True Crime + Paranormal – Both Full Transcripts (Released simultaneously 30 November 2025)
The Key Facts (for the impatient)
- Date: Night of 9–10 June 1912, Villisca, Iowa
- Victims (8): Josiah (43) & Sarah Moore (39), their children Herman (11), Mary Katherine (10), Arthur Boyd (7), and Paul (5), plus sleepover guests Lena Stillinger (12) & Ina Stillinger (8)
- Crime: All were bludgeoned in their beds with the family’s own axe. Faces covered, mirrors draped, the killer washed hands and ate a snack, leaving on foot toward the railroad tracks.
- Main suspects: – State Senator Frank F. Jones + hired killer “Blackie” Mansfield (business feud) – Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly (confessed, later acquitted) – Serial killer “The Man from the Train” (50–100 similar axe murders, 1898–1912)
- Status: No arrests, no convictions. The case is still officially open in 2025.
- Today: The house is one of America’s most violently haunted locations – self-stabbings, bleeding mirrors, children’s EVPs begging “Lena, wake up", and activity exploding since the 2023 sale.
I told the entire story in two full-length videos released at the exact same moment.
Below are both videos embedded and the complete word-for-word spoken transcripts.
Watch both – together they give you the whole nightmare.
PART 1 – The true-crime investigation on True Crime Tales with Cosette
The Villisca Axe Murders: Eight Souls Butchered in Their Beds (Part 1) 🎞️
Imagine a warm summer evening in 1912, the kind where the air hums with cicadas and families linger on porches after church. In the small railroad town of Villisca, Iowa, one such family heads home, full of laughter from a joyful Children's Day celebration. By morning, their house has become a tomb – eight people, including six children, slaughtered in their beds with an axe. No screams split the night. No doors were forced. The killer even paused to eat before vanishing into the dawn. This is the Villisca Axe Murders, a nightmare that gripped America and remains unsolved over a century later. Tonight, I'm sharing the full story in two parts, released simultaneously. This is the true-crime tale, woven from the facts. If you're drawn to the shadows beyond – the hauntings, the whispers from the grave – the companion is already available on Eerie Tales with Cosette. Links in the description and pinned comment.
Let me take you back to Villisca, a quiet dot on the Iowa prairie in June 1912. With just over two thousand souls, it was the sort of place where life moved slowly – cornfields stretching to the horizon, hogs rooting in the mud, and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad rumbling through like clockwork. Doors stayed unlocked, neighbours shared pies, and the biggest excitement was the weekly sermon or a new shipment at the hardware store. But on that fateful Sunday, 9 June, the air was thick with the promise of summer, and the local Presbyterian Church hosted its annual Children's Day programme – a sweltering affair of hymns, recitations, and ice cream on the lawn.
At the heart of it all was the Moore family, the very picture of Midwestern success and warmth. Josiah B. Moore, 43, had built himself up from nothing – born in Illinois to modest farmers, he'd apprenticed as a clerk before landing in Villisca and rising through the ranks at a local implement firm. Ambitious and affable, with a neatly trimmed moustache, he struck out on his own in 1907, opening Moore-Linn Implement Company and snagging the exclusive John Deere franchise for the county. It was a coup that turned heads and filled his pockets. His wife, Sarah Montgomery Moore, 39, was the gentle anchor – born in nearby Page County, she'd married Josiah in 1892 and devoted her days to home and church. A talented pianist, she played for the choir and organised community events, her kind smile hiding a quiet strength.
Their four children were the joy of the household: Herman Montgomery Moore, 11, already tall and freckled, helping his dad with deliveries and dreaming of machines; Mary Katherine Moore, 10 – everyone called her Katy – a bright spark with ribbons in her hair, who recited poems at church that very evening; Arthur Boyd Moore, 7, or Boyd as they knew him, all knees and mischief, forever chasing his siblings; and little Paul Vernon Moore, just 5, the baby with cherubic curls and a thumb-sucking habit, clutching his rag doll as he drifted off.
