Hi Gerald.
How's this for an article?
On June 10, 1912, the same year as the Titanic went down, a smaller tragedy
happened in a town that had been founded by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy
railroad company to be one of its train stops in the southwest part of Iowa.
That summer night nearly a century ago, eight of Villisca?s 2,000 inhabitants
died in their beds when bludgeoned with a dull axe by an unknown assailant.
This crime still ranks as the worst unsolved serial murder in American history.
The name ?Villisca? comes from a Native American language. Depending on
who you ask, it can mean either ?pretty place? or ?evil place.? Both terms
fit, unfortunately, which was something I found out while researching the
murders of all six members of the Joe Moore family as well as their unlucky
overnight guests, Ina and Lena Stillinger. In the winter of 2008, I hoped to
start writing a screenplay which would feature one of my paternal
grandfathers, Warren Van Ness. Family legends say Warren was a crack shot
with pistol or rifle who may have been a part-time Pinkerton?s detective when
he wasn?t working a hardscrabble farm in Centerville, Iowa. For the longest
time I had no story, only a lead character. That same winter I by chance read
Roy Marshall?s fine book about the axe murders, Villisca. Not too long after,
I experienced the eureka moment that led me to begin work on a screenplay in
which Warren--who could, after all, have visited Villisca in 1912-- figures
prominently in at least pointing the way to a solution for eight of the
fifty-six murders, most of them by axe, that happened along railway lines
between Chicago and Colorado Springs from 1911 to 1912.
Sixty pages into my project, I had to remind myself that my designated
murderer, Andy Sawyer, who had been one of the prime suspects in 1912, was a
real person, not a fictional person of my own devise. Several detectives
interviewed him and found the itinerant railroad worker to be obsessed with
axes and a bit daft besides, but they left him alone after believing his story
about where he was the night before the crime. According to him, he began that
night over sixty miles away in Osceola, where, around nine, he was escorted to
the train by a local constable, who wanted him to go anywhere but back into
town. By six the next morning, he showed up out of nowhere in Creston and took
a job on a pile-driving crew, although he proved better at sharpening the piles
with his axe--he talked to it, sharpened it lovingly, even slept with it--than
at driving the piles. Researchers of the crime have always wondered how this
man could have managed to leave Osceola at nine, go to Villisca, slaughter
eight people, then find another train to Creston so that he could arrive there
first thing in the morning to find the work that would later function as part
of his alibi.
Fearing that relatives of Andy Sawyer might sue me for libel if I said he
was the axe murderer,, I stopped writing the screenplay in 2010 and started two
new lines of research.
Relying on timetables from that era as well as my railroad expert, your own
Gerald Edgar, I first investigated whether there was enough nighttime train
traffic through Iowa in the summer of 1912 that a man of the rails like Andy
Sawyer, if motivated, could have gotten to Villisca in time to commit the
murders and still traveled to Creston. I was relieved to discover that if
Andy were determined enough and the trains ran mostly on time on those days
(Gerald said they did), he might have brought off this travel feat with hours
to spare.
As for Andy Sawyer himself, it is hard to say what might have motivated him
to murder. He was not your classic psychopath, but instead a blowhard and
somewhat of a neer-do-well. Even his uncle in Minneapolis could not find much
good to say of Andy, claiming the boy never held a job long and was cruel to
horses, painting their flanks with turpentine (animal torture being one trait
of psychopaths, but only one). Around the time of the Villisca murders, Andy?s
wife and in-laws moved to rural North Dakota to homestead there and, perhaps,
to disappear from public sight. (or his sight). Andy followed them from Iowa
after being questioned by authorities late in June, 1912, and he himself does
indeed disappear from public sight soon thereafter, along with his wife and
children. I found one census record from later that same year attesting to
the fact that Andy and Anna Sawyer had been living with their two sons in a
North Dakota town so small it wasn?t even a train stop. Besides that evidence,
there is nothing to chronicle his whereabouts after the summer of 1912, much
less his fate?.
When my wife and I toured the Joe Moore home in September, 2008, our guide,
the recently deceased Darwin Linn--a combination of P.T. Barnum and country
bumpkin that worked to insinuate, in mostly tasteful ways, the axe murders back
into the daily consciousness of Villisca?s citizens--used a prism suspended
from a strand of what appeared to be fishing line to suggest the presence of
spirits in the house. The spirits were told to sway the prism from right to
left to answer ?yes? to questions asked of them, while ?no? answers were
represented by the prism swaying toward and then away from the person holding
it. In Darwin?s hand the prism performed well enough that my wife then decided
to try the experiment. She held the prism while I interviewed the spirits,
getting slight but definite swaying in response until I asked, ?Did Andy Sawyer
kill the Moores and Stillingers?? Unless a chance wind of cyclone strength
passed through the closed-up Villisca axe murder house at precisely that
moment, the foot-length movement of the prism must otherwise have been rather
vigorously answering ?yes.?
Interestingly, a recently telecast installment of Ghost Hunters
International had been filmed in Villisca. Darwin Linn was interviewed, and
also Roy Marshall, as nice and, fortunately for me, gregarious a man as Darwin.
If you ever have watched that particular show, you know the host will do
anything--beg, pester, even heckle--to get the ghosts to make chance noises or
utter word-like sounds. During the show I am speaking of, in response to the
host asking the fateful ?whodunit? question, a disembodied voice answers,
clearly enough for me, ?Andy.?
Clearly enough that I can write the final sixty pages of my screenplay with
a cleaner conscience and new sense of purpose. All I will say of the end of
the movie I envision is that it is set during a fall snowstorm on the train
trestle that eventually was named the Kate Shelley Bridge, in honor of the
famous woman who died in the spring of 1912. She was old by then, but still
virtually every Iowan remembers her act of selfless heroism when, as a youth,
she crawled across damaged tracks stretched several hundred feet above a river
during a violent rainstorm in order to make sure a train would not attempt what
would surely have been a fatal crossing. What better place to depict another
selfless act of heroism history has forgotten?for now.
That railway system that figured so prominently in Villisca?s founding and,
so far, its most infamous moment also figures, then, in the final scene of my
saga about who might have committed the axe murders, as well as who might have
put a stop to any future such crimes. I call that serendipity. One day, I
would like to call it movie magic.
You have any news about my questions? Let me know, and thanks--JVN
To: CBQ@yahoogroups.com
From: vje68@hotmail.com
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 17:47:58 +0000
Subject: [CBQ] CB&Q/H&StJ & the Civil War
You just never know when/where you will pick-up a nugget of Burlington
history. This being the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, there is a lot of
coverage in the media. Our Sunday local had article about an area woman whose
ancestors fought on the Union side; quote:
Pvt. James "Alfred" Davis enlisted in June 1861 in the 19th Regiment of
Illinois Volunteers - he was 18. The 19th Regiment spent time guarding the
Hannibal & St. Jospeh Railroad from Quincy, IL to Palmyra, MO..." (by spring of
1862 they were stationed in Alabama where Pvt. Davis was killed by a Rebel
bushwasker on April 17).
Richard Overton in his "Burlington Route" opus states that the only year the
Burlington had a financial loss was 1964 due to Confederate raiders in Missouri
severely damaging the H&stJ (guess the 19th Reg should have been kept in
Missouri!)
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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