Villisca murder mystery researcher releases book

VILLISCA - Edgar Epperly was not even born when arguably the most tragic and mysterious event in Iowa history happened on the night of June 10, 1912.

Someone bludgeoned to death Josiah B. Moore, his wife Sara, their children Herman, Katherine, Boyd and Paul, and two overnight guests Lena and Ina Stillinger in the Villisca home of the Moore’s. The event led to nearly 10 years of investigations and trials. Who used an axe to end those eight lives still has not been confirmed today.

Epperly explained his book about that night and years afterward during a presentation Monday at The Bank, an art gallery, in Villisca.

Epperly began his interest and research of the crime as a college student. In 1955 he traveled to Villisca at the age of 20 with two friends and met Dr. Cooper, the physician who examined the victims and the crime scene. Epperly eventually taught education at Luther College in Decorah before retiring. But his interest in the murders has not ended as he released his book last November about the crime titled “Fiend Incarnate.”

“It’s amazing how the community has been tied up in it for 100 years,” he said.

He said there are some obscurities to the story that were not important to the crime, but still “interesting.”

Epperly said Villisca’s law enforcement officer that night, Mike Overman, was told by a cafe owner of two men who arrived in town by train and needed a place to sleep. The owner suggested using Villisca’s jail, which Overman agreed. The two were not confined to the jail as they could leave when they desired.

Overman was in the town’s square hidden in the shadows of the trees. It is suspected if Overman would have been walking the business district he may have seen the same encounter as the town’s night telephone operator, Xenia Delaney. The phone office was on the second story of a business building and accessed by an exterior, cast-iron stairway which is still attached to the building.

Overnight calls were usually emergencies and rare. Delaney was able to rest on a cot in the room. During her shift that night she claimed she heard doors opening and footsteps outside her office. Whoever it was not able to enter the telephone room and left. Delaney was never able to identify or clearly see the person. She did not contact law enforcement about the moment.

“Robbery, violence and murder were rare to the point of nonexistence,” Epperly said about Villisca crime. “Had she known (about the murders), not six blocks away it’s doubtful she would have drifted back to sleep so easily.”

Epperly wondered if the murder suspect saw the light in the telephone operator room.

“In a frenzy of excitement did he see other things,” he said.

Epperly said Villisca’s case has some similarities to other murders in other parts of the country, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, Monmouth, Illinois, and Ellsworth, Kansas. The suspect killed a family and left the house.

“The town marshall of all people was at home and he heard someone jimmying the back door or window. He went there and the person fled,” Epperly said about the Kansas case. “Maybe it was part of a pattern that they went from one place to another and the killer was the person coming up the stairway. There are a lot of gaps in that chain of logic. Lots of guesses. It’s interesting,” he said.

Epperly explained the life of Welch Pogue, a teenager from a farm family in Grant, north of Villisca. Epperly said he was fascinated by the attorneys during related trials in 2016. Epperly said he shifted his interest from farming to practice law.

Epperly said Pogue earned his law degree from Harvard and had an interest in aviation. The timing could not have been better.

According to the Washington Post that reviewed Pogue’s life, “at the time, Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight and other aeronautical feats of derring-do were helping to usher in the age of commercial air travel. Working with such clients as Bell Aircraft, Pogue decided the skies showed limitless promise for a young lawyer.

At the Civil Aeronautics Board, he played a major role in the 1944 Chicago Convention, which established vital transnational air treaties among more than 90 nations. The agreements allowed peacetime flights over countries without mandatory stops in each and made English the international language of air traffic control.”

He died in 2003 in Baltimore at the age of 103.

“Had it not been for the murder, Pogue would probably be known by very few people except for the town where he was lawyer. Because of his attending those trials and getting excited, he moved away from the farm and went to Washington D.C. That had a real impact. If you fly internationally you are still governed by rules that were developed in that conference in 1944.”

Epperly’s research has the Rev. Lyn George Kelly as a suspect. “I’ve been all over the map,” he said about his own list of suspects based on his work. “I probably am the only person who thinks Kelly might have done it. I’m not sure, it’s a fascinating case.”

Epperly said others have ruled out Kelly because of his small stature and the ability to swing an axe.

According to his studies, Kelly was at the the children’s day service on Sunday evening, June 9, the same church event all the victims had attended. The bodies were discovered at about 8:30 a.m. June 10. Doctors speculated the murders happened between midnight and 1 a.m. based on the condition of the bodies.

Kelly was born in England. He and his wife, Laura, had arrived in New York City in 1904. During his youth Lynn suffered some kind of mental illness.

He served the Methodist church in the United States and traveled to North Dakota for his first parish. Between 1904 and 1912, he served a dozen or more Methodist churches. Because of poor money management and personal habits, Kelly never stayed long term in any church as he preached in Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska. Scheduled to begin classes in September 1912, the seminary president arranged for him to serve three churches that summer including two churches northwest of Villisca.

He was arrested in May 1917 based on evidence connecting him to being in Villisca. By that time, he had been known of being sexually inappropriate with others in various ways. Kelly admitted to the murders but recanted his story before trials began later that year. The first jury was hung and the second acquitted him.

In 1942, the Kellys were living in Manhattan, New York. Laura died in December 1947 in a hospital at the age of 80. George was admitted to a New York mental hospital in September 1957 and he died in April 1959 at the age of 80 still with mental health conditions.

“I wanted to try to tell what really happened,” Epperly said about the motive of his book. “It’s hard to recreate complex events long after they happened.”