The prelude to the Villisca Anniversary

It was twenty years ago, perhaps more. Four or five supervisors with the Iowa Department of Public Safety concluded a meeting and went to lunch at a Mexican place near the Capital complex.  One of them was Tim MacDonald, assistant director, Division of Criminal Investigation. This was before cell phones.  Midway through the enchiladas MacDonald’s pager chirped.  He left to make a call.  He returned a man in a hurry.  Eight bodies, he said, had been found in a house in a Des Moines suburb.  All had been murdered.

As I watched him leave two thoughts crossed my mind.  One was that Villisca had finally been equaled. The other was that MacDonald, Scotch in more ways than one, had left us with his lunch tab.          

The Des Moines Register made the Villisca connection.  The murder count, however, was revised down. One of the dead, the killer, had shot himself.  

As the 100th anniversary of Iowa’s most notorious crime approaches, there still is nothing that compares to events put in motion in Villisca in 1912.  

This was impressed on me a few weeks ago in a small city well over a thousand miles from here.  

I needed to conduct a bit of business and found myself across the desk from a pleasant young lady.  Her name, according to a tag pinned to her blouse, was Kendra.  She produced some forms, asked a few questions, I signed and the transaction was completed.  I stood to leave.  

“Mr. Marshall,” she looked me in the eye. “I wonder if I might ask about the Villisca book.”

The experience was eerie—almost chilling. This attractive, thirty-something lady had known who I was when I entered the building. It was not, of course, me that interested her.  She was instead drawn to an event that took place decades before she was born, in a state she has never visited.  She’d watched the cable programs, the documentaries, done some reading.  

The allure of the crime is not in the brutality of the slayings, nor the total innocence of childhood victims, although these are factors.

Neither is it the paranormal, which has enticed many in recent years.    

The core of the intrigue lies in the bizarre cast of characters, the almost inexplicable series of events, and how they all tie together—if, in fact, they do. It is not what we know about the case that brings new interest and keeps old researchers hanging around—it is what we don’t know.         

I suspect this June will bring some sort of commemorative program, an event noting the centennial of the murders.  Investigative reports bearing dates from 100 years ago have been compiled into a booklet, and they’ll be read and re-analyzed. Newspaper accounts warning that a “fiend incarnate” was still on the loose will be reprinted. The saga of a summer those who lived through never quite got over will be recalled.       

It’s a shame Darwin Linn won’t be here.  Linn, who died last year, was looking forward to the 100th.  Operator of a privately-owned museum, Linn amassed a mountain of local history.

In 1994 he bought the old Joe Moore house, saving it from demolition. There are those who wish he hadn’t, but he made the place one of the most popular tourist destinations in the area.  

I may, in an April column, note another 100th anniversary—one that made the front pages of far more newspapers than the Villisca crime.  

Two months before the ax murders a Montgomery County family boarded the Titanic.           

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.