In 1912, a small Iowa town was the scene of a chilling and brutal crime. Eight people were murdered in their beds by an assailant who has never been identified. Read the show notes here.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and I'm Tracy Wilson. Uh, and today's subject has been requested by multiple listeners, especially when we first came on the podcast. We came on just after kind of the hundred anniversary of the event we're talking about today, and so it had been covered by a number of papers and had kind of been in people's minds a little bit more. It's actually been on my list for almost since the beginning, and we haven't had an X Murderer episode in a little while, so we're do I suppose, as do as one can be for such things. Uh, this one has some haunting mythology around it. It remains an unsolved case, so it's good for the Halloween season, and it's probably no surprise based on the fact that I've already said this is an X Murderer episode. But just to be safe, here's the warning. This is some graphic talk of some pretty brutal murders and particularly the deaths of children, which I know can be really difficult for some people to hear. So if you are sensitive to violent subjects of this nature, or if you listen with younger history buffs. This is maybe one to proceed with caution or to pre screen. For example, I can already tell you my best friend is not going to partake of this one. She and I were talking about it while I was researching uh and as a parent for her, it's just too rough to listen to this kind of stuff. And the story is incredibly tragic, and even I mean, I'm I'm often quite open that I'm not really a kids person. Um, it took me a long time to research because I would find that I just had to get up and walk away for a while, because it's just it's brutal, and it's hard to think about somebody doing the things that this person or persons did. So we are talking about the Valiska As murders, and before we get into the details of the actual event, I will let Tracy set the scene a little bit about the town of Vliska, Iowa. Pliska, Iowa. This took place in nineteen twelve. Fliska is in Montgomery County and it's only about four square kilometers in size. They're not not really big. Omaha, Nebraska and Des Moines, Iowa are the nearest large metro areas, and Valiska is roughly in between them and a little bit south. Yeah, it's a little closer to one side than the other. But for the purposes of this in between and in the early nineteen hundreds, this was a town that was on a growth trajectory. It was kind of rural, but there was a budding business community. The train depot was very busy. They had a lot of trains coming and going, and visitors and business people, and it was a close knit community. Josiah B. Moore, who was the father of the family at the center of this whole unsettling crime, was forty three and nineteen twelve. He's sometimes referred to as j. B. And he had lived in Valiska for thirteen years when he died, and was a respected businessman. He had married Sarah Montgomery on December six, eighteen ninety nine, and Sarah had been born in Illinois in eighteen seventy three, and she moved to Iowa n eighteen ninety four when the rest of her family moved there. She was thirty nine at the time of the murders. The Morris had four children. Herman was eleven and was also really close to his father Catherine was their second child and she was aged ten at the time of the attack. There were also two younger brothers, Boyd who was seven and Paul who was five, and there are two other children that were victims in this case. So on the morning of June nine of nineteen twelve, sisters Lena who was twelve and Ainah who was eight Stillinger uh They were the daughters of Joseph and Sarah Stillinger attended Sunday services at the Presbyterian Church and the girls were intending to visit with their grandmother for the day after church had concluded and then The plan for the rest of the day was that the girls would then go back to church to attend special Children's Day activities the evening before returning to their grandmother's house to spend the night. But the evening's plans changed when Katherine Moore invited her two friends to spend the night at the Moor House after the children's Day activities. Jamie Moore called still at the Stillinger home. On the phone, he left a message with Lena and Anah's older sister Blanche to pass along to their parents that they would be spending the evening with them. So you know, one of those parenting heads up calls, your kids are gonna stay over here. If this was in part because the girls seemed as kind of afraid to walk back to their grandmother's house alone in the dark. Yeah, The children's day program, led by Sarah Moore, began at eight pm, so this was an evening thing. It would have been quite dark when they concluded at mine thirty pm, and once the festivities were all wrapped up, the entire More family and the two young Stillinger sisters walked back to the More home and arrived there is estimated somewhere between and ten pm. On the morning of June two, the Moor's next door neighbor, Mary Peckham, noticed that the house was unusually quiet. She hadn't seen any of the family come outside or start their normal morning chores, so sometimes shortly after seven am, Mrs Peckham walked over to the Moor house and knocked on the door. