The Villisca Axe Murders of 1912: What the Record Establishes

The Villisca Axe Murders of 1912: What the Record Establishes On the night of 9-10 June 1912, eight people were killed inside a modest frame house in Villisca, Iowa: Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two young guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger. The weapon was the household's own axe, left in the room where the Stillinger girls were found. This is an account of what the surviving record establishes, and where it stops. The Moore household and the town it lived in. The Children's Day programme and the walk home. A neighbour's concern at chore time the next morning. The covered mirrors, the drawn curtains, the slab of bacon in the downstairs bedroom. The uncontrolled hours in which a whole town walked through the house before anything was photographed or recorded. Bloodhounds and private detectives entering a case already damaged at the source. Two trials of one man in 1917 - a hung jury, then an acquittal - and a case that remains officially unsolved. No confession accepted by a court closes this story, and this account does not invent one. Where the documents are silent, the narration says so. Marginalia, episode one. Runtime 22 minutes. --- IMAGE CREDITS Villisca Ax Murder House photograph by Ryan Moomey, licensed CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain archival material: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (no known restrictions) - telegraph operator, 1904; drugstore interior, 1909; general store interior; Bonus Bureau Fingerprint Division, 1924. "The Day Book" (Chicago), 14 June 1912, via Chronicling America, Library of Congress. Remaining imagery is synthesised for this production and is not photographic evidence of the events described.