Nearly a century later, the worst massacre in Iowa history remains in the public consciousness

by Erin Randolph

Murder came to Villisca in 1912, and in many ways, it never left. Nearly a century after Iowa's most gruesome set of homicides, the small, southwest-Iowa town still sits haunted by the unsolved death of eight of its residents who were bludgeoned to death with an axe after they had gone to bed - unaware of the danger that awaited them that fateful night in June.

In a time and place where people felt safe leaving their doors unlocked, deep in the heartland where such heinous acts were practically unheard of, the unheard of happened. The deaths divided the small community, spawned several grand jury actions, a slander suit, two murder trials, several minor litigations and helped in the formation of the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Still, justice was never served. Nearly a century later, the killer or killers are surely dead and buried. But the memory of what happened in that two-story house sometime between midnight and 5 a.m. on the night of June 10, 1912, still haunts the town of Villisca. And perhaps it forever will.

Today, an ongoing interest still exists for those events that took place so long ago, brought on perhaps by the grisly nature of the crimes or perhaps because it remains an unsolved mystery. A documentary film, several books, a gaggle of paranormal investigation teams and an upcoming feature film on the matter, have all kept the Villisca axe murders in the public consciousness. And nobody knows that better than Villisca, a spectacle of a town that is, in many ways, still trying to heal and that in many ways remains divided on how to handle all of the notoriety brought on by an event everyone would obviously prefer had never happened to begin with.

The setting

Villisca means "pretty place" or "pleasant view." The town lies at the fork of the Middle and West Nodaway rivers, just miles south of the intersection of highways 34 and 71 and about 35 miles south of Interstate 80.

Even on an abnormally cool Saturday night in August, much of Villisca is asleep by midnight. Like so many other small towns, the storefronts are dark and the lamp-lit streets are bare, save the occasional passing car, or kitten crossing to the other side. The only real sign of life comes from the trains, making themselves well known with the eerie sounds of their horns as they pass in the night.

Approach the corner of East Second Street and Sixth Avenue on this night, however, and the attention belies the rest of Villisca. Here, this two-story home has drawn a crowd. Multiple cars sit bumper-to-bumper along the streets, some ignoring the "No Parking This Side" signs. A group of paranormal investigators from Des Moines stands in a huddle near their cars, waiting for the house to be turned over to them until the following morning.

Inside the house is a film crew from Des Moines, attempting to get in a few last shots before another train passes by, adding unneeded noise to their production. Large lights have been placed outside the home to illuminate its insides, as no electricity exists within its walls. Thick orange extension cords snake their way back to a half-built barn that sits behind the home, offering the only plumbing and electricity on the premises. Someone has just used the restroom, but he cannot flush for fear of ruining the scene, prompting the need for it to be re-shot. There, Kimberly Busbee intently watches a monitor displaying the scenes being shot within the home.

Outside, however, the paranormal investigators are growing impatient. There's much equipment to be set up in the house before the peak hours of supposed paranormal activity (about 2 to 3:30 a.m.) approach.

It's activity like this in the town of about 1,300 that's sparked a renewed interest in the Villisca axe murders and this house that, according to some, never sleeps. The home's owners, Darwin and Martha Linn, recently restored the home to its original condition at the time of the murders. It is now open for lamp-lit tours and overnight stays to anyone willing to shill out the money.

Is the house haunted? Some say it is. Some say the restoration of the house back to its original form at the time of the murders has led to the return of the spirits whose lives were taken there. Some maintain that it's not haunted, that the seven families who lived there following the murders never saw anything out of the ordinary.

But hardly anyone would disagree that there's something haunting about what happened in that home in 1912, that you can't enter the house without thinking about the gruesome nature of the murders that brought true evil to small-town Iowa.

The crime

	Joe & Sarah Moore
The Moore Children
Ina & Lena Stillinger

J.B. and Sarah Moore were prominent citizens of Villisca. On the night of June 10, the Moore children - Herman, 11, Katherine, 9, Boyd, 7, and Paul, 5 - participated in the Children's Day Program at the Presbyterian Church, which Sarah coordinated and J.B. sat in on. About 9:30 p.m., the family, along with two houseguests, Lena, 12, and Ina, 8, Stillinger, returned to the Moore home.

At 7 a.m. the next morning a neighbor, finding it odd that the Moores had not yet been outside and their chores not yet started, knocked on the door and received no response. She tried the door. Locked. She let out the family's chickens and placed a call to J.B.'s brother Ross, who unlocked the house and soon discovered the bodies of the Stillinger girls in the downstairs bedroom. The remaining members of the Moore family were found in the upstairs bedrooms by the city marshal.

