Imagine just for a second that you live in a world where locking your front door is actually considered a little bit. Weird, right, like almost defensive, yeah. Offensive to your neighbors. You're in this modestly prosperous, super tight knit Midwestern town at the turn of the twentieth century. The street lamps are casting this warm glow, kids are out playing until the sun dips down, And that piece of wood swinging on hinges at the front of your house. It's definitely not a barricade, No. Not at all. It's just there to keep the prairie wind and like stray dogs out. Well. I mean, it was an entirely different psychological landscape than the one we occupy today totally. That open door was basically the physical manifestation of a societal contract. It was this unspoken agreement built on absolute implicit trust in the people around you. Exactly. You don't lock out the world because you fundamentally believe there is just nothing out there to fear, which is a really comforting way to live. Absolutely, But what happens when that illusion of safety isn't just broken, but violently shattered overnight? Today we are taking a deep dive into the nineteen twelve Veliska Axe murders. And just to be clear right up front, this isn't just a recounting of a true crime cold case. We are exploring the actual anatomy of community trauma because the crime itself, horrific as it is, is really only the inciting incident. Yeah, it's just the beginning. What follows is this textbook study and how human beings react when their reality is fractured. It's crazy. We're looking at paranoia, the destruction of evidence through sheer, morbid panic, the scapegoating of innocence, and the fascinated way that history eventually mutates into folklore. So to put this together for you today, we've been digging through a massive, really diverse stack of source. Material, huge stack. Yeah, we are talking at deep cut historical records. We have a heavily researched investigative piece from Smithsonian magazine, and we've been scouring the ie Agen web. Archive, which is such a cool resource. Oh, it's amazing. If you weren't familiar, it's this incredible grassroots project where volunteers digitized decades of old local newspaper clippings. So it gives us a real time look at the hysteria as it unfolded. And we're even pulling from an academic paper on architectural preservation. Right, because, as we'll discover, the physical buildings left behind in this town serve as these silent, permanent witnesses to both our darkest nightmares and you know, our capacity to. Rebuild the structural legacy of an event like this is often the most honest record we have left. Yeah, I mean, long after the rumors fade and the eyewitnesses are gone, the bricks and timber just remain. Okay, let's unpack this. Let's go back to that timber. We have to start with the stark reality of what happened in the dark because it sets the stage for this century of madness that followed. It's pretty brutal. Very It's the night of June ninth crossing into the early hours of June tenth, nineteen twelve. The town is Veliska, Iowa. Population is roughly two thousand. It's a thriving railroad town. And as we established, nobody locks their doors. Which is a vulnerability that the perpetrator didn't just stumble upon, right, He clearly relied upon it as a core component of his methodology. Yeah, he counted on it. So sometime shortly after midnight, a figure walks up to the two story home of Josiah B. Moore. Everyone called him Joe and his wife Sarah. They are a well liked, successful. Family, pillars of the community. Basically exactly, the intruder walks to the back door, lifts the simple latch, and just steps inside. And immediately we see a level of terrifying methodical preparation. He doesn't just stumble around in the dark. No, he locates an oil lamp on a dresser. But he doesn't just light it to see where he's going. He physically dismantles it. This part always gets me right. He removes the glass chimney and sets it aside on the floor, tucked under a chair. Then he reaches into the lamp and bends the wick in two wow. Only then does he light it, turning the flame down so low that it produces nothing more than a really faint look glimmer. If we pause and just look at the mechanics of that action, it tells us an enormous amount about who we are dealing with. Let's think about how an oil lamp works. Okay, The glass chimney is designed to draw oxygen up, feeding the flame and projecting the light outward to illuminate a whole room. Right. It acts like a funnel exactly. So by removing that chimney, you starve the flame of that updraft. It becomes weak, and then by physically bending the wick, you reduce the surface area that's actually burning. What he created, essentially is the nineteen twelve equivalent of tactical night vision. That's chilling. He's creating a highly controlled micro environment. Precisely he needs just enough illumination to see his own hands and map the floor plan. But he is hyper aware of like discipline because. A normal flame would cast shadows. Right, Yeah, shadows against the window shades. It might bleed under a bedroom door and wake someone up. He is managing his environment with a level of terrifying precision that suggests this is not his first time navigating a sleeping house, and he. Moves through that house with total confidence. He walks right past a downstairs guest bedroom. Sleeping inside are two young girls. Still in your sisters, Lena and Nina. Yeah, Lena who is twelve, and Aina, who is nine. They were just over for a sleepover after a church event. He completely ignores them. He creeps up the narrow, creaky wooden stairs to the second. Floor, which is so risky in an old house. Right, And he bypasses the children's room where the four more kids are sleeping, and heads straight into Joe and Sarah's master bedroom. Now he's carrying an axe and it wasn't even his axe. He found it on the property. Yeah, he picked up Joe Moore's own axe from the coal shed out in the backyard. He approaches the bed, but when he strikes Joe, he doesn't use the sharp edge of the blade. He turns it around and brings the heavy, flat back of the axe head down, completely crushing Joe's skull. Then he immediately does the same to Sarah. This is a detail that investigators and profilers focus on heavily because it reveals her really cold practical intelligence. How so, Well, if you strike a human skull with the sharp edge of a heavy, wedge shaped object like an axe, basic physics dictates that the blade is highly likely to lodge deep in the bone it gets stuck. Oh wow, And if it's stuck, you've just disarmed yourself exactly. You are suddenly wrestling to free your weapon while the victim's spouse wakes up screaming right next to you. That makes a terrifying amount of sense. By using the flat blunt side of the axe head, the attacker delivers a massive, instantaneously lethal concussion, but the weapon bounces back he retains total mobility. Right. It's gruesome to discuss, obviously, but it indicates a perpetrator who really understood the physical mechanics