, chimneys removed, wixed,
turned low. At some point before dawn, the killer had
rinsed his hands and the axe in the basin, wiped
it clean, and leaned it against the wall beside the
downstairs bedroom. He then ate a small meal, a piece
of bread, a slice of bacon left on a plate,
and then locked the doors behind him when he left. Outside,
(03:52):
the town began its day. Farmers drove wagons past the house,
unaware that eight people lay inside. Their bodies cooling. As
the sun rose, the clock on the wall kept ticking
until its spring ran down. By the time the marshal emerged,
pale and shaking, Feliska's name would never again mean peace.
The coroner would later determine that all eight victims were
(04:14):
killed between midnight and two am. The first blow struck Josiah.
From there, the killer worked room by room, upstairs to down.
There were no neighbors who hurt anything, though the property
stood only thirty feet from the nearest window. The scene
that followed was chaos disguised as justice. Curious townspeople filled
(04:35):
through the home that day, neighbors, newspapermen, and strangers who
would later swear they had seen the devil's face in
the wallpaper. The Marshal's authority evaporated under the crush of bodies.
Within hours, footprints, fingerprints, and any trace of certainty were gone.
What could still be read was the message the killer
left in his method. Every act in that house had purpose,
(04:59):
faces and mirrors covered, lamps darkened, food left uneaten, acts cleaned.
Some have seen ritual in it, Others see guilt or
an effort to erase the sight of what he had done.
The arrangement of the bodies, the meticulous covering, the locked doors.
These were the gestures of someone who had likely done
(05:19):
this before. The newspapers struggled to find language that fit
bloodiest night in Iowa history. One headline read, another called
it the crime that has no equal. The town, once
a name on a rail line, was now a symbol
of something darker, a warning that safety itself could be
an illusion. The funerals came two days later, eight caskets
(05:42):
in a single procession, wagons lined along the street, mourners
crowding the yard of the church where Sarah had organized
children's Day only hours before her death. The preacher that
day spoke of heaven, but the congregation listened for answers.
None came. By the time the last tasket was lowered
into the red Iowa soil, the killer was likely long gone,
(06:05):
perhaps riding one of the same trains that still whistled
through town that night, disappearing into the dark between depots.
Balliska would try and move on, but the house on
East Second Street refused to fade for months. The smell
lingered no matter how often it was scrubbed. The wallpaper
had to be replaced. The floors sanded still, the stains
(06:26):
bled through. People said the home was cursed, but what
haunted it was far simpler, a mystery too large for
a small town to bear. In the weeks that followed,
law men and traveling detectives descended upon Veliska like scavengers.
Some promised swift justice, others came only for the story.
(06:46):
Rumors began to bloom faster than facts. But the years
that came next, long after the headlines had cooled and
new crimes had claimed the nation's attention, a handful of
investigators kept following the shadows cast by that night. They
believed the more Families killer had not stopped in Velliska
at all, and so as nineteen thirteen began, a hunt
(07:07):
for the truth started again, not in the quiet of
that home, but along the rail lines that cut through
the heart of America. This is the story of the
Velliska Axe Murders, Part two, Ghost on the Rails. By
(07:34):
the first anniversary of the crime, the moorhouse stood shuddered,
grass high, windows dark. The sheriff had nothing new, evidence
had spoiled, witnesses had drifted, and rumor had hardened into myth.
Then a man named James Newton. Wilkerson arrived in Montgomery
County with a detective's badge and a taste for theater.
(07:55):
Once with the Burns Agency, now self employed, he promised
to find the Uiska's killer and free the town's conscience.
Wilkerson was broad shouldered, sharp eyed, and loud, a showman
more than a sleuth. Within weeks, he named his culprit,
State Senator Frank F. Jones, Josiah Moore's former employer and
business rival. The two had split years earlier when Moore
(08:18):
took the lucrative John Deere account and opened his own
hardware store in a town the small. Such betrayals festered,
Wilkerson's theory grew by the week. Jones, he claimed, had
hired a drifter named William Mansfield or Blackie Mansfield to
silence Moore. A contract killing born of pride. Mansfield, a
(08:39):
railroad laborer and an ex convict, had been linked two
other axe murders across the Midwest. That was enough for
Wilkerson to declare a pattern. He staged public meetings, thundered
in newspapers, and cast Jones as a politician rotted by ambition.
The story divided veliska neatly in two those who believed
the feud and those who didn't. For many, the Jones
(09:02):
theory was comforting. It made evil local familiar, almost moral.
A jealous rival was easier to face than a faithless traveler.
In nineteen fourteen, Wilkerson convinced Kansas City police to arrest Mansfield.
Hope surged until the suspect's employer produced time cards proving
he had been working in Illinois the night of the murders.
(09:24):
Coworkers confirmed it. The case collapsed within days, yet Wilkerson
refused to yield the records he said were forged. The
witnesses bribed. His accusations only swelled, now tinged with conspiracy
claims that Senator Jones had bought off officials and buried evidence.
What began as an investigation turned to obsession. From nineteen
(09:48):
thirteen all the way through nineteen sixteen, reporters treated Wilkerson's
every outburst as a revelation. Each denial became proof of guilt,
each rumor a new headline. Meanwhile, while detectives in other
states began to see something different, a string of family
murders along the same rail lines. The pattern matched Veliska
almost exactly. Lamps, dimmed faces covered, no theft, total silence.
(10:14):
But in town the feud made better copy. That summer,
pressure from residents finally forced the county to convene a
grand jury. Thirty witnesses testified there is Wilkerson, then Jones,
and anyone remotely connected to them. For two weeks, the
courthouse baked in July heat, while the crowd outside traded
gossip like currency. When the jury returned, it found nothing,
(10:38):
no new evidence, no indictments, only a bunch of tired jurors. Officially,
the case remained unsolved. Unofficially, Veliska had chosen its villain,
and Wilkerson his legend. James Newton Wilkerson would keep shouting
Frank F. Jones's name for years. After the courts dismissed him,
his story began to harden into some kind of a
(10:59):
local myth, a feud retold as justice denied. Yet, while
Wilkerson chased politics and pride, other investigators had already begun
expanding outside of Iowa. The Reverend George Jock Kelly had
been in Veellisca less than a day before the murders.
But for some people that was long enough. He was
(11:20):
a small, nervous man forty years old at the time,
English by birth, with a thin mustache into gaze that
flickered between charm and panic. He preached in short, burst
sentences that climbed and fell with theatrical rhythm. His wife
accompanied him from revival to revival, though she was rarely
mentioned by name. Most people remembered him instead for his eyes,
(11:42):
which darted around a room as if searching for approval
or escape. On June ninth, nineteen twelve, Kelly stood at
the front of the Presbyterian Church during the children's day program.
He watched as the more children and the Stillinger girls
recited their verses and sang the hymns that Sarah Moore
had spent the whey weeks rehearsing. Kelly joined in the
closing prayer, then lingered afterward, shaking hands and complimenting the children.
(12:07):
Several witnesses later said he appeared overly familiar, pressing the
girls to speak with him, asking questions that felt intrusive.
Late that night, he and his wife boarded a train
out of town. They were headed east the direction of
the rising sun, leaving Velliska behind. Before dawn. By the
time the murders were discovered, Reverend Kelly was already across
(12:29):
state lines. When word of the killing spread, he seemed captivated.
From his next stop in Macedonia, he wrote letters to
local authorities asking for details of the case. The first
one read like an expression of concern. The second was
more peculiar. He described specific aspects of the crime that
had not yet been made public, the positioning of the bodies,
(12:51):
the absence of robbery, the way the house had been
sealed up. He claimed to have dreamed about it, as
if God had shown him what happened. Within weeks, the
legs grew stranger. Kelly wrote to investigators, ministers, and even
newspaper reporters, proposing theories and demanding answers. Some correspondents dismissed
him as eccentric. Others began to suspect he knew too much.
