October 27, 2014 • 41 mins
In 1912, a small Iowa town was the scene of a chilling and brutal crime. Eight people were murdered in their beds by an assailant who has never been identified. Read the show notes here.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and I'm Tracy Wilson. Uh,
and today's subject has been requested by multiple listeners, especially
when we first came on the podcast. We came on
(00:24):
just after kind of the hundred anniversary of the event
we're talking about today, and so it had been covered
by a number of papers and had kind of been
in people's minds a little bit more. It's actually been
on my list for almost since the beginning, and we
haven't had an X Murderer episode in a little while,
so we're do I suppose, as do as one can
be for such things. Uh, this one has some haunting
(00:46):
mythology around it. It remains an unsolved case, so it's
good for the Halloween season, and it's probably no surprise
based on the fact that I've already said this is
an X Murderer episode. But just to be safe, here's
the warning. This is some graphic talk of some pretty
brutal murders and particularly the deaths of children, which I
know can be really difficult for some people to hear.
(01:09):
So if you are sensitive to violent subjects of this nature,
or if you listen with younger history buffs. This is
maybe one to proceed with caution or to pre screen.
For example, I can already tell you my best friend
is not going to partake of this one. She and
I were talking about it while I was researching uh
and as a parent for her, it's just too rough
to listen to this kind of stuff. And the story
(01:30):
is incredibly tragic, and even I mean, I'm I'm often
quite open that I'm not really a kids person. Um,
it took me a long time to research because I
would find that I just had to get up and
walk away for a while, because it's just it's brutal,
and it's hard to think about somebody doing the things
that this person or persons did. So we are talking
about the Valiska As murders, and before we get into
(01:53):
the details of the actual event, I will let Tracy
set the scene a little bit about the town of Vliska, Iowa. Pliska, Iowa.
This took place in nineteen twelve. Fliska is in Montgomery
County and it's only about four square kilometers in size.
They're not not really big. Omaha, Nebraska and Des Moines,
Iowa are the nearest large metro areas, and Valiska is
(02:17):
roughly in between them and a little bit south. Yeah,
it's a little closer to one side than the other.
But for the purposes of this in between and in
the early nineteen hundreds, this was a town that was
on a growth trajectory. It was kind of rural, but
there was a budding business community. The train depot was
very busy. They had a lot of trains coming and going,
and visitors and business people, and it was a close
(02:38):
knit community. Josiah B. Moore, who was the father of
the family at the center of this whole unsettling crime,
was forty three and nineteen twelve. He's sometimes referred to
as j. B. And he had lived in Valiska for
thirteen years when he died, and was a respected businessman.
He had married Sarah Montgomery on December six, eighteen ninety nine,
(03:02):
and Sarah had been born in Illinois in eighteen seventy three,
and she moved to Iowa n eighteen ninety four when
the rest of her family moved there. She was thirty
nine at the time of the murders. The Morris had
four children. Herman was eleven and was also really close
to his father Catherine was their second child and she
was aged ten at the time of the attack. There
(03:24):
were also two younger brothers, Boyd who was seven and
Paul who was five, and there are two other children
that were victims in this case. So on the morning
of June nine of nineteen twelve, sisters Lena who was
twelve and Ainah who was eight Stillinger uh They were
the daughters of Joseph and Sarah Stillinger attended Sunday services
(03:46):
at the Presbyterian Church and the girls were intending to
visit with their grandmother for the day after church had
concluded and then The plan for the rest of the
day was that the girls would then go back to
church to attend special Children's Day activities the evening before
returning to their grandmother's house to spend the night. But
the evening's plans changed when Katherine Moore invited her two
(04:09):
friends to spend the night at the Moor House after
the children's Day activities. Jamie Moore called still at the
Stillinger home. On the phone, he left a message with
Lena and Anah's older sister Blanche to pass along to
their parents that they would be spending the evening with them.
So you know, one of those parenting heads up calls,
your kids are gonna stay over here. If this was
(04:29):
in part because the girls seemed as kind of afraid
to walk back to their grandmother's house alone in the dark. Yeah,
The children's day program, led by Sarah Moore, began at
eight pm, so this was an evening thing. It would
have been quite dark when they concluded at mine thirty pm,
and once the festivities were all wrapped up, the entire
More family and the two young Stillinger sisters walked back
(04:52):
to the More home and arrived there is estimated somewhere
between and ten pm. On the morning of June two,
the Moor's next door neighbor, Mary Peckham, noticed that the
house was unusually quiet. She hadn't seen any of the
family come outside or start their normal morning chores, so
sometimes shortly after seven am, Mrs Peckham walked over to
(05:14):
the Moor house and knocked on the door. She got
no response, and so she tried the door and found
it locked. And this is one of those areas that
there is some conflicting information in various records, so many
will say this was actually pretty unusual for the door
to have been locked. Uh. The habitual locking of doors
at night was not really particularly common practice at this
(05:35):
time in Valisca or in fact many other places you know,
in the early nineteen hundreds, there just wasn't that sort
of level of uh lockdown at the end of the night.
Mrs Peckham, who was troubled and also wanted to help
let the Moore's chickens out as the family would normally
have done themselves in the morning, and then she also
telephoned Ross Moore, who was Josiah's brother, And when Rossmore
(06:00):
arrived at the home of his brother's family, he shouted
and he knocked. He attempted to peer into the house
through the windows, but they were covered and he got
neither reaction nor information like he couldn't there was nothing.
So eventually he went through his keys until he found
the one that unlocked the door. Like he had a
copy of their key, but it took him a little
(06:21):
while to sort out which one it was. Mary Peckham
was there with Rosmore, but she didn't venture past the
porch and into the house. The surviving Moore brother didn't
go past the second room of the house. He opened
the door to the bedroom off the parlor and he
immediately saw the bodies of two children on the bed,
as well as an enormous amount of blood. He went
(06:43):
back to the porch and told Mary Peckham to call
the police. Yeah, and this is a very small, i
mean by today's standards home. So the bottom floor was
only three rooms. It was like the parlor of the
front room, the small bedroom, and a kitchen. So after
they raised an alert, city Marshall Hank Horton responded. He
(07:04):
quickly arrived on the scene and his investigation of the
house revealed that in addition to the two bodies Rossmore
had seen the young Stillinger sisters, there were six more
bodies upstairs. The entire More family and their guests had
been killed in their beds. It was about nine in
the morning when the county coroner finally got there and
took a look at the situation. He later reviewed his
(07:26):
findings with the sheriff and the marshal and then he
called a coroner's jury to the home. So once words
spread of what had happened, uh in a small community,
these things do spread rather quickly. Many townspeople made their
way to the scene, and this ended up being a
real problem. We've talked about similar things happening before with
crime scene, So these people were all there, they were
(07:49):
very interested, and so keeping the crime scene intact became
something of an impossibility. There were accounts of dozens of
people at a time walking through the house kind of
with the you know, morbid curiosity, trying to catch a
glimpse of the bodies or see what had happened. Some
reports even put it at close to a hundred people
(08:10):
at one point that we're all in the house, which
again was not that large a structure, so you can
imagine like keeping evidence intact was completely out the window
at that point. Irritated by these looky loose yes, eventually
the Valiska National Guard had to come and clear the
area and keep onlookers out of the house. By that time,
(08:32):
several hours had passed and a lot of the evidence
was damaged or compromised, which just infuriates me. I want
to take all the looky lose stern a stern lecture
about how not to be terrible. Yeah, and I mean
I have read some uh there was I forget which
account it was that I was reading where they were
(08:52):
kind of pointing out like, yes, this was terrible, But
even so, there's maybe wouldn't have been that much more
evidence that was really garnered in the investigation. Um, but
we don't know. So the coroner's jury did not finish
their investigation of the home until after ten PM, and
it was at that point that the undertaker was given
(09:12):
clearance to remove the bodies. UH. Those were taken to
a local fire station which was being used as kind
of a makeshift morgue because it was so many people
at once uh and the undertakers did not finish moving
the victims until roughly two am. So before we get
into kind of the grizzly stuff, do you want to
have a quick word from a sponsor so we don't
(09:32):
interrupt all of this yuckness with an ad. Let's do,
and now we will jump back to you discussing the
horrific events at Veliska. Despite the herd of looky loose
who had passed through the crime scene, there were some
solid facts that they were able to glean about these murders. Yes,
so the doors to the house, all of the doors
(09:52):
were locked, and as we mentioned earlier, many people believed
that this was not a normal state of affairs. The
curtains and every room of the house had been closed,
and in the case of two windows that had no curtains,
Mrs Moore's clothing had been used to cover them. Uh,
and I left it out of these notes, but her
clothing had also been used to cover all of the
(10:14):
mirrors in the house. Well that now I'm scared. Don't
be scared. I don't. I don't mean to laugh at
his tragic and creepy but I don't want Tracy to
be scared. No, genuinely. And you said that I had
a shutter. Sorry, So to get more serious, all eight
of these victims have been bludgeoned, apparently in their sleep
(10:34):
with an ax, and each victim's head had been covered
with bed linens or articles of clothing after their skulls
had been crushed. Based on the medical examination of the bodies,
it's believed that the murders took place shortly somewhere between
shortly after midnight and three am, so it's kind of
a three hour window. In the two rooms where Josiah
(10:55):
and Sarah Moore and Lena and ailis Aina Stillinger had
been killed, a scene lamps were found at the ends
of the beds with their chimneys removed and their wicks
turned back, as though the killer had wanted to dim
the lights. The murder weapon had ben Josiah Moore's. It
was found in the room with Lena and Aina, and
the ceilings in several of the rooms had been hit
(11:17):
during the killer's upswing as he raised the axe. On
the kitchen table, there was a plate of food and
a pan of water, and the water had blood in it.