of his weapon and the biological reality of his victims. From there, the horror just cascades. He moves to the children's room, Herman eleven, Catherine ten, Boyd seven, and little Paul just five. He murders all four of them as they sleep. It's just unthinkable. Having cleared the upstairs, he heads back down those narrow stairs to the guest room and attacks the Stillinger sisters. And the forensic evidence, like the positioning of the bodies, suggests that twelve year old Lena might have been the only person in the entire house who actually woke up just a fraction of a second before the end. It brings up a really good point about the acoustics of a nineteen twelve timber frame house. These structures are not sound proof at all. No, they creak when the wind. Blows exactly Yet an intruder navigates the stairs, murders six people on the second floor and the two girls directly below. Hear absolutely nothing until he enters their room. The silence of the execution is staggering. But the murders themselves the actual taking of life, seem to be only phase one of his process. What he does afterward is where the psychology gets deeply, profoundly bizarre. The staging. Yes, he doesn't flee. He goes back upstairs, taking his time, and systematically strikes the victims again. He hits Joe Moore and estimated thirty times, the faces of the entire family are rendered completely unreck ignizable, just overkill, absolute overkill. And then the staging begins. He pulls the heavy bedclothes up over Joe and Sarah, completely covering their rubned faces. He finds a gauze undershirt and drapes it over Hermann's face. He takes a dress and covers Catherine. He does this for every single victim. Psychologically, reducing a victim's face to pulp often points to an intensely personal rage, like a desire to obliterate the person's identity. But when you couple it with the careful, deliberate shrouding of the bodies afterward, it suggests something a bit more complex. It often points to a profound psychological fear or some kind of detachment. Mechanism, like he's hiding his own work from. Himself, or he's hiding himself from them. In the mind of a severely disturbed individual, the dead might still possess a kind of agency. Oh creepy, that might still be watching him, you know. Covering their faces severs that perceived connection. He is neutralizing their. Gaze, and that idea of the game perfectly explains his next move, which is the detail that always gets to me. He systematically goes through the house room by room and covers every single mirror and reflective piece of glass. He covers them with whatever he can find. Yeah, closed towels, just draped over them. Why would someone take the time to do that in a house full of dead bodies. It's a very old, deep seated superstition found in a lot of cultures, the idea that mirrors are portals, or that the soul of the newly dead can be trapped in a reflection, or even that the mirror can record the face of the killer. So by covering the mirrors, he is expanding on what he did to the victim's faces. He is attempting to completely erase any eyes from the environment. So it's about being unseen. Whether it's a manifestation of extreme guilt or a full psychotic break where he genuinely believes the dead or observing him, he's desperately trying to render himself invisible. He also pulls skirts and aprons over the windows, completely blacking out the house. But then as he's preparing to leave, he leaves behind something so strange that it has baffled people for over a century. The bacon. Yes, He goes to the ice box in the kitchen, takes out a two pound slab of uncooked bacon, wraps it in a towel, and drops it on the floor in the downstairs bedroom, next to the murdered Stillinger girls. It makes no sense. Right next to the bacon, he leaves a mysterious piece of a keychain that did not belong to anyone in the Moor family. He washes his hands in a bowl of water, locks the doors, takes the keys with him, and disappears into the pre dawn misted. I mean, you can analyze the lamp in the mirrors all day, but how do you explain a raw slab of bacon. Well, it is the ultimate anomaly. Investigators have theorized for decades, Like what some wondered if it was a distraction for a guard dog, but the Moors didn't have a dog inside the house. Could it have been an aborted meal like he got hungry? Yeah, did the adrenaline crash leaving him suddenly ravenous, only for a sudden panic to make him drop it and run? Or said a psychological signature so personal and distorted that only he understood its meaning. That's so weird. The just a position of this highly organized, tactical assault with a raw slab of meat and a broken keychain is what cements this crime in the public imagination. It's a terrifying blend of absolute control and just complete absurdity. And that bizarre silent crime scene sat there, locktight, entirely undiscovered as the sun came up, Which brings us to the morning after. And if the night was defined by silent control, the day was defined by chaotic, irreversible. Destruction the discovery phase. Let's talk about it, because it completely doomed any chance of solving this case. The tragedy of the crime is immediately compounded by the tragedy of the community's response. We really have to look at how account completely untrained in crisis management, reacts to the unthinkable. It's June tenth, a beautiful summer morning. The neighbor next door, Mary Peckham, is out hanging her laundry by seven am. She realizes some thing. Is wrong because it's too quiet. Yeah, the moorhouse is usually a beehive of activity, kids running around, chores being done, but the house is dead silent. The window shades are all drawn out. In the barn, Joe's horses are restless and neighing because nobody has fed. Them, which is a huge red flag for a farmer. Huge. So Mary knocks on the door. It's locked. She tries the windows locked, so she calls Joe's brother, Ross Moore, who owns a local store. Ross arrives completely confused and uses his own spare key to open the front door. Think about the psychological weight of that moment. For Ross, he is walking into a void. The house is dark, the air is stagnant, and the metallic smell of blood would have been overpowering. Ross steps into the parlor. He looks through the doorway into the gloom of the downstairs guest bedroom. He sees the blood on the bed sheets. He doesn't go any further. Smart man. Yeah. He turns around, bolts out the front door, and starts screaming for Marshall Hank Horton. Marshall Horton goes in, confirms the horror, and slowly the local doctor begin to arrive. One of them is doctor F. S. Williams, Poor doctor Williams. He walks through that house, examines the eight bodies, and when he walks out into the porch, he sees that a massive crowd of townspeople has already gathered on the lawn. Word travels fast. Doctor Williams looks at this crowd, visibly shaken, and he gives them a very stark warning. He says, don't go in there, boys, you'll regret it until the last day of your life. It was incredibly prescient advice. I mean, he