(13:14):
But Kelly was skilled at walking the thin line between
curiosity and confession. He offered just enough evidence to intrigue,
never enough to incriminate. The years passed, other suspects came
and went, but in nineteen seventeen, five years after the murders,
Kelly's name returned to the headlines. A postal inspector in
(13:34):
South Dakota discovered that the minister had been writing obscene
letters to young women who answered his newspaper ads for
typists and secretaries. He was arrested for violating the federal
obscenity law and briefly institutionalized for evaluation. During questioning, he
began to talk again about Veliska. Kelly told investigators that
he had been in town the night of the murders.
(13:57):
He said he could remember the sounds of children playing,
the glow of lamps through the windows, and the quiet afterward.
He claimed that the murders had been committed by someone
called to do God's work, and that he could still
feel the presence of that calling in himself. The confession
was confusing and even contradictory. Some statements suggested first hand knowledge,
(14:18):
others divine vision. When pressed for details, Kelly changed his
story repeatedly. Still, the authorities saw a chance to close
one of the most infamous cases in the country. In
the spring of nineteen seventeen, they charged him with the
murder of Lena Stillinger. The trial began that September in
Red Oak, Iowa. Reporters arrived from across the Midwest. The
(14:41):
prosecution presented Kelly's letters, his inconsistent confessions, and testimony from
witnesses who remembered his odd behavior at the church. They
argued that his fascination with the case was evidence of guilt.
The defense painted him as a delusional man, unfit to
distinguish truth from phantasy. They called doctors who testify that
Kelly suffered from psychical abnormality and periods of mania. His
(15:05):
wife described his sleeplessness, his paranoia, as well as his
long stretches of incoherent preaching. Kelly himself testified for hours.
He was eager to explain, as if the trial were
another sermon. At times he seemed proud, as though the
murders that elevated him to tragic importance. At others he
trembled and wept. He told the jury that he had
(15:26):
been commanded by voices to do God's will, then moments
later denied ever setting foot in the moorhouse. After several days,
the jury deadlocked. Eleven jurors voted for acquittal, one for conviction.
The judge declared a mistrial. A second trial was held
in the neighboring county early the next year. This time,
(15:47):
the prosecution's case faltered. Kelly's confession was ruled partly inadmissible,
and there was no physical evidence connecting him to the crime.
He had no prior history of violence, no weapon, no
credible motive. The jury deliberated for a single hour before
returning a verdict of not guilty. Kelly was released, but
(16:07):
he never returned to the ministry. He drifted between small towns,
occasionally preaching, also occasionally institutionalized. His mental health continued to
deteriorate and de faded from public view. Some said he
continued to claim spiritual insight into murders, not just the
more Instillinger girls, but from other murders across the country.
(16:29):
Others said that he avoided the subject entirely. To many
in Velliska, the trials were the final insult. Five years
of hope had ended with nothing. The more family was
still dead, the killer still unknown, and the only man
ever tried for the crime had been acquitted. In fact,
in both trials, only one juror ever found him guilty.
(16:50):
Modern historians tend to agree that Kelly was almost certainly innocent.
His confessions were inconsistent and appeared to have been drawn
out by coercion and suggestion. His known offenses involved voyeurism
and Lewde letters, not violence. His personality was unstable, yes,
but erratic more than methodical. The Veliska murders seemed to
(17:12):
have required precision and composure, qualities that Kelly did not possess.
Bill James, the author of a book called The Man
from the Train, later argued that Kelly could not have
committed the murders for a simple reason. He lacked the
physical and psychological control to kill eight people silently and
efficiently in total darkness. While he might have been mad,
(17:34):
he was the wrong kind of mad. What the Kelly
saga revealed was how deeply the town still needed an ending.
The trials gave Veliska another spectacle to replace the silence,
but when it ended, the silence returned. The community was
left with questions that seemed to multiply rather than resolve,
And so, with Kelly acquitted and Wilkerson's feud spent, the
(17:56):
case passed out of the courtrooms and back into rumor.
For many years. It would sleep there until researchers began
to notice that Veliska's story was not as unique as
it had once seemed other families had died the same
way in other towns along the same lines of track.
The killer who had vanished into the dark might not
have been a Vellisca man at all, but a traveler
(18:17):
who carried his violence from place to place. It was
this idea, the thought that the More family and the
Stillinger girls had fallen victim to a pattern stretching far
beyond Iowa, that would shape the next century of speculation.
For years, people in Velliska told themselves that the crime
had been personal. They almost needed it to be. Evil
(18:40):
was easier to accept if it came from jealousy, or vengeance,
or even lust, anything that could be explained. But beneath
those comforting stories, something larger had been happening, something that
stretched far beyond Iowa's borders. The Valiska murders were not
the first of their kind, and they were not the last.
Between eighteen ninety eight eight and nineteen twelve, families across
(19:03):
the United States were slaughtered in their beds by someone
wielding the same simple weapon. The crimes shared so many
peculiar details that modern researchers have come to believe they
were connected the work of a single killer. Who traveled
by train from town to town. That theory, the so
called man from the train hypothesis, emerged much later, but
(19:23):
its evidence lay in plain sight even at the time.
In the years before Veliska, small town newspapers had recorded
a string of nearly identical murders, Entire families bludgeoned in
their homes, Lamps found with their chimneys removed and wicks
turned low, mirrors or windows covered after the killings, doors
locked from the inside, valuables left untouched homes within sight
(19:47):
of a rail line. Investigators in Kansas, Colorado, Illinois, and
several states in the Deep South had noted the similarities,
but communication between jurisdictions was poor. Crimes that to the
day would have been connected by database search or fingerprint
comparison were then isolated tragedies, each with its own sheriff
and its own dead. The killings began quietly. In eighteen
(20:11):
ninety eight, a family in Brookfield, Massachusetts, was murdered in
their home near the Boston and Albany railroad. In nineteen
oh four, the Hodges family was killed near Statesboro, Georgia.
Their house burned afterward to conceal the evidence. Within months,
another family in South Carolina met the same fate. From
nineteen oh nine to nineteen twelve, the pattern grew relentless.
(20:33):
There was the Allen family in Arkansas, the Burnhams in Kansas,
the Hudsons, and Paula, Kansas, only four days before the
More family died. The Hudson murders were so similar to
Velliska that some later investigators believed that they were part
of the same trip. The killer had entered the Paula
home after dark, dismantled the lamp, murdered the sleeping family,
(20:54):
covered their faces, and left without stealing a thing. The
tracks behind the house led directly to the nearby railyard.
If the same man committed both crimes, he could have
boarded a freight train west and arrived in Velisco within hours.
The timing fits, so does the method. When author Bill
James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James revisited the records
(21:15):
a century later, they found at least two dozen such
cases with nearly identical details. They noted that the murders
occurred mostly in warm months, near small towns with easy
rail access, and almost always on weekends. Each attack followed
the same pattern. Entry through an unlocked back door or window,
use of an axe found on the property. Family members
(21:37):
killed in bed, beginning with the father, and post mortem orderliness, faces, covered, lamps, extinguished,
doors locked. What linked them above all was control. The
killer did not act in panic. He worked with eerie composure,
often remaining in the house afterward to eat, wash up,
or linger in silence. The Jameses even proposed a suspect Mueller,
(22:00):
a European immigrant who had been accused of murdering a
family in Massachusetts in eighteen ninety seven and who vanished
before trial. Mueller had been a carpenter and a logger,
used to travel, and may have worked his way across
the United States aboard freight trains. He was never seen
again under that name, but crimes bearing his signature appeared
along the rail corridors that criss crossed the country. The
(22:23):
Jameses theorized that Mueller killed not from passion, but from compulsion,
following a ritual that combined sexual repression, religious guilt, and
the satisfaction of dominance. Each family represented the same tableaux,
the husband first, the wife's second children last. Each act
was quiet, deliberate, and complete. The idea of a single
(22:45):
traveling killer was almost unthinkable in the early twentieth century.
