Williams (who became the first to examine the bodies and estimate a time of death). They were followed by the county coroner, L.A. Clark Cooper and Edgar Hough and Wesley Ewing, the minister of the Moore’s Presbyterian congregation. That set in train a sequence of events that destroyed what little hope there may have been of gathering useful evidence from the crime scene. Ross found a key on his chain that opened the front door, but barely entered the house before he came rushing out again, calling for Villisca’s marshal, Hank Horton. The Moores were not discovered until several hours later, when a neighbor, worried by the absence of any sign of life in the normally boisterous household, telephoned Joe’s brother, Ross, and asked him to investigate. Lena, the elder of the girls, was the only one who may have awoken before she died. Taking the house keys, the murderer vanished as the Sunday sun rose red in the sky. Some time before 5 a.m., he abandoned the lamp at the top of the stairs and left as silently as he had come, locking the doors behind him. He seems to have stayed inside the house for quite some time, filling a bowl with water and–some later reports said–washing his bloody hands in it. At some point the killer also took a two-pound slab of uncooked bacon from the icebox, wrapped it in a towel, and left it on the floor of the downstairs bedroom close to a short piece of key chain that did not, apparently, belong to the Moores. He then drew up the bedclothes to cover Joe and Sarah’s shattered heads, placed a gauze undershirt over Herman’s face and a dress over Katherine’s, covered Boyd and Paul as well, and finally administered the same terrible postmortem punishment to the girls downstairs before touring the house and ritually hanging cloths over every mirror and piece of glass in it. The ax man went back upstairs and systematically reduced the heads of all six Moores to bloody pulp, striking Joe alone an estimated 30 times and leaving the faces of all six members of the family unrecognizable. What happened next marked the Villisca killings as truly peculiar and still sends shivers down the spine a century after the fact. The killer then descended the stairs and took his ax to the Stillinger girls, the elder of whom may finally have awakened an instant before she, too, was murdered.
Nor did the assailant or any of the four children make sufficient noise to disturb Katherine’s two friends, Lena and Ina Stillinger, as they slept downstairs. Once again, there is no evidence that Herman, 11 Katherine, 10 Boyd, 7 or Paul, 5, woke before they died. Leaving the couple dead or dying, the killer went next door and used the ax-Joe’s own, probably taken from where it had been left in the coal shed-to kill the four Moore children as they slept. For a price, visitors can stay in the house overnight there is no shortage of interested parties. One of the town’s larger and better-appointed properties, it still stands today and has been turned into Villisca’s premier tourist attraction. Then he struck Sarah a blow before she had time to wake or register his presence. Raising the ax high above his head-so high it gouged the ceiling-the man brought the flat of the blade down on the back of Joe Moore’s head, crushing his skull and probably killing him instantly. He ignored one, in which four more young children were sleeping, and crept into the room in which 43-year-old Joe Moore lay next to his wife, Sarah. Still carrying the ax, the stranger walked past one room in which two girls, ages 12 and 9, lay sleeping, and slipped up the narrow wooden stairs that led to two other bedrooms.
Then, according to a reconstruction attempted by the town coroner next day, he took an oil lamp from a dresser, removed the chimney and placed it out of the way under a chair, bent the wick in two to minimize the flame, lit the lamp, and turned it down so low it cast only the faintest glimmer in the sleeping house. The door was not locked-crime was not the sort of thing you worried about in a modestly prosperous Midwest settlement of no more than 2,000 people, all known to one another by sight-and the visitor was able to slip inside silently and close the door behind him. Shortly after midnight on June 10, 1912-one hundred years ago this week-a stranger hefting an ax lifted the latch on the back door of a two-story timber house in the little Iowa town of Villisca.