That night, after the programme wrapped around 9:30, Katy begged two friends to stay over – Lena Gertrude Stillinger, 12, a tomboy with braids and big dreams of becoming a teacher, and her little sister Ina Mae Stillinger, 8, all ringlets and giggles, inseparable from her porcelain doll. The girls' father was a railroad foreman, their home a bustling place nearby, but a locked door meant they couldn't get in late. Josiah and Sarah, ever hospitable, welcomed them into the downstairs guest room. The group walked home under the stars, sipped cocoa, said prayers, and turned out the lights by 10:30. Curtains billowed in the breeze from open windows. It was the last peaceful moment.
 |
| The victims |
Sometime after midnight – likely between 12:30 and 2 a.m., based on how the blood had clotted – evil slipped into the house. The back door was unlocked, as always. The intruder, perhaps waiting in the attic or barn where fresh cigarette butts and disturbed hay were later found, grabbed Josiah's own axe from the woodshed. He moved upstairs first, silent as a shadow. Josiah and Sarah were struck in their sleep – Josiah's skull shattered with over thirty blows from the blunt side, his face a ruin, blood arcing to the ceiling. Sarah twisted in agony, her throat slashed with the blade's edge, a defensive wound on her arm telling of a brief, desperate stir.
The children didn't stand a chance. Herman, perhaps roused by the thuds, took more than thirty hits, with gashes on his arms from trying to shield himself. Katy was turned face down, her small body absorbing twenty blows. Boyd and Paul, curled together in the same bed, were obliterated – twenty and twenty-five strikes, their tiny skulls pulped. Downstairs, the Stillinger girls may have heard something – Lena fought back, with wounds on her forearms and her nightgown hiked up in a way that hinted at something darker, though exams at the time found no clear evidence of assault. Ina Mae, the youngest, was killed almost in her sleep, with fewer blows but no less fatal.
The killer didn't rush. He covered every face with bedclothes, as if granting a twisted mercy. He draped skirts and blankets over ten mirrors and windows, stuffing chimneys with garments to block light or smoke. A kerosene lamp burnt low on the landing, its chimney removed for a ghostly glow. He washed the blood from his hands in the kitchen basin, sliced a four-pound slab of bacon from the icebox and left it by the axe – symbolic, perhaps, or just bizarre. An uneaten meal sat on the table. Even the family cat was locked in the basement, unharmed. The axe, wiped but still gore-flecked, was propped in the guest room. By dawn, he was gone – bloodhounds later trailed his scent to the Nodaway River and the rail depot, where it vanished among the freight cars.
Dawn broke humid and mocking. At 5 a.m., the milkman noted no orders left out. By 7, neighbour Mary Peckham grew worried – the Moores were early risers, but no chores were done, and no curtains were drawn. She knocked, then called Josiah's brother Ross. With a spare key, Ross entered and recoiled at the coppery stench. Peering into the guest room, he saw Ina Mae and Lena Gertrude, pale and bloodied. He bolted out, gasping for the marshal. Henry "Hank" Horton, the stout local lawman, arrived at a scene from hell – "Somebody's murdered in every bed," he muttered. Word spread like prairie fire: eight dead, six children. The town descended, over a hundred trampling the house by 9:30, handling the axe, even pocketing skull fragments as grim souvenirs. The sheriff and coroner arrived too late to preserve much; the National Guard sealed it by 11, but the damage was done.
The funerals on 12 June were the largest Iowa had seen – five thousand mourners lining the streets, black crepe fluttering, and Guard rifles gleaming against whispers of lynching. Six tiny white coffins for the children and two larger ones for the adults were carried through the square to Villisca Cemetery. The Moores in their family plot, the Stillingers nearby. A state reward of $1,000 and a county reward of $500 – but no leads from the inquest. Autopsies confirmed death by massive skull fractures; no poisons were tested, and there was no clear motive beyond rage or madness.
In a town where everyone knew each other's secrets, suspects emerged like ghosts from the corn. Over a hundred were questioned, but three theories have endured for more than 113 years.
First, the business grudge that festered like poison. Frank F. Jones was Villisca's kingpin – state senator, banker, implement tycoon. Josiah had been his star employee until he quit in 1907, opening a rival store and stealing the John Deere deal Jones craved. It cost Frank thousands, and rumours swirled of arson at Josiah's place – two fires in 1911. Worse, whispers of an affair between Josiah and Frank's daughter-in-law, Dona, were caught on the party-line phone by nosy operators. Frank allegedly offered $5,000 for Josiah's "removal". But the hand? William "Blackie" Mansfield, a morphine-addicted drifter and ex-Army man, was employed by Jones for odd jobs. Detectives linked Blackie to identical axe murders: his own family in Blue Island, Illinois, in 1914 – wife, child, in-laws, faces covered, mirrors draped. A Pinkerton swore Blackie confessed in 1916: he hid in the attic, struck at midnight, and was paid by Jones. Grand juries in 1916 and 1917 twice refused to indict – Frank’s political machine was simply too strong. The scandal destroyed his career; he lost re-election in 1912 and never held office again. He died uncharged in 1941.
