Monday, January 28, 2008
The 1912 Villisca Axe Murder Blog
The folks over at the 1912 Villisca Axe Murder Blog have a feature called "Ask Ed." Essentially you send them a question you have about the Villisca crime and then Dr. Ed Epperly, the foremost expert on the case, will answer it! I've had some confusion about the Villisca crime scene pertaining to the method of entry. Did the UNSUB walk in the open back door or did he "break in" more traditionally (like in Colorado Springs fer example). I sent my question to the fine folks at 1912VAMB and although they forgot my name, Dr. Epperly answered the question! See it here.
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2 comments:
Hi there, Astrid here from Tasmania, Australia! I’m a little late to this party, I know, but recently became hyper focused on this series of murders as a research interest, & have been delving into the firsthand accounts (wish I’d found your excellent blog earlier!)
On this topic - and thanks for the link, I’ve read the Q&A, very interesting - one thing that I haven’t yet seen mentioned, unless it’s later in your blog & I haven’t yet got to it… one newspaper account of the Villisca murders quotes a near female neighbour of the Moores who lived in the second house from the entrance to an alley that led to the Moores’ back yard. She stated that on Sunday afternoon,, she saw a man in the street outside her house, seemingly scouting all the houses. She called her husband to go out and confront him, before the husband could get outside, the man had vanished in the direction of the alley. When the husband reached the street he was nowhere to be seen.
This account interested me more than most of the ‘I saw an unknown man’ witness accounts purely because the woman’s story shows that there was something about this man’s actions that spooked her - enough to call for her husband to go outside and check it out. We could infer that the man looked perfectly normal, as she gave only a vague description - it was how he was acting that triggered her to feel alarmed. We all have an ancient instinct for ‘danger’ and it occurs to me that his actions felt predatory to her, maybe at a subconscious level.
Initially I thought it couldn’t be relevant because it was in the afternoon. At the time, the Moores were out, but in between then and the murders, they came home, had dinner, went out for the evening (locking the door), came home again, then went to bed in the normal way. However I was interested in the account of a newspaperman from Colorado Springs who was permitted to inspect the Moore house and found an indented cloth ‘seat’ in a cupboard, and the dust on the floor of the cupboard disturbed. To me this does ring true as evidence of a person concealing themselves in the cupboard. Which could make the timeline of the afternoon prowler match up.
It further occurs to me that this might be an answer to the question of how the murderer got into the house. People are generally less likely to lock their doors during day.Iggy hours. Joe Moore was a shopkeeper and by all accounts a careful man, he locked his feyes ont door when taking the family out for the night. I feel like he would also have locked the back door at that time. But few people locked their houses during the day, so it may be more likely that the murderer scouted the location and gained access in the afternoon, when doors were likely unlocked and people were less likely to be concerned if they saw someone walking around the streets. Just a thought?
Astrid - Hello again! And thanks for this comment. The biggest problem with the "killer hiding in the house" idea is that the people who inspected the house in the immediate discovery of the crime were certain that a grown person could not have hidden themselves inside any of the closets or crawl spaces. The second problem is, by the time the reporter from Colorado had been inside the house, half the county had also been inside it, grabbing souvenirs (like a piece of Joe Moore's skull) and jostling things about. There was no way to say with any certainty that the small chair was the one thing not disturbed by the crowds of people who toured the house. The other issue is the waiting. The Villisca murders occurred sometime after midnight. The children's program was going on at the church that evening and the families probably got home around 10:00 PM. This means the killer would have had to enter the house and hide themselves on a Sunday afternoon, and remain concealed, likely while the family was in the house before leaving for the evening, then remained concealed until everyone had gone to sleep. The Children's Program started at 7:00 PM, after the 5:00 PM evening service. So the killer would have entered the house at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon? Maybe? That would have been 8 hours of waiting in a house, some of that time stuffed into a tiny space with the family walking about, without air conditioning. I'm not sure even the most dedicated serial killer of all time could have managed this. Even BTK got bored and left the house of one of his potential victims when she came home later than he expected. I think it more likely the killer entered through an unlocked door after spying on the house from the barn. That's my assessment of it, anyway.
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