THE ODD LITTLE PREACHER

I do not believe the Reverend Kelly. But I am not sure if I don’t believe him when he said he did not murder those eight people, or when he said he did.  What I do know is that five years later, passengers on board the westbound number 5 train,  which had pulled out of the little station at Villisca, Iowa (above)  at 5:19 A.M. that Monday morning, remembered the twitchy, diminutive preacher telling his fellow bleary eyed travelers that he had left eight butchered bodies back in Villisca. The bodies would not be discovered until almost eight that morning. So if the sleepy witnesses correctly remembered the words spoken to them five years earlier by a strange little preacher they had never seen before, then he was guilty of an unspeakable horror. If they were wrong, he was innocent. Of course, either way, he was crazy as a loon. And don't get me started on why none of the travelers told anybody at the time, about the odd little preacher and his little tale of horror.

Villisca is a self proclaimed “community of pride where the rivers divide”,  the rivers being the West and Middle branches of the Nordaway River. It lies  80 miles southwest of Council Bluffs, Iowa, in   Montgomery County. The region was settled in the mid 19th century,  mostly by people from the old Midwest, upstate New York and Pennsylvania, people with names like Bates and Bowman, Kennedy and Hoover, Powers and Preston and Wymore. 

Almost all of them  arrived on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad, called by its  customers just “The Q”.   At the time no community in Iowa was more than a few miles from an active passenger rail line. Most of the residents of Villisca either sold services or equipment to the local farmers or worked for the railroad. And in 1912 the little town contained about 2,000 souls.

On the morning of 10 June, 1912,   inside a  sad looking two story house (now at 323 East 4th.Street) were found the bodies of Mr. Josiah Moore, his wife Sara, their daughter Katherine and their sons Herman, Boyd and Paul (below) , as well as the bodies of their overnight child guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger. The children were aged 5 through age 12. 

All the victims were found in their beds, with their heads covered with bedclothes. All had their skulls battered 20 to 30 times with the blunt end of an ax, which was found wiped clean in the downstairs sewing room/bedroom,  along with the bodies of the Stillinger girls.

The ceilings in the parent's bedroom and the children's room upstairs showed gouge marks, apparently made by the upswing of the ax blade

Downstairs little Lena Stillinger’s nightgown was pushed up, leaving her genitalia exposed. But the doctors said there was no evidence of molestation. There was an odd bloodstain on her knee and an alleged defensive wound on her arm.  A two pound slab of bacon was found, wrapped in a dishtowel, on the bedroom floor.  

On the kitchen table was a plate of uneaten food and a bowl of bloody water. The medical estimate was that all of the murders had occurred shortly after midnight, the morning of 10 June, 1912.

On 11 June, 1912,  Mr. Sam Moyer was arrested for the murders.  He was released on the 15 June, because of lack of evidence.  On 20 June, 1912  a Mr. John Bohland was arrested for the murders. He was released a few days later, also because of lack of evidence.  

On 5 July, 1912, Mr. Frank Roberts (“a negro”) was arrested for the murders. He was released a few days after that. Also for lack of evidence. On 28 December, farmer and the ex-brother-in-law to victim Sara Moore,  Mr. Lew Van Alstine,   was arrested for the murders. He was released a few weeks later. For lack of evidence. On 15 July, 1916,  Mr. William Mansfield was arrested for the murders. On 21 July,  he was released. Ditto.

On 19 March, 1917, five years after the murders, the Reverend J.J. Burris told a Grand Jury sitting in the county seat of Red Oak, that a mystery man had confessed on his death bed to having committed the murders.  Lack of evidence prevented any further action being taken, And finally, on 30 April, 1917,  a warrant for the arrest of the Reverend George Kelly was issued. He arrived to surrender himself two weeks later, oddly enough on the Number 5 train.

The authorities first became interested in the Reverend (above, on the right) a few weeks after the murders, alerted by local recipients of his rambling letters. He had arrived in Villisca for the first time the Sunday morning before the murders, and had attended a Sunday school performance by the Stillinger girls. He had left Villisca the following day, the Monday morning of the murders, on that Number 5 train..

Two weeks later he had returned posing as a detective, and had even joined a tour of the murder house with a group of real investigators (above).  There was virtually no control of the crime scene. The only thing stopping police from arresting George Kelly immediately was that it was abundantly clear the Reverend was absolutely crazy.