The downstairs bedroom where the still injured girls were slain,
contained a number of clues and sort of odd aspects.
Uh Aina was sleeping on the portion of the bed
(11:38):
closest to the wall when she was killed, and a
coat had been used to cover her face afterwards. Uh
Lena was situated part way down the bed. This led
to some speculation that she may have been struck and
then shifted or wiggled down the bed a little bit.
Initially before she died, she was wearing no undergarments and
her nightgown had been shifted upward. There was blood on
(12:00):
the inside of one of her knees and injuries to
one arm, which appeared to be defensive, as though she
had tried to protect herself against the attacker. She's the
only one that exhibited any sort of defensive injury. There
was a two pounds slab of bacon on the floor,
wrapped in what was either a rag or a dish towel,
and there was a nearly identical slab of bacon in
(12:23):
the kitchen ice box. And additionally, there was part of
a key chain on the floor. And I know what
some of you people are probably thinking based on a
couple of these details, and I promise you we are
coming back to them now. We will get to sort
of the coroner's inquest the day after the Grizzly discovery,
So on June eleven, the coroner's jury began their official
(12:45):
inquest into the murders, and they eventually called fourteen witnesses
for testimony. So their first witness was Mary Peckham, who
you know, was the first woman, the neighbor that discovered
that there was something not quite right. And she's stated
that the last time she saw the family was when
they were leaving for the children's day activities at the
church on the evening of the ninth. She was already
(13:07):
in bed when the family returned home, and she said
that she didn't hear any noises during the night. She
related how she came to be curious about the family's
whereabouts in the morning because of the unusual stillness of
the house uh and that she had seen Mr Moore's employee,
Ed Selly arrive and head to the barn to tend
the horses. Not long after she contacted Ross Moore. The
(13:29):
second witness was Ed Selly, and as we just said,
he was an employee at Javy Moore's store, and his
testimony indicated that he had opened the store as normal
the morning of the discovery before being contacted by Ross
Moore about the suspicious situation. After speaking with the victim's
sister in law, Jesse Moore, Selly contacted the Moore's parents
(13:52):
and Sarah's parents to see if the family had gone
to visit any of them. So at that point they
were trying to figure out where they were, not realizing
they were in the house. He was then contacted by
Mrs Peckham about the moors livestock, so he left the
store to attend to the horses and then went back
to work. Not long after, Mrs Peckham called again, this
(14:13):
time to tell him to get the marshal and come
back to the house and Selly's testimony, uh contradicts Mary
Peckham's just a little bit, and it's not really anything
terribly important. I just wanted to point it out. He
indicated that he had joined Mrs Peckham and Ross Moore
in entering the house, whereas Mrs Peckham indicated that she
(14:34):
had never gone past the porch. After the Marshal had
a preliminary look at the scene, Selly indicated that the
house was blocked and that he went to the store
to contact business associates about the situation. Yeah, he wanted
to let the people that they had business dealings with
know that uh, Mr Moore had been killed and that
they were gonna have to make some arrangements. Selly was
(14:56):
asked if J. B. Moore had any enemies he knew of,
and he indicated that he had told him that his
brother in law, Sam Moyer had it in for him.
The third witness was Dr J. Clark Cooper. Cooper was
the first physician on the scene after the bodies were discovered.
Cooper described his first access to the bodies, first encountering
(15:19):
the Stillinger girls, who he didn't recognize. He also mentioned
the lamps without their chimneys. Cooper indicated that he didn't
touch the bodies on site. He sort of performed just
a visual assessment at that point. Yeah, he didn't do
uh any real hands on examination. His statement also included
that estimated time of death that we talked about, and
(15:40):
that was based on his observation of the blood and
brain matter on the scene and the level of dryness
and congealment it had achieved. Uh. He was also the
one that introduced the detail that the faces he believed
had been covered after the bludgeoning, and this was based
on the fact that none of the covering fabris were
stuck to the wounds, They had just kind of been
(16:02):
draped over afterwards, and none of those fabrics or articles
of clothing had any holes or damage of any kind
other than normal wear and tear. Witness for was Jesse Moore,
who was Rossmore's wife. Jesse spoke with Mrs Peckham when
she first called for Ross and her statement echoed ed
Sally's regarding what their conversations were like. She also mentioned
(16:24):
that she later entered Josiah's and Sarah's home to retrieve
photographs of the family for the local paper, and she
didn't know of any possible enemies that the family might
have had. Yeah, there are some accounts that suggests that
she had gone in and kind of like posed for pictures,
but those seem like embellishments. She did go in, but
she was trying to get pictures from the household for
(16:46):
the press um so that they could be used in
news stories. Witness number five was Dr F. S. Williams,
And whereas Dr Cooper that we mentioned just a few
moments ago had only done a visual inspection on the
bodies at the crime scene, Dr Williams was the one
that actually examined the bodies. His testimony described the crushed
(17:07):
heads of each victim and their positions in their beds uh.
And he was the one to introduced the idea that
Lena Stillinger had squirmed on the bed after having been struck.
Some people have theorized over the years that Lena had
been sexually assaulted, but Dr williams testimony runs really counter
to that. He indicated that he had investigated the possibility
(17:27):
of a rape, but he didn't find any evidence of
that kind of violation. Yeah, she was the one we mentioned.
She didn't have any undergarments on, and that her night
dress had been shifted up. She may have been the
object of some um, you know, visual stimulation for the killer,
but her body was not in any way um molested
(17:49):
to the best of this doctor's knowledge. Uh. Witness number
six was Edward Landers, and Landers was a neighbor. He
was actually the son of a neighbor. He was staying
a few houses down from the moors at his mother's
house for the summer, and he stated that he had
gone to bed shortly after nine pm on the night
of the murders, but that he had heard a noise
during the night that to him at the time sounded
(18:11):
like people hooting to one another outdoors. And he was
kind of pressed by the examiners over what time this
might have been, and he guessed it was probably around
eleven p m. But he wasn't certain. Uh. And after
the news of the murders broke the next morning, he
began to wonder if the noise that he had heard
had not been people hooting, but in fact a woman moaning.
(18:32):
The seventh witness was rossmore so beside his brother, and
he relayed the events of the morning of the tenth
and how he had come to discover the bodies of
the two styliner girls before exiting the home. He mentioned
that before opened the opening the bedroom door and making
the discovery, nothing in the home seemed like it was
out of place, and he also couldn't offer any information
(18:53):
about possible enemies that the family may have had. Witness
number eight was Fenwick More and this was another More brother.
There were several brothers in the mix here. His testimony
was not particularly illuminating. He indicated that he really didn't
know anything about his brother's business or if he had
any enemies, and he was dismissed from the stand pretty quickly.
(19:14):
The ninth witness was Marshall Hank Horton, and the Marshall's
testimony was really brief. He basically said he had been
contacted by Seally to go into the More home. He
corroborated entering the house with Sally and then again with
the doctors. Witness number ten was Levin Gilder and this
was Josiah's nephew, but he also did not have a
whole lot of information to impart. He had briefly been
(19:36):
considered a suspect because he had some kind of shady
uh happenings in his background. His record was not entirely clean,
but he was cleared pretty early on. Witness eleven was
another More brother, Harry More, and he also had really
nothing new to add in the proceedings. Like Finwick, his
other brother, he had neither knowledge of Jav's business nor
(19:59):
of any post well ill intentions against him. Witness twelve
was Blanche Stillinger, and remember this was Lena and Ainah's
older sister. She was the one that had spoken with
Jsiah over the phone about the girls sleeping over at
the Moorhouse, and she was the one that kind of said, yeah,
I think that will be fine. I will tell my parents.
