The bloody Villisca Axe Murders have stumped authorities for over a century, despite numerous suspects, two trials, and a confession.
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At the end of a quiet street in Villisca, Iowa, there sits an old white frame house. Up the street, there are a group of churches, and a few blocks away is a park that faces a middle school.
The old white house looks like many of the others that fill the neighborhood, but unlike them, it lies abandoned. The house emits no light or sound, and upon closer inspection, the doors are found to be tightly boarded up. A small sign out front reads: "Villisca Axe Murder House."
Despite its ominous air, the little white house was once filled with life. Life that was harshly stamped out one warm summer's night in 1912, when a mysterious stranger broke in, and viciously bludgeoned its eight sleeping inhabitants to death. The event would come to be known as the Villisca axe murders and would baffle law enforcement for over a century.
On June 10, 1912, the Moore family was sleeping peacefully in their beds. Joe and Sarah Moore were asleep upstairs, while their four children were resting in a room down the hall. In a guest room on the first floor were two girls, the Stillinger sisters, who had come for a sleepover.
Shortly after midnight, a stranger entered through the unlocked door (not an uncommon sight in what was considered a small, safe, friendly town), and plucked an oil lamp from a nearby table, rigging it to burn so low it supplied light for barely one person.
On one hand, the stranger held the lamp, lighting the way through the house.
In his other, he held an axe.
Ignoring the sleeping girls downstairs, the stranger made his way up the stairs, guided by the lamp, and a seemingly unerring knowledge of the home's layout. He crept past the room with the children, and into Mr. and Mrs. Moore's bedroom. Then he made his way to the children's room, and finally back down to the bedroom downstairs.
Then, as quickly and silently as he had arrived, the stranger left, taking keys from the home, and locking the door behind him.
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