understood the psychological trauma that visuals of that magnitude inflict on a person absolutely, but from an investigative standpoint, keeping that crowd out was the single most important thing that needed to happen. But the crowd completely ignores him. And this is where my jaw hit the floor reading the Smithsonian piece. Throughout that day, an estimated one hundred people, neighbors, businessmen, curious kids, pushed their way into the house. Unbelievable. They tramped up and down the stairs, They touched the furniture, They scattered their own fingerprints everywhere, They tracked mu ud and dirt over whatever footprints the killer might have left. They ruined everything, and. In a display of morbid curiosity that genuinely makes my stomach turn, some people were actually picking up fragments of Joe Moore's shattered skull from the bedroom floor and putting them in their pockets to take home. As keepsicks, Yeah, souvenirs. Like if you're a detective arriving from out of town at three pm, you are walking into a nightmare. Where do you even begin? When the whole town has essentially tracked the evidence out on the soles of their boots, you don't begin. This scene is fundamentally compromised. To understand why this happened. We have to contextualize nineteen twelve forensic science and rural law enforcement. Okay, set the scene today. If a window breaks, we expect yellow police tape, tivik suits and a clear exclusion zone. In nineteen twelve, the concept of crime scene preservation was practically non existent outside of major metropolitan forces like New York or London. But fingerprinting existed. It existed. Yes, the Bertillion system of body measurements was giving way to fingerprinting, but it was highly specialized. A local town marshal like Hank Courton wasn't walking around with fingerprint dusting powder. Blood typing was barely in its experimental infancy. They couldn't even definitively distinguish human blood from animal blood at a rural crime scene, let alone narrow it down to a suspect. That's wild. The only hope they had of catching this person was a clear footprint, a dropped item, or tracking dogs, and the townspeople destroyed all three by tramping through the house. They erased the killer's physical narrative and replaced it with a hundred of their own. But why do you think people did that? Taking skull fragments that seems so completely contrary to normal human behavior. It's a mechanism for processing incomprehensible trauma. When an event is too massive, too horrific to digest, people often try to take a physical piece of it to prove to themselves that actually happened. Oh interesting, it's a dark, tactile connection to a reality they can't mentally map. But the immediate consequence of that curiosity was a delayed realization of what it all meant. Once they stepped back out into the daylight, the gravity of the situation finally hit them. And the gravity was a monster didn't come from the deep dark woods. The monster opened a simple wooden door, exactly like the ones on every other house in Feliska. Right, the illusion was gone. The panic that followed was absolute. According to the historical newspaper clippings, by sundown on June teenth, you could not buy a physical lock in the town of Eliska. The hardware stores sold out completely. The farmers from the surrounding counties drove in and bought every single dog available for sale. They were desperately trying to rebuild the barrier between themselves and the outside world. But a lock doesn't fix a broken societal contract. Because they had ruined the physical evidence, the investigation immediately stalled. And when a community is terrified and the authorities have zero answers, a very dangerous psychological shift occurs. Paranoia, yes, desperation mutates into wild speculation. When the speculation was wild, you had locals acting like amateur sleuths, finding clues everywhere. A woman named Redda Johnson went into the house during the stampede and later claimed she saw indentations on some cotton batting bags in a downstairs closet. Right the closet theory, she. Loudly concluded that the killer must have been hiding in the closet for hours, just waiting for the family to fall asleep. People were staring at unoccupied beds, analyzing broken chains, doing anything to impose order. On the chaos, which is human nature. We abhor a vacuum. If there is no clear narrative, we will invent one. And because there was no physical evidence pointing to a transient stranger, the town began to look inward, scapegoating. Exactly if a stranger didn't do this, the logic went, then someone we know did. And that transition from fearing the outside world to fearing your neighbors. Completely fractured veliska. It tore the community apart along deeply entrenched social, economic, and religious lines. Let's look at the suspects of the town turned on, because the theories tell us more about the town's existing resentments than they do about the crime. It's really political. The first massive target suspect number one was Frank Jones. Now, Frank Jones was the absolute opposite of a transient drifter. He was a wealthy state senator, a highly prominent businessman who owned a huge retail store, and a very visible pillar of the local Methodist church. He was, for all intents and purposes, local royalty. He held immense power over the economic life blood of the town. Which is exactly where the friction started. Joe Moore, the murdered father, used to be Frank Jones's star employee. Joe worked for Jones for seven years selling farm equipment. He was fantastic at his job, but Joe grew tired of Jones's punishing expectations working from seven am to eleven pm, six days a week. That's brutal, so Joe quit. He walked down the street and opened up a rival implement business, and to add a massive insult to the injury, Joe somehow managed to take the incredibly lucrative John Deere tractor account away from Frank Jones and bring it to his new store in. An agricultural hub in nineteen twelve. Losing the John Deere account isn't just a loss of revenue, it's a massive public humiliation. It challenged Jones's supremacy. In the town exactly. But it wasn't just business. The rumor mill in Veliska was incredibly toxic. The prevailing gossip was that Joe Moore had been having an affair with Frank Jones's daughter in law, Donah. A classic small town scandal. Now, Donah was a local beauty, and according to the lore, she had a notoriously indiscreet habit of arranging her romantic trysts using the local telephone. Which is crucial context. In nineteen twelve, making a phone call meant picking up an earpiece, cranking a handle, and speaking directly to a human switchboard operator. You'd say, connect me to this number. The operator physically plugged a wire into a board, and quite frequently the operator would just leave the channel open and listen in on the conversation. There were no secrets on a small town switchboard. So the whole town knew or thought they knew, about this affair. The bad blood between Joe Moore and Frank Jones became so intense and so public