Lyn George Jacklin Kelly (above left, again with his wife) was the son and the grandson of English ministers, who, as an adolescent, had suffered a “mental breakdown”.  He had immigrated to America with his wife in 1904 and preached at a dozen Methodist churches across North Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas and Iowa. Preaching from the pulpit he was “...a confident, well-versed, and articulate speaker”. But in personal interactions the 5 foot, 119 pound minister displayed “...a nervous demeanor, shifty eyes, and often spoke so quickly that saliva would dribble down his chin”.He had been assigned as a visiting minister to several small communities north of Villisca, where  he developed a reputation for odd behavior; late night walks, rumors that he was a peeping tom and unconfirmed stories that he had tried to convince young girls to undress for him.  In 1914, while preaching in South Dakota,  he had advertised for a private secretary. One young woman who responded was informed by return post that Kelly wanted her to type in the nude (above) . He was convicted of sending obscene material through the mail, and spent time in a mental hospital.  While there he wrote to the Montgomery County D.A. that he expected at any moment to be arrested for the Villisca murders.Finally, after investigating just about every other possibility, the Grand Jury indicted Kelly for the murder of Lena Stillinger.  All through the summer of 1917, while in jail awaiting trial, Kelly was interrogated.

The last interview was on 30 August,  a marathon session that lasted all night (above) .  At 7AM on the morning of the 31 August,  Kelly signed a confession to the murder, saying God had whispered to him to “suffer the children to come unto me.”

At trial the Reverend Kelly recanted his confession, and on Wednesday, 26 September 1917 the case went to the jury, which deadlocked eleven to one for acquittal.

A second jury was immediately empanelled, and in November the Reverend Kelly was acquitted by all 12 jurors.  No one else was ever tried for the murders. And the crime remains one of the most horrific, unsolved mass murders in American history, known simply as the Villisca Axe Murders.Did he do it?  I don't know. The passengers on the number 5 train that Monday morning of 1912 were pretty sure he had confessed to them, three hours before the bodies were discovered. But did they really remember the confession, five years later? And why had they not reported the confession at the time? Was it really the morning of of the murders? Or had it happened two weeks after the murders, when Reverend Kelly had impersonated a detective? It is enough to shake your faith in any certainty in this world. ( http://www.villiscaiowa.com/)

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MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

I have an impossible mission for you. Should you decide to accept it, if successful you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams. But fail and, if you are lucky enough to live, you will spend the rest of your life in the deepest darkest prison on earth. The object of this mission is a 48 year old male, being held prisoner on a remote volcanic island (above). It has no port and only one beach. The nearest land is another island, 800 miles to the northwest. The nearest port is 1,200 miles to the east. Your mission must be accomplished without using aircraft or balloons, motorboats, radio, or electricity of any kind, or high explosives. You see, it is 1817, and the mission is to rescue Napoleon Bonaparte.

It is hard to imagine today the terror Napoleon inspired in the British ruling class. He had not a drop of royal blood in his veins, and no privileged education. Yet as a lowly general the "Corsican Ogre" humiliated an Austrian Army in northern Italy. Then like a new Pharaoh, he conquered Egypt. He was elected Emperor of France in 1804, and six months later crowned King of Italy. For almost two years his Grand Army threatened an invasion of England, and then suddenly "Le petit Corporal"  spun about and almost without firing a shot, captured Vienna and an Austrian army of 30,000 men. A month later he was cornered in Czechoslovakia by a combined Russian and Austrian army of 85,000 men. He crushed them in a few hours. After surrendering, Czar Alexander was forced to admit, “We are babies in the hands of a giant.”

The famous quatrains of Nostradamus were quoted as predicting Napoleon's rise: “An Emperor will be born near Italy”. Everywhere he went Kings were overthrown, kingdom's collapsed, and fortunes evaporated. Napoleon closed Europe to all English trade, and cost English bankers vast treasure, not even counting the wealth they had to spend on ships and men of their own. He was the “bogeyman of Europe.” In 1814, after fifteen years and five million dead, Napoleon was finally cornered, forced to abdicate, and exiled to the tiny island of Elba, 12 miles off the coast of Italy. A year later he escaped, and in the famous 100 days reconquered France, recruited a new army of 72,000 men, invaded Belgium, beat a Prussian army of 84,000 men, and finally, at the “very close” battle of Waterloo, was stopped by sacrificing another 45,000 lives. This time the British were determined to lock “Boney” away where he could never escape.

