Villisca, Ia. (1912)
Jun. 9, 1912, Joseph Moore, his wife Sarah, their four
children and two visiting children were murdered “by a fiend who crushed their
skulls with an ax.” An “itinerant
minister” was charged. The Iowa Attorney-General
“sought to commit” the minister “to an insane asylum, a step which would bar
the prosecution of any other person suspected of the crime.” Relatives of the victims claimed that the
wrong person was being tried; in response, the Iowa legislature passed a law
prohibiting public discussion of the crime, leading to an “injunction against
J.N. Wilkerson, a detective, whose four years’ investigation of the murders
cast suspicion on a prominent state senator.”
The public meeting by Villisca residents took place in Omaha, Neb.,
instead.
Category: family?
Suicide: no.
Cause: unknown
Weapon: ax.[1]
"... a law prohibiting public discussion of the crime..."
ReplyDeleteWhich should have blown up instantly on 1st Amendment grounds. Perhaps no one challenged it effectively.
Presumably the law in question would be found in the statutes of Iowa for the time; was it ever repealed? (It seems like the sort of thing that would be just left on the books and forgotten.)
First Amendment did not yet restrict states.
ReplyDeleteThere's a very interesting book out that covers aspects of this mass murder...
ReplyDeleteThe Man From the Train, written by Bill James. In it, he lays out a series of similar crimes from the same period, covering most of the US, and a reasonable theory of the crime. His conjecture even ties in that mysterious killing in Germany, where the family was found murdered in their barn after the maid reported strange goings-on and quit...
It's a good read, and thought-provoking. I agree with the likelihood of those crimes being connected, and his work in identifying the killer. Maybe. It could be mere conjecture and shallow research, but I think it's pretty solid.