that by early nineteen twelve, the two men were literally crossing the dirt streets to avoid walking past each other. The tension was palpable. So when Joe and his entire family are massacred, half the town immediately points at the most powerful man they know. But we have to apply critical thinking here. Frank Jones was fifty seven years old. He was a wealthy politician. The idea that a man in his late fifties crept into a house in the dead of night and swung a heavy axe thirty times with such ferocity that it pulverized six people, it's ridiculous. It defies physical and logical reality. Which is exactly what the town realized. So the narrative evolved enter Detective James Wilkerson. Wilkerson was an operative for the Burns Detective Agency, which was like the Pinkerton's, a private intelligence and security firm. A very controversial figure. Wilkerson arrives in Veliska, takes the temperature of the town, and builds this elaborate, massive crusade against Frank Jones. Wilkerson loudly insists that Jones didn't swing the acts. He hired a hit man from Illinois named William Mansfield to wipe out the more family. Wilkerson is a fascinating and destructive character in this saga. Private detectives of this era operated with very little oversight. They often function more like mercenaries or fixers than modern police investigators. Yeah, he had his own agenda. Wilkerson provided a narrative that perfectly suited the grievances of a segment of the town. The idea of a corrupt, wealthy mastermind pulling the strings is a much easier, almost cinematic pill to swallow than acknowledging a random chaotic act of violence by a passing madman. It gives the tragedy a clear, understandable motive. But the collateral damage of Wilkerson's crusade was catastrophic for the town's social fabric. It became a holy war. The Methodist Frank Jones's congregation rallied behind him, insisting he was a good Christian man being framed by a rogue detective. On the other side, the Presbyterians, which was the More family's church, through all their weight behind Wilkerson, fully believing Jones was a monster. You had lifelong neighbors suddenly refusing to speak to each other. It's the weaponization of grief. But as you mentioned earlier, if we step back, the hitman theory is extraordinarily weak. Right, I have to push back on the very premise of it. Are we really supposed to believe that a wealthy, image obsessed fifty seven year old state senator hires an out of town assassin to wipe out a family of eight, including four young kids and two completely random neighbor girls who just happened to be sleeping over a farm equipment rivalry and a family scandal. It's a stretch. It feels like the plot of a Terrible Penny dreadful novel. It totally overshadows the reality of the tragedy. Your skepticism is entirely justified, and history bore it out. When Wilkerson finally managed to drag his supposed hitman, William Mansfield, in front of a grand jury in nineteen sixteen, the case collapsed instantly. He had an alibi right, a. Cast iron alibi. Payroll records unequivaled proved he was hundreds of miles away in Illinois working at his job at the exact time the murders took place. He was released, but Wilkerson, deeply invested in his own narrative, refused to let it go. Wilkerson totally spiraled into madness. Reading through the old Ia Jane Webb archives, the newspaper updates about Wilkerson are insane. In nineteen seventeen, he is literally arrested in Corning, Iowa for conspiracy to commit a felony wait really, yes. He apparently furnished revolvers and getaway cars to three men, instructing them to break into Frank Jones's store and steal his private papers, hoping to find a written contract for. The hitman that is unhinged. Then a year later, in nineteen eighteen, Wilkerson gets arrested again in a hotel in Ottumwa, Iowa. He's registered under fake names, alongside a widow named missus Noel and the Kicker. Her late husband had been a photographer who acted as a star witness for Wilkerson, and that photographer had mysteriously turned up dead with a bullet in his head in a rail yard a year prior. It is sheer madness. It is the definition of a witch hunt. The community needed a villain so desperately that they allowed a row clearly unstable detective to essentially run a shadow justice system based on paranoia and vendettas exactly, and when the Frank Jones mastermind theory inevitably failed in the courts, the town pivoted entirely. If it wasn't the powerful local oligarch, it had to be the town outcast, which leads us to the second major suspect, a man who was the absolute antithesis of Frank Jones. Suspect number two, the Reverend Lynn George Jacqline Kelly, a. Deeply, deeply tragic and troubling figure. Let's look at Kelly's profile, because it's a lot to take in. He is a tiny English immigrant, standing about five foot two and weighing maybe one hundred and nineteen pounds. He has an itinerant, unordained preacher, traveling around preaching mostly to Presbyterian congregation. He had a lot of issues. Yeah, a well documented history of severe mental health issues coupled with deeply concerning sexual deviancy. Just two days before the murders, he was caught peeping into windows in Veliska. Which is a massive red flag. Later in nineteen fourteen, while living in South Dakota, he placed an advertisement in the Omaha World Herald asking for a girl stenographer to do confidential work, adding that she must be willing to pose as model. And the follow up to that ad is chilling. Yeah. A woman replied to the ad, and Kell had sent back a letter that was so intensely graphic and disturbing that when he was arrested for sending obscene material through the mail, the judge flat out refused to read the letter into the public court record. Kelly was demanding she type for him in the nude. So we have a man ruled by compulsions, severe delusions, and sexual deviancy. That alone makes him a person of interest. But what made him the prime suspect was his proximity to the victims. Crucially, Kelly was in Veliska on the day and night of the murders. In fact, he attended the exact same Children's Stay church service where the more children and the stillinder girls had performed just hours before they were all killed. He was watching them, and his behavior immediately following the crime was incredibly suspicious. He leaves on an early train at five nineteen am on June tenth, hours before Mary Peckham even noticed the silent house. While on that train, he starts telling fellow passengers that eight people have been murdered in Veliska. He knew before anyone else knew. Furthermore, he was left handed. The coroner, by analyzing the cast off blood spatter and the low ceiling of the moorhouse, had deduced that the killer almost certainly swung the axe left handed. Right. Kelly also sent a bundle of bloody shirts to a local laundry shortly after the murders. The circumstantial web closing around him was incredibly dense, and. Then the nail on the coffin. He confessed in nineteen seventeen, five years after the murders, after hours of