The 1912 Villisca Axe Murders Blog

Pen Pals & the Axe Murders

Rev. Lyn George Jacklin Kelly

By Dr. Edgar V. Epperly

Late in December of 1913 Jessamine Hodgson, a woman in her early thirties, answered this advertisement in the Omaha World Herald:

"Girl stenographer typewriter wanted by gentleman for literary and artistic work on problem novel (high class) for publication in east.  Spare time work, some can be done at home, some at employer’s.  Must be interested in literature and fine arts; well educated; confidential work.  Must be willing to pose as model for book pictures, as required by artists.  Strictly honorable dealings.  Liberal to right party. Reply confidentially to 0680 World Herald."

That answer to the blind ad provoked great excitement in Reverend Lyn George J. Kelly, a Methodist minister in Winner, South Dakota.  Pastor Kelly, suspected by some as being the 1912 Villisca, Iowa Axe Murderer, had, that Fall, been expelled from the Omaha Presbyterian Seminary.  Jobless, he reverted to his Methodist roots by accepting the Methodist pulpit in Winner.  Arriving in late Fall, 1913 he had just settled into home and church before placing an advertisement in the Omaha newspaper.

Jessamine’s reply surely induced a shiver of anticipation in Kelly’s disturbed psyche and he lost no time in responding.  His letter began:

“This is Friday morning, January 2--I received your letter this morning--and I am hurrying to reply at once.  This letter is strictly and mutually secret and confidential.”

We do not know what the body of his letter contained but in the words of the Grand Jury that indicted him for sending it through the mail:

“That said letter was obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy and was so obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy as to be offensive to this honorable court and improper to be spread upon the record thereof.”

The court did include Kelly’s concluding sentence:

“I am a favorite with everyone, especially with the girls, they like me, they trust me and I have never wronged one yet. ~Lyn Geo. J. Kelly, Reply quickly and freely.  Replies treated secret.”

He then affixed a two cent stamp and mailed  it to:

Miss Jessamine Hodgson [street address omitted], Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Jessamine apparently read this four-page epistle with less anticipation than the Rev. Kelly had when he wrote it.  She failed to heed Kelly’s admonition to keep the letter confidential.  Instead she took it to her minister, Reverend Jones.  He in turn contacted Deputy United States Marshal W. A. Groneweg.

Together the two men hatched a plan to send Kelly a bogus reply.  Jessamine wrote this response to Kelly, which Jones and Groneweg then edited.   Jessamine’s edited letter has been lost, or at least is undiscovered.  Whatever was written in response to Kelly’s first letter successfully stimulated him to draft a feverish reply. 

Dated Friday afternoon, January 23, 1914, Kelly opened with another plea for secrecy:

“Please Jessamine, treat this and all our other communications as strictly secret.  I faithfully promise you I shall never utter a word about your correspondence or your relations with me.  Our relations together of work and pleasure shall be kept a secret, with me forever.  I want you to be faithful to me, Jessamine.  Never breathe one word of what we do together alone.”

Again the body of the four-page letter was judged by the Grand Jury to be so “obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy as to be improper to spread upon the record.” And, again they allowed the closing section into the record.

Kelly ended with a post script:

“When you write, just tell me you will be willing to pose in the nude or perfectly bare.  Then you can also address me as “Dear Lyn” as we have begun to be friends, and sign “Jessamine” at end.  Nothing but the very best kindnesses awaits you.”

Too excited to wait for a reply, Kelly sent another letter on Sunday afternoon, January 25, 1914.  As in the other letters a bland opening paragraph was followed by an “obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy" middle, which in turn proceeded a rather mundane ending.  Kelly closed this four-page letter:

“Now I am only human.  I must not boast, sometime I may do wrong.  I may yield to temptation sometime, who can ever tell?  None of us know what we will do.  I am eagerly awaiting your picture and letter. (This is certainly a clue as to what was in Jessamine’s bogus response.)  I hope you will come to Norfolk (Nebraska) to be with me 2 or 3 days anyway.  I will be as good to you as I can, but we may fall in love with one another if we work long enough.  I will be in Omaha soon to stay.  We will meet at the depot and then go out to supper and so on.  Say, won’t it be just fine to go out together up there to supper, to moving pictures, etc.?  We won’t go anywhere but the best places.  I am sure you will keep whatever is done between us always a strict secret.  I will.  Affectionately, Lyn.”

