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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