Serial murder as a concept did not really yet exist.
Law Men looked for motive, not pattern. They wanted to
know why, not how often. But when you lay all
of the cases side by side, the repetitions are uncanny.
Yet even some contemporary officers suspected a link. After the
(23:08):
killings in Paul La, Kansas, the local sheriff warned that
the murderer was an experienced traveler who would strike again
days later. It seems Feliska proved him right then in
Colorado Springs later that fall, two more families were wiped
out in identical fashion. Each town treated its tragedy as unique,
its grief as singular. Newspapers reported the similarities, but rarely
(23:31):
connected them. The thought that one man could drift through
America's heartland killing strangers at random was too destabilizing to believe.
In Velliska, a few lawmen noticed the pattern, but were
drowned out by the Louder feud theories. By the time
the Grant jury disbanded in nineteen sixteen, the idea of
a traveling killer had faded into rumor. Yet in hindsight,
(23:53):
the more murders fit the pattern with almost mathematical precision.
The timing, the method, the silence, the lack of theft,
the position of the lamps, the coverings, the calm afterward.
If the man from the Train theory was real, Velliska
was not the killer's first stop and likely not his last.
Bill James counted hundreds of potential victims across fifteen years,
(24:15):
ranging from New England all the way to the Pacific.
Some of the earliest victims lived in lumber towns, others
in farming villages, all within walking distance of the rails.
Each time the killers struck and vanished. This possibility reframes
Veliska completely. It becomes less a tale of small town
betrayal and more a window into an era when America's
(24:37):
growing rail network carried not only goods and people, but
also danger that could appear without warning. Still, the theory
remains circumstantial. There is no physical evidence tying any one
man to all the crimes. What survives are patterns of
behavior and the uneasy feeling that coincidence alone cannot explain them.
The man from the Train hypothesis does not solve Instead,
(25:01):
it enlargens it, turning one family's murder into part of
a continental mystery, and maybe that's why the idea endures.
Liska is both specific and endless. Eight lives extinguished in
one house on one night, and yet somehow also connected
to dozens of others who died in the same way
under the same dark sky. For Veliska, the pattern changed everything.
(25:24):
The crime was seemingly no longer an isolated act, but
a symptom of something vast and rootless. The town could
not accept that they wanted their killer to have a
face they recognized, so even as the tracks hummed with
passing freight and the newspapers reported new murders hundreds of
miles away, Veliska turned its attention back to the suspects
within reach. The wider pattern faded again into background noise,
(25:48):
but it had already left its mark. The killer had
moved on, perhaps north, maybe south, following the rails, and
each time a train whistle cut through the dark, the
people of Veliska were reminded that he had no ever
really been caught. By nineteen twelve, America had begun to
collect its monsters. One of them briefly seemed to fit Feliska.
Like a missing piece. Henry Lee Moore, no relation to
(26:11):
the victims, was a railroad worker from Missouri, arrested that
December for murdering his mother and grandmother with an axe.
The coincidence of his name and killing method was irresistible.
He left their bodies on the kitchen floor and fled
west by train. When captured weeks later, he showed no remorse.
Federal investigator W. M. McClory declared Henry not only guilty
(26:34):
of his family's murder, but responsible for dozens of similar crimes.
He claimed that the trail of axe murders from the
South to the Midwest mirrored Henry's railroad jobs. Each scene
lay within earshot of a depot, each family having died
the same quiet way. For a moment, the story satisfied everyone.
A tangible villain caught at last, Newspapers printed mclaury's theory
(26:57):
without hesitation. It made sense that a man who had
killed his own kin could kill another's. Then the timeline
began to unravel. Records placed Henry in Missouri through the
veliska weekend. Other murders ascribed to him occurred while he
was already jailed. The Grand Conspiracy clapped under dates and
payroll slips. Turns out, Henry Lee Moore was no wandering mastermind,
(27:20):
just a violent, grasping man who killed for money. He
was convicted and later sentenced to life, yet his name lingered,
fitting too neatly into the country's growing myth of the
drifter killer. After Henry came others, laborers, transients, men with
scars and stories. Each new suspect burnt briefly, then vanished.
(27:42):
Each time the town's hope flared, but each time it
guttered out. By nineteen sixteen, the files were stacked and closed.
Frank F. Jones, William Blackie Mansfield, Reverend George Kelley, Henry
Lee Moore, all ghost of their own making. What endured
was the sense that Veliska's horror had never really belonged
(28:02):
solely to Iowa, but to an America bound by steel
and distance, where now even murder could travel by train.
By nineteen sixteen, Velliska had grown tired of ghost theories
had come and gone, suspects paraded through headlines. The town
(28:25):
wanted finality, even without truth. That spring, under pressure from
residents and politicians, Montgomery County convened a new grand jury
for the first time in four years Iowa would formerly
reopen the case. The courthouse in Red Oak became a stage.
Each morning, Farmers, merchants, and widows packed the gallery, while
(28:45):
reporters filled the hotels outside. Gossip ran hotter than the
July air. Fifteen jurors were chosen quietly, though nothing about
the preceding State Private Detective James Wolkerson, still chasing his
feud with Senator Frank Jones, arrived with boxes of papers
and a grin he mistook for confidence. Jones, older and paler,
(29:06):
now appeared with his lawyers, tired of defending himself against
a charge that was never actually made. Wilkerson's presentation was
pure theater, A timeline of conspiracies, unsigned affidavits in the
name Mansfield spoken like a curse. He had no physical evidence,
only conviction. He accused Jones of corruption reaching to the
highest levels of Iowa politics. Jones's attorneys answered with calm precision.
(29:31):
They provided travel records, letters, even alibis. When Jones himself
took the stand, he denied everything. His composure impressed the room,
but did little disway public opinion. Outside. Weeks past, and
the summer heat thickened witnesses repeated stories Warren thin from
four years of retelling. The sheriff admitted that the original
scene had been trampled by townspeople. The crime, he said,
(29:54):
had been lost before sunrise on the very first morning.
By August, the hearings felt less like justice than ritual.
Everyone sensed the verdict before it came, and when it
did arrive, coming with no indictments, no new evidence, nothing,
it surprised no one. Wilkerson quickly left town without speaking
to reporters. Jones never recovered his reputation. The state closed
(30:18):
its books, and Veliska slipped from active investigation into legend
cold case. The jurors report was bureaucratic and bloodless, but
its subtext was clear. The truth had been destroyed years earlier,
not by malice, but by curiosity. Its estimated that more
than two thousand visitors had walked through the Moorhouse before
(30:39):
order was restored. Many had taken a piece of the
mystery with them, and together they had erased any possibility
for justice. So after that grand jury, the files were sealed,
stored in a courthouse vault, and gradually lost to time. Officially,
the case became dormant. Unofficially, it had simply become a story.
(31:04):
Years later, investigators and writers returned to the Moorhouse, searching
for something the first generation had missed. What they found
was ordinary. An axe, a lamp, a plate of food,
and traces of deliberate order amid slaughter. The murder weapon
was Josiah Moore's own, washed after use, and propped up
(31:24):
against the wall beside the stillinger girl's bed. The handle
was slick with oil prints wiped away. Whoever swung it
had time to think and no fear of interruption. Every
lamp in the house had been altered, their chimneys removed, wixed,
turned low, shades drawn tight, light enough to move, but
dark enough to hide. One lamp sat on the floor
(31:45):
at the foot of Josiah's bed, another on a chair
by the two girls. The placement suggested pauses moments of
regard before the bedding was pulled over. Their faces, mirrors
and windows were covered. Even the clocks were stopped mid winding.
A bowl of bloody water sat in the kitchen basin.
