PROLOGUE (an excerpt from Dr. Edgar V. Epperly's forthcoming book on the 1912 Villisca, Iowa axe murder mystery)
In the spring and summer of 1993, rain fell so frequently and fiercely in the Upper Midwest that the resulting great flood exceeded the combined volume of all five of the Great Lakes. The water from 150 major rivers and tributaries engulfed twenty million acres, killed fifty people, destroyed or damaged nearly 50,000 homes, and left fifteen billion dollars of damage in its wake. It remains one of the worst natural disasters in American history.
In late July of that year, on a gray day in which a moisture-laden sky seemed about to open up again on water-weary Iowans, 98-year-old Des Moines resident Ervalene Curtis Brown stood and gazed plaintively out her fifth floor apartment window. She didn’t see the tree-lined drive below. She saw a misty day from long ago. It was a day of ladies with parasols in long dresses, and men in straw hats, watches ticking in their vest pockets.
Fourth Wall Films photo.
She closed her eyes for a moment and then said to her daughter, “This is a day like that day.” Her daughter knew what day she meant. Sometimes a whole month would go by without a trivial word or action triggering Ervalene’s malingering memories. Her father sold his business and moved their family from the town of her birth to escape a small rural community torn apart by one night of violence and decades of contentious investigations, divisive local speculation, and frothy allegations.
Later Ervalene married and moved to the city, longing for obscurity and to disassociate herself from the event and all the uncertainty and conflict that it represented. She dreaded the inevitable innocence of the question, “Where are you from?” The answer always brought a knowing nod followed by a stream of additional queries and uninformed conjecture about the infamous murders of all six members of the Josiah B. Moore family and the two young Stillinger girls. The unsolved 1912 Villisca axe murders were and are the worst mass homicide in Iowa history.
Spewing acrid smoke and white billowy steam, a train pulls into the depot with eager bloodhounds on board straining at a handler’s traces. Thousands spill into town driving horse and buggy, gripping picnic lunches, and clicking Kodaks. The dead covered faces of the eight victims still staring upward as feverish crowds push past a young deputy to see the scene of inexplicable horror for themselves.
Awash in a great flood of unwanted reflections, Ervalene opened her moist blue eyes. Her macabre thoughts were interrupted only vaguely by the appearance of a droplet, or two, of rain on the glass before her.
“It was a cloudy, humid day,” she remembered. “If it sprinkled it didn’t rain, I know.”
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Order the award-winning "Villisca: Living with a Mystery," featuring an interview with Ervalene Curtis Brown here: http://fourthwallfilms.com/dvds.htm
Stream "Villisca: Living with a Mystery" here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/villisca
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