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 murdered an entire family, or when he said he didn't.  What I do know is that five years later, passengers on the Monday morning westbound number 5 train remembered the twitchy, diminutive preacher telling his fellow bleary eyed travelers that he had just butchered five souls back in Villisca, Iowa. 

The bodies would not be discovered until almost three hours later. So if the sleepy witnesses remembered the unspeakable horror described by a strange little preacher they had never seen before, or since, then he was guilty of 8 grisly murders. But, no passengers at the time repeated such a tale. And why would they keep it a secrete if they heard it?  But either way, the Reverend George Kelly was crazy as a loon.

Villisca Iowa is a self proclaimed “community of pride where the rivers divide”,  the rivers being the West and Middle branches of the Nordaway. 

Villsaca lies 80 miles southwest of Council Bluffs.  Montgomery County was settled in the mid 19th century,  mostly by people from upstate New York and Pennsylvania, people with names like Bates and Bowman, Kennedy and Hoover, Powers and Preston and Wymore. 

They arrived on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad, called by her customers just “The Q”.  At the time no community in Iowa was more than a few miles from an active 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 Monday, 10 June, 1912,  inside a sad looking two story house (now at 323 East 4th.Street) were found the bodies of Mr. Josiah B. Moore, his wife Sara, their daughter Katherine and their sons Herman, Boyd and Paul, as well as the bodies of their overnight child guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger. The children were aged 5 through 12. 

All of the Moore family (above) were found in their beds, with their heads covered by bedclothes. All of their skulls had been 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 (above) and the children's room upstairs showed gouge marks, apparently made by the upswing of the ax blade

Downstairs Lena Stillinger’s (above, left) 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 downstairs bedroom floor. 

On the kitchen table (above, right) 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 Monday morning of 10 June, 1912.

On Tuesday, 11 June, 1912,  Mr. Sam Moyer was arrested for the murders.  He was released on Saturday, 15 June.  On Thursday,  20 June, 1912  Mr. John Bohland was arrested for the murders. He was released a few days later.  

On 5 July, 1912, Mr. Frank Roberts (“a negro”) was arrested for the murders. He was released a few days after that. 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. On 15 July, 1916,  Mr. William Mansfield was arrested for the murders. On 21 July,  he was released.  And for the next five years that was where the investigation ended. 

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.  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 Monday morning 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, It was known that, 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 “...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 (above)  for a private secretary. One young woman who responded was informed by return post that Kelly wanted her to type in the nude .  He was convicted of sending obscene material through the mail, and spent more 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, 1917,  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 empaneled, 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 in 1912, were pretty certain in 1917 that the Reverend Kelly had confessed to them, three hours before the bodies were discovered. But did they really remember the confession, five years later? Was it really the morning of the murders? Or had it happened two weeks later,  when Reverend Kelly had impersonated a detective, and returned to the scene of the crime, and then boarded the same Number 5 train ? It is enough to shake your faith in any certainty in this world. ( http://www.villiscaiowa.com/).  

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GIANT KILLER Chapter One

 

I find it odd that such a minor player as the Methodist minister, the Reverend Henry Benjamin Turk,. is the villain of the story of the Cardiff Giant. Turk's pompous ignorance is what motivates and justifies the heroic sins of George Hull. See, in Christian theology, ignorance is not one of the seven deadly sins. Greed, yes, lies, yes, lust and envy, surely, gluttony, and wrath: these are all the "forgiven" the sins of George Hull. 

Meanwhile, a fervent evangelical blind faith in the dyslexic translation of  Old English, via Latin and Hebrew, was the Reverend Turk's chosen path to piety.  And for obtusely following that path ad nauseam, the Reverend generally gets all the blame. Maybe the problem is that hypocrisy is not considered a deadly sin.  

George Hull came close to being a giant himself. At six feet three inches tall, he towered half a foot above the average man of his day, and intimidated them with his broad muscular shoulders, and round face behind a slick black mustache all beneath his black, slicked back hair. But other than his size and villainous appearance, what most people remembered were George's small sharp intelligent blue eyes always darting about. His chief delight, recalled the post master in the Wisconsin Dells town of Baraboo, was expounding on the advantages of infidelity and betting on everything from pool games to local elections. 