Each had been brutally murdered, their skulls crushed as they slept. Their bodies had been covered with sheets and the mirrors had been covered with clothing. All of the windows had been drawn.

The murder weapon was found in the room occupied by the Stillinger girls. It was bloody, despite a crude attempt to wipe it clean. The ax belonged to J.B. It had been returned to his hardware store because it had a chip in the blade. The family kept it in a shed behind the house.

The police investigation was almost a study in mismanagement. Once the townspeople heard what had happened, they stormed the home and walked freely throughout it after the police lost control of the crime scene.

Investigators reason the killer or killers hid in the crawl space in the attic until the house grew quiet, waiting for a passing train to help mask the sounds of footsteps walking through the house.

Years later, several townspeople would be brought to trial for the murders, but none would be found guilty. The people of Villisca remained divided as to who they thought the killer or killers were, and those accused would spend the rest of their lives fighting to wash the blood off their names. The possibility of it being a drifter or a serial killer was tossed into the ring, too, but ultimately, the events of that night have remained a mystery to everyone but those responsible.

A renewed interest

Shortly after 12:30 a.m., the film crew wraps up at this location and begins to pack up its equipment. This is the final weekend of filming for "Haunting Villisca," a feature film based on the murders by AriesWorks Entertainment, a Des Moines-based company run by Kimberly Busbee and James Serpento. The film is a period piece and a contemporary piece in one, and much of the filming has been done in the town of Villisca.

"Haunting Villisca" creates a fictional story around the true story of the murder. The Internet Movie Database is touting the film as being in the "horror" genre, which makes some of those interested in Villisca and its history a bit nervous. Others like the tourist attention that projects like this have garnered. Some could not care less either way.

The wrap up of this filming location makes room for DIEPART, a Des Moines-based paranormal group that volunteers to conduct investigations in an effort to disprove supposed paranormal activity. Founder Joe Leto does not believe in ghosts. He has, however, seen some things in his time as a "ghost hunter" that he has not been able to recreate or explain. He and his teammates enter the home, setting up cameras and monitors and preparing cameras in an attempt to capture photographic anomalies and recorders to capture EVPs, or electronic voice phenomena, paranormal voices discovered on audio and video recording devices. These voices cannot be heard by the human ear, but are only decipherable upon playback. (This phenomena provided the premise for the recent film "White Noise.")

It's investigations like these that have helped the resurgence of interest in the house, prompting many to fork over money in exchange for an overnight stay so they, too, can have an up-close-and-personal encounter with the spirits that supposedly occupy the house. The revival has also been sparked by "Villisca: Living With a Mystery," a documentary film by two Los Angeles filmmakers, Kelly and Tammy Rundle, that was screened several times over the past year to sizeable audiences throughout the Midwest.

"Living With A Mystery" is as historically accurate as possible, but it's also meant to be entertaining. The Rundles spent years conducting interviews, poring over 400-500 pages of grand jury testimony and newspaper accounts and consulting three forensic experts.

"It's about everything that happened as a result of the murders," Kelly Rundle says. "The fallout, the repercussions, the effect on the town back then and even in the present day. It really is a better story than the classic murder stories that people are aware of. I think the fact that it's unsolved keeps people trying to puzzle it out. So perhaps that makes it more interesting than if it had been solved."

But it's a combination of these film projects and paranormal investigations, along with the books that have been published, that have helped keep the axe murders in peoples' minds, most say. That, and that it's unsolved. In fact, the only thing people can agree on are the reasons for the continued interest in the murders. What they can't, however, is whether or not the house is truly haunted by spirits, or if it's just haunted by the memory of a horrific crime.

Is it haunted?

KGGO's the Round Guy, Steve Pilchen, was one of the first to spend an entire night in the Moore home after owner Darwin Linn purchased and renovated it. It was Halloween and the Round Guy and a few coworkers decided to stay all night and broadcast the following morning on all of the things that took place in the house.

"We really didn't know what to expect," the Round Guy says. "We were open for anything and had been told that a lot of people had experienced a lot of different things. We weren't sure what and we weren't sure how often something kind of bizarre would occur. We thought the bottom line was that it would be good radio and it would be something people would be interested in hearing about."

However, there'd been enough documented and unexplained evidence to make the Round Guy believe that something might happen that night in the house.
Owner Darwin Linn gave the three of them a tour of the house, but the Round Guy experienced nothing like anybody had previously reported. He felt disappointed. After the tour, they laid out their sleeping bags in the living room and talked until they eventually dozed off.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the Round Guy sat upright in his sleeping bag, awakened by a group of kids carrying on. The other two were awakened by the same noise. Because it was Halloween and because they'd lost track of time, they thought surely it was a group of neighborhood kids out having a good time. A walk around the outside of the house produced nothing, however.