The prison they picked in 1816 was St Helena, a wind swept tropical volcanic island rising 2,000 feet out of the south Atlantic, a third of the way between Africa and South America. Its arid coastal cliffs were cleaved by a half dozen V shaped canyons where rivers fell from the humid forested interior. The British Prime Minister assured his cabinet, “At such a distance and in such a place, all intrigue would be impossible.” But they were still taking no chances.

Ensconced in a single story mansion called Longwood (above) near the center of the island, Napoleon and his small retinue were watched round the clock by a battalion of 2,800 soldiers and 500 cannon. A British officer was required to set eyes upon Napoleon twice a day. He was not allowed out side after sunset, nor if there was an unidentified sail on the horizon. Eleven warships patrolled the seas around the island, and at sunset every boat was secured under guard and every bridge and gate was locked. Residents of the island's only village, Jamestown, were allowed out after 9 pm only with a signed pass. Escape seemed impossible.

But, of course, from the moment of his imprisonment there were those who wanted to set “The Thief of Europe” free again. A group of retired French officers, who had emigrated to Texas in America, were raising funds and plotting Napoleon's escape. His brother Joseph, one time King of Spain, had escaped to America with 20 million francs. And there were others, more surprising, such as the legendary British Admiral Thomas Cochrane, AKA “the Sea Wolf”.  Two years after this brilliant officer commanded the naval squadron that burned Washington D.C.  in 1814,  Cochrane was convicted of stock fraud, and forced to resign from the British Navy. Bitter, he sold his skills to Chile, where he founded their navy and helped win their  independence from Spain. And word was that Cochrane was planning to free Napoleon to lead the revolutionaries in South America.

But the man all the would-be rescuers sought out was a common smuggler named Tom Johnson (above). He'd been born to Irish parents living in southern England, and had become a successful smuggler by the age of 12. The revenue agents caught him twice, but after his second escape he somehow managed to reach France.Using his knowledge of the English coast Tom Johnson quickly again became such a successful smuggler that while Napoleon was planning his invasion of England, he met with Tom and offered him a command in the French navy. Tom said no, so Napoleon threw the smuggler into prison. After nine months Tom escaped yet again, and was later caught by a British warship almost within sight of America. But this time the Admiralty was desperate enough to grant Tom a pardon and put him on the payroll. And one of the first jobs they gave him was to review a new invention being offered to save England from Napoleon's invasion fleet - a submarine.

In 1800 American Robert Fulton (above) built a working prototype for the French revolutionaries. The four man crew of the Nautilus were supplied with air up to 25 feet under the surface via a snorkel. Underwater she was faster than a row boat on the surface, and while on the surface the Nautilus was powered by a sail which ingeniously popped up from a deck hanger. But Napoleon took one look at the leaky thing and decided Fulton was a fraud. He ordered the prototype destroyed. That was when the British offered Fulton the modern equivalent of $10 million if he could build one for England.

Maybe the Admiralty never thought it would work, and they hired Fulton just to keep him occupied. But the inventor still brought his experience and plans for an even bigger submarine. The Nautilus II would be 35 feet long, with a crew of six, two snorkels, a bigger sail and could remain at sea for 20 days. Tom Johnson went over the plans with Fulton at Dover, and they discussed them in detail. But after the British Navy destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at the battle of Trafalgar, they had no need of Fulton's submarine. Discouraged, Fulton took the offer to build a commercial steam boat in New York. But somebody knew the smuggler Tom Johnson was still interested in the idea. That, plus Johnson's reputation for audacity,  convinced some body that the old smuggler should be offered the equivalent of $3 million to rescue Napoleon.

The plan conceived by Johnson involved two submarines. The larger one would approach St. Helena at night from the leeward side, and then submerge at dawn. The next evening, she would surface and launch the smaller sub, which would land Johnson and another man at the foot of the cliffs on the north side of the island (above). Johnson would ascend the cliff, where he would install a bosun's chair. Then he would make his way to Longwood, where he would slip through the British cordon. The next evening, Johnson and Napoleon would sneak out and make for the cliff. Napoleon would be lowered in the chair, and be spirited away before dawn.