Alas, Lyn was never to step down from the Omaha train into the arms of Jessamine.  Instead, on the 30th of January, 1914, Walter McQueen, Deputy United States Marshal, stepped into the small office where Kelly supplemented his meager preaching salary by offering stenographic services.

McQueen made small talk until a very nervous Kelly asked him, “What do you want?”  McQueen answered, “I guess it is you I want.”  He arrested Kelly for sending obscene letters through the mail.

It would be four three years later in the fall of 1917 that Lyn George J. Kelly would find himself sitting in the Montgomery County Courtroom standing trial for the 1912 Villisca ax murders of eight, and specifically the violent death of 12-year-old Lena Stillinger, whose young body was found nude below the waist and sexually posed after her death.

Villisca Ax Murder Suspects: Andy Sawyer Nearly Talked his Way Into Jail

 

Andy Sawyer: A Serious Suspect
By Dr. Edgar V. Epperly

June 10, 1912 was a cool, misty Monday morning, as Russell Lash walked beside the softly breathing locomotive engine in the Creston, Iowa, railroad yard.  Russ looked up and there, casually leaning against the tender, was a tall, lanky, raw-boned fellow.  Introducing himself as Andy Sawyer, he asked for a job.  Lash, a member of Tom Dyer's pile driving crew, took him to the boss.  Dyer appraised the stranger as someone who could do a day's work and, when Andy assured him he had experience operating a steam engine, he hired him on the spot.

After a quick breakfast, Dyer sat with his legs dangling out the bunk car door as the stubby little work train chugged west.  Sawyer sat beside him cleaning his muddy shoes with a pocket knife.  Between 7:00 and 8:00 am they passed through Villisca, Iowa which, for perhaps another hour, would be like all other small town way-stations on the Chicago Burlington & Quincy line.  That would soon change with the discovery of the axe murders of all eight members of the Moore family and two Stillinger girls.  By then the pile driving crew would have arrived at Red Oak, travelled up the Cumberland branch line, and stopped just outside of Greenfield where a bridge was under construction.

Once their day's work had commenced, Andy quickly demonstrated that his claim of steam engine experience had been a fabrication to get the job.  Within an hour Dyer could tell he had never operated a pile driver.  Rather than break the machine or kill someone, Dyer shifted his new employee to a simpler task.  Both Andy and Russ Lash were set to work sharpening piles so those large poles could be driven more easily into the river muck.

A crew building a bridge over the Nodaway River. 

Sawyer proved as skillful with an axe as he was inept running a pile driver.  Quick as a cat he enlivened his task by talking to the inert piles as he chopped their ends to a point.  Addressing them as if they were alive, he told them he was, "...going to chop off their heads!"  Lash was also surprised to observe that Andy's lips were always in motion as he muttered softly to himself.  All of the members of the work gang also agreed that their new co-worker had unusual eyes.  "Glassy, queer looking and mad all the time," is how Lash described Andy's eyes.

Within twenty-four hours of being hired, Andy Sawyer had alienated the entire work gang.  He was unsociable to the degree of being unfriendly.  He always sat alone during breaks and ate by himself.  He did not ride to and from the job site with the gang, but preferred to ride alone on the engine or tender.  Always muttering to himself, he cursed his work mate Lash as they whacked away at the huge pilings.  He also seemed inordinately fond of his axe.  All gang members agreed he was a skillful axe man, possibly because his axe never left his side.  If he was not using it, he was sharpening it.  Even at bedtime, he carried it with him to the bunk car.  In fact two gang members claimed he put the axe under the covers with him when he went to sleep.

As with several Villisca murder suspects, Andy's eccentric behavior would have been forgotten had it not been for Iowa's worst mass homicide.  Dyer's crew learned about the murder late Monday afternoon when they read the Creston daily paper in Fontenelle, Iowa.  Andy was especially excited by the murder and talked of little else.  He told some gang members that he had been in Villisca the night of the murder and left town to avoid suspicion.  On Tuesday the 12th of June, the work train passed through Villisca and Andy pointed out the neighborhood where the murder occurred and described the route the murderer took out of town.

