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Given Kelly’s history of mental illness, his confession was dismissed. They searched Villisca and the surrounding areas and interviewed some townsfolk. But the killer had at least a three-hour headstart on them, and police believed that he would have already fled the town. The cause of death was brute force trauma to each of the victims’ skulls.
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However, 12-year-old Lena Stillinger may have still been awake when the killer struck. Her body displayed a defensive wound on her arm, and she was lying lengthwise across her bed. It was a quiet town, interrupted only by the regular trains which passed through. In addition to the many businesses, Villisca also featured a National Guard Armory, funded entirely by the local residents – the first of its kind on U.S. soil. In the other cases, robbery was not a motive, while in his case, greed was the obvious driver.
Murder of Roland T. Owen in a Kansas...
Upon closer inspection, I realized that the pictures were evidence of paranormal spookiness going on. There were lots of nighttime pictures with ghostly orbs and even a snapshot of someone whose back had been scratched, supposedly by an unseen entity. It’s been on basically every ghost hunting show, from Ghost Adventures to Scariest Places on Earth and all of the essential spooky podcasts, including Lore and My Favorite Murder. I became aware of the home in 2014 after a man staying there on an overnight ghost hunt inexplicably stabbed himself, an event that made national news. He first inspected the downstairs bedroom, and to his horror, he found two bloodsoaked sheets covering two corpses.
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The house lives in infamy as one of Iowa's most haunted locations. The Villisca Ax Murder House has even been featured on the popular web series, Buzzfeed Unsolved. "Everybody loved them. And all of a sudden they wake up, and everyone's dead in bed."
Daytime Tour
Sawyer, however, was apparently dismissed as a suspect in the case when it was discovered that he was able to prove he’d been in Osceola, Iowa, on the night of the murders. He had been arrested for vagrancy and the Osceola sheriff recalled putting him on a train at approximately 11 p.m. Dyer’s son, J.R., also testified that one day as the crew drove through Villisca, Sawyer told him he would show him where the man that killed the Moore family got out of town. He said the killer jumped over a specific manure box a block from the Moore house, then crossed the railroad track. Sawyer then said to look on the other side of the railroad car to see an old tree where the murderer stepped into a creek. A brutal, unsolved murder case from last century still attracts morbid visitors to the crime scene that is now unabashedly named the Villisca Axe Murder House.
Henry Lee Moore
They were people who were ill-used — and a lot of people in Villisca were ill-used. It isn’t a current fascination of ghosts at the home that has been made into a tourist attraction. It isn’t even fingering the murderer, although in retirement he is working on a lead about a man known to sleep with an ax who may have traveled the rails through Villisca. Epperly visited Whipple’s close friend Cloyd Smith in his dying days in a nursing home.
Iowa's infamous Villisca Axe Murder was renovated in 1996 - KCCI Des Moines
Iowa's infamous Villisca Axe Murder was renovated in 1996.
Posted: Sat, 23 Apr 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
As you can see in the newspaper articles that discussed the accusation, the man was not recognized as the man seen in Villisca asking for directions to the Moore home the day preceeding the murders. However, this was a rare time the account of Fay Van Gilder was noted – her testimony is absent from the coroner’s inquest and subsequent trials. Every hobo, transient and otherwise unaccounted for stranger was also a suspect in the Villisca ax murders. As with many other suspects, no real evidence linked Sawyer to the crime, however, his name came up often in Grand Jury testimonies. Just a week before the murders in Villisca, a man and his wife were killed in Paola, Kan.
Discovery of the crime
The publicity comes naturally, mostly from true crime and ghost enthusiasts. The Villisca house is now an attraction, a spectacle for the morbidly curious tourists. Slightly touched up to maintain its stability, it now exists as a museum. Its interior still boasts the same furniture and beds in which the Moore family and Stillinger girls were cruelly slain. Reportedly, he told some of the passengers that eight dead bodies were lying back in Villisca – several hours before the news had spread. Numerous suspects cropped up over the years, some of whom even confessed to the Villisca murders.
The Villisca Ax Murders: 111 years later
However, it was considered a stretch that Jones could progress to murdering his business rival. There were also rumors around Villisca that Moore had engaged in extramarital activities with Jones’s daughter-in-law. Reverend Kelly returned to Villisca two weeks later, and after fooling officers into thinking he was a detective from out of town, he was able to latch on to a tour of the Moore house with a group of legitimate investigators. The Moore family was well-liked throughout Villisca and gained a reputation for being generous and kind. They were a church-going family who maintained strong contacts and good relationships with many in the community.
Some signatures of the other crimes are missing, such as covering the victims’ faces. Also, the spree seems to have started earlier, while Moore was still detained, and continue after his imprisonment. Monmouth, Ill., June 15, 1912 – Joe Ricks, held here in connection with the Moore murder at Villisca, Ia., is not the man Fay Van Gilder saw “acting in a suspicious manner,” near Villisca a few days before the murder.
The slain family members were found in different bedrooms throughout the house. According to reporting from the Tribune, the victims were killed with an ax the killer, or killers, found in the family's backyard, while they slept sometime around or after midnight. The family had spent the evening at a program at the local Presbyterian Church and returned home around 10 p.m. Jo Naylor/FlickrThe Villisca Axe Murders house where an unknown attacker committed one of American history’s most disturbing unsolved murders of all time in 1912. Every transient and otherwise unaccounted-for stranger was a suspect in the murders, Andrew Sawyer was one of those people. He also was obsessed with the murders and slept fully clothed as if he was ready to make a clean getaway and he also slept with an axe by his bed.
Jennifer Kirkland/FlickrIn recent years, the Villisca Axe Murders house has become a tourist attraction, with visitors even allowed to venture inside. One of the townspeople even took a fragment of Joe’s skull as a keepsake. The state of the bodies wasn’t the most concerning part, however, once the police had searched the home. The Travel Channel's television show Destination Fear filmed at the location for the eighth episode of their third season.
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