Villisca Ax Murder House

The house at five oh eight East Second Street in Villisca looks exactly like what it is: a modest Victorian farmhouse built in eighteen sixty-eight, white clapboard, two stories, the kind of home that anchored any small Iowa town in the late nineteenth century. But what happened inside on the night of June ninth into June tenth, nineteen twelve, made it one of the most studied and least-solved crimes in American history.

Josiah Moore was a prosperous farm implement dealer in Villisca, a town of about twenty-five hundred people in Montgomery County in southwestern Iowa. On the evening of June ninth his family attended a Children's Day event at the Presbyterian Church. They came home with two additional children, sisters Ina and Lena Stillinger, who had been invited to spend the night. That brought the household to eight people: Josiah and his wife Sarah, their four children, and the two Stillinger girls.

Sometime in the small hours of the morning, someone entered the house with an axe. All eight people were killed in their beds. All the windows had been covered. The killer had stayed in the house for some time after. Josiah Moore had been struck more times than any other victim.

The investigation consumed years and produced no conviction. Among the suspects was Reverend George Kelly, a traveling Presbyterian minister who had attended the same Children's Day program. He confessed, then recanted, and was tried twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second ended in acquittal.

The Moore house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-seven. It is now open for tours and overnight stays, operating as one of Iowa's most visited dark-history sites. The murders are still officially unsolved. Whoever entered that house with an axe was never identified, and the case remains open more than a century later.