 

This easy familiarity with the murder, coupled with his appearance in the Creston switch yards early on the morning the murder was discovered convinced the pile driving crew that Andy was the guilty man.  Unshaven and wet to the knees when he had signed on, his co-workers accepted his tale that he had been in Villisca and beat his way east after the murder.  Russell Lash told boss Dyer he was afraid of Sawyer and would no longer work with him.  Dyer, also being suspicious of his new employee contacted Montgomery County sheriff Oren Jackson suggesting that Sawyer was the Villisca axe murderer.

On Tuesday evening June 18th, just over a week after the murder, Sheriff Jackson met Dyer and his crew in the Red Oak, Iowa rail yard after work.  The crew had just sat down for dinner when the sheriff called Sawyer out from the dining car.  Jackson and another investigator talked with Sawyer for some ten minutes before releasing him.  Sawyer was unnerved by this confrontation.  He looked scared, was very nervous, and could eat no supper.  Muttering, "that's awful," he drank a cup of coffee and left the supper table.  In fact, he left the work gang.  He quit the next morning asking Dyer to have his time sent to an Omaha address.

Subsequent investigation revealed that he had returned to his wife and children on their homestead claim in Lark, North Dakota.  W. S. Gordon who had been assigned to the Villisca case by the Burns Detective Agency was incensed that sheriff Jackson had failed to hold Andy when he had him.  In September, 1912, Gordon was convinced the Villisca killer was one of a trio of likely suspects: the lace salesman, Roy Van Gilder or Andy Sawyer.

In mid-September Gordon and Montgomery County attorney W. C. Ratcliff embarked on a long journey to confirm or disprove the story Sawyer had told Sheriff Jackson.  First, they went to Burlington, Iowa, where they interviewed Tom Dyer and several members of his pile driving crew.  To a man they were convinced of Sawyer's guilt.  Then it was off to Lark, North Dakota, where they interviewed Andy, his wife Anna, and his father-in-law Royal Worthing who also was homesteading a few miles away from the Sawyer claim.  Andy denied  his co-workers' accusations, claiming all his talk about the murder came from newspaper accounts he had read, and knowing Villisca from having grown up in the vicinity.  He also carefully traced his itinerary during months of wandering just before the murder.  Confident, they could find him if needed, Ratcliff and Gordon retraced his pre-murder travels to see if his alibi checked out.

Their first stop was in Minneapolis-St. Paul where an Uncle, Henry S. Sawyer confirmed Andy had stayed with him.  Beyond this, Uncle Henry was not a particularly helpful character witness as he said Andy was a worthless tramp who was brutal to horses.  From the twin cities, Andy had traveled on to Missouri, then Des Moines, and finally Chariton, Iowa about a week before the murder.  In Chariton he stayed with a cousin, Miss Florence Hall, and left on June 8th for Osceola, Iowa.  On Sunday night June 9th, the night the murder was committed, he was in Osceola with another hobo.  Stopped by the city marshal, the two were told to hop a  freight out of town or be arrested for vagrancy.  The vagabonds swung aboard a timed freight at 10:11 p.m. and arrived in Creston between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., Monday morning June 10, 1912.

Ratcliff and Gordon interviewed both Florence Hall and the Osceola Marshal who confirmed Andy's story.  Consequently Andy Sawyer joined several dozen others as a discarded murder suspect.

Of the many early suspects, Sawyer seemed the most viable.  An anonymous member of the 1917 Grand Jury investigating the case was quoted, "In my mind, his (Andy Sawyer) is the most reasonable clue that has been investigated since the grand jury has been in session.  This man was mentally unbalanced."  At least one student of the murder offers Andy as the most plausible candidate for this infamous true crime.  While her arguments in defense of his involvement are interesting, she was handicapped by not having access to the State of Iowa archives which include the several interviews corroborating Andy's movements prior to the murder.