In 1818 the Times of London reported on rumors of a plot to rescue Napoleon, and ex-Admiral Cochrane's wife assured several people that such a plan existed. Cochrane was still working with the Chilean Navy. It might all be a fantasy, except we know from British Admiralty records that early in 1820 a commission of senior naval officers reviewed expense accounts for a submarine, built by Johnson. And leading that commission was Sir George Cockburn, the soldier who burned down the White House in 1814, while under orders from Admiral Thomas Cochrane. The records show Johnson was asking for 100,000 pounds, and the sailors gave him just 4,735 pounds. But clearly there was at least one submarine in existence in 1820, and Johnson had control of it.

What does not seem clear is that Johnson’s submarine could have accomplished the rescue mission.   More than likely, Johnson's plot was a scam to obtain money from Napoleon's supporters. But if Johnson had not intended upon trying, why, late one night in November of 1820, did Tom Johnson try to steal his submarine?He got as far as London Bridge, when the navy caught up with him. And according to a Thames boatman who witnessed the scene, “Captain Johnson...(was) threatening to shoot them. But they paid no attention to his threats, seized her (the submarine) and taking her to Blackwall, burned her.” Thus ended the impossible mission.

Was any of it possible? Were there really far flung plots to rescue Napoleon? Well, remember the island 800 miles to the northwest of St. Helena? Its name is Ascension Island, and in 1815 British marines were sent ashore to occupy it, in the unlikely event that some one would try to use it as a base to rescue Napoleon. And as they splashed ashore they reported some one had left a written a message in the beach sand; “Le mai l'Empereur Napoleon vit pour toujours”  It translated as, “May the Emperor Napoleon live forever!”

He did not. Napoleon Bonaparte died on St. Helena in May of 1821, possibly of stomach cancer, or possibly from arsenic poisoning: by whom is any one's guess. Tom Johnson was sent to debtors prison, and while there seems to have contributed to a fanciful retelling of his plan to rescue Napoleon. Upon his release Johnson was granted a comfortable pension, and retired to Southern England. In 1832 Admiral Thomas Cochrane was restored to his full rank in the British Navy, and was later even promoted to Real Admiral. He died in 1860.

Considering the entire tale from beginning to end, I have to say, it it had not involved Napoleon, I would have called it impossible. But with Napoleon, nothing was impossible.

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AN UNLIKELY COMBINATION OF EVENTS

I don’t know the truth of what happened to Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, and it is unlikely I ever will. And if it seems strange that someone so famous could die so mysteriously, you must remember that he was a hero of the Soviet Union, a place and at a time where truth and lies were so intermingled as to make reality as thin as tissue paper.  

On 27 March, 1968, so the story goes, Yui died in a training crash, and not even his widow Valentina, and daughters Yelena and Galina, will ever know with certainty what really happened to him. In the Soviet Union, rumors were part of the disguise. It was a very different world, then.

In 1961 the average yearly income in America was $5,315.00 and gallon of gas cost 27 cents. The city of Seattle completed the tallest structure west of the Mississippi river, the Space Needle. The 200th McDonald’s resturant had opened in Southern California. The hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls produced electricity for the first time. An X-15 rocket plane reached the edge of space at 31 miles high, and President John Kennedy asked Congress for $531 million to “…put a man on the moon in this decade.” And on 12 April, 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first man into space.

His call sign was “Cedar”. The 5’ 2” cosmonaut was a typical fighter jockey, self confident and cocky, described as “virtually unflappable” by his instructors.  He was launched from the desert steppes of Tjuratam, Kazakhstan, just after 9AM (Moscow time) and he whistled a tune during his 90 minute orbital flight. “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, Where her son flies in the sky.” 

But unlike the American astronauts who landed at sea, Yuri had to eject from his Vostok 1 spacecraft at over 15,000 feet. And instead of an aircraft carrier crew,

   on landing Yuri was greeted by an old woman, her granddaughter and her cow. But once the Soviet leadership was certain he had survived, he became a prop in the propaganda wars. And like Alan Shepherd, America’s fist man in space, Yuri longed to fly again, this time to the moon. He was trying to get there, when he died.