A heel of bread and a slice of bacon waited
(32:06):
uneaten on a plate. The gestures spoke a language no
one could understand. Modern criminologists agree on a few things.
That the killer was practiced, methodical, and unhurried. He began upstairs,
killed Josiah first, then Sarah, and then the children, then
finally the guest below. The only mark of resistance came
(32:26):
from Lena Stillinger, a bruise on her forearm, a human
reflex to raise an arm before the dark. The corner
fixed the murders between midnight and two a m. Just
before a freight train roared through town. If the killer
boarded that train, he had washed, eaten, and vanished before
the engineer saw the next signal. Even now, what matters
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most is what's missing. No footprints, no pri marks, no
forced entry. Either the moors left a door unlocked or
the man they welcomed in was someone they knew. Cigarette
butts found in the attics suggested another possibility that he
had hidden there before The family returned from church, waded
through the evening heat as their lights went out one
by one. After the discovery, hundreds of neighbors poured through
(33:11):
the house, evidence that might have spoken to investigators even
decades later. Fibers, prints, blood traces, was crushed under boots
or pocketed as souvenirs. The theme became a cautionary exhibit
in forensic textbooks contamination as destruction. What endures is not
proof but pattern that strange, respectful tidiness amid ruin. Some
(33:34):
call it remorse, others call it a ritual. Standing in
that house today, restored to its nineteen twelve stillness, one
can still feel it, the heavy quiet of intention fulfilled.
The evidence tells only this much, that whoever moved through
those rooms did so with purpose, locked the doors, and
then left a silence that has lasted more than a century.
(33:59):
Time did not erase Feliska. Instead, it preserved it. The
quiet town became a symbol of what small town America
most fears about itself. In the decades after the murders,
families moved in and out of the moor House, never
staying for very long. Some claimed to hear footsteps, doors
creaking open, the sound of children running. Others felt only unease.
(34:22):
By the nineteen thirties, the house often sat empty, its
paint peeling, its legend growing with time. For half a century,
the property drifted between neglect and brief habitation, until in
the nineteen nineties, local farmer Darwin Lynn bought it. He
stripped away every modern trace, wiring, plumbing, wallpaper, and restored
(34:42):
it to its nineteen twelve appearance. Each bed, lamp and
shade was placed exactly as it had been on that
last summer night. Lynne said he wanted preservation, not spectacle.
What he built was both. Reporters returned, tourists followed. The
home became a destination for the newly christened industry of
dark tourism. Daytime tours gave way to overnight's days. Some
(35:07):
came for history, others for ghosts. The Lynn family insisted
the house was a memorial, but each Halloween news crews
filmed fresh visitors whispering into the dark. The boundary between
remembrance and entertainment blurred, and trust me, I'm not judging
by making this podcast after all. In twenty fourteen, a
man renting the house overnight stabbed himself in the chest.
(35:29):
He survived, but the act renewed the house's grim notoriety.
Locals argued whether the place honored the victims or exploited them.
Either way, the name Feliska was no longer just a town.
It was a brand. Through all of it, the house
remained mostly unchanged two stories of pine and plaster on
Second Street, framed by trees that have grown thicker since
(35:52):
nineteen twelve. By day it looks almost peaceful. By night,
it returns to what it has always been, a reminder
that horror can live quietly among ordinary things. A century
of investigation has turned Veliska into a maze of competing explanations,
(36:12):
each convincing until weighed against the evidence. First came the
theory of a local feud. It offered a simple morality tale.
Senator Frank Jones ordered the death of his business rival,
carried out by hired killer Blackie Mansfield. But Jones had
motive without opportunity, and Mansfield had alibis that placed him
in another state. The story endured not because it had
(36:35):
any proof, but because it gave the town a villain
with a familiar face. Then came the preacher theory. Reverend
George Kelly embodied the other fear, the dangerous outsider, a
man of God hiding madness behind the pulpit. His confessions
were contradictory and almost certainly coerced. He lacked the strength, discipline,
and composure to slaughter eight people in silence. Kelly was
(36:58):
a casualty of the town's needs for closure, but not
its answer. Then came Henry Lee Moore, the Missouri rail
worker who murdered his own family with an axe months later.
His crime looked identical to Veliska's, and for a time
he was blamed for dozens of others, But his murders
were personal and impulsive, not methodical. His movements did not
(37:19):
fit the known timeline, and his conviction closed nothing. The
final and broadest theory belongs to authors Bill and Rachel
McCarthy James the Man from the Train theory. Their research
gathered two decades of nearly identical murders stretching from New
England to the Plains, each near a railway, each executed
with precision and calm. The suspect, they argued was a
(37:42):
European immigrant named Paul Mueller, a carpenter who vanished after
an eighteen ninety seven killing and may have ridden the
rails west. Their case is circumstantial but compelling. It explains
the order the ritual covering of faces. It connects Veliska
to a national Paser pattern of transience and fear the dark,
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byproduct of an industrial age that could carry death as
easily as freight. If Eliska teaches anything, it's that some
crimes refuse conclusion. The house that this crime took place
in still stands, restored to its moment of interruption, each
room frozen between ordinary life and unspeakable violence. The clock
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on the wall no longer ticks, but the silence it
left behind remains its own kind of testimony. Whatever name
the killer carried, he walked out of Eliska before sunrise
and vanished into history. The rest of us have been
listening to the quiet they left behind ever since. Before
(38:47):
they became symbols, they were simply a family. Josiah and
Sarah Moore lived by routine. Their children filled the house
with sound. Hermann raced barefoot through the yard. Catherine minded
her younger brothers, Void and Paul, and all four sang
beside their mother in the church choir. That Sunday had ended,
like hundreds before it, prayer, laughter, borrowed hymns, The Stillinger
(39:11):
girls asleep under a borrowed quilt. By dawn, they were history.
What endures is not just the mystery, but the interruption.
The moment in ordinary life was divided forever by something
without reason. Theories multiply, because we need stories to make
sense of senselessness. But the truth is smaller, and maybe
(39:31):
even crueler. Eight people went to bed in a house
that should have kept them safe. The walls that held
their voices now hold silence, and that silence has outlived
every suspect, every headline, every argument about who did it.
Walked through the rooms today and you could still feel
the residue of their living. A child's toy on a shelf,
(39:51):
the neat line of a wash basin, the hum of
a summer night, caught between memory and myth. This is
what remains of Veliska. Not the kill are, not the
fear they left behind, but the fragile proof that ordinary
love once lived there, and that it deserved to last
longer than it did. The stories of Josiah Sarah, Catherine
(40:12):
Herman Boyd, and Paul Moore, as well as Aina and
Lina Stellinger, remain unresolved.
This episode contains graphic content that may not be suitable
for all ages. Listener discretion is advised. If you or
someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available,
call or text nine eight eight, or chat with someone
at nine eight eight lifeline dot org. Those outside of
the US, reach out to someone at your local crisis
(00:24):
center or hotline. Please do not suffer in silence. Morning
(00:56):
light came late to Veliska, Iowa, on June tenth, nineteen
twelve twelve. The sky was clear, the air already warming,
and yet the Moorhouse sat still and sealed, as though
the night had not passed at all. Curtains drawn, doors
locked from within, no sound. When Rossmore finally forced the
door and stepped inside with Marshall Hank Horton, they were
(01:17):
met with a silence that felt wrong, the kind that
seems to listen back. The parlor smelled faintly of kerosene
and something heavier beneath it, the scent of iron and
rot and day's old heat. They climbed the narrow staircase first,
the marshal leading revolver drawn. In the front bedroom, they
found Josiah and Sarah Moore in their bed. The coverlet
(01:40):
was pulled up neatly, almost politely, but the shape beneath
it told the truth. The axe had struck Josiah first,
splitting through flesh and into the ceiling above him. He
had been hit with such force that his eyes, jaw,
and nose were gone. Sarah lay beside him, struck again
and again. The ceiling above them bore the marks of
(02:02):
each swing, small circular dens of blood and wood grain
that no one would ever scrub out. In the room
down the hall, the children all slept together, Catherine twelve,
Boyd seven, Hermann ten, and Paul five. The killer had
moved methodically, one bed at a time. Each child's face
(02:22):
was covered after death, the bedding drawn to their chins,
as though to restore the peace that the killer had taken.