Andy Sawyer is certainly the only real suspect examined in the summer of 1912.  Still, the Osceola Marshal was quite clear in his memory of shooing Andy out of town on the night of the murder.   What appears to have happened was that a disturbed young man talked a great deal about the murder.  This talk was drawn from his familiarity with Villisca and his retention of newspaper accounts of the unsolved murder.   His braggadocio (empty boasting) also frightened and convinced his co-workers that he must be the Villisca killer even though subsequent investigation placed him some 75 miles east of Villisca when the murder was committed.

Did a Family Member Murder the Moores in Villisca?

Minnie Moore.

Brothers-in-Law in Trouble with the Law?
By Dr. Edgar V. Epperly

1912 Villisca, Iowa axe murder victims Joe and Sara Moore's two errant brothers-in-law, Sam Moyer and Roy Van Gilder were the only family members to attract official scrutiny.  Joe Stillinger, father of victims Lena and Ina, was never more than the target of unfounded rumors.  Nor was Fen Moore, Joe's brother, ever viewed as a serious suspect.  Only brothers-in-law Moyer and Van Gilder became "persons of interest".

Samuel Moyer had married Joe's sister Anna Moore several years before the murder.  He was a carpenter by trade and had a sister Cora and brother Gum who still lived near Villisca.  Taciturn, if not surly, in manner, he did not appear to have been abusive.

Early in his marriage he drifted away from home without telling anyone.  Then some six months later he returned.  Three years before the murder he left again without a farewell.  In neither of these two separations had he asked for a divorce.  Rather, it appeared he was a roamer who could not tolerate the obligations of marriage.

Though separated from his family, he had not broken all lines of communication.  While in Oregon he wrote his second daughter Marie.  Later he wrote his wife.  His letter to his wife contained money which he directed towards their rent and his lodge dues.  It is to be hoped his long-suffering wife followed only half of his directive.

About a year after his second desertion, Anna his wife died.  Joe Moore's sister Minnie in a newspaper interview said Anna had died of a broken heart.  As an aside, it should be noted that Minnie, who lived in Omaha when the murder occurred, was not reticent in sharing her opinions with the press.

In fact, her public comments had a very pernicious effect on how the murder has been understood.  Minnie is the primary source for the legend that the killer or killers were hiding in a closet when the Moores came home from church.

She picked up this tale from a Kansas City Post reporter named Hoban.  Hoban fancied he saw a heel print and a partially crushed cardboard box in the downstairs bedroom closet.  Hoban theorized that the killer had crouched in that closet waiting until all were asleep.

Undertaker Wolfe and all investigators first on the scene dismissed this theory, because the crushed box was sitting on three perfectly intact suit boxes which should have been mashed flat had a person sat on them.

Minnie was satisfied with the newspaper reporter's story and blithely told the local press that the killer hid in a closet.  Perhaps because of her relationship to the victims, her assertions were quite persuasive to Villisca citizens.

James Newton Wilkerson.

Burns Detective James N. Wilkerson used this theory to place killers in three closets.  His elaborate closet theory continues to flourish, perpetrated by hordes of paranormal investigators who have flocked to the house during the past decade.  They say they find laughing children in the house and an evil eminence lurking in the upstairs crawl space where Wilkerson placed his prime suspect William Mansfield.

At least one group of investigators went so far as to name William as the evil sprit they found.  This in spite of documents and sworn testimony in the Iowa State archives proving Bill Mansfield was working in Illinois when the murder occurred.  It is too bad Minnie Moore turned a newspaper reporter's sensational rumor into local truth.  Sadder, criminal in fact, that Wilkerson ignored documentary evidence to perpetuate that fiction.

Perhaps it is time to pick up Sam Moyer's trail.  When the murder occurred, everyone agreed police should locate Sam and make him prove an alibi.  After all, Harry Moore told authorities his brother Joe had said Sam Moyer was the only enemy he had in the world.  Only a few days after the murder, Sam was located in Nehawka, Nebraska.

Detectives Delaney and Buel hired Bert McCaull to drive them to Nebraska.  The trio had just passed Glenwood, Iowa, when Bert, driving at his usual breakneck pace, put their car in a ditch.  No one was injured, but the car suffered a broken wheel.