And the thirteenth witness was Joseph Stillinger, so Lena and
(20:21):
i Dinah's father. He also didn't know of anyone who
might commit such a crime, and he indicated that his
wife had phoned the Moors several times in the morning,
uh the morning that the bodies were found, because she
had expected the girls to be back before school time. Yeah,
this had happened on a Sunday night into the Monday
morning hours, and so she thought the kids were going
to come home and get ready for school, but they didn't,
(20:44):
so they were trying to contact them and getting no answer.
The Laps witness was Charles Moore. This is yet another
more brother. Charles testified to the coroner's jury that he
knew Josiah kept an AX, but when he was questioned,
he couldn't say with certainty that the murder up and
was the one that Josiah owned. He just wasn't sure. H.
(21:04):
He also indicated that it was in fact his brother's
habit to lock the house from the inside at night. Um.
One thing that always kind of rings odd to me
and is not really discussed all that much in a
lot of these is that the whole house was locked,
but somehow the killer or killers got out. So that's
(21:25):
always stayed a little bit of a mystery. Whether they
had a key or not is unclear. Yeah. Well, and
then that gets into me super wondering what lock technology
was like at the time, Like now we have door
knoblocks that you just looted the thing and then you
go out. Well, and there was also you know, uh,
skeleton keys that could open multiple doors were a little
more common still than uh, you know, it just wasn't
(21:45):
quite the same as what we're dealing with today, So,
and that may be one of the reasons that it's
not really talked about that much. It's not that insane
a thing. It's not like, uh, even in some of
the and I'll talk about them briefly at the end,
but even in like some of the sort of supernatural
investigations of it, it doesn't really seem to come up
as like a weird thing, like an entity locked all
(22:07):
the doors. Uh doors are just locked. They don't really
it doesn't get embellished a whole lot. But before we
start talking about suspects and what may have driven someone
to do this, let's have another quick word from a sponsor.
Will take a break from all of this sort of
dark material for just a moment, so to return to
this horrifying subject. There were many early leads in this
(22:28):
case and really no shortage of suspects, but nothing ever
panned out, and this horrific crime is still unsolved. It's
not possible in the scope of a podcast episode to
cover every single suspect, but we're going to talk about
the more high profile ones. Yeah, this really sort of
turned this town on its head, and a lot of
(22:48):
people characterize it as basically making a place where people
would invite a stranger into their home for a meal
and you know, be very open and very friendly, into
a place where suddenly everyone was suspicious of everyone else,
and you know, sort of fear driven suspicion kind of
led their behavior beyond that and as a consequence, a
lot of different people were accused of participating in this crime,
but one of the primary suspects that comes up in
(23:12):
almost any discussion of this case is Frank F. Jones,
and he was an Iowa State senator. He had been
Josiah Moore's boss for many years, but in nineteen eight
More had struck out on his own, opening a farming
implement company, and he took several of their lucrative business
partners with him, including the John Deere company, So Jones
(23:33):
was a little i rate with him from that point on.
There were also rumors that Josiah had had an affair
with jones daughter in law, So Frank Jones and his son,
so the husband of this daughter in law, we're even
accused quite publicly by a detective agency of having hired
a killer named William Mansfield to take out the More family,
(23:57):
and William Mansfield was arrested the murders in nineteen sixteen,
four years after they had taken place. According to Detective
James Newton Wilkerson, who had been the one that had
leveled those accusations against the Joneses uh, he asserted that
Mansfield was in fact a serial killer and that he
also had a cocaine habit. Mansfield was also linked via
(24:20):
Wilkerson's research, to other brutal murders, including those of his
own wife, child, and his wife's family in nineteen fourteen,
so that would have been a couple of years after Veliska,
as well as murders in Kansas and Colorado, and in
all of these cases, the victims were bludgeoned with an
ax in homes where the windows and mirrors were all covered,
(24:40):
similar to the morse Lings. Detective Wilkerson was so convinced
that Mansfield had been hired by Jones that he posted
flyers all over town with Mansfield's face on them that read,
this is the axe murderer he murdered the more family
at Veliska. The hypocrite whose dirty money paid for Hellis
(25:00):
job wants your support for the state Senate. Will he
get it? So? I'm sure delighted Jones. Uh, and I
have to say, I think, if you have just accused
a man of hiring someone to kill a man who
has made you angry, making him angry and this way
seems like a really bold and foolish move. Um. But
(25:23):
while Mansfield does seem like an obvious solution to who
killed the Moors, and while Detective Wolkerson really seemed for
the rest of his life that he was certain that
what that Mansfield was the killer. Uh. Mansfield had an
art alibi for the time of the Veliska murders that
placed him in Illinois. There was some payroll happenings that
(25:46):
indicated that he had had been working there at the time.
There were some eyewitnesses that placed Mansfield in Vliska and
not Illinois, but none of those UH eye witness accounts
for ever substantiated, and Mansfield was eventually set After his release,
Mansfield sued Wilkerson for slander and he was awarded more
than two thousand dollars. Wilkerson alleged that Jones had in
(26:10):
fact managed to use his position of power to secure
Mansfield's release. Yeah, he also kind of blamed Jones for
orchestrating the decision In Mansfield's favor during the slander case,
and he suggested that Frank Jones set up the next
suspect to kind of take the fall, and that next
(26:31):
suspect was Reverend George Kelly, who was a preacher who
had moved to Macedonia, Iowa in nineteen twelve. So after
the trail went cold with Mansfield, Kelly was arrested and
charged with the More murders in nineteen seventeen, and he
was in the Liska for the children's day activities and
he left town the next morning. He was even alleged
(26:52):
at one point to have spoken of the murders on
the train out of town, which is early in the morning,
before the bodies had even been discovered. He also returned
to Veliska a week after the murders and he pretended
to be a detective from Scotland Yard to gain entry
into the More home. He actually had some mental problems
that were on record, and Kelly was considered to be
(27:15):
a sexual deviant, obsessed with sex, and known to have
been a peeping tom. There have been some theories about
the rolled up bacon slab that was found downstairs in
the bedroom had been used as a sexual aid by
the killer, and that made people really willing to connect
the dots to to Kelly, who had this reputation. Unlike Mansfield,
(27:39):
Kelly actually did confess to the murders, and in his
confession he wrote, I killed the children upstairs first and
the children downstairs last. I knew God wanted me to
do it this way. Slay utterly came to my mind,
and I picked up the axe, went into the house
and killed them. So that makes it seem like an
(27:59):
an in shut case. But it all fell apart. He
wound up recanting his confession, and the witnesses that initially
claimed he talked to them on the train about the
murders before it was public knowledge all changed their story.
He was also a really small man, at five ft
two inches tall, and he weighed less than a hundred
and twenty pounds, So the idea of him being able
(28:20):
to deliver the crushing blows that killed the family was
a little difficult to support. I imagine at that height
it might have been also difficult for the upswings of
the axe to hit the ceiling. Yes, I couldn't find anything.
I thought about that as well, And I couldn't find
anything substantial. I'm sure we could do it if with
(28:41):
a little bit more time to find out what the
height of the ceilings were in the length of the axe.
But I did not have time to work out the
math on that. And while somebody that size could probably
easily until children, Mr Moore was like six ft tall
and weighed about two hundred pounds, you know, he was
a full grown man, so it seemed like that would
have been a little bit more of a stretch for
(29:04):
Kelly to be able to manage. Kelly was actually tried
twice for this crime. The first trial resulted in a
hung jury, and in the second trial the jury freed
him because there was really no evidence other than sort
of the suspicion that he was weird and deviant and
might be the kind of person to do these things.
(29:26):
The third suspect was Henry Lee Moore, and in May
of nineteen thirteen, almost a year after the murders, a
federal investigator on the case named m W. Mccloudy announced
that he had solved it, as well as twenty two
other similar cases. Mcclardy believed all of the slings to
be the work of serial killer Henry Lee Moore, who
(29:48):
was not actually relation to the More family. It was
not yet another More brother. Yeah, it was just coincidental
that they had the last name. UH. A few months
after the Veliska incident, Henry Moore was convicted of murdering
his mother and grandmother in Missouri. The brutality of the
victims was quite similar. They were legend with an ax
(30:10):
and UH. It should be pointed out that one of
the things that differs is that he was allegedly motivated
by money in this he was hoping to gain their
assets after they died. As the Valiska investigation had gone on,
multiple similar acts murders were uncovered in Colorado, Illinois, and Kansas,
(30:32):
and some of these were crimes Mansfield had also been
linked to by other investigators, but McClary thought they were
all Henry Moore's doing. More actually served thirty six years
of his life sentence for the deaths of his mother
and grandmother. UH, and then he was paroled in nineteen
forty nine. UH. He ended up having his sentence commuted
(30:54):
some years later when he was in his eighties. UM.
He kind of falls off the public record after that.