In August of 1867 the tobacco warehouse George had opened just four months earlier, and which he had insured to the amount of $12,000, burned to the ground, under circumstances which the insurance company thought highly suspicious. Despite George's declarations of innocence and threats of legal action, he accepted a $1,000 settlement and moved on.

According to George, he moved on to the tiny Iowa hamlet of Ackley -   because of his brother-in-law who lived there,  had taken a consignment of 10,000 cigars, and was having trouble selling them. This could not have been surprising since Ackley had barely 300 residents. Even if every man woman and child smoked a dozen cheap cigars a day, it is difficult to envision how they could ever smoke 10,000 cigars before hacking up a lung and dropping dead.

George Hull had gotten into the business through his uncle, the front half of the Hull and Grummand Company, which had recently opened a cigar factory at Water and Henry streets in Bimginham, New York, on the Pennsylvania border.  The young George needed work after a short stint in jail for selling marked cards, and the cut throat cigar business seemed a natural for him.

The 8,000 citizens of Bimingham had strict anti-union laws, encouraging  local sweat shops to employ unskilled workers at starvation wages - 40 cents for a day spent rolling stale tobacco scraps and assorted agricultural detritus, dust and rodent droppings,  into 100 cigars that sold from three to five cents each. It inspired a business model long on salesmanship, and short on morality.

But it was while residing with his sister and brother-in-law that George Hull briefly crossed paths with the fulcrum of his giant morality tale. According to George, “At that time a Methodist revivalist was in Ackley, and prayed all over the settlement....One night he was at my sister’s house, and after supper we had a long discussion and a hot one.” Specifically, according to George, the hot discussion centered around a quote from the King James Biblical book of Genesis, chapter six, verse four, “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”.

Besides sounding like a “Christianized” version of ancient Greek theology, the King James edition of the bible which the Reverend Turk quoted, was an English translation of a compilation written in Latin, of stories originally composed in Aramaic and Greek . And as any skilled translator will tell you, and any reader of a Google translation will confirm, conveying the meaning from one language to another is as much social art as lexicography. Translating a translation only increases the inevitable misunderstandings. And in this particular text, the scholars compromised on the word “giants”, when a more precise word was “Nephilim”. But that word requires an uncomfortable explanation.

The mysterious Nephilim are mentioned only twice in the bible, this once in Genesis, and once in Numbers, chapter 13, verses 32 and 33 . “And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.'” But they also appear in the Book of Enoch, which is not part of the conical bible, but a conservative Judaic variation of the Torah.  

In that book the Nephilim were the products of male angles mating with human woman. This was far too close to the pagan religions Yawah was so critical of.  Later Christian scholars chose to mention them only twice, hoping to avoid the theological torture required to explain them, by using the word “giants” instead of Nephilim.  And it was on the foundation of this compromised pebble that the Reverend Turk built his temple of biblical literalism.

But to return to the theology of George Hull, he wrote, “At midnight we went to bed, and I lay wide awake wondering why people would believe those remarkable stories in the Bible about giants, when suddenly I thought of making a stone giant and passing it off as a petrified man.” But, of course, there is nothing in George Hull's past which would have give any reason to believe that is what George thought. As one recent biographer put it, “ "Once Hull had an idea, he had no qualms about breaking partnerships, or laws, to get what he wanted.” And George Hull's obsession was not logic, or heaven, but money.

Five years earlier, Mark Twain had written his first humorous article for the Virginia City, Nevada “Territorial Enterprise”, which began, “A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner...”  In Twain's story the locals want to bury the defunct stone man, but cannot separate him from the rock which has engulfed him. So, “Everybody goes to see the stone man, as many as three hundred having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.”

Twain (above) later explained his inspiration. “One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding...one or two glorified discoveries of this kind....and I felt called upon to destroy this growing...petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire.” Except the joke did not kill the idea of a petrified man. Twain was “stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced.” Over the next year, Twain's joke was reprinted as fact in newspapers across America, and even England, where it was published in “The Lancet”, the premiere scientific medical journal of the day.

