The lamps were still burning when neighbors found the Moore house locked from the inside on the morning of June 10, 1912. Josiah and Sarah Moore were dead in their bed. Down the hall, all four of their children were dead too, and in the guest room, two young sisters who were only sleeping over that night, Ina and Lena Stillinger, had been killed as well. Eight people in one house, all struck with the same weapon, an axe that belonged to Josiah Moore himself, left behind at the scene rather than carried away.
Whoever did it stayed in the house for hours afterward. The mirrors were covered with cloth. A bowl of bloody water sat on the kitchen table. Every window shade was drawn. Nothing valuable was taken.
Investigators chased the case for years. A traveling minister named George Kelly was tried twice and acquitted the second time. A serial killer theory pointed at a man named Henry Lee Moore, no relation, who was already committing similar axe murders across the Midwest. Neither theory ever produced a conviction, and the house still stands in Villisca today, restored to its 1912 layout, open to anyone willing to spend the night inside.
Is it possible whoever covered those mirrors knew exactly what they were doing and wanted the house itself to forget what happened in it.
Cold case, or does that house still remember?