No one really knows, like where he went or how
he died, but he was never formally charged for the
murders in Valiska, despite mccloudy's insistence that he was clearly
the one who had done it. In addition to these
three high profile suspects, there were so so many others,
(31:16):
And initially it was because of the shocking nature of
the hot side. Citizens of Aliska suspected anyone who wasn't
from around there. Some of them were legitimately suspect, although
not not ever actually linked to the murders, and some
of them were simply guilty of being strangers. And I
wanted to make a note about the similarities among the
(31:37):
murders UH that were discovered in other states and other areas,
and the use of an AX as the murder weapon.
It's worth considering just food for thought that this was
a time when almost every home would have an X,
often readily accessible UH. Mike dash, who was a writer
that wrote an article for the Smithsonian in twelve about
(31:58):
the Valiska killings, makes the point that this sort of
could be considered a weapon of convenience for the times,
like in the Midwest, if you just wanted to go
on a killing spree, an act was pretty easy to
get a hold of. Additionally, as is the case often
with high profile crimes, confessors came out of the woodwork
for decades. People were confessing to the crime well into
(32:21):
the nineteen thirties, although many of these confessions got details
wildly wrong. Yeah, you know that. That happens with any
big UH murder case. Or there are people that confess
that could not have done it for whatever reasons, but those,
of course, we're pretty easily dismissed in most cases. Um
(32:44):
So jumping to sort of the modern day UH in
The house where J. B. More and his family were
killed was purchased by Darwin and Martha Lynn, and the
Lins restored the house to its nineteen twelve condition and
the residents was placed on the National Historic Places Regis Stree.
Prior to the Lens purchase, the house had passed through
many hands of ownership and it had been repeatedly renovated,
(33:07):
so it was really quite a significant restoration effort. Today
you can tour the home. It's actually a museum and
for a little less than five hundred dollars a night
you can book sleepovers in the murder house. It's actually
one of the main draws of Valisco, which is pretty
rural town. If you want a book on the anniversary
(33:27):
of the murders, though, there's a lottery, and there have
been many discussions and debates through the years about whether
it's right for a business to grow out of such
a tragedy and so much brutality. These debates probably go
on for as long as the museum is open. Yeah,
I mean a lot of articles if you search for
this that talk about it kind of from the modern standpoint.
(33:48):
They really do discuss kind of that this is a
problem and something that continues to be debated, and and
they kind of look at like the Valisca murder houses,
this odd money making been sort of but you know,
that's something that you can draw your own conclusions and
have your own opinions of um. Paranormal investigators and ghost
(34:09):
hunters have of course kind of flocked to this house
hoping to get some activity that they can record or discuss.
It's been featured on a lot of numerous television reality
and making the air quotes shows, uh, And there have
been several documentaries made about the murders that are less
about sensationalizing it and making a haunted house, a ghost story,
but really just trying to break down the actual crime. Um.
(34:33):
I kind of feel like a broken record when I
do this wrap up, because we do it for almost
any of the cases where they're go unsolved. But odds
are that this one is not ever going to be solved,
and the further away we get from the date of
when it actually happened, the less and less evidence there
will be to go on. So it will remain a
draw for crime history buffs and visitors to the Valiska
(34:54):
murder House. Uh, probably for quite some time. But that
is the Valiska Murderer, which, as I said, we're requested
by a large number of people. Very unsettling and disturbing
to think about. Uh, but you know, good Halloween fodder.
And again it is a huge tragedy. I mean, like
I said, I'm not a kids person, but reading these
(35:16):
testimonies about what happened to these children was so rough
for me. Yeah, I kept I kept like going, like,
let's go hug a kitty. I having to go out
to cartoon for fifteen minutes, just anything to kind of
break the intensity of that. Well. And in addition to
how I got genuinely creeped out sitting here when you
said all the mirrors were covered up with their clothing. Um.
The part about their you know, the parents of the
(35:38):
children who were visiting the home calling over there because
they were expecting them to be home for school, that
really got to me. It's it's very upsetting to think about.
I mean, these were, you know, kids that were part
of someone's lives and it was just it could be
it's one of those this could happen to anyone kinds
of things. Um. And I think especially when these kinds
of crimes happen in rural community, these that were very
(36:01):
you know, friendly and and pretty free of this kind
of thing. It's really shocking. It kind of reminds me
of when I first read In Cold Blood by Dream
Capodi as a kid, because it's kind of a similar
There's some parallels there. Um. It's hard to think about
what a mental shift that has to be for the
entire community to be like one day life is one
way and the next day you see it all completely differently. Yeah,
(36:22):
there was a similar actually even at the same similar
time period, mass murder in the tiny, tiny rural town
that I grew up in, and it had similar horrific
elements and similar like family members found in their beds,
and I was like, wow, this is uncanny when I
got her outline. Can we move on to some perhaps
less disturbing listener mail and so much less disturbing. I
(36:44):
have two short pieces because I know this episode has
been a little bit lengthy. UH about Ethan Allen? And
the first one is from UH our listener Hannah, and
she says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. My paternal grandfather made
a hobby of tracing his family ancestry. My other three
grandparents have straightforward lineages, but Papa's family was rather more convoluted.
(37:05):
One of the things he discovered and is searching was
that he was descended from Ethan Allen. And besides old,
perhaps less than reliable records, the evidence of this is
actually in the names of the men in my father's family,
back and back and back. The men of one of
my grandfather's lines all have the middle name Allen and
variations thereupon, in honor of perhaps their most famous progenitor.
(37:25):
It's such a cool I always love it when people
have connections to history like that. Um, we got a
lot after a FIDUA episode and then there is another
Ethan Allen one from our listener, Vincent, and he says
love the podcast. And for some reason, I never wrote
you all before, probably because I usually listened in the car,
But today I happened to be at my desk when
(37:46):
I finished listening to part two of your Ethan Allen podcast.
I wanted to let you know how I first learned
of him. I didn't learn his name from the furniture store.
We didn't have one near me that I knew of
until I was in high school. I actually learned his
name from a box of pencils. I always wanted to
draw comics as a kid, and I still draw them now.
And once saw a photo of Charles M. Schultz's desk
and got a good look at the brand of pencils
(38:08):
he used, So I bought a box the next time
I was in an office supply store to get school supplies.
On my box of Dixon Ticonderoga Number two pencils is
the story of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.
I kind of love that. I love that he got
his connection to Ethan Ellen one three pencils, which is
sort of charming. And to that there's a Charles Schultz connection,
(38:28):
because perhaps one day we will discuss peanuts on the podcast,
if you would like to. Oh, and I want to
mention briefly before I go to that. I know we've
gotten some flak over our pronunciation of Bella Lagosi's name.
I will tell you why. It's because when I pronounce
it correctly in the Hungarian language, which is Bela, I
sound like the count from Sesame Street and just or
(38:50):
like I've mentioned to one of our fans that posted
about it on Facebook, like or some Hungarian variation of
Tina Phey's character from Muppets. Most wanted it, but comes
very comedic, and I did not want to do that well,
and mine becomes comedic in an entirely different way. That
embarrasses me so much that I'm not even going to
try to say it, because somehow every ounce of Southern
(39:12):
drawl that I have, so I can see that a
three syllable word, I could understand how that would happen.
And I will say that I watched a lot of
footage of him, like in interviews and stuff whatever I
could get my hands on, and he seemed to not
mind when people pronounced it Bella, so I was not
worried too much about it. Yeah, sorry, I'm sorry if
that dismayed anyone who actually speaks Hungarian and thought you
(39:33):
yol well, and having having, for my part, having mostly
seen uh like documentary footage about him that was made
and produced in the United States. There are a lot
of American actors and commentators who pronounced it that way.
So I genuinely was unaware that there was a different
way to pronounce it, and so we got into that discussion. Yeah,
(39:55):
I would sound like the count. I really do. Uh.
So I apologize if that bothered anybody. I made that
decision based on my desire cannot make it a comedy.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com,
slash missed in History at missed in History on Twitter,
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, Interest dot com,
(40:17):
slash missed in History, and you can check out our
selection of missed in History goodies at missed in History
dot spreadshirt dot com. And you would like to get
a T shirt or a mug or any number of
other fun accessories with our logo and some other fun
designs on them. You would like to learn a little
bit more about a related topic to what we talked
about today, go to our parents site how stuff Works.
(40:40):
If you type in the phrase pivotal murders in the
search bar, you're going to get an article. It's pretty new,
called top ten Historically Pivotal Murders, and it talks about
some murders that kind of did things. Uh, they had
an effect similar to what this one had, where it
really shifted the way a community or you know, uh,
even the world looked at things after it had happened.
(41:00):
So you can do something that at our website at
our parents site, how stuff works dot com. You can
also visit us at mist in history dot com or
show notes all of our episodes archive and the occasional
fund blog posts. We hope you visit us at mt
in history dot com and hous dot for more on
(41:21):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and I'm Tracy Wilson. Uh,
and today's subject has been requested by multiple listeners, especially
when we first came on the podcast. We came on
(00:24):
just after kind of the hundred anniversary of the event
we're talking about today, and so it had been covered
by a number of papers and had kind of been
in people's minds a little bit more. It's actually been
on my list for almost since the beginning, and we
haven't had an X Murderer episode in a little while,
so we're do I suppose, as do as one can
be for such things. Uh, this one has some haunting
(00:46):
mythology around it. It remains an unsolved case, so it's
good for the Halloween season, and it's probably no surprise
based on the fact that I've already said this is
an X Murderer episode. But just to be safe, here's
the warning. This is some graphic talk of some pretty
brutal murders and particularly the deaths of children, which I
know can be really difficult for some people to hear.
(01:09):
So if you are sensitive to violent subjects of this nature,
or if you listen with younger history buffs. This is
maybe one to proceed with caution or to pre screen.
For example, I can already tell you my best friend
is not going to partake of this one. She and
I were talking about it while I was researching uh
and as a parent for her, it's just too rough
to listen to this kind of stuff. And the story
(01:30):
is incredibly tragic, and even I mean, I'm I'm often
quite open that I'm not really a kids person. Um,
it took me a long time to research because I
would find that I just had to get up and
walk away for a while, because it's just it's brutal,
and it's hard to think about somebody doing the things
that this person or persons did. So we are talking
about the Valiska As murders, and before we get into
(01:53):
the details of the actual event, I will let Tracy
set the scene a little bit about the town of Vliska, Iowa. Pliska, Iowa.
This took place in nineteen twelve. Fliska is in Montgomery
County and it's only about four square kilometers in size.
They're not not really big. Omaha, Nebraska and Des Moines,
Iowa are the nearest large metro areas, and Valiska is
(02:17):
roughly in between them and a little bit south. Yeah,
it's a little closer to one side than the other.
But for the purposes of this in between and in
the early nineteen hundreds, this was a town that was
on a growth trajectory. It was kind of rural, but
there was a budding business community. The train depot was
very busy. They had a lot of trains coming and going,
and visitors and business people, and it was a close
(02:38):
knit community. Josiah B. Moore, who was the father of
the family at the center of this whole unsettling crime,
was forty three and nineteen twelve. He's sometimes referred to
as j. B. And he had lived in Valiska for
thirteen years when he died, and was a respected businessman.
He had married Sarah Montgomery on December six, eighteen ninety nine,
(03:02):
and Sarah had been born in Illinois in eighteen seventy three,
and she moved to Iowa n eighteen ninety four when
the rest of her family moved there. She was thirty
nine at the time of the murders. The Morris had
four children. Herman was eleven and was also really close
to his father Catherine was their second child and she
was aged ten at the time of the attack. There
(03:24):
were also two younger brothers, Boyd who was seven and
Paul who was five, and there are two other children
that were victims in this case. So on the morning
of June nine of nineteen twelve, sisters Lena who was
twelve and Ainah who was eight Stillinger uh They were
the daughters of Joseph and Sarah Stillinger attended Sunday services
(03:46):
at the Presbyterian Church and the girls were intending to
visit with their grandmother for the day after church had
concluded and then The plan for the rest of the
day was that the girls would then go back to
church to attend special Children's Day activities the evening before
returning to their grandmother's house to spend the night. But
the evening's plans changed when Katherine Moore invited her two
(04:09):
friends to spend the night at the Moor House after
the children's Day activities. Jamie Moore called still at the
Stillinger home. On the phone, he left a message with
Lena and Anah's older sister Blanche to pass along to
their parents that they would be spending the evening with them.
So you know, one of those parenting heads up calls,
your kids are gonna stay over here. If this was
(04:29):
in part because the girls seemed as kind of afraid
to walk back to their grandmother's house alone in the dark. Yeah,
The children's day program, led by Sarah Moore, began at
eight pm, so this was an evening thing. It would
have been quite dark when they concluded at mine thirty pm,
and once the festivities were all wrapped up, the entire
More family and the two young Stillinger sisters walked back
(04:52):
to the More home and arrived there is estimated somewhere
between and ten pm. On the morning of June two,
the Moor's next door neighbor, Mary Peckham, noticed that the
house was unusually quiet. She hadn't seen any of the
family come outside or start their normal morning chores, so
sometimes shortly after seven am, Mrs Peckham walked over to
(05:14):
the Moor house and knocked on the door. She got
no response, and so she tried the door and found
it locked. And this is one of those areas that
there is some conflicting information in various records, so many
will say this was actually pretty unusual for the door
to have been locked. Uh. The habitual locking of doors
at night was not really particularly common practice at this
(05:35):
time in Valisca or in fact many other places you know,
in the early nineteen hundreds, there just wasn't that sort
of level of uh lockdown at the end of the night.
Mrs Peckham, who was troubled and also wanted to help
let the Moore's chickens out as the family would normally
have done themselves in the morning, and then she also
telephoned Ross Moore, who was Josiah's brother, And when Rossmore
(06:00):
arrived at the home of his brother's family, he shouted
and he knocked. He attempted to peer into the house
through the windows, but they were covered and he got
neither reaction nor information like he couldn't there was nothing.
So eventually he went through his keys until he found
the one that unlocked the door. Like he had a
copy of their key, but it took him a little
(06:21):
while to sort out which one it was. Mary Peckham
was there with Rosmore, but she didn't venture past the
porch and into the house. The surviving Moore brother didn't
go past the second room of the house. He opened
the door to the bedroom off the parlor and he
immediately saw the bodies of two children on the bed,
as well as an enormous amount of blood. He went
(06:43):
back to the porch and told Mary Peckham to call
the police. Yeah, and this is a very small, i
mean by today's standards home. So the bottom floor was
only three rooms. It was like the parlor of the
front room, the small bedroom, and a kitchen. So after
they raised an alert, city Marshall Hank Horton responded. He
(07:04):
quickly arrived on the scene and his investigation of the
house revealed that in addition to the two bodies Rossmore
had seen the young Stillinger sisters, there were six more
bodies upstairs. The entire More family and their guests had
been killed in their beds. It was about nine in
the morning when the county coroner finally got there and
took a look at the situation. He later reviewed his
(07:26):
findings with the sheriff and the marshal and then he
called a coroner's jury to the home. So once words
spread of what had happened, uh in a small community,
these things do spread rather quickly. Many townspeople made their
way to the scene, and this ended up being a
real problem. We've talked about similar things happening before with
crime scene, So these people were all there, they were
(07:49):
very interested, and so keeping the crime scene intact became
something of an impossibility. There were accounts of dozens of
people at a time walking through the house kind of
with the you know, morbid curiosity, trying to catch a
glimpse of the bodies or see what had happened. Some
reports even put it at close to a hundred people
(08:10):
at one point that we're all in the house, which
again was not that large a structure, so you can
imagine like keeping evidence intact was completely out the window
at that point. Irritated by these looky loose yes, eventually
the Valiska National Guard had to come and clear the
area and keep onlookers out of the house. By that time,
(08:32):
several hours had passed and a lot of the evidence
was damaged or compromised, which just infuriates me. I want
to take all the looky lose stern a stern lecture
about how not to be terrible. Yeah, and I mean
I have read some uh there was I forget which
account it was that I was reading where they were
(08:52):
kind of pointing out like, yes, this was terrible, But
even so, there's maybe wouldn't have been that much more
evidence that was really garnered in the investigation. Um, but
we don't know. So the coroner's jury did not finish
their investigation of the home until after ten PM, and
it was at that point that the undertaker was given
(09:12):
clearance to remove the bodies. UH. Those were taken to
a local fire station which was being used as kind
of a makeshift morgue because it was so many people
at once uh and the undertakers did not finish moving
the victims until roughly two am. So before we get
into kind of the grizzly stuff, do you want to
have a quick word from a sponsor so we don't
(09:32):
interrupt all of this yuckness with an ad. Let's do,
and now we will jump back to you discussing the
horrific events at Veliska. Despite the herd of looky loose
who had passed through the crime scene, there were some
solid facts that they were able to glean about these murders. Yes,
so the doors to the house, all of the doors
(09:52):
were locked, and as we mentioned earlier, many people believed
that this was not a normal state of affairs. The
curtains and every room of the house had been closed,
and in the case of two windows that had no curtains,
Mrs Moore's clothing had been used to cover them. Uh,
and I left it out of these notes, but her
clothing had also been used to cover all of the
(10:14):
mirrors in the house. Well that now I'm scared. Don't
be scared. I don't. I don't mean to laugh at
his tragic and creepy but I don't want Tracy to
be scared. No, genuinely. And you said that I had
a shutter. Sorry, So to get more serious, all eight
of these victims have been bludgeoned, apparently in their sleep
(10:34):
with an ax, and each victim's head had been covered
with bed linens or articles of clothing after their skulls
had been crushed. Based on the medical examination of the bodies,
it's believed that the murders took place shortly somewhere between
shortly after midnight and three am, so it's kind of
a three hour window. In the two rooms where Josiah
(10:55):
and Sarah Moore and Lena and ailis Aina Stillinger had
been killed, a scene lamps were found at the ends
of the beds with their chimneys removed and their wicks
turned back, as though the killer had wanted to dim
the lights. The murder weapon had ben Josiah Moore's. It
was found in the room with Lena and Aina, and
the ceilings in several of the rooms had been hit
(11:17):
during the killer's upswing as he raised the axe. On
the kitchen table, there was a plate of food and
a pan of water, and the water had blood in it.