It seems unlikely that George Hull realized that Twain's story, if he ever read it, was intended as a joke. In the history we have of him, George Hull does not display a sense of humor about anything that does not entail some degree of humiliation for somebody other than George Hull.  In fact, a witness said in the summer of 1867 George had considered “salting” an “Indian burial mound” outside of Barboo, Wisconsin. And that was long before he ever met the Reverend Turk. 

 It did not even matter to Hull that there were no dead Indians in most of  the Wisconsin mounds. They were in truth drumlins,  formed by moving rivers of ice more than 10,000 years earlier, proving again that the truth is more complex and fascinating than the theology of angels dancing on the head of a pin, or giants mating with human women.

I don't know if the native peoples got the idea for their burial mounds from the moraines, but I do know that George Hull did not get the idea for the Cardiff Giant from the maligned Reverend Turk. And we should stop blaming him for it. Everything that now followed could be laid at the foot of George Hull.

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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 murdered an entire family, or when he said he didn't.  What I do know is that five years later, passengers on the Monday morning westbound number 5 train remembered the twitchy, diminutive preacher telling his fellow bleary eyed travelers that he had just butchered five souls back in Villisca, Iowa. 

The bodies would not be discovered until almost three hours later. So if the sleepy witnesses remembered the unspeakable horror described by a strange little preacher they had never seen before, or since, then he was guilty of 8 grisly murders. But, no passengers at the time repeated such a tale. And why would they keep it a secrete if they heard it?  But either way, the Reverend George Kelly was crazy as a loon.

Villisca Iowa is a self proclaimed “community of pride where the rivers divide”,  the rivers being the West and Middle branches of the Nordaway. 

Villsaca lies 80 miles southwest of Council Bluffs.  Montgomery County was settled in the mid 19th century,  mostly by people from upstate New York and Pennsylvania, people with names like Bates and Bowman, Kennedy and Hoover, Powers and Preston and Wymore. 

They arrived on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad, called by her customers just “The Q”.  At the time no community in Iowa was more than a few miles from an active 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 Monday, 10 June, 1912,  inside a sad looking two story house (now at 323 East 4th.Street) were found the bodies of Mr. Josiah B. Moore, his wife Sara, their daughter Katherine and their sons Herman, Boyd and Paul, as well as the bodies of their overnight child guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger. The children were aged 5 through 12. 

All of the Moore family (above) were found in their beds, with their heads covered by bedclothes. All of their skulls had been 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 (above) and the children's room upstairs showed gouge marks, apparently made by the upswing of the ax blade

Downstairs Lena Stillinger’s (above, left) 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 downstairs bedroom floor. 

On the kitchen table (above, right) 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 Monday morning of 10 June, 1912.

On Tuesday, 11 June, 1912,  Mr. Sam Moyer was arrested for the murders.  He was released on Saturday, 15 June.  On Thursday,  20 June, 1912  Mr. John Bohland was arrested for the murders. He was released a few days later.  

On 5 July, 1912, Mr. Frank Roberts (“a negro”) was arrested for the murders. He was released a few days after that. 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. On 15 July, 1916,  Mr. William Mansfield was arrested for the murders. On 21 July,  he was released.  And for the next five years that was where the investigation ended. 

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.  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, Monday morning 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, It was known that, 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 “...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 (above)  for a private secretary. One young woman who responded was informed by return post that Kelly wanted her to type in the nude .  He was convicted of sending obscene material through the mail, and spent more 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, 1917,  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 empaneled, 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 in 1912, were pretty certain in 1917 that the Reverend Kelly had confessed to them, three hours before the bodies were discovered. But did they really remember the confession, five years later? Was it really the morning of the murders? Or had it happened two weeks later,  when Reverend Kelly had impersonated a detective, and returned to the scene of the crime, and then boarded the same Number 5 train ? It is enough to shake your faith in any certainty in this world. ( http://www.villiscaiowa.com/).  

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