The Soviet leadership showered him with medals and awards. He was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the rubber stamp legislature. But all the glittering medals soon grew dull and he was allowed to return to Star City, the home of all Cosmonauts, in the Moscow suburbs. But he was not allowed another space mission. He worked on spacecraft design, and was eventually promoted to the rank of a full Colonel. He became deputy training director for the cosmonaut corps, and in 1968 he began the process to re-qualify as a fighter pilot, perhaps as his first step back to flight status.

On January 10, 1968 the U.S. lost its 10,000th military airplane over Vietnam. The average income in the U.S. was up to $7,850 a year, and gasoline was up to 34 cents a gallon. On January 23rd, North Korean naval boats captured the US Intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, and its 83 man crew. On January 31, 70,000 North Vietnamese troops launched the Tet offensives by briefly capturing the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, and during just the second week of February the United States suffered 543 dead and 2,547 wounded in Vietnam; for that week alone. And on March 27 at 10:17 AM Yuri Gagarin climbed into the front cockpit of a MIG-15UTI trainer with Colonel Vladimir Seryogin in the back seat. On takeoff  Serogiin pushed the throttles to 9,000 rpm’s and headed for Kirzhach, 30 miles to the Northwest of Moscow.

The weather was horrible, and a heavily overcast quickly enveloped the Korean War era fighter/trainer. The Mig 15 was small by modern standards, just 33 feet long, with a 35 ft. swept back wing span.  It was capable of well over 600 mph and had a ceiling of over 50,000 feet.  

But the “Babouskha” (grandmother) also had a tenancy to stall and go into a tight spin at anything under 160 mph. In fact, according to one pilot who recently flew a similar two seat Mig 15UTI trainer, “Turning at that speed could be a delicate exercise, and inadvisable at low altitude. The Mig didn’t seem to care for doing anything under 250 knots.”

Minutes after take off , Seryogin requested permission to alter course. It was granted. But those were the last words heard from the aircraft. Fellow Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was flying a helicopter in the area and he heard two loud booms. An investigation reported that a Sukhoi 11 (above) was also in the area, also in the overcast, and had gone supersonic. That would have accounted for the first boom Leonov heard. The second was probably Gagarin’s Mig slamming into the ground. So great was the impact that no human remains could be positively identified. The plane’s clock was stopped at 10.31 AM. Yuri Gagarin was only 34 years old. He left behind a widow and twin daughters.

Two hundred officers and technicians conducted a thorough investigation. But because of the Soviet obsession with secrecy the report on the crash was never released to the public. And so rumors filled the void. Rumor said the pilots must have been drunk, the plane must have been sabotaged by a jealous superior, the parachute cords were cut and the ejection seats were disconnected, the plane had hit a weather balloon or a bird or someone had forgotten to close a vent or the Mig had been caught the turbulence of that Sukhov 11.  There are a hundred theories, and you can argue that, like all conspiracy theories, an open investigation would never have refuted them all. And given the provable conspiracies that governed the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century, that would likely never be possible, We will never be able to say with absolute certainty why Yuri Gagarin died. But there does seem to be a most likely sequence of events.

The SU-11 had been intended as an all weather interceptor, and was capable of almost twice the speed of sound. But the Soviet design bureau considered it a failure, and it was no longer in production. The most likely assumption is that the Sukhoi pilot was disoriented by the dense overcast and was lower than he thought when he lit his afterburners. The ground radar system that was supposed to provide altitude information to all pilots in the area was out of order for the day. And Soviet fighter aircraft of that era had no cockpit radar.  So the SU-11 might have roared past within 2-300 feet of Gagarin and Seryogin’s jet, maybe even closer and basically, sucked the air out from under their wings. 

To put it another way, the turbulence produced by the SU-11 would have robbed the wings on the smaller Mig-15 of their lift, particularly if it was flying slower than 160 mph. That would have  dropped it into a flat spin. In the overcast, whoever was piloting the Mig would have unable to orient himself before impact in the trees. If either plane had taken off a minute sooner or later they would have never come close to each other. So the death of Yuri Gagarin was most likely a combination of unlikely events; a bad day for a radar system to be down, a bad day to fly, a nasty combination of flight characteristics and some very bad luck. Combat pilots like Yuri would call such combinations of unlikely events the normal risks of flying so high and so fast. Which is what he loved to do.

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