There were no signs of a struggle. None of the
children had woken, or not long enough to cry out.
Their father's axe had silenced the house before a single
scream could cross the threshold. Downstairs, in the small guest
room near the front parlor lay the Stillinger sisters Lena
(02:45):
and Aina had been invited to stay the night after
the children's day programmed the day prior The older girl,
Lena eleven years old, seems to have stirred. Her body
was turned slightly, one arm raised across her pillow, a
defensive mark along her fore arms. Her nightgown was pushed up.
Her undergarments were found to the foot of the bed.
It has never been clear whether the killer assaulted her.
(03:07):
The evidence was ambiguous. The examination hurried, but there is
little doubt that she woke and saw him. One of
her eyes was open when they found her, fixed toward
the door. Everywhere the killer moved, he imposed order after chaos.
Mirrors were covered with cloth, as though to hide the
sight of what he had done. The shades were drawn tight.
(03:29):
Every lamp in the house had been disassembled, chimneys removed, wixed,
turned low. At some point before dawn, the killer had
rinsed his hands and the axe in the basin, wiped
it clean, and leaned it against the wall beside the
downstairs bedroom. He then ate a small meal, a piece
of bread, a slice of bacon left on a plate,
and then locked the doors behind him when he left. Outside,
(03:52):
the town began its day. Farmers drove wagons past the house,
unaware that eight people lay inside. Their bodies cooling. As
the sun rose, the clock on the wall kept ticking
until its spring ran down. By the time the marshal emerged,
pale and shaking, Feliska's name would never again mean peace.
The coroner would later determine that all eight victims were
(04:14):
killed between midnight and two am. The first blow struck Josiah.
From there, the killer worked room by room, upstairs to down.
There were no neighbors who hurt anything, though the property
stood only thirty feet from the nearest window. The scene
that followed was chaos disguised as justice. Curious townspeople filled
(04:35):
through the home that day, neighbors, newspapermen, and strangers who
would later swear they had seen the devil's face in
the wallpaper. The Marshal's authority evaporated under the crush of bodies.
Within hours, footprints, fingerprints, and any trace of certainty were gone.
What could still be read was the message the killer
left in his method. Every act in that house had purpose,
(04:59):
faces and mirrors covered, lamps darkened, food left uneaten, acts cleaned.
Some have seen ritual in it, Others see guilt or
an effort to erase the sight of what he had done.
The arrangement of the bodies, the meticulous covering, the locked doors.
These were the gestures of someone who had likely done
(05:19):
this before. The newspapers struggled to find language that fit
bloodiest night in Iowa history. One headline read, another called
it the crime that has no equal. The town, once
a name on a rail line, was now a symbol
of something darker, a warning that safety itself could be
an illusion. The funerals came two days later, eight caskets
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in a single procession, wagons lined along the street, mourners
crowding the yard of the church where Sarah had organized
children's Day only hours before her death. The preacher that
day spoke of heaven, but the congregation listened for answers.
None came. By the time the last tasket was lowered
into the red Iowa soil, the killer was likely long gone,
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perhaps riding one of the same trains that still whistled
through town that night, disappearing into the dark between depots.
Balliska would try and move on, but the house on
East Second Street refused to fade for months. The smell
lingered no matter how often it was scrubbed. The wallpaper
had to be replaced. The floors sanded still, the stains
(06:26):
bled through. People said the home was cursed, but what
haunted it was far simpler, a mystery too large for
a small town to bear. In the weeks that followed,
law men and traveling detectives descended upon Veliska like scavengers.
Some promised swift justice, others came only for the story.
(06:46):
Rumors began to bloom faster than facts. But the years
that came next, long after the headlines had cooled and
new crimes had claimed the nation's attention, a handful of
investigators kept following the shadows cast by that night. They
believed the more Families killer had not stopped in Velliska
at all, and so as nineteen thirteen began, a hunt
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for the truth started again, not in the quiet of
that home, but along the rail lines that cut through
the heart of America. This is the story of the
Velliska Axe Murders, Part two, Ghost on the Rails. By
(07:34):
the first anniversary of the crime, the moorhouse stood shuddered,
grass high, windows dark. The sheriff had nothing new, evidence
had spoiled, witnesses had drifted, and rumor had hardened into myth.
Then a man named James Newton. Wilkerson arrived in Montgomery
County with a detective's badge and a taste for theater.
(07:55):
Once with the Burns Agency, now self employed, he promised
to find the Uiska's killer and free the town's conscience.
Wilkerson was broad shouldered, sharp eyed, and loud, a showman
more than a sleuth. Within weeks, he named his culprit,
State Senator Frank F. Jones, Josiah Moore's former employer and
business rival. The two had split years earlier when Moore
(08:18):
took the lucrative John Deere account and opened his own
hardware store in a town the small. Such betrayals festered,
Wilkerson's theory grew by the week. Jones, he claimed, had
hired a drifter named William Mansfield or Blackie Mansfield to
silence Moore. A contract killing born of pride. Mansfield, a
(08:39):
railroad laborer and an ex convict, had been linked two
other axe murders across the Midwest. That was enough for
Wilkerson to declare a pattern. He staged public meetings, thundered
in newspapers, and cast Jones as a politician rotted by ambition.
The story divided veliska neatly in two those who believed
the feud and those who didn't. For many, the Jones
(09:02):
theory was comforting. It made evil local familiar, almost moral.
A jealous rival was easier to face than a faithless traveler.
In nineteen fourteen, Wilkerson convinced Kansas City police to arrest Mansfield.
Hope surged until the suspect's employer produced time cards proving
he had been working in Illinois the night of the murders.
(09:24):
Coworkers confirmed it. The case collapsed within days, yet Wilkerson
refused to yield the records he said were forged. The
witnesses bribed. His accusations only swelled, now tinged with conspiracy
claims that Senator Jones had bought off officials and buried evidence.
What began as an investigation turned to obsession. From nineteen
(09:48):
thirteen all the way through nineteen sixteen, reporters treated Wilkerson's
every outburst as a revelation. Each denial became proof of guilt,
each rumor a new headline. Meanwhile, while detectives in other
states began to see something different, a string of family
murders along the same rail lines. The pattern matched Veliska
almost exactly. Lamps, dimmed faces covered, no theft, total silence.
(10:14):
But in town the feud made better copy. That summer,
pressure from residents finally forced the county to convene a
grand jury. Thirty witnesses testified there is Wilkerson, then Jones,
and anyone remotely connected to them. For two weeks, the
courthouse baked in July heat, while the crowd outside traded
gossip like currency. When the jury returned, it found nothing,
(10:38):
no new evidence, no indictments, only a bunch of tired jurors. Officially,
the case remained unsolved. Unofficially, Veliska had chosen its villain,
and Wilkerson his legend. James Newton Wilkerson would keep shouting
Frank F. Jones's name for years. After the courts dismissed him,
his story began to harden into some kind of a
(10:59):
local myth, a feud retold as justice denied. Yet, while
Wilkerson chased politics and pride, other investigators had already begun
expanding outside of Iowa. The Reverend George Jock Kelly had
been in Veellisca less than a day before the murders.
But for some people that was long enough. He was
(11:20):
a small, nervous man forty years old at the time,
English by birth, with a thin mustache into gaze that
flickered between charm and panic. He preached in short, burst
sentences that climbed and fell with theatrical rhythm. His wife
accompanied him from revival to revival, though she was rarely
mentioned by name. Most people remembered him instead for his eyes,
(11:42):
which darted around a room as if searching for approval
or escape. On June ninth, nineteen twelve, Kelly stood at
the front of the Presbyterian Church during the children's day program.