The downstairs bedroom where the still injured girls were slain,
contained a number of clues and sort of odd aspects.
Uh Aina was sleeping on the portion of the bed
(11:38):
closest to the wall when she was killed, and a
coat had been used to cover her face afterwards. Uh
Lena was situated part way down the bed. This led
to some speculation that she may have been struck and
then shifted or wiggled down the bed a little bit.
Initially before she died, she was wearing no undergarments and
her nightgown had been shifted upward. There was blood on
(12:00):
the inside of one of her knees and injuries to
one arm, which appeared to be defensive, as though she
had tried to protect herself against the attacker. She's the
only one that exhibited any sort of defensive injury. There
was a two pounds slab of bacon on the floor,
wrapped in what was either a rag or a dish towel,
and there was a nearly identical slab of bacon in
(12:23):
the kitchen ice box. And additionally, there was part of
a key chain on the floor. And I know what
some of you people are probably thinking based on a
couple of these details, and I promise you we are
coming back to them now. We will get to sort
of the coroner's inquest the day after the Grizzly discovery,
So on June eleven, the coroner's jury began their official
(12:45):
inquest into the murders, and they eventually called fourteen witnesses
for testimony. So their first witness was Mary Peckham, who
you know, was the first woman, the neighbor that discovered
that there was something not quite right. And she's stated
that the last time she saw the family was when
they were leaving for the children's day activities at the
church on the evening of the ninth. She was already
(13:07):
in bed when the family returned home, and she said
that she didn't hear any noises during the night. She
related how she came to be curious about the family's
whereabouts in the morning because of the unusual stillness of
the house uh and that she had seen Mr Moore's employee,
Ed Selly arrive and head to the barn to tend
the horses. Not long after she contacted Ross Moore. The
(13:29):
second witness was Ed Selly, and as we just said,
he was an employee at Javy Moore's store, and his
testimony indicated that he had opened the store as normal
the morning of the discovery before being contacted by Ross
Moore about the suspicious situation. After speaking with the victim's
sister in law, Jesse Moore, Selly contacted the Moore's parents
(13:52):
and Sarah's parents to see if the family had gone
to visit any of them. So at that point they
were trying to figure out where they were, not realizing
they were in the house. He was then contacted by
Mrs Peckham about the moors livestock, so he left the
store to attend to the horses and then went back
to work. Not long after, Mrs Peckham called again, this
(14:13):
time to tell him to get the marshal and come
back to the house and Selly's testimony, uh contradicts Mary
Peckham's just a little bit, and it's not really anything
terribly important. I just wanted to point it out. He
indicated that he had joined Mrs Peckham and Ross Moore
in entering the house, whereas Mrs Peckham indicated that she
(14:34):
had never gone past the porch. After the Marshal had
a preliminary look at the scene, Selly indicated that the
house was blocked and that he went to the store
to contact business associates about the situation. Yeah, he wanted
to let the people that they had business dealings with
know that uh, Mr Moore had been killed and that
they were gonna have to make some arrangements. Selly was
(14:56):
asked if J. B. Moore had any enemies he knew of,
and he indicated that he had told him that his
brother in law, Sam Moyer had it in for him.
The third witness was Dr J. Clark Cooper. Cooper was
the first physician on the scene after the bodies were discovered.
Cooper described his first access to the bodies, first encountering
(15:19):
the Stillinger girls, who he didn't recognize. He also mentioned
the lamps without their chimneys. Cooper indicated that he didn't
touch the bodies on site. He sort of performed just
a visual assessment at that point. Yeah, he didn't do
uh any real hands on examination. His statement also included
that estimated time of death that we talked about, and
(15:40):
that was based on his observation of the blood and
brain matter on the scene and the level of dryness
and congealment it had achieved. Uh. He was also the
one that introduced the detail that the faces he believed
had been covered after the bludgeoning, and this was based
on the fact that none of the covering fabris were
stuck to the wounds, They had just kind of been
(16:02):
draped over afterwards, and none of those fabrics or articles
of clothing had any holes or damage of any kind
other than normal wear and tear. Witness for was Jesse Moore,
who was Rossmore's wife. Jesse spoke with Mrs Peckham when
she first called for Ross and her statement echoed ed
Sally's regarding what their conversations were like. She also mentioned
(16:24):
that she later entered Josiah's and Sarah's home to retrieve
photographs of the family for the local paper, and she
didn't know of any possible enemies that the family might
have had. Yeah, there are some accounts that suggests that
she had gone in and kind of like posed for pictures,
but those seem like embellishments. She did go in, but
she was trying to get pictures from the household for
(16:46):
the press um so that they could be used in
news stories. Witness number five was Dr F. S. Williams,
And whereas Dr Cooper that we mentioned just a few
moments ago had only done a visual inspection on the
bodies at the crime scene, Dr Williams was the one
that actually examined the bodies. His testimony described the crushed
(17:07):
heads of each victim and their positions in their beds uh.
And he was the one to introduced the idea that
Lena Stillinger had squirmed on the bed after having been struck.
Some people have theorized over the years that Lena had
been sexually assaulted, but Dr williams testimony runs really counter
to that. He indicated that he had investigated the possibility
(17:27):
of a rape, but he didn't find any evidence of
that kind of violation. Yeah, she was the one we mentioned.
She didn't have any undergarments on, and that her night
dress had been shifted up. She may have been the
object of some um, you know, visual stimulation for the killer,
but her body was not in any way um molested
(17:49):
to the best of this doctor's knowledge. Uh. Witness number
six was Edward Landers, and Landers was a neighbor. He
was actually the son of a neighbor. He was staying
a few houses down from the moors at his mother's
house for the summer, and he stated that he had
gone to bed shortly after nine pm on the night
of the murders, but that he had heard a noise
during the night that to him at the time sounded
(18:11):
like people hooting to one another outdoors. And he was
kind of pressed by the examiners over what time this
might have been, and he guessed it was probably around
eleven p m. But he wasn't certain. Uh. And after
the news of the murders broke the next morning, he
began to wonder if the noise that he had heard
had not been people hooting, but in fact a woman moaning.
(18:32):
The seventh witness was rossmore so beside his brother, and
he relayed the events of the morning of the tenth
and how he had come to discover the bodies of
the two styliner girls before exiting the home. He mentioned
that before opened the opening the bedroom door and making
the discovery, nothing in the home seemed like it was
out of place, and he also couldn't offer any information
(18:53):
about possible enemies that the family may have had. Witness
number eight was Fenwick More and this was another More brother.
There were several brothers in the mix here. His testimony
was not particularly illuminating. He indicated that he really didn't
know anything about his brother's business or if he had
any enemies, and he was dismissed from the stand pretty quickly.
(19:14):
The ninth witness was Marshall Hank Horton, and the Marshall's
testimony was really brief. He basically said he had been
contacted by Seally to go into the More home. He
corroborated entering the house with Sally and then again with
the doctors. Witness number ten was Levin Gilder and this
was Josiah's nephew, but he also did not have a
whole lot of information to impart. He had briefly been
(19:36):
considered a suspect because he had some kind of shady
uh happenings in his background. His record was not entirely clean,
but he was cleared pretty early on. Witness eleven was
another More brother, Harry More, and he also had really
nothing new to add in the proceedings. Like Finwick, his
other brother, he had neither knowledge of Jav's business nor
(19:59):
of any post well ill intentions against him. Witness twelve
was Blanche Stillinger, and remember this was Lena and Ainah's
older sister. She was the one that had spoken with
Jsiah over the phone about the girls sleeping over at
the Moorhouse, and she was the one that kind of said, yeah,
I think that will be fine. I will tell my parents.