As luck would have it, a Glenwood dentist owned a car of the same make and model and happily lent them a wheel so they could be on their way.  Once in Nebraska, it took only a short time to clear Sam.  Several of his friends confirmed his claim that he had been in Nehawka both Saturday and Sunday on the murder weekend.  With that the detectives struck another name from their list of suspects.

From the beginning Roy Van Gilder was perceived as an unlikely suspect.  He was Sara Montgomery Moore's brother-in-law, having married her sister Mary years ago when the family was still in Illinois.  Roy hadn't been in Villisca for fifteen years.

Joe had met him only once or twice over the years and it was doubtful they would recognize each other had they met on the street.  Roy's son Lee testified at the coroner's inquest that he had not seen his father for several years.  He didn't know where he was and was confident his mother also didn't know his whereabouts.

The case against Van Gilder was based on three factors.   First, it was widely suspected that he had been abusive to his wife and family.  Secondly, it was rumored that after years of absence, he had been seen in Villisca the weekend of the murder.  Mrs. Fred McIntyre of Red Oak claimed she had seen him before the murder in Elliott, a neighboring town.

The redoubtable Minnie Moore resurfaced, giving an interview to the Des Moines Register and Leader.  This paper printed a garbled account that combined information about Sam Moyer and Roy Van Gilder.  It reported that Van Gilder had appeared in Villisca on Saturday, June 8th.  He had called on the Moores but was refused entrance to their  house.

By June 10, he was nowhere to be found and the paper reported a dragnet had been launched to find him.  The third and final reason Roy lingered as a suspect was that he couldn't be found.  No one in Villisca had the least idea where he was living.

While the search for him proceeded, investigators quashed the rumor of his being in town on the murder weekend.  Detective Tobie of the Burns Detective Agency quickly disposed of the Elliot sighting, and Roy's front door confrontation with Joe and Sara Moore proved to be the product of an over zealous reporter.

In December 1912, six months after the murder, Roy was discovered living in Illinois.  Investigators needed only a few questions directed at friends and neighbors to prove he was no closer to Villisca on Sunday June 9, 1912, than he had been in the previous 15 years.

So it was that Joe and Sara's brothers-in-law joined a growing congregation of former suspects in the notorious Villisca ax murder case.

Did a Bearded Bulgarian Lace Salesman Swing the Murder Axe in Villisca?

 

M. J. Rourney: The Salesman Suspect
By Dr. Edgar V. Epperly

He looked like a hard character to the night clerk of Villisca, Iowa's Ingman Hotel when he asked for a room on Friday night, June 7, 1912.  She and her daughter agreed it had been a good idea to tell him they were full even though several rooms remained unrented.

Perhaps used to such treatment, the bearded and mustached fellow trudged on down the street to the Fisher Hotel.  Not as squeamish as their competitor, its management was happy to rent him a room.  Carrying more of a pack than a suitcase, this stranger with a distinct foreign accent settled down for the night.

Fisher Hotel

Saturday morning found him out on the street trying to sell European lace to several housewives.    In addition to selling, he seemed very interested in the community and its buildings.  He stopped several people and questioned them about public buildings, and prominent citizens in town.

With two railroads serving the town, such itinerant peddlers were common in Villisca.  He would have evoked no notice had it not been for his eccentric behavior and the fact that eight people were hacked to death with an axe the same weekend he came calling.

His mildly unusual behavior assumed a sinister cast after the Villisca axe murder was discovered on Monday morning, June 10, 1912.  Gossip and speculation swept the town, but this itinerant, now known as the Bulgarian Lace Salesman, was nowhere to be found.  Apparently he left town before the murder was discovered.  Most assumed he had taken a train out of town Sunday night or Monday morning.

 
H. W. Willet

An alternative explanation was that he had walked out of town.  At about 7:30 a.m. Monday morning, perhaps an hour before the murder was discovered, H. W. (Uncle Harv) Willett left his farm northwest of Villisca and headed for town.  Approximately 60 rods east of Harv's farm, he passed a "pretty hard looking case" walking west.   This stranger was carrying a bundle of clothes or rags and Harv thought him to be a tramp.  In fact Harv thought nothing of this chance encounter until he arrived in Villisca and found the town hysterical about the just discovered murder.