He watched as the more children and the Stillinger girls
recited their verses and sang the hymns that Sarah Moore
had spent the whey weeks rehearsing. Kelly joined in the
closing prayer, then lingered afterward, shaking hands and complimenting the children.
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Several witnesses later said he appeared overly familiar, pressing the
girls to speak with him, asking questions that felt intrusive.
Late that night, he and his wife boarded a train
out of town. They were headed east the direction of
the rising sun, leaving Velliska behind. Before dawn. By the
time the murders were discovered, Reverend Kelly was already across
(12:29):
state lines. When word of the killing spread, he seemed captivated.
From his next stop in Macedonia, he wrote letters to
local authorities asking for details of the case. The first
one read like an expression of concern. The second was
more peculiar. He described specific aspects of the crime that
had not yet been made public, the positioning of the bodies,
(12:51):
the absence of robbery, the way the house had been
sealed up. He claimed to have dreamed about it, as
if God had shown him what happened. Within weeks, the
legs grew stranger. Kelly wrote to investigators, ministers, and even
newspaper reporters, proposing theories and demanding answers. Some correspondents dismissed
him as eccentric. Others began to suspect he knew too much.
(13:14):
But Kelly was skilled at walking the thin line between
curiosity and confession. He offered just enough evidence to intrigue,
never enough to incriminate. The years passed, other suspects came
and went, but in nineteen seventeen, five years after the murders,
Kelly's name returned to the headlines. A postal inspector in
(13:34):
South Dakota discovered that the minister had been writing obscene
letters to young women who answered his newspaper ads for
typists and secretaries. He was arrested for violating the federal
obscenity law and briefly institutionalized for evaluation. During questioning, he
began to talk again about Veliska. Kelly told investigators that
he had been in town the night of the murders.
(13:57):
He said he could remember the sounds of children playing,
the glow of lamps through the windows, and the quiet afterward.
He claimed that the murders had been committed by someone
called to do God's work, and that he could still
feel the presence of that calling in himself. The confession
was confusing and even contradictory. Some statements suggested first hand knowledge,
(14:18):
others divine vision. When pressed for details, Kelly changed his
story repeatedly. Still, the authorities saw a chance to close
one of the most infamous cases in the country. In
the spring of nineteen seventeen, they charged him with the
murder of Lena Stillinger. The trial began that September in
Red Oak, Iowa. Reporters arrived from across the Midwest. The
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prosecution presented Kelly's letters, his inconsistent confessions, and testimony from
witnesses who remembered his odd behavior at the church. They
argued that his fascination with the case was evidence of guilt.
The defense painted him as a delusional man, unfit to
distinguish truth from phantasy. They called doctors who testify that
Kelly suffered from psychical abnormality and periods of mania. His
(15:05):
wife described his sleeplessness, his paranoia, as well as his
long stretches of incoherent preaching. Kelly himself testified for hours.
He was eager to explain, as if the trial were
another sermon. At times he seemed proud, as though the
murders that elevated him to tragic importance. At others he
trembled and wept. He told the jury that he had
(15:26):
been commanded by voices to do God's will, then moments
later denied ever setting foot in the moorhouse. After several days,
the jury deadlocked. Eleven jurors voted for acquittal, one for conviction.
The judge declared a mistrial. A second trial was held
in the neighboring county early the next year. This time,
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the prosecution's case faltered. Kelly's confession was ruled partly inadmissible,
and there was no physical evidence connecting him to the crime.
He had no prior history of violence, no weapon, no
credible motive. The jury deliberated for a single hour before
returning a verdict of not guilty. Kelly was released, but
(16:07):
he never returned to the ministry. He drifted between small towns,
occasionally preaching, also occasionally institutionalized. His mental health continued to
deteriorate and de faded from public view. Some said he
continued to claim spiritual insight into murders, not just the
more Instillinger girls, but from other murders across the country.
(16:29):
Others said that he avoided the subject entirely. To many
in Velliska, the trials were the final insult. Five years
of hope had ended with nothing. The more family was
still dead, the killer still unknown, and the only man
ever tried for the crime had been acquitted. In fact,
in both trials, only one juror ever found him guilty.
(16:50):
Modern historians tend to agree that Kelly was almost certainly innocent.
His confessions were inconsistent and appeared to have been drawn
out by coercion and suggestion. His known offenses involved voyeurism
and Lewde letters, not violence. His personality was unstable, yes,
but erratic more than methodical. The Veliska murders seemed to
(17:12):
have required precision and composure, qualities that Kelly did not possess.
Bill James, the author of a book called The Man
from the Train, later argued that Kelly could not have
committed the murders for a simple reason. He lacked the
physical and psychological control to kill eight people silently and
efficiently in total darkness. While he might have been mad,
(17:34):
he was the wrong kind of mad. What the Kelly
saga revealed was how deeply the town still needed an ending.
The trials gave Veliska another spectacle to replace the silence,
but when it ended, the silence returned. The community was
left with questions that seemed to multiply rather than resolve,
And so, with Kelly acquitted and Wilkerson's feud spent, the
(17:56):
case passed out of the courtrooms and back into rumor.
For many years. It would sleep there until researchers began
to notice that Veliska's story was not as unique as
it had once seemed other families had died the same
way in other towns along the same lines of track.
The killer who had vanished into the dark might not
have been a Vellisca man at all, but a traveler
(18:17):
who carried his violence from place to place. It was
this idea, the thought that the More family and the
Stillinger girls had fallen victim to a pattern stretching far
beyond Iowa, that would shape the next century of speculation.
For years, people in Velliska told themselves that the crime
had been personal. They almost needed it to be. Evil
(18:40):
was easier to accept if it came from jealousy, or vengeance,
or even lust, anything that could be explained. But beneath
those comforting stories, something larger had been happening, something that
stretched far beyond Iowa's borders. The Valiska murders were not
the first of their kind, and they were not the last.
Between eighteen ninety eight eight and nineteen twelve, families across
(19:03):
the United States were slaughtered in their beds by someone
wielding the same simple weapon. The crimes shared so many
peculiar details that modern researchers have come to believe they
were connected the work of a single killer. Who traveled
by train from town to town. That theory, the so
called man from the train hypothesis, emerged much later, but
(19:23):
its evidence lay in plain sight even at the time.
In the years before Veliska, small town newspapers had recorded
a string of nearly identical murders, Entire families bludgeoned in
their homes, Lamps found with their chimneys removed and wicks
turned low, mirrors or windows covered after the killings, doors
locked from the inside, valuables left untouched homes within sight
(19:47):
of a rail line. Investigators in Kansas, Colorado, Illinois, and
several states in the Deep South had noted the similarities,
but communication between jurisdictions was poor. Crimes that to the
day would have been connected by database search or fingerprint
comparison were then isolated tragedies, each with its own sheriff
and its own dead. The killings began quietly. In eighteen
(20:11):
ninety eight, a family in Brookfield, Massachusetts, was murdered in
their home near the Boston and Albany railroad. In nineteen
oh four, the Hodges family was killed near Statesboro, Georgia.
Their house burned afterward to conceal the evidence. Within months,
another family in South Carolina met the same fate. From
nineteen oh nine to nineteen twelve, the pattern grew relentless.
(20:33):
There was the Allen family in Arkansas, the Burnhams in Kansas,
the Hudsons, and Paula, Kansas, only four days before the
More family died. The Hudson murders were so similar to
Velliska that some later investigators believed that they were part
of the same trip. The killer had entered the Paula
home after dark, dismantled the lamp, murdered the sleeping family,
(20:54):
covered their faces, and left without stealing a thing. The
tracks behind the house led directly to the nearby railyard.
If the same man committed both crimes, he could have
boarded a freight train west and arrived in Velisco within hours.