Then there's the mad preacher, Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly – a diminutive Englishman, 5'2" and erratic, with a history of breakdowns and obscene letters to young women. He'd preached in Villisca that weekend, eyes fixed on Mary Katherine and Lena Gertrude during the recital. He boarded the 5 a.m. train on Monday, boasting to passengers of "eight dead souls" before the bodies were found. When arrested in 1917, he confessed after a gruelling interrogation: God commanded him to "slay utterly, old and young," quoting Scripture; he hid in the barn, peeped through a knothole, and draped mirrors to bind spirits. He knew details only the killer could – the bacon slab, the low lamp. But he recanted, claiming coercion. Two trials ended in hung juries and acquittal – juries saw a fragile mind, not a monster. Kelly died in 1949, still scribbling justifications.
But perhaps the most chilling possibility: Villisca was just one stop on a serial killer's bloody tour. Between 1898 and 1912, over fifty people – perhaps a hundred – were axed in their beds across the Midwest and beyond, with eerie signatures: blunt-side blows, faces shrouded, mirrors draped, chimneys stuffed, a low-burning lamp, the axe left wiped, always near rail lines. The press called him "Billy the Axeman" or "The Man from the Train". Just five nights before Villisca, in Paola, Kansas, 170 miles away, Rollin and Anna Hudson were hacked in their bed – faces covered, dog locked unharmed, scent lost at the depot.
And the earliest confirmed victim in this chilling string may well have been Blanche Wayne of Colorado Springs. On the night of 17 September 1911 – nine months before Villisca – Blanche, her husband H.C. Wayne, their young child, and three members of the neighbouring Burnham family were all hacked to death while they slept. The killer used the family’s own axe, heaped bedclothes over every victim’s head so their dead eyes couldn’t watch him, paused to wash the blood from his hands in a basin, and simply left the weapon at the scene. Mirrors were covered, a lamp burnt low, and the scent vanished at the nearby railroad tracks – every signature that would appear again and again, including five nights before Villisca in Paola, Kansas, and finally in that quiet white house on East Second Street.
Earlier: the Showmans in Ellsworth, Kansas – a family of five; the Dawsons in Monmouth, Illinois – three dead; the Hills in Ardenwald, Oregon – four bludgeoned. Criminologists like Edgar Epperly and Bill James map dozens more, pointing to Paul Mueller, a German immigrant carpenter who vanished after an 1897 Massachusetts slaying. Or Henry Lee Moore, a drifter who axed his own kin in 1912. The hounds in Villisca lost the trail at the tracks – a transient hopping freights, killing on impulse, vanishing west.
Other shadows flickered: Josiah's brother-in-law with old threats, a disgruntled employee, and a vagrant oil worker obsessed with axes. But no one was ever convicted. The case lingers open with Iowa's investigators, with no DNA left to test and no closure for the graves.
Eight names etched in stone: Josiah B. Moore. Sarah Montgomery Moore. Herman Montgomery Moore. Mary Katherine Moore. Arthur Boyd Moore. Paul Vernon Moore. Lena Gertrude Stillinger. Ina Mae Stillinger. A family and two girls, gone in the night. But the house at 508 East Second Street remembers – and that's where the story turns darker.
The full paranormal companion is already live on Eerie Tales with Cosette – "The Villisca Axe Murders: Ghosts, Curses & the House That Bleeds (Part 2)". Link in the description and pinned comment. Dive in for the chills that follow the blood.
If this tale gripped you, subscribe, hit the bell, and share your theory in the comments – was it Jones's revenge, Kelly's madness, or the man from the train? I look forward to reading them.
Thank you for joining me on True Crime Tales with Cosette. Sleep well... if you can. And I'll see you on the other channel.
PART 2 – The hauntings and paranormal activity on Eerie Tales with Cosette
The Villisca Axe Murders: Ghosts, Curses & the House That Bleeds (Part 2) 🎞️
Think again.
The bodies were carried out, the coffins lowered, and the town tried to forget…
but the house never did.
For 113 years shadows have moved when no one was there.
Axes have fallen in empty rooms.
Visitors have run screaming into the Iowa night with wounds they can’t explain.
This is no longer just a murder house.
This is a place where the dead refuse to leave… and they hate company.
Tonight the full story drops in two parts at the exact same moment.