Riding or walking, the Bulgarian Lace Salesman was no longer in Villisca.  Consulting the Fisher Hotel register, it was determined the stranger had signed his name as M. J. Rourey, although some read the signature as M. J. Kourey.  Try as they might, police could not locate this suspect.  In August of 1912, local authorities were contacted by the Chicago, IL, police who suspected that one of their fugitives might be the man in question.

A Bulgarian, Gelesko Enchevv had confessed to a brutal axe murder in Chicago.  This murder involved the decapitation of a female school teacher in her home in 1910.  Mr. Enchevv had confessed, been ruled insane and incarcerated in a mental hospital. Hardly settled in the hospital he escaped, and was now at large.  Trying to be helpful, the Chicago police speculated that their escaped killer might be Villisca's Bulgarian Lace Salesman and mass murderer.

In late summer 1912, another traveling salesman volunteered that he knew M. J. Rourey who had been selling his lace in Chariton, IA, just the week before.  Villisca authorities made hurried inquiries but, if he had been in Chariton, he was no longer there.

Like so many "leads" in the Villisca ax murder mystery investigation, this suspicion died with a whimper.  In February, 1913, following a tip from J. Bader, a furniture polish salesman, Mr. Rourey surfaced living placidly in Pattonsburg, Missouri.  He did sell lace door to door, he did have a foreign accent, he had been in Villisca the weekend of the murder, but he had left on Sunday before the murder had been committed.

It was obvious that he was an established citizen of Pattonsburg and had no criminal record nor history of violence in his past.  Other than a special interest in public buildings and prominent citizens, who he probably viewed as potential customers, there was nothing to link M. J. Rourey to Iowa's most sensational true crime.

Did a Quirky Cobbler Kill Eight in Villisca, Iowa?

J. H. Bartlett: The Suspicious Shoemaker
By Dr. Edgar V. Epperly

By the time the 1912 Villisca, Iowa murder was a few hours old, the town was hardly recognizable.  An entire family of six and two visiting children had been found bludgeoned to death with an axe while they slept.  All business had ceased.   The streets were full as open buggies and farm wagons jostled for parking spaces.  Every Tin Lizzie within 30 miles had chugged into town loaded to the running boards with excited gawkers.  Each passenger train disgorged a new horde of curiosity seekers.

Drawn by telephone and telegraph, two or three times the town's normal population surged up and down its streets. Crowds were greatest at the murder scene on East Second Street, but every corner held its knot of excited citizens whispering in awe about this, the greatest crime in Iowa history.  Impromptu posies formed and stormed out of town as rumors of suspicious characters being seen swept over the crowds.  Confusion was the order of the day.

If one could have eavesdropped on any of those excited street corner conversations, a consistent picture would have emerged.  Everyone was stunned beyond belief.  Was it really true?  How could it have happened?  Who could have done such a thing?

At first it was assumed a wild-eyed blood-stained maniac must be on the loose.  Perhaps he was even now stumbling down the Nodaway River valley.  Perhaps he was cunning enough to have found a hiding place in a local building while he waited for surveillance to fade.  Perhaps, in fact most likely, this deranged killer had swung aboard an outgoing freight before the light of dawn.

As the hours passed without any of these speculations bearing fruit, the conversations changed.  Distraught town folk began to cast furtive glances at each other as their suspicions turned inward.  In their desperation to catch the killer they began to minimize the bizarre nature of the murder as they looked for viable local suspects.

Perhaps it was the result of a family dispute?  Did victim Josiah B. Moore have any enemies in town?  Had he served on a jury that condemned someone to prison?  Joe Stillinger, father of Lena and Ina, the unfortunate overnight guests, was offered as a suspect.  Fen Moore, a younger brother of Joe had his name thrown in the hopper as well.  Among these many local suspects, by far the most popular  was J. H. Bartlett.

Bartlett was a popular choice, not because he had intimate and adversarial relationships with the victims, but because he had attracted widespread negative attention in the years immediately preceding the murder.  Unusual and eccentric behavior, behavior with an accompanying touch of aggression was what caused the street corner speculators to focus on him.