intense police interrogation, Reverend Kelly signs a formal confession. But look at the context. He claims he was lying out in the fields outside Veliska, listening to voices in his head, he said a voice commanded him to slay utterly. According to his confession, he picked up the axe, went into the house and killed the children upstairs first and the children downstairs last. But if we examined the reality of false confessions, especially in an era of preceding Miranda Rights, a time when police interrogations often equated to psychological and sometimes physical torture, Kelly's confession begins to disintegrate. So you think he was fed the details, it is highly probable we're looking at a fragile, profoundly mentally ill man who was grilled relentlessly by state agents desperate to close the most infamous cold case in Iowa history. He later recanted the confession entirely, claiming it was beaten out of him. Wow, and the judicial system, despite the massive public pressure to hang him, ultimately couldn't make it stick. The first grand jury hung eleven to one against indicting him. When they finally did bring him to trial, a jury acquitted him. Even his wife stepped in right. Yes, his own wife testified on his behalf, noting that he had a history of confessing to crimes he couldn't possibly have committed. She proved he was sitting at home with her during another crime he had eagerly confessed to in the past. His mind was just broken. He was a man who confessed because of his delusion, and the state tried to use him as a convenient trash can to throw the case into. So let's step back and look at the board. The wealthy state senator pulling strings was a bust. The tiny, delusional preacher with the false confession was acquitted. If it wasn't a local grudge and it wasn't the town outcast, who the hell was it. This is where it gets really dark. Here is where our deep dive pivots away from the claustrophobia of small town politics and takes a truly terrifying turn. We have to look at the theory that Velisko is just one bloody stop on a nationwide tour of terror. We are entering the realm of the transient serial killer. This is a paradigm shifting theory championed heavily by a Department of Justice special agent named Matthew McClary. He was looking at crime data decades before the FBI officially established its behavioral science unit. He was ahead of his time. He really was. McClary noticed a pattern that local sheriffs isolated by geography and relying on telegraphs or the mail had completely missed. The pattern is genuinely chilling. Mclauley tracked a string of nearly ten axe murders that occurred between nineteen eleven and nineteen twelve, scattered across the Midwestern and Western United States. We are talking about massacres in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Monmouth, Illinois, Powela, Kansas, Ellsworth, Kansas, and even Rainier, Washington. And they all connected. McClary saw striking undeniable behavioral signatures connecting all of these crimes directly to Aliska. What's fascinating here is the concept of a behavioral signature versus a modus operandi. What's the difference. Well, an mo is what a killer needs to do to accomplish the crime, bringing a weapon, breaking a lock. A signature is something the killer has to do to fulfill a psychological need. It's totally unnecessary to the actual killing. These crimes shared incredibly specific signatures. Right, Let's list them. The attacks almost exclusively took place on Sunday nights. The murder weapon was almost always an axe, and crucially, it was never the killer's axe. He found it on site, found it on the property, and can consistantly abandon it at the scene, right out in the open. The attacks were always near railway tracks. The killer washed his hands in a bowl at the scene, he covered the faces of the sleeping victim's post mortem, and most damningly, he used the exact same chimneyless lamp trick to create a low light environment. That lamp modification is the lynchpin. Bending a wick and removing a chimney is not a standard burglary technique passed around in prisons. It is a highly specific, idiosyncratic behavioral quirk. To see it replicated across multiple states and identical ax murders strongly points to a single perpetrator. And the connective tissue between all these towns is the railroad. It's like an early twentieth century horror movie monster. He is this phantom who rides the rails, steps off a box car into a sleepy town in the dead of night, performs this incredibly specific ritualistic nightmare, and then just dissolves back into the steam. Of the locomotive. Exactly. By the time Mary Peckham realizes the house is too quiet. This guy's three states away eating breakfast in a diner. You've hit on the exact mechanism that made this possible. The rapidly expanding American railroad system created an entirely new vector for crime. It was essentially the dark web of physical travel in nineteen twelve. That's a great way to put it. It provided unparalleled anonymity and extreme mobility. Before the transcontinental rail networks, criminals were tethered to the endurance of a horse. The range was maybe a few counties, and a stranger riding into town was immediately scrutinized. The train changed everything. Hundreds of transient workers, hobos, and travelers were moving through these rail yards every day. A killer could blend into the industrial churn seamlessly. The timeline of these events is what really sells the theory for me. The murders in Paula, Kansas, where Rollin Hudson and his wife were killed, happened just five days before Veliska. Five days and there is a detail in the Smithsonian article that completely gave me goosebumps. On the exact night of the Powella murders. Another family living in the same town woke up up in the dead of night because they heard the distinct sound of a glass lamp chimney hitting the wooden floor. They woke up just in time to see a man scrambling out of their window and escaping. Was that our killer practicing his chimneyless lamp trick, failing and then moving on to his actual victims across town. It strongly suggests a rehearsal or an a boarded attack where his light discipline failed, he dropped the glass, lost the element of surprise, and aborted. It shows he was actively refining his methodology as he traveled. But the detail that absolutely haunts me, the one I cannot stop thinking about, comes from the Ellsworth, Kansas murders in October nineteen eleven, about eight months before Veliska. The Showman family, yes William Shauman, his wife, and their three kids are slaughtered with an axe. The killer uses the chimneyless lamp he covers their faces, but he also does something completely unique to that house. He finds a pile of clothing and he meticulously drapes it over the Showman's wall mounted telephone completely covering it. Why take the time to cover a telephone in nineteen eleven at one in the more. It's not going to ring, It's not going to wake anyone up. Think back to our discussion about the mirrors in the Moorhouse. What did an early twentieth