Eight Dead in One House. Every Mirror Was Covered. The Villisca Axe Murders.

On the morning of June 10, 1912, a woman in the small town of Villisca, Iowa, noticed that her neighbors, the Moore family, had not come out to do their chores.

The house was silent. The curtains were drawn. The doors were locked.

She called Josiah Moore's brother, Ross, who had a key.

What he found inside would make Villisca famous for the rest of the century, for all the wrong reasons.

Children's Day

Josiah Moore, 43, was a successful businessman in Villisca, a town of about 2,000 people in southwest Iowa. He and his wife, Sarah, 39, were well known and well liked.

They had four children: Herman, 11, Mary Katherine, 10, Arthur, 7, and Paul, 5.

Sunday, June 9, 1912, was Children's Day at the Presbyterian church, and Sarah had helped organize the program. Mary Katherine invited two friends, sisters Lena Stillinger, 11, and Ina Stillinger, 8, to spend the night.

The program ended at about 9:30 p.m. The Moores and the two girls walked home and were inside by about 10.

Nobody saw any of them alive again.

The discovery

On the morning of June 10, neighbor Mary Peckham noticed the house was strangely quiet. When nobody answered, she called Ross Moore.

Ross unlocked the door and went in. In the downstairs bedroom, he found the bodies of the two Stillinger girls. He sent for the town marshal.

Upstairs, the marshal found the rest of the family. All eight people in the house had been killed with an axe while they slept.

Doctors estimated the murders happened between midnight and 2 a.m.

The axe belonged to Josiah Moore. It was found in the downstairs bedroom where the girls slept.

The strange details

The crime scene was unlike anything the town had seen, and some of the details have never been explained.

Every mirror in the house had been covered with a cloth or a piece of clothing.

The windows were covered too, some of them with clothes, as if the killer did not want to be seen from outside.

Upstairs, a lamp had been left with its glass chimney taken off and its wick turned down low, giving just enough light to see.

A slab of bacon, about four pounds, had been taken from the icebox and left on the floor near the axe.

In the kitchen, a bowl of bloody water sat on the table, as if someone had washed their hands. A plate of food was untouched.

In the attic, investigators found two cigarette butts, suggesting someone had waited up there until the family fell asleep.

In the barn, an impression in the hay beside a knothole suggested someone had watched the house.

The crowd

What happened next destroyed most of the evidence.

Word spread quickly. The town telephone office sent out an alert. Within hours, hundreds of people had gathered, and many walked through the house. Some touched the bodies. Some reportedly took souvenirs.

It took hours before the scene was secured. The Iowa National Guard eventually set up a perimeter. The bodies were not removed until late that night.

There were no fingerprints worth testing. Any footprints were trampled. Whatever the killer had left behind was mixed with the traces of a town.

The preacher

Many people were suspected over the years. Only one was ever put on trial.

Reverend George Kelly was an English-born traveling preacher who had been in Villisca for the Children's Day services. He left town on an early train on the morning of June 10, before the bodies were found.

Kelly was known as an odd man. He later wrote letters to investigators about the case and was said to have spoken about details of the murders.

He was arrested in 1917, five years after the killings. After hours of questioning, he signed a confession. He later took it back, saying it had been forced out of him.

His first trial ended with a hung jury, eleven jurors to one in favor of acquittal. At a second trial in November 1917, he was acquitted.

Other theories

A private detective hired in the case argued that a local businessman and political rival of Josiah Moore had paid a hired killer to do it. The man accused of being the hired killer was arrested, but a grand jury refused to indict him, and payroll records placed him in another state at the time. Neither man was ever charged with the murders, so they are not named here.

Other investigators noted that several families had been killed with axes in their sleep across the Midwest around the same time, some with similar details, such as covered windows. Some researchers believe a single traveling killer may have been responsible for many of them. It has never been proved.

The house today

The Moore house still stands. In the 1990s, it was restored to how it looked in 1912, and today it is open to visitors, including people who pay to stay the night.

Nobody was ever convicted of the murders.

What we still don't know

Who was waiting in the attic?

Why did the killer cover every mirror and window, turn the lamp down low, and leave a slab of bacon by the axe?

Was it someone from Villisca, or a stranger passing through on the railroad?

And was this one terrible night, or one stop in a longer trail of murders that has never been fully traced?