You’re watching the haunted half right now.
If you want every forensic detail, every suspect, every axe blow, the companion true-crime deep dive is already live on True Crime Tales with Cosette – link in the description and pinned comment.
I want to tell you what happened after the coffins were lowered into Iowa soil.
The town tried to forget.
They nailed boards across the windows of 508 East Second Street, let weeds choke the porch, and taught their children to cross the road when they passed that silent white house.
For eighty years it stood empty, paint peeling, floors sagging, waiting like something holding its breath.
They weren’t afraid.
They wanted to bring the house back to the exact morning of 10 June 1912 – wallpaper, lace curtains, oil lamps, beds left unmade with the sheets still tucked the way little Paul and Boyd had kicked them off in their sleep.
They finished the restoration in 1997 and opened the doors for tours.
That was the night the dead came home.
The very first evening Martha spent alone inside, she woke to the sound of small bare feet running across the attic floorboards.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
She climbed the stairs with a flashlight.
The second her beam touched the empty attic, the footsteps stopped.
Two fresh Camel cigarette butts lay in the corner – the same brand found the morning of the murders.
From that night on, the house never slept again.
Heavy trunks have slid across floors on their own.
Axes – real, seven-pound axes – have toppled from locked glass cases at 3 a.m. sharp.
But the house saves its worst for those who stay overnight.
A paranormal investigator named Robert Laursen locked himself in the children’s bedroom to prove nothing would happen.
At 3:17 a.m. the camera caught him sitting bolt upright, eyes wide with terror.
He seized his own hunting knife, raised it to his chest, and drove it in – once, twice – blood pouring down his shirt.
When the others broke down the door, he was sobbing:
“She made me do it… the little girl in the white nightgown made me do it.”
He needed twenty-three stitches and has never returned to Iowa.
A woman woke to an ice-cold child’s hand closing around her throat.
A tiny voice whispered against her ear:
“Mama… why won’t you wake up?”
She screamed and clawed at empty air, and when the lights came on, there were five perfect fingerprints bruised into her neck.
The mirrors weep red liquid that isn’t paint.
Handprints bloom on fogged glass and vanish the moment you reach out.
Cold spots drop thirty degrees in a heartbeat, and suddenly you’re drowning in grief that isn’t yours.
EVPs caught over the years are heartbreaking:
A little boy: “Play with me.”
A woman, soft and broken: “It still hurts.”
And clearest of all – a girl’s voice, over and over:
“Lena… Wake up. It’s morning.”
The dead took it as an invitation.
Since the sale, the activity has turned vicious.
A man’s voice, low and venomous – “Jones did it.”
A preacher snarling “Slay utterly… old and young.”
And a little girl crying for her sister:
“Lena… Lena, please wake up.”
In March 2025 a woman woke with three long scratches down her back – perfect spacing, like a child standing on the mattress behind her.
Another guest caught a photograph no one can explain: Sarah Moore in a blood-soaked nightgown, arms outstretched, standing at the foot of the children’s bed, watching over the empty mattresses where her babies once lay.
People still ask why the spirits won’t leave.
I think the house won’t let them.
The mirrors were covered so their souls couldn’t find the light.
The faces were shrouded so they couldn’t see the way home.
Eight violent deaths in one night soaked the walls with something darker than blood – something that grows stronger with every footstep, every whispered prayer, every scream that echoes down the hallway after midnight.
Fifteen thousand people walk through those doors every year now.
Most leave shaking.
Some leave bleeding.
A few never truly leave at all.
They still hear children laughing in their dreams.
They still feel cold fingers tracing their throats in the dark.
And so the house on East Second Street waits, patient as ever, under the same Iowa moon that looked down on the murders in 1912.
Josiah.
Sarah.
Herman.
Mary Katherine.
Arthur Boyd.
Paul.
Lena.
Ina.
Eight souls who never saw another sunrise… and who are still waiting upstairs for someone to come tuck them in.
If tonight has left frost on your heart, the full true-crime investigation – every suspect, every axe blow, every secret the town tried to bury – is already waiting for you on True Crime Tales with Cosette.
The link is in the description and the pinned comment.
Subscribe here if you want more stories whispered from the other side.
And tell me, honestly…
Would you spend the night?
Sweet dreams are cancelled.
This is Eerie Tales with Cosette…
and the children are still playing upstairs.
Watch both videos. Read both transcripts.
Then tell me in the comments on either channel:
Who swung the axe… And would you spend the night?