And the thirteenth witness was Joseph Stillinger, so Lena and
(20:21):
i Dinah's father. He also didn't know of anyone who
might commit such a crime, and he indicated that his
wife had phoned the Moors several times in the morning,
uh the morning that the bodies were found, because she
had expected the girls to be back before school time. Yeah,
this had happened on a Sunday night into the Monday
morning hours, and so she thought the kids were going
to come home and get ready for school, but they didn't,
(20:44):
so they were trying to contact them and getting no answer.
The Laps witness was Charles Moore. This is yet another
more brother. Charles testified to the coroner's jury that he
knew Josiah kept an AX, but when he was questioned,
he couldn't say with certainty that the murder up and
was the one that Josiah owned. He just wasn't sure. H.
(21:04):
He also indicated that it was in fact his brother's
habit to lock the house from the inside at night. Um.
One thing that always kind of rings odd to me
and is not really discussed all that much in a
lot of these is that the whole house was locked,
but somehow the killer or killers got out. So that's
(21:25):
always stayed a little bit of a mystery. Whether they
had a key or not is unclear. Yeah. Well, and
then that gets into me super wondering what lock technology
was like at the time, Like now we have door
knoblocks that you just looted the thing and then you
go out. Well, and there was also you know, uh,
skeleton keys that could open multiple doors were a little
more common still than uh, you know, it just wasn't
(21:45):
quite the same as what we're dealing with today, So,
and that may be one of the reasons that it's
not really talked about that much. It's not that insane
a thing. It's not like, uh, even in some of
the and I'll talk about them briefly at the end,
but even in like some of the sort of supernatural
investigations of it, it doesn't really seem to come up
as like a weird thing, like an entity locked all
(22:07):
the doors. Uh doors are just locked. They don't really
it doesn't get embellished a whole lot. But before we
start talking about suspects and what may have driven someone
to do this, let's have another quick word from a sponsor.
Will take a break from all of this sort of
dark material for just a moment, so to return to
this horrifying subject. There were many early leads in this
(22:28):
case and really no shortage of suspects, but nothing ever
panned out, and this horrific crime is still unsolved. It's
not possible in the scope of a podcast episode to
cover every single suspect, but we're going to talk about
the more high profile ones. Yeah, this really sort of
turned this town on its head, and a lot of
(22:48):
people characterize it as basically making a place where people
would invite a stranger into their home for a meal
and you know, be very open and very friendly, into
a place where suddenly everyone was suspicious of everyone else,
and you know, sort of fear driven suspicion kind of
led their behavior beyond that and as a consequence, a
lot of different people were accused of participating in this crime,
but one of the primary suspects that comes up in
(23:12):
almost any discussion of this case is Frank F. Jones,
and he was an Iowa State senator. He had been
Josiah Moore's boss for many years, but in nineteen eight
More had struck out on his own, opening a farming
implement company, and he took several of their lucrative business
partners with him, including the John Deere company, So Jones
(23:33):
was a little i rate with him from that point on.
There were also rumors that Josiah had had an affair
with jones daughter in law, So Frank Jones and his son,
so the husband of this daughter in law, we're even
accused quite publicly by a detective agency of having hired
a killer named William Mansfield to take out the More family,
(23:57):
and William Mansfield was arrested the murders in nineteen sixteen,
four years after they had taken place. According to Detective
James Newton Wilkerson, who had been the one that had
leveled those accusations against the Joneses uh, he asserted that
Mansfield was in fact a serial killer and that he
also had a cocaine habit. Mansfield was also linked via
(24:20):
Wilkerson's research, to other brutal murders, including those of his
own wife, child, and his wife's family in nineteen fourteen,
so that would have been a couple of years after Veliska,
as well as murders in Kansas and Colorado, and in
all of these cases, the victims were bludgeoned with an
ax in homes where the windows and mirrors were all covered,
(24:40):
similar to the morse Lings. Detective Wilkerson was so convinced
that Mansfield had been hired by Jones that he posted
flyers all over town with Mansfield's face on them that read,
this is the axe murderer he murdered the more family
at Veliska. The hypocrite whose dirty money paid for Hellis
(25:00):
job wants your support for the state Senate. Will he
get it? So? I'm sure delighted Jones. Uh, and I
have to say, I think, if you have just accused
a man of hiring someone to kill a man who
has made you angry, making him angry and this way
seems like a really bold and foolish move. Um. But
(25:23):
while Mansfield does seem like an obvious solution to who
killed the Moors, and while Detective Wolkerson really seemed for
the rest of his life that he was certain that
what that Mansfield was the killer. Uh. Mansfield had an
art alibi for the time of the Veliska murders that
placed him in Illinois. There was some payroll happenings that
(25:46):
indicated that he had had been working there at the time.
There were some eyewitnesses that placed Mansfield in Vliska and
not Illinois, but none of those UH eye witness accounts
for ever substantiated, and Mansfield was eventually set After his release,
Mansfield sued Wilkerson for slander and he was awarded more
than two thousand dollars. Wilkerson alleged that Jones had in
(26:10):
fact managed to use his position of power to secure
Mansfield's release. Yeah, he also kind of blamed Jones for
orchestrating the decision In Mansfield's favor during the slander case,
and he suggested that Frank Jones set up the next
suspect to kind of take the fall, and that next
(26:31):
suspect was Reverend George Kelly, who was a preacher who
had moved to Macedonia, Iowa in nineteen twelve. So after
the trail went cold with Mansfield, Kelly was arrested and
charged with the More murders in nineteen seventeen, and he
was in the Liska for the children's day activities and
he left town the next morning. He was even alleged
(26:52):
at one point to have spoken of the murders on
the train out of town, which is early in the morning,
before the bodies had even been discovered. He also returned
to Veliska a week after the murders and he pretended
to be a detective from Scotland Yard to gain entry
into the More home. He actually had some mental problems
that were on record, and Kelly was considered to be
(27:15):
a sexual deviant, obsessed with sex, and known to have
been a peeping tom. There have been some theories about
the rolled up bacon slab that was found downstairs in
the bedroom had been used as a sexual aid by
the killer, and that made people really willing to connect
the dots to to Kelly, who had this reputation. Unlike Mansfield,
(27:39):
Kelly actually did confess to the murders, and in his
confession he wrote, I killed the children upstairs first and
the children downstairs last. I knew God wanted me to
do it this way. Slay utterly came to my mind,
and I picked up the axe, went into the house
and killed them. So that makes it seem like an
(27:59):
an in shut case. But it all fell apart. He
wound up recanting his confession, and the witnesses that initially
claimed he talked to them on the train about the
murders before it was public knowledge all changed their story.
He was also a really small man, at five ft
two inches tall, and he weighed less than a hundred
and twenty pounds, So the idea of him being able
(28:20):
to deliver the crushing blows that killed the family was
a little difficult to support. I imagine at that height
it might have been also difficult for the upswings of
the axe to hit the ceiling. Yes, I couldn't find anything.
I thought about that as well, And I couldn't find
anything substantial. I'm sure we could do it if with
(28:41):
a little bit more time to find out what the
height of the ceilings were in the length of the axe.
But I did not have time to work out the
math on that. And while somebody that size could probably
easily until children, Mr Moore was like six ft tall
and weighed about two hundred pounds, you know, he was
a full grown man, so it seemed like that would
have been a little bit more of a stretch for
(29:04):
Kelly to be able to manage. Kelly was actually tried
twice for this crime. The first trial resulted in a
hung jury, and in the second trial the jury freed
him because there was really no evidence other than sort
of the suspicion that he was weird and deviant and
might be the kind of person to do these things.
(29:26):
The third suspect was Henry Lee Moore, and in May
of nineteen thirteen, almost a year after the murders, a
federal investigator on the case named m W. Mccloudy announced
that he had solved it, as well as twenty two
other similar cases. Mcclardy believed all of the slings to
be the work of serial killer Henry Lee Moore, who
(29:48):
was not actually relation to the More family. It was
not yet another More brother. Yeah, it was just coincidental
that they had the last name. UH. A few months
after the Veliska incident, Henry Moore was convicted of murdering
his mother and grandmother in Missouri. The brutality of the
victims was quite similar. They were legend with an ax
(30:10):
and UH. It should be pointed out that one of
the things that differs is that he was allegedly motivated
by money in this he was hoping to gain their
assets after they died. As the Valiska investigation had gone on,
multiple similar acts murders were uncovered in Colorado, Illinois, and Kansas,
(30:32):
and some of these were crimes Mansfield had also been
linked to by other investigators, but McClary thought they were
all Henry Moore's doing. More actually served thirty six years
of his life sentence for the deaths of his mother
and grandmother. UH, and then he was paroled in nineteen
forty nine. UH. He ended up having his sentence commuted
(30:54):
some years later when he was in his eighties. UM.
He kind of falls off the public record after that.
