What happened next marked the Villisca killings as truly peculiar and still sends shivers down the spine a century after the fact. The killer then descended the stairs and took his ax to the Stillinger girls, the elder of whom may finally have awakened an instant before she, too, was murdered.

Nor did the assailant or any of the four children make sufficient noise to disturb KatherineвЂ™s two friends, Lena and Ina Stillinger, as they slept downstairs. Once again, there is no evidence that Herman, 11 Katherine, 10 Boyd, 7 or Paul, 5, woke before they died. Leaving the couple dead or dying, the killer went next door and used the ax-JoeвЂ™s own, probably taken from where it had been left in the coal shed-to kill the four Moore children as they slept.

For a price, visitors can stay in the house overnight there is no shortage of interested parties. One of the townвЂ™s larger and better-appointed properties, it still stands today and has been turned into VilliscaвЂ™s premier tourist attraction. Then he struck Sarah a blow before she had time to wake or register his presence. Raising the ax high above his head-so high it gouged the ceiling-the man brought the flat of the blade down on the back of Joe MooreвЂ™s head, crushing his skull and probably killing him instantly. He ignored one, in which four more young children were sleeping, and crept into the room in which 43-year-old Joe Moore lay next to his wife, Sarah. Still carrying the ax, the stranger walked past one room in which two girls, ages 12 and 9, lay sleeping, and slipped up the narrow wooden stairs that led to two other bedrooms. Then, according to a reconstruction attempted by the town coroner next day, he took an oil lamp from a dresser, removed the chimney and placed it out of the way under a chair, bent the wick in two to minimize the flame, lit the lamp, and turned it down so low it cast only the faintest glimmer in the sleeping house. The door was not locked-crime was not the sort of thing you worried about in a modestly prosperous Midwest settlement of no more than 2,000 people, all known to one another by sight-and the visitor was able to slip inside silently and close the door behind him. Shortly after midnight on June 10, 1912-one hundred years ago this week-a stranger hefting an ax lifted the latch on the back door of a two-story timber house in the little Iowa town of Villisca.

Tennessee Serial Killer 1902