A cobbler by trade, he did not fit the stereotype.  He was anything but the wizened little shoe maker of folk literature fame, quietly tapping out a miserable existence until a magical pair of slippers led a princess to his door.  Balding and broad shouldered Bartlett was wealthy enough to be involved in several real estate transactions between 1907 and the murder in 1912.  He had arrived in Villisca in 1906, setting up a shop just east of the opera house.  By 1911 he was prosperous enough to build a new shop, and a new house and garage on that location.

While he seemed to be making good financial progress, his years in Villisca were marred by personal problems.  In the fall of 1910 Villisca was shocked by a most unusual crime.

Harold Todd a young baker at Van Camp's restaurant suffered a bout of rheumatism.  Unable to work, he left Mrs. Dora Gourley's boarding house to move in with H. T. Bunker where he could enjoy uninterrupted bed rest.  While he was recuperating someone entered his room at the Gourley Boarding house, and took a knife to his wardrobe.  Every suit was slashed as was a coat and vest, a hat and his underwear before, as the Villisca Review reported,  "Jack-the-Ripper" left the scene.

W. C. Ratcliff

County attorney W. C. Ratcliff conducted a quiet investigation and less than a month later, Mr. Bartlett was brought to trial.  The case against him was circumstantial, but convincing to many Villisca citizens.  Todd, much the younger of the two was rumored to have been the favorite a girl they were both courting.

With motive established, Ratcliff tried to prove opportunity.  He introduced several witnesses who placed Bartlett in and around the Gourley rooming house on the night when the crime probably was committed.  Mrs. Gourley also testified that Bartlett was a frequent visitor to her house and for months had tried to convince her she should throw Todd out.

On October 1st she saw Bartlett go by the east side of her house and shortly thereafter heard a noise in Todd's room.  She stayed in her bedroom, while listening to someone padding around the house in his stocking feet.  Later she assumed it was the slasher.  Though most citizens were convinced Bartlett was guilty, the jury did not convict.

Not a year had passed before Mr. Bartlett was back in the news.  In October of 1911, he was injured when he rolled his car in a ditch as he was returning from Red Oak.  Being involved in a car accident was not incriminating, but his reason for traveling to Red Oak did raise eyebrows.  He was returning from the court house where he had just been divorced from his wife Myrtle.  Neither would a divorce be unusual, except J. H. and Myrtle had been married only four weeks.

These two public events were the reason J. H. Bartlett was an early suspect in the Villisca axe murder mystery.  His fellow citizens thought him eccentric, and quite possibly dangerous.  How large a leap is it from slashing an adversary's clothes  to smashing his skull?  Why would a man sue for divorce after only a month of marriage?  Did this suggest some kind of sexual aberration?

The typical Villisca citizen couldn't answer these questions, but felt the investigators should look quite closely at cobbler Bartlett.

Authorities did consider him but found nothing to link him to the murder.  Ed Selley, Joe's chief clerk, assured them that Moore and Bartlett had no conflicts preceding the murder.  Neither did Bartlett evidence any overt behavior after the murder that attracted police interest.

By 1914, he was still operating a prosperous shoe repair business in Villisca.   His success was illustrated by his purchase of a new "electric shoe machine" that would triple his output while improving his finish work.  All seemed to be going well with him, and his fellow townspeople were by now convinced State Senator F. F. Jones was the local instigator of the murder of eight citizens.

Consequently, cobbler Bartlett moved quitely off the Villisca ax murder stage.

Coming up next: Did a real estate salesman from Shenandoah, Iowa "confess" to a fortune teller before the murders were discovered?

The Unusual Suspects - Introduction

Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly is among the well-known, or usual, suspects in the Villisca axe murder case.

This week we begin a fascinating new series on the blog called The Unusual Suspects.

Many are aware of the usual suspects in this still unsolved 1912 Villisca axe murder case:

• Iowa State Senator Frank F. Jones
• William "Blackie" Mansfield
• Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly

But a number of other little-known figures fell under the investigative gaze of Iowa's criminal investigators and suspicious townsfolk.  Dr. Edgar V. Epperly, a student of the true crime murder mystery for more than 50 years will host this detailed examination of some of The Unusual Suspects.

First up?  A suit-slashing cobbler named J. H. Bartlett.