century wall phone look like? Think of the classic Western electric model three p. Seventeen. It's a large wooden box on the wall, and right on the front are two prominent round metal bells. They look exactly like eyes, precisely to. A severely psychotic mind, a mind terrified of being observed by the dead or by unseen forces. Those bells represent a gaze covering the eyes of the telephones, driven by the exact same psychological imperative as covering a mirror. He needed total absolute visual isolation to perform his rituals. That is deeply unsettling. It paints a picture of a man completely detached from humanity, operating under a terrifying set of internal. Rules, and know never caught him. No, because this transient killer was never definitively caught, Agent mcclaury strongly suspected a convicted killer named Henry Lee Moore, who eventually went to prison for killing his own mother and grandmother, but the link is hotly debated. The Veliska mystery remained a massive open wound, and an open wound in the public consciousness leads to a desperate, clawing psychological need for closure. Which brings us to the ghosts right. An entire century of ghosts, absurd theories, and more false confessions. When a crime of this magnitude, this level of pure violation goes permanently unsolved, the human brain simply rejects the lack of resolution. We cannot tolerate. A void, so we make things up. If the authorities, the people meant to protect us, cannot provide an answer, the public will manufacture one. And oh boy, did they manufacture them. Reading through these old newspaper clippings from the Ia Jane Web archives is like reading a catalog of mass delusion and hysteria. Let's start with the retina theory because it blew my mind. Oh the optography stuff. Yes. In August nineteen twelve, just two months after the murders, a newspaper in Council Bluffs genuinely reported as fact that detectives had obtained a photograph of the killer. How by magically extracting the final imag that was trapped on the dead retina of twelve year old Lina Stillinger's eye. It sounds utterly absurd to a modern ear, almost like science fiction, but we have to place ourselves in the cultural mindset of the early nineteen hundred right. Science was moving fast, exactly. This is a period where breakthrough science like X rays and wireless telegraphy felt like magic, and it frequently overlapped with spiritualism in the public imagination. The concept you're referring to is called optography, the belief that the eye functions literally like a camera, capturing and developing the last images sees upon death. Like taking a snapshot of the murderer. Exactly. It was a wildly popular myth, fueled by sensationalist journalism. The fact that the public and even some law enforcement believed this could crack the Veliska case shows just how desperate they were. They were praying for a magical solution to an impossible problem. And when the magic eye camera didn't produce a suspect, they just resorted to arresting literally anyone who looked suspicious or acted strangely. Arrested Sam Moyer, Joe Moore's brother in law, simply because he'd had a few arguments with. Joe in the past. Such flimsy evidence, they. Arrested a random farm hand named John Bolan all the way down in Missouri because Bolan started rambling about a vision where God told someone to kill people who didn't bear the mark of the Lord. They even arrested a black man named Frank Roberts and Sioux's City just because he happened to be traveling through the area at the time, which reeks of the casual, reflexive racial prejudice of the era. This is the immense danger of a panicked community. The burden of proof evaporates. Anyone perceived as an outsider, anyone exhibiting abnormal behavior, or anyone of a marginalized demographic becomes an immediate target for the mob's. Anxiety and confessions. They kept coming for decades. In nineteen thirteen, a dying man in Montana who used to be a blacksmith in Veliska summons a minister and makes a dramatic deathbed confession claiming he committed the murders, but when detectives actually investigate his timeline, he had no real connection to the event. People just want the infamy. Then, incredibly, eighteen years later, in nineteen thirty one, a career burglar named George Myers is sitting in a Detroit jail cell. He calls detectives over and confesses that a wealthy businessman paid him two thousand dollars to wipe out the family. Which sounds incredibly familiar, doesn't it. It sounds suspiciously like Detective Wilkerson's old hitman theory, recycled and digested through the underworld rumor mill for two. Decades exactly because the moment the police pressed Myers for actual details of the crime scene, he completely ruined his own credibility. He claimed he killed six people. He didn't even know the two still injured girls were in the house. Right, So why do we do this? Why does the public continually buy into these fake leads? And why do people keep confessing? Is it just that the human brain cannot accept that someone can swing and acts thirty times and walk away completely unpunished. Yes, that is the core of it. Acknowledging that someone can walk into a secure home butcher eight innocent people and vanish into the night without facing justice. Is an acknowledgment of our own profound inescapable vulnerability. It's terrifying. It means the monster is real and the monster got away. False confessions, even the most obvious, ridiculous ones, provide a narrative structure. They offer us a villain with a face, a villain we can put in handcuffs and lock in a cage. Without a captured villain, the fear remains ambient, formless, and omnipresent. It's a heavy realization. But while the murders forever defined Veliska in the national press, cementing it as a town of tragedy, the actual town itself didn't just freeze in time in nineteen twelve. The physical structures left behind tell a much broader, much more complex story. We've talked about the anatomy of the crime, the panic, the transient serial killer theories, but now I want to shift our focus to the physical legacy of the town, the buildings, specifically an incredible building that was rising from the dirt at the exact moment the community was tearing itself apart, the Veliska National Guard Armory. The contrast between the Moorhouse and the ARMORYI it's the perfect metaphor for how a community processes trauma. One structure is the site of ultimate passive victimization. The other is a monument to resilience, active duty, and communal strength. Let's dig into this academic architectural preservation paper by Abby Williams, which is an absolutely incredible source. The Veliska Armory was designed in nineteen twelve and finished in nineteen thirteen. Literally while the blood was still drying, while the hardware stores were selling out of locks, and while Senator Jones and Detective Wilkerson were starting their Holy war, the town was coming together to excavate a massive basement right on the town square. It's a huge undertaking. Today it stands as the oldest armory