"I came back in the house and we all three talked about the fact that we'd heard, unmistakably, a group of kids laughing and carrying on and having a good time," the Round Guy says. "We didn't have anything else happen before or after that. We took a couple of Polaroids of some of the rooms, and in one photo we thought we saw what looked like an orb, which is kind of a small, round ball of light. However, that's a little easier to explain than the sound of a group of kids giggling and tee-heeing."

And while there are many who will tell you the house is not haunted, never has been, there are many who will tell you that they've had a brush with the dead while inside the house. Some tell tales about an unexplainable and noticeable temperature drop in the "Blue Room" where Lena and Ina were found, or an uneasiness and intense pressure around the entrance to the attic, or that they've seen a closet in the children's room open and close on its own.

"There's something there," says Darwin Linn. "I don't know what it is. I haven't been pushed and I haven't been kicked and my hair hasn't been pulled like many others have reported. But it's the first place I ever took a picture that had an orb in it. I've gone into the Blue Room and seen my breath on a sunny day. I tell people it's kind of like fishing. Sometimes they're really biting and sometimes they're not."

Still, some say they never bite, so to speak. Tammy and Kelly Rundle spent quite a bit of time in the house, and never once felt or experienced anything paranormal.

"We were never haunted by anything other than the memory of what happened," Kelly Rundle says. "You can't be in the house and not think of what occurred there."

And all of the people who lived in the house following the murders told the Rundles the same thing. While people in town thought it was a bit creepy those families lived there following such a gruesome event, they never ran out of the house frightened, telling ghost stories.

"I don't think as a community, the people are thrilled with the emphasis on paranormal studies that's going on right now," says Edgar Epperly, a scholar of the murders for the past 50 years or so. "I think that probably the majority of citizens, and this is just my opinion, have never felt the house was haunted in any way."

DIEPART wrapped up its investigations about 5 a.m. after a very quiet night in the house. Nothing was really picked up that was out of the ordinary, though the group had hours worth of recorded noise to go through in search of EVPs. A few days later, it would be revealed that a few EVPs were found. However, DIEPART has been in other homes with far more paranormal evidence than Villisca, which, in a way, is a bit disappointing considering the house is touted as one of the most haunted in the Midwest.

Following the investigation, founder Joe Leto would release an e-mail to his group, saying in part that, "We are average people looking into claims of the paranormal. We don't make stuff up and we know not every place is genuinely haunted... Although Villisca seemed dead (no pun intended), I am glad the spirits of those poor children, and those vicious killers are at rest."

A resting place

At 9:30 a.m. on a sunny Sunday morning, the Casey's General Store on the outskirts of town is abuzz with townspeople filling up their tanks and purchasing coffee and donuts. Next to the register sits the usual bevy of Bic lighters, candy bars and packs of gum. Perhaps a little out of place for a small-town gas station, however, is the novel about the axe murders that's available for purchase.

An out-of-town visitor enters and waits in line while others make their purchases. However, she's not here for a caffeine injection or even a fill up.
"Is there a cemetery in town?" she asks.

"Yes," he says, seemingly unfazed by the question. "Take this street all the way down and take a left."

Following the street through the length of the town, people in their Sunday best are approaching the entrance to a church, while others mow the lawns that sit in front of their aging, yet character-filled homes. The Villisca Cemetery sits on the northeast side of town, marked at its entrance by a black wrought-iron arc for cars to pass under. Follow the main path up through the cemetery, and about halfway on the west side sits the gravestones of the eight people whose lives were cut short with a few swings of an axe.

That axe, for now, remains in a closet in Epperly's Decorah home. Villisca is working to establish a historical society, which would gain possession of the infamous murder weapon. Otherwise, Epperly plans to turn it over to the State of Iowa Historical Society.
Though Linn grew up in and around Villisca, he didn't hear about the murders until he was a sophomore in high school. As a track participant in the Drake relays, he was marching in a parade in his letter jacket when somebody yelled out "axe-murder town." Anywhere he went, whether he was wearing his FFA jacket or track jacket, somebody would corner him and ask him about the murders.

"I think the murder is a little like Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden," Epperly says. "Those are the two classic murders that everyone's heard about and there are dozens of books about. I think the Villisca murders are bound to be that way eventually."
That said, Epperly is in the process of writing his own book based on the axe massacre, a result of his many, many years of research. He began delving headlong into the murders as a college student for a paper he was writing. Even now, as an aging man closing in on 70 years of age, Epperly's interest in the murders hasn't waned.