The timing fits, so does the method. When author Bill
James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James revisited the records
(21:15):
a century later, they found at least two dozen such
cases with nearly identical details. They noted that the murders
occurred mostly in warm months, near small towns with easy
rail access, and almost always on weekends. Each attack followed
the same pattern. Entry through an unlocked back door or window,
use of an axe found on the property. Family members
(21:37):
killed in bed, beginning with the father, and post mortem orderliness, faces, covered, lamps, extinguished,
doors locked. What linked them above all was control. The
killer did not act in panic. He worked with eerie composure,
often remaining in the house afterward to eat, wash up,
or linger in silence. The Jameses even proposed a suspect Mueller,
(22:00):
a European immigrant who had been accused of murdering a
family in Massachusetts in eighteen ninety seven and who vanished
before trial. Mueller had been a carpenter and a logger,
used to travel, and may have worked his way across
the United States aboard freight trains. He was never seen
again under that name, but crimes bearing his signature appeared
along the rail corridors that criss crossed the country. The
(22:23):
Jameses theorized that Mueller killed not from passion, but from compulsion,
following a ritual that combined sexual repression, religious guilt, and
the satisfaction of dominance. Each family represented the same tableaux,
the husband first, the wife's second children last. Each act
was quiet, deliberate, and complete. The idea of a single
(22:45):
traveling killer was almost unthinkable in the early twentieth century.
Serial murder as a concept did not really yet exist.
Law Men looked for motive, not pattern. They wanted to
know why, not how often. But when you lay all
of the cases side by side, the repetitions are uncanny.
Yet even some contemporary officers suspected a link. After the
(23:08):
killings in Paul La, Kansas, the local sheriff warned that
the murderer was an experienced traveler who would strike again
days later. It seems Feliska proved him right then in
Colorado Springs later that fall, two more families were wiped
out in identical fashion. Each town treated its tragedy as unique,
its grief as singular. Newspapers reported the similarities, but rarely
(23:31):
connected them. The thought that one man could drift through
America's heartland killing strangers at random was too destabilizing to believe.
In Velliska, a few lawmen noticed the pattern, but were
drowned out by the Louder feud theories. By the time
the Grant jury disbanded in nineteen sixteen, the idea of
a traveling killer had faded into rumor. Yet in hindsight,
(23:53):
the more murders fit the pattern with almost mathematical precision.
The timing, the method, the silence, the lack of theft,
the position of the lamps, the coverings, the calm afterward.
If the man from the Train theory was real, Velliska
was not the killer's first stop and likely not his last.
Bill James counted hundreds of potential victims across fifteen years,
(24:15):
ranging from New England all the way to the Pacific.
Some of the earliest victims lived in lumber towns, others
in farming villages, all within walking distance of the rails.
Each time the killers struck and vanished. This possibility reframes
Veliska completely. It becomes less a tale of small town
betrayal and more a window into an era when America's
(24:37):
growing rail network carried not only goods and people, but
also danger that could appear without warning. Still, the theory
remains circumstantial. There is no physical evidence tying any one
man to all the crimes. What survives are patterns of
behavior and the uneasy feeling that coincidence alone cannot explain them.
The man from the Train hypothesis does not solve Instead,
(25:01):
it enlargens it, turning one family's murder into part of
a continental mystery, and maybe that's why the idea endures.
Liska is both specific and endless. Eight lives extinguished in
one house on one night, and yet somehow also connected
to dozens of others who died in the same way
under the same dark sky. For Veliska, the pattern changed everything.
(25:24):
The crime was seemingly no longer an isolated act, but
a symptom of something vast and rootless. The town could
not accept that they wanted their killer to have a
face they recognized, so even as the tracks hummed with
passing freight and the newspapers reported new murders hundreds of
miles away, Veliska turned its attention back to the suspects
within reach. The wider pattern faded again into background noise,
(25:48):
but it had already left its mark. The killer had
moved on, perhaps north, maybe south, following the rails, and
each time a train whistle cut through the dark, the
people of Veliska were reminded that he had no ever
really been caught. By nineteen twelve, America had begun to
collect its monsters. One of them briefly seemed to fit Feliska.
Like a missing piece. Henry Lee Moore, no relation to
(26:11):
the victims, was a railroad worker from Missouri, arrested that
December for murdering his mother and grandmother with an axe.
The coincidence of his name and killing method was irresistible.
He left their bodies on the kitchen floor and fled
west by train. When captured weeks later, he showed no remorse.
Federal investigator W. M. McClory declared Henry not only guilty
(26:34):
of his family's murder, but responsible for dozens of similar crimes.
He claimed that the trail of axe murders from the
South to the Midwest mirrored Henry's railroad jobs. Each scene
lay within earshot of a depot, each family having died
the same quiet way. For a moment, the story satisfied everyone.
A tangible villain caught at last, Newspapers printed mclaury's theory
(26:57):
without hesitation. It made sense that a man who had
killed his own kin could kill another's. Then the timeline
began to unravel. Records placed Henry in Missouri through the
veliska weekend. Other murders ascribed to him occurred while he
was already jailed. The Grand Conspiracy clapped under dates and
payroll slips. Turns out, Henry Lee Moore was no wandering mastermind,
(27:20):
just a violent, grasping man who killed for money. He
was convicted and later sentenced to life, yet his name lingered,
fitting too neatly into the country's growing myth of the
drifter killer. After Henry came others, laborers, transients, men with
scars and stories. Each new suspect burnt briefly, then vanished.
(27:42):
Each time the town's hope flared, but each time it
guttered out. By nineteen sixteen, the files were stacked and closed.
Frank F. Jones, William Blackie Mansfield, Reverend George Kelley, Henry
Lee Moore, all ghost of their own making. What endured
was the sense that Veliska's horror had never really belonged
(28:02):
solely to Iowa, but to an America bound by steel
and distance, where now even murder could travel by train.
By nineteen sixteen, Velliska had grown tired of ghost theories
had come and gone, suspects paraded through headlines. The town
(28:25):
wanted finality, even without truth. That spring, under pressure from
residents and politicians, Montgomery County convened a new grand jury
for the first time in four years Iowa would formerly
reopen the case. The courthouse in Red Oak became a stage.
Each morning, Farmers, merchants, and widows packed the gallery, while
(28:45):
reporters filled the hotels outside. Gossip ran hotter than the
July air. Fifteen jurors were chosen quietly, though nothing about
the preceding State Private Detective James Wolkerson, still chasing his
feud with Senator Frank Jones, arrived with boxes of papers
and a grin he mistook for confidence. Jones, older and paler,
(29:06):
now appeared with his lawyers, tired of defending himself against
a charge that was never actually made. Wilkerson's presentation was
pure theater, A timeline of conspiracies, unsigned affidavits in the
name Mansfield spoken like a curse. He had no physical evidence,
only conviction. He accused Jones of corruption reaching to the
highest levels of Iowa politics. Jones's attorneys answered with calm precision.
(29:31):
They provided travel records, letters, even alibis. When Jones himself
took the stand, he denied everything. His composure impressed the room,
but did little disway public opinion. Outside. Weeks past, and
the summer heat thickened witnesses repeated stories Warren thin from
four years of retelling. The sheriff admitted that the original
scene had been trampled by townspeople. The crime, he said,
(29:54):
had been lost before sunrise on the very first morning.
By August, the hearings felt less like justice than ritual.
Everyone sensed the verdict before it came, and when it
did arrive, coming with no indictments, no new evidence, nothing,
it surprised no one. Wilkerson quickly left town without speaking
to reporters. Jones never recovered his reputation. The state closed
(30:18):
its books, and Veliska slipped from active investigation into legend
cold case. The jurors report was bureaucratic and bloodless, but
its subtext was clear. The truth had been destroyed years earlier,
not by malice, but by curiosity. Its estimated that more
than two thousand visitors had walked through the Moorhouse before
(30:39):
order was restored. Many had taken a piece of the
mystery with them, and together they had erased any possibility
for justice. So after that grand jury, the files were sealed,
stored in a courthouse vault, and gradually lost to time. Officially,
the case became dormant. Unofficially, it had simply become a story.