No one really knows, like where he went or how
he died, but he was never formally charged for the
murders in Valiska, despite mccloudy's insistence that he was clearly
the one who had done it. In addition to these
three high profile suspects, there were so so many others,
(31:16):
And initially it was because of the shocking nature of
the hot side. Citizens of Aliska suspected anyone who wasn't
from around there. Some of them were legitimately suspect, although
not not ever actually linked to the murders, and some
of them were simply guilty of being strangers. And I
wanted to make a note about the similarities among the
(31:37):
murders UH that were discovered in other states and other areas,
and the use of an AX as the murder weapon.
It's worth considering just food for thought that this was
a time when almost every home would have an X,
often readily accessible UH. Mike dash, who was a writer
that wrote an article for the Smithsonian in twelve about
(31:58):
the Valiska killings, makes the point that this sort of
could be considered a weapon of convenience for the times,
like in the Midwest, if you just wanted to go
on a killing spree, an act was pretty easy to
get a hold of. Additionally, as is the case often
with high profile crimes, confessors came out of the woodwork
for decades. People were confessing to the crime well into
(32:21):
the nineteen thirties, although many of these confessions got details
wildly wrong. Yeah, you know that. That happens with any
big UH murder case. Or there are people that confess
that could not have done it for whatever reasons, but those,
of course, we're pretty easily dismissed in most cases. Um
(32:44):
So jumping to sort of the modern day UH in
The house where J. B. More and his family were
killed was purchased by Darwin and Martha Lynn, and the
Lins restored the house to its nineteen twelve condition and
the residents was placed on the National Historic Places Regis Stree.
Prior to the Lens purchase, the house had passed through
many hands of ownership and it had been repeatedly renovated,
(33:07):
so it was really quite a significant restoration effort. Today
you can tour the home. It's actually a museum and
for a little less than five hundred dollars a night
you can book sleepovers in the murder house. It's actually
one of the main draws of Valisco, which is pretty
rural town. If you want a book on the anniversary
(33:27):
of the murders, though, there's a lottery, and there have
been many discussions and debates through the years about whether
it's right for a business to grow out of such
a tragedy and so much brutality. These debates probably go
on for as long as the museum is open. Yeah,
I mean a lot of articles if you search for
this that talk about it kind of from the modern standpoint.
(33:48):
They really do discuss kind of that this is a
problem and something that continues to be debated, and and
they kind of look at like the Valisca murder houses,
this odd money making been sort of but you know,
that's something that you can draw your own conclusions and
have your own opinions of um. Paranormal investigators and ghost
(34:09):
hunters have of course kind of flocked to this house
hoping to get some activity that they can record or discuss.
It's been featured on a lot of numerous television reality
and making the air quotes shows, uh, And there have
been several documentaries made about the murders that are less
about sensationalizing it and making a haunted house, a ghost story,
but really just trying to break down the actual crime. Um.
(34:33):
I kind of feel like a broken record when I
do this wrap up, because we do it for almost
any of the cases where they're go unsolved. But odds
are that this one is not ever going to be solved,
and the further away we get from the date of
when it actually happened, the less and less evidence there
will be to go on. So it will remain a
draw for crime history buffs and visitors to the Valiska
(34:54):
murder House. Uh, probably for quite some time. But that
is the Valiska Murderer, which, as I said, we're requested
by a large number of people. Very unsettling and disturbing
to think about. Uh, but you know, good Halloween fodder.
And again it is a huge tragedy. I mean, like
I said, I'm not a kids person, but reading these
(35:16):
testimonies about what happened to these children was so rough
for me. Yeah, I kept I kept like going, like,
let's go hug a kitty. I having to go out
to cartoon for fifteen minutes, just anything to kind of
break the intensity of that. Well. And in addition to
how I got genuinely creeped out sitting here when you
said all the mirrors were covered up with their clothing. Um.
The part about their you know, the parents of the
(35:38):
children who were visiting the home calling over there because
they were expecting them to be home for school, that
really got to me. It's it's very upsetting to think about.
I mean, these were, you know, kids that were part
of someone's lives and it was just it could be
it's one of those this could happen to anyone kinds
of things. Um. And I think especially when these kinds
of crimes happen in rural community, these that were very
(36:01):
you know, friendly and and pretty free of this kind
of thing. It's really shocking. It kind of reminds me
of when I first read In Cold Blood by Dream
Capodi as a kid, because it's kind of a similar
There's some parallels there. Um. It's hard to think about
what a mental shift that has to be for the
entire community to be like one day life is one
way and the next day you see it all completely differently. Yeah,
(36:22):
there was a similar actually even at the same similar
time period, mass murder in the tiny, tiny rural town
that I grew up in, and it had similar horrific
elements and similar like family members found in their beds,
and I was like, wow, this is uncanny when I
got her outline. Can we move on to some perhaps
less disturbing listener mail and so much less disturbing. I
(36:44):
have two short pieces because I know this episode has
been a little bit lengthy. UH about Ethan Allen? And
the first one is from UH our listener Hannah, and
she says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. My paternal grandfather made
a hobby of tracing his family ancestry. My other three
grandparents have straightforward lineages, but Papa's family was rather more convoluted.
(37:05):
One of the things he discovered and is searching was
that he was descended from Ethan Allen. And besides old,
perhaps less than reliable records, the evidence of this is
actually in the names of the men in my father's family,
back and back and back. The men of one of
my grandfather's lines all have the middle name Allen and
variations thereupon, in honor of perhaps their most famous progenitor.
(37:25):
It's such a cool I always love it when people
have connections to history like that. Um, we got a
lot after a FIDUA episode and then there is another
Ethan Allen one from our listener, Vincent, and he says
love the podcast. And for some reason, I never wrote
you all before, probably because I usually listened in the car,
But today I happened to be at my desk when
(37:46):
I finished listening to part two of your Ethan Allen podcast.
I wanted to let you know how I first learned
of him. I didn't learn his name from the furniture store.
We didn't have one near me that I knew of
until I was in high school. I actually learned his
name from a box of pencils. I always wanted to
draw comics as a kid, and I still draw them now.
And once saw a photo of Charles M. Schultz's desk
and got a good look at the brand of pencils
(38:08):
he used, So I bought a box the next time
I was in an office supply store to get school supplies.
On my box of Dixon Ticonderoga Number two pencils is
the story of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.
I kind of love that. I love that he got
his connection to Ethan Ellen one three pencils, which is
sort of charming. And to that there's a Charles Schultz connection,
(38:28):
because perhaps one day we will discuss peanuts on the podcast,
if you would like to. Oh, and I want to
mention briefly before I go to that. I know we've
gotten some flak over our pronunciation of Bella Lagosi's name.
I will tell you why. It's because when I pronounce
it correctly in the Hungarian language, which is Bela, I
sound like the count from Sesame Street and just or
(38:50):
like I've mentioned to one of our fans that posted
about it on Facebook, like or some Hungarian variation of
Tina Phey's character from Muppets. Most wanted it, but comes
very comedic, and I did not want to do that well,
and mine becomes comedic in an entirely different way. That
embarrasses me so much that I'm not even going to
try to say it, because somehow every ounce of Southern
(39:12):
drawl that I have, so I can see that a
three syllable word, I could understand how that would happen.
And I will say that I watched a lot of
footage of him, like in interviews and stuff whatever I
could get my hands on, and he seemed to not
mind when people pronounced it Bella, so I was not
worried too much about it. Yeah, sorry, I'm sorry if
that dismayed anyone who actually speaks Hungarian and thought you
(39:33):
yol well, and having having, for my part, having mostly
seen uh like documentary footage about him that was made
and produced in the United States. There are a lot
of American actors and commentators who pronounced it that way.
So I genuinely was unaware that there was a different
way to pronounce it, and so we got into that discussion. Yeah,
(39:55):
I would sound like the count. I really do. Uh.
So I apologize if that bothered anybody. I made that
decision based on my desire cannot make it a comedy.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com,
slash missed in History at missed in History on Twitter,
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, Interest dot com,
(40:17):
slash missed in History, and you can check out our
selection of missed in History goodies at missed in History
dot spreadshirt dot com. And you would like to get
a T shirt or a mug or any number of
other fun accessories with our logo and some other fun
designs on them. You would like to learn a little
bit more about a related topic to what we talked
about today, go to our parents site how stuff Works.
(40:40):
If you type in the phrase pivotal murders in the
search bar, you're going to get an article. It's pretty new,
called top ten Historically Pivotal Murders, and it talks about
some murders that kind of did things. Uh, they had
an effect similar to what this one had, where it
really shifted the way a community or you know, uh,
even the world looked at things after it had happened.
(41:00):
So you can do something that at our website at
our parents site, how stuff works dot com. You can
also visit us at mist in history dot com or
show notes all of our episodes archive and the occasional
fund blog posts. We hope you visit us at mt
in history dot com and hous dot for more on
(41:21):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!