The pictures and the newspaper articles, and perhaps even a few of the details, have faded with time. But somehow, the accounts of what happened and the memory of the victims haven't faded as easily. Somehow, the murder has never left Villisca and visa versa.

"There were so many innocent lives that were taken," Busbee says. "It was such a shock to the community in such a small, pretty place where, usually, everything is peaceful. It's a shock even this much later that something like that could happen in such a pretty place." CV

COVER STORY SIDEBAR

DIEPART

The Des Moines Iowa Extreme Paranormal Advanced Research Team is a group of people dedicated to investigating reports of paranormal activity on a purely volunteer basis. They use sophisticated electronic instruments to monitor temperature, movement, EVPs, photographic anomalies and more.

While the team's overnight stay in the Villisca axe murder house was extremely quiet, the members did manage to capture some EVPs featuring paranormal voices.
For more information on this group, its past investigations and how to hire it for future investigations, visit www.diepart.com.

Fourth Wall Films

Fourth Wall Films is run by filmmakers Kelly and Tammy Rundle. Recently, their documentary film, "Villisca: Living with a Mystery," drew more than 1,200 people in three days to screenings at the State of Iowa Historical Building. It ran in Midwestern theaters for 13 months, including a two-night run in Creston that drew 700 people. It will soon be shown for a short run in Los Angeles, so it can qualify for Oscar consideration.

The film is based on historical documents and interviews, and is the most accurate account as possible, says Kelly Rundle. "I'm going to claim that not only is our film historical and factual and enlightening, but I'm going to claim that it's entertaining," he says.
The Rundles do not believe the Villisca axe murder house is haunted.

The DVD is available for preorder at www.villiscamovie.com.

AriesWorks Entertainment

Kimberly Busbee, one of the owners of AriesWorks Entertainment, is a wearer of many hats when it comes to "Haunting Villisca," a feature film her company recently finished filming. She's a producer, co-creator and casting director in the project that's now in post-production. Busbee hopes it will be finished sometime next year.

The film is both a period piece and contemporary piece, jumping back and forth from 1912, 1915 and present day. The film is five years in the making.

"We'll be depicting before and after [the murders]," Busbee says. "We're being respectful of not doing a Freddy Krueger version of it. We're trying to bring the story to life but not glorify the act of what happened. It was impossible to tell the story while doing it justice without including the ghastly elements of it."

However, the pigeonholing of the film into the "horror" category has some people a little wary of "Haunting Villisca."

"Underneath the horror in is the theme of forgiveness and redemption - and that goes for the film and the story," Busbee says. "Part of the reason the story needs to be told is to lead people to that light."

While the filmmakers didn't have any really significant paranormal experiences while filming, Busbee has had some personal encounters in the house that have made her a part of the camp that believes there is something unexplainable in that house.

Darwin and Martha Linn

Darwin and Martha Linn bought the Villisca axe murder house in 1994. The rumor around town was that a neighbor was planning to buy it an tear it down, but the Linns decided to restore it to its original condition at the time of the murders, and eventually opened it up for private tours and overnight stays.

The popularity of such activities grew significantly following the proclamation by some paranormal groups that the house was haunted. While some people in Villisca have quietly disapproved of his renting out the property, which is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, Darwin Linn maintains that if it wasn't for the accounts of paranormal activity and those overnight stays, he would probably have to some up with some other way to support the house.

The Linns also own the Olson-Linn Museum, a space dedicated to the history of Villisca and the axe murders. Behind the ax murder house, the Linns are building a barn that will serve as a welcome center of sorts for those who visit the Moore home.

For more information on the history of the Moore house, the murders, the town of Villisca and renting out the house for overnight stays, visit www.villiscaiowa.com.

Edgar Epperly

Edgar Epperly grew up about 100 miles from Villisca. As a child, he heard about the Villisca axe murders, but it wasn't until he was a student at the University of Northern Iowa in the 1950s that he would study the crime in great detail in an effort to write a college paper on the subject.

That was the first time he'd visited Villisca and talked to townspeople and read newspaper accounts. After college, he continued to explore the murders without any particular purpose in mind other than his own curiosity. Basically his whole life since, as time permitted, he's been gathering information and polishing his existing file of records.
Now, in conjunction with Fourth Wall Films, Epperly is finally going to turn all of his hard work into a book, the purpose of which is to give a historical accounting of the event from the time of the murders to the last legal proceeding in 1920.

Epperly is in possession of the original axe from the murders, which he keeps in a closet. However, he does not consider himself to be the owner of it. Once the town of Villisca organizes its historical society, he intends to turn it over. Otherwise, he is planning to give it to the State of Iowa Historical Society.

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