Thanks for a lot of good info John. CB&Q TT's for the month in question show
several major trains in ea direction but also locals of shorter distances that
a person could have used to hop from one town to another. One would think
sheriffs/police would have questioned conductors as to who got on/off at the 3
towns that night and check train sheets & disptachers to exact arrivals but
then it was in an era long before CSI, NCIS or Blue Bloods. We'll look forward
to future research on this John
(Iowan's know all about the infamous Villisca axe murders but I did not know it
was the largest unsolved serial murder in USA)
--- In CBQ@yahoogroups.com, John Van Ness <johnwvn@...> wrote:
>
>
> 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@...
> Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 17:47:58 +0000
> Subject: [CBQ] CB&Q/H&StJ & the Civil War
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> 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).
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> 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!)
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