(31:04):
Years later, investigators and writers returned to the Moorhouse, searching
for something the first generation had missed. What they found
was ordinary. An axe, a lamp, a plate of food,
and traces of deliberate order amid slaughter. The murder weapon
was Josiah Moore's own, washed after use, and propped up
(31:24):
against the wall beside the stillinger girl's bed. The handle
was slick with oil prints wiped away. Whoever swung it
had time to think and no fear of interruption. Every
lamp in the house had been altered, their chimneys removed, wixed,
turned low, shades drawn tight, light enough to move, but
dark enough to hide. One lamp sat on the floor
(31:45):
at the foot of Josiah's bed, another on a chair
by the two girls. The placement suggested pauses moments of
regard before the bedding was pulled over. Their faces, mirrors
and windows were covered. Even the clocks were stopped mid winding.
A bowl of bloody water sat in the kitchen basin.
A heel of bread and a slice of bacon waited
(32:06):
uneaten on a plate. The gestures spoke a language no
one could understand. Modern criminologists agree on a few things.
That the killer was practiced, methodical, and unhurried. He began upstairs,
killed Josiah first, then Sarah, and then the children, then
finally the guest below. The only mark of resistance came
(32:26):
from Lena Stillinger, a bruise on her forearm, a human
reflex to raise an arm before the dark. The corner
fixed the murders between midnight and two a m. Just
before a freight train roared through town. If the killer
boarded that train, he had washed, eaten, and vanished before
the engineer saw the next signal. Even now, what matters
(32:47):
most is what's missing. No footprints, no pri marks, no
forced entry. Either the moors left a door unlocked or
the man they welcomed in was someone they knew. Cigarette
butts found in the attics suggested another possibility that he
had hidden there before The family returned from church, waded
through the evening heat as their lights went out one
by one. After the discovery, hundreds of neighbors poured through
(33:11):
the house, evidence that might have spoken to investigators even
decades later. Fibers, prints, blood traces, was crushed under boots
or pocketed as souvenirs. The theme became a cautionary exhibit
in forensic textbooks contamination as destruction. What endures is not
proof but pattern that strange, respectful tidiness amid ruin. Some
(33:34):
call it remorse, others call it a ritual. Standing in
that house today, restored to its nineteen twelve stillness, one
can still feel it, the heavy quiet of intention fulfilled.
The evidence tells only this much, that whoever moved through
those rooms did so with purpose, locked the doors, and
then left a silence that has lasted more than a century.
(33:59):
Time did not erase Feliska. Instead, it preserved it. The
quiet town became a symbol of what small town America
most fears about itself. In the decades after the murders,
families moved in and out of the moor House, never
staying for very long. Some claimed to hear footsteps, doors
creaking open, the sound of children running. Others felt only unease.
(34:22):
By the nineteen thirties, the house often sat empty, its
paint peeling, its legend growing with time. For half a century,
the property drifted between neglect and brief habitation, until in
the nineteen nineties, local farmer Darwin Lynn bought it. He
stripped away every modern trace, wiring, plumbing, wallpaper, and restored
(34:42):
it to its nineteen twelve appearance. Each bed, lamp and
shade was placed exactly as it had been on that
last summer night. Lynne said he wanted preservation, not spectacle.
What he built was both. Reporters returned, tourists followed. The
home became a destination for the newly christened industry of
dark tourism. Daytime tours gave way to overnight's days. Some
(35:07):
came for history, others for ghosts. The Lynn family insisted
the house was a memorial, but each Halloween news crews
filmed fresh visitors whispering into the dark. The boundary between
remembrance and entertainment blurred, and trust me, I'm not judging
by making this podcast after all. In twenty fourteen, a
man renting the house overnight stabbed himself in the chest.
(35:29):
He survived, but the act renewed the house's grim notoriety.
Locals argued whether the place honored the victims or exploited them.
Either way, the name Feliska was no longer just a town.
It was a brand. Through all of it, the house
remained mostly unchanged two stories of pine and plaster on
Second Street, framed by trees that have grown thicker since
(35:52):
nineteen twelve. By day it looks almost peaceful. By night,
it returns to what it has always been, a reminder
that horror can live quietly among ordinary things. A century
of investigation has turned Veliska into a maze of competing explanations,
(36:12):
each convincing until weighed against the evidence. First came the
theory of a local feud. It offered a simple morality tale.
Senator Frank Jones ordered the death of his business rival,
carried out by hired killer Blackie Mansfield. But Jones had
motive without opportunity, and Mansfield had alibis that placed him
in another state. The story endured not because it had
(36:35):
any proof, but because it gave the town a villain
with a familiar face. Then came the preacher theory. Reverend
George Kelly embodied the other fear, the dangerous outsider, a
man of God hiding madness behind the pulpit. His confessions
were contradictory and almost certainly coerced. He lacked the strength, discipline,
and composure to slaughter eight people in silence. Kelly was
(36:58):
a casualty of the town's needs for closure, but not
its answer. Then came Henry Lee Moore, the Missouri rail
worker who murdered his own family with an axe months later.
His crime looked identical to Veliska's, and for a time
he was blamed for dozens of others, But his murders
were personal and impulsive, not methodical. His movements did not
(37:19):
fit the known timeline, and his conviction closed nothing. The
final and broadest theory belongs to authors Bill and Rachel
McCarthy James the Man from the Train theory. Their research
gathered two decades of nearly identical murders stretching from New
England to the Plains, each near a railway, each executed
with precision and calm. The suspect, they argued was a
(37:42):
European immigrant named Paul Mueller, a carpenter who vanished after
an eighteen ninety seven killing and may have ridden the
rails west. Their case is circumstantial but compelling. It explains
the order the ritual covering of faces. It connects Veliska
to a national Paser pattern of transience and fear the dark,
(38:02):
byproduct of an industrial age that could carry death as
easily as freight. If Eliska teaches anything, it's that some
crimes refuse conclusion. The house that this crime took place
in still stands, restored to its moment of interruption, each
room frozen between ordinary life and unspeakable violence. The clock
(38:22):
on the wall no longer ticks, but the silence it
left behind remains its own kind of testimony. Whatever name
the killer carried, he walked out of Eliska before sunrise
and vanished into history. The rest of us have been
listening to the quiet they left behind ever since. Before
(38:47):
they became symbols, they were simply a family. Josiah and
Sarah Moore lived by routine. Their children filled the house
with sound. Hermann raced barefoot through the yard. Catherine minded
her younger brothers, Void and Paul, and all four sang
beside their mother in the church choir. That Sunday had ended,
like hundreds before it, prayer, laughter, borrowed hymns, The Stillinger
(39:11):
girls asleep under a borrowed quilt. By dawn, they were history.
What endures is not just the mystery, but the interruption.
The moment in ordinary life was divided forever by something
without reason. Theories multiply, because we need stories to make
sense of senselessness. But the truth is smaller, and maybe
(39:31):
even crueler. Eight people went to bed in a house
that should have kept them safe. The walls that held
their voices now hold silence, and that silence has outlived
every suspect, every headline, every argument about who did it.
Walked through the rooms today and you could still feel
the residue of their living. A child's toy on a shelf,
(39:51):
the neat line of a wash basin, the hum of
a summer night, caught between memory and myth. This is
what remains of Veliska. Not the kill are, not the
fear they left behind, but the fragile proof that ordinary
love once lived there, and that it deserved to last
longer than it did. The stories of Josiah Sarah, Catherine
(40:12):
Herman Boyd, and Paul Moore, as well as Aina and
Lina Stellinger, remain unresolved.
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