still owned by the Guard in Iowa, and it holds the longest continuous military use in the entire state. And its architectural design speaks volumes about its psychological purpose. It was built as a fortress of stability. Let's paint a picture of it, because it's striking. It's this fascinating mix of late Victorian Romanesque revival meets Tudor Revival. It's a massive two story masonry building sixty one feet wide by one hundred and twenty two feet deep. The front facade is made of what the paper calls six point one American bond polychrome vitrified face. Brick, which is a mouthful right now for. Those of us who aren't architects. Polychrome vitrified brick basically means these bricks were fired in a kiln at such incredibly high temperatures that the clay almost becomes glass like. It makes them super hard, weather resistant and slightly shiny. They use tinted red mortar between the bricks. It has these sweeping corbelled brick archways over the entrance, and originally it had castellations along the roofline, those square teeth like structures you see on medieval castle walls. They literally built a castle in the middle of Iowa. It was explicitly designed to project strength and impenetrable security during the time when the citizens of the town felt utterly, terrifyingly defenseless. But we shouldn't view it strictly as a military bucker. It was the beating heart of the community's social and civic life. It really was, and the historical irony here is just palpable. In nineteen seventeen, a massive, highly contentious public town hall meeting about the Axe murders was held right in the Armory Gymnasium. That was the specific meeting where Detective Wilkerson and Senator Frank Jones openly clashed in front of everybody. So you have the town literally tearing itself apart over murder conspiracies inside the walls of this newly built fortress. It's a fascinating dynamic. The very building that housed their bitter internal divisions would soon become the staging ground for their unified external defense. Exactly because the military history of this building is staggering. It housed Company F of the fifty fifth Infantry. It saw intense local dramas during the Spanish American War, where a commanding officer, Captain Burton, was actually accused of cowardice and running a loan sharking operation, charging his own enlisted man fifty percent interest. On loans aw It's a drama, but. The Armory's true defining historical moment came decades later during World War Two. The incredible story of Captain Bob Moore. Yes, Bob Moore was the local drug store owner in Veliska, but when the war broke out, he led the men of Company Esh out of the armory doors, down to the train station, and eventually all the way to the deserts of North Africa. They fought in the brutal, chaotic Battle of Caserine Pass against Rommel's forces, where many Veliska boys were tragically killed or captured. It was a horrific battle. But Major Moore managed to lead four hundred and twenty men, who were completely cut off from Allied forces, through enemy lines to safety. When he finally came home on leave in nineteen forty three, an Omaha World Herald photographer named Earl Bunker happened to be at the Veliska train station and snapped a photo of Moore embracing his family on the platform. That single photograph won the Pulitzer Prize. That image is the emotional antithesis of the Axe murders. Think about it. The murders took a family way in the dark, destroying a home. The Pultrer photo captures a family reunited in the light, representing the survival of the town. And the armory was the anchor for all of it. It was the center of everything between wars. It hosted the annual military balls, the Firemen's ball, high school basketball games, community dances. It was the space where life continued. And today there is a fierce ongoing fight to preserve that life. The architectural paper details the modern preservation efforts led by a local woman named Rox Santa Cyber. They are working tirelessly to save the building, turning it into a community center and a military history museum. And preserving a historic building is not easy work. It was a nightmare. Sometimes. They have to adhere to strict guidelines called preservation briefs, which are essentially rule books issued by the National Park Service on how to restore historic properties without ruining their character. It is a grueling, meticulous process. They had to figure out how to repoint that historic red tinted mortar without damaging the vitrified wink. They had to rip out ugly nineteen fifties aluminum windows and replace them with historically accurate, custom made wooden, double hung windows. They had to fix this massive flat and pitch roof that had been leaking for years and destroying the original beautiful pressed tin ceiling in the gymnasium. They even had to navigate the architectural puzzle of adding modern eighty eight compliant wheelchair ramps to the front entrance without destroying the esthetics of that grand Romanesque entry. Arch preservation is an act of profound respect. By choosing to pour money, sweat, and years of effort into saving the Armory, the people of Veliska are making a deliberate choice. They're choosing to define their town's legacy by its service, its community gatherings, and its survival, rather than allowing themselves to be exclusively defined by their darkest strategy. Which provides the starkest possible contrast to our final topic. Today, we have to return to the site where it all began. We have to explore what has become of the Moorhouse, because while the Armory represents noble preservation and community pride, the Moorhouse represents the highly controversial, often deeply unsettling world of dark tourism. The life cycle of a murder house is always fraught with profound ethical dilemmas. How do we as a society treat a space where the unspeakable actually happened? Well, For decades, the town of Veliska treated it like an unwonted, cursed burden. The Moorhouse changed hands in astonishing thirteen times over ninety years. It was owned by a savings alone at one point. It's that completely vacant. For long stretches nobody wanted it. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, it was used as a rental property, but the turnover rate was insanely high. Tenants would move in, unpack and then suddenly leave weeks later. There is even a piece of local lore from the nineteen sixties, and who knows how much is fact versus legend, where a renter was supposedly making dinner in the kitchen, saw a strange flash of light, went into a total daze, and woke up to find a knife stuck through his own hand. He reportedly packed his family into their car and fled the property immediately. Whether you place any stock in the paranormal or whether you simply acknowledge the immense, crushing psychological weight of trying to eat dinner and raise children in a space saturated with such horrific history, it's clear that the house was fundamentally uninhabitable as a normal home. The ambient stress of knowing what happened in those rooms would be overwhelming for anyone. So it sat there until nineteen ninety four, when local historians Darwin and Martha Lynn decided to buy it. And from a purely architectural standpoint, what the Lins did was a masterclass in historical restoration. They really did an amazing job. They didn't just paint it. They went backward in time. They used old, grainy photographs and conducted interviews with elderly neighbors to piece together exactly what the house looked like on the day of the murders in nineteen twelve. They stripped away decades of vinyl sighting. They tore down modern patio enclosures. They painstakingly removed the modern electricity and indoor plumbing. They literally ripped out an indoor bathroom to convert it back into the pantry it was in nineteen twelve. In nineteen ninety seven, because of their meticulous work, it was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places. From a strictly historical perspective, preserving a middle class eighteen sixty eight Queen Anne Timberhouse as a perfect time capsule, is mendible. Most homes of that era are bulldozed or renovated beyond recognition. It provides a rare tactile link to the past. But it's not just an architectural time capsule, is it. It's a crime scene. The Linz opened it up to the public, not just for daytime educational historical tours, but for overnight stays. That's where it gets complicated. For a fee, you can sleep there, and predictably, it has become a mecca for ghost hunters, YouTube paranormal channels, and morbid thrill seekers. And in twenty fourteen, the house nearly claimed another life. An amateur paranormal investigator from Wisconsin was paying to stay there overnight. He was alone in the downstairs bedroom, the exact room where the Stillinger sisters were murdered. Oh no, According to the police reports, he was actively trying to provoke spirits, and around midnight he somehow ended up stabbing himself in the chest. He had to be airlifted to a hospital in Omaha in serious condition. He survived, but claimed later he had absolutely no memory. Of doing it. This incident crystallizes the crux of the dark tourism debate. Why are we as a culture drawn to literally sleep in the beds where children were massacred? It speaks to a societal more big curiosity that frankly hasn't evolved very much since the townspeople tramped through the blood to steal skull fragments in nineteen twelve. That's a great point. The technology has changed, but the impulse is identical. We are still gawking at the scene. It really makes you ask, is restoring a murder house to its exact nineteen twelve condition an act of honoring history or are we just meticulously preserving a nightmare? At what point does honoring the past cross the line into commodifying a tragedy for entertainment. It's a line that is incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible to definitively draw. The restoration freezes the house entirely at the moment of its greatest trauma. It ensures that Joe, Sarah, their four children, and the two Stillinger girls are forever defined by their final terrifying moments in the dark. Their lives before that night are erased. Yeah, Yet simultaneously tearing the half down and paving over the lot is an attempt to sanitize history, to erase a harsh reality, just because it makes us uncomfortable. There is no clean, easy answer It's. Just such a surreal juxtaposition to think about. Picture it. You have this meticulously restored eighteen sixty eight timber house sitting quietly on a residential street. It is a beautiful, important piece of architectural history. But inside, instead of a family eating dinner, it's filled with tourists holding emf meters, night vision cameras and audio recorders in the pitch black, sitting in silence, hoping to catch the echo of a swinging axe. It forces us to confront our own relationship with history, violence, and empathy. Do we visit these places to learn from them to understand our own vulnerabilities, or do we seek to be entertained by the echoes of someone else's suffering. Okay, let's bring us all together. What a heavy, fascinating journey this deep dive has been. We have traveled from a brutally silent, methodically staged crime scene in the dead of a June night in nineteen twelve. We walked through the contaminated, chaotic aftermath that destroyed the evidence, and watched a small town tear itself apart with paranoia, destroying the lives of a prominent local politician and an unhinged preacher alike. We explored the terrifying reality of the early twentieth century that the expanding railroad networks may have allowed an invisible, transient serial killer to ride the rails through the Midwest, executing a grim, ritualistic pattern of chimneylus, lamps, and covered faces before dissolving back into the steam. And finally, we looked at how Veliska's soul is fundamentally captured in its remaining brick and timber. You have the haunting, meticulously preserved Moorhouse on one side, permanently frozen in its worst nightmare, catering to our darkest curiosities. And on the other side of town you have the proud, enduring Armory, a massive brick monument to a community that survived, sent its sons to war, and fought to preserve its own dignity. It is a powerful reminder that the built environment around us has never just past the scenery exactly. Every single town has its ghosts, and every town has its monuments. The old buildings you drive past every single day, the ones you don't even look twice on your commute or holding a century of secrets, They hold scandals, unimaginable tragedies and moments of quiet heroism. History is not just written in books, it is literally built into the walls around us. So as we wrap up, I want to leave you with one final provocative thought to mullover. Think back to the killer in that house in nineteen twelve. He went to incredible obsessive lengths to avoid being seen. He removed the lamp chimney, bent the wick, and worked in near total darkness. He draped clothing over the mirrors and painstakingly shrouded the faces of his victims because he was so deeply psychologically terrified that the dead or anyone else might be watching him. But think about what his actions actually. Achieved incredibly ironic. Legacy did his terrifying, ritualistic attempts to remain invisible actually backfire on a cosmic scale by leaving behind such a bizarre, theatrical, and unsolvable crime scene, By creating a mystery so dark and so strange that it demanded attention, he ensured the exact opposite of what he wanted. Because of what he did, a century later, millions of people, true crime tourists and amateur sleuths are doing exactly what he feared most. They are walking into that house. They are staring at him. They are dissecting his every move, his every footstep. He tried desperately to hide in the dark, but in doing so, he guaranteed that the eyes of the world will be watching him forever. Thank you for joining us on this exploration. Stay curious and always keep questioning the history that surrounds you. Until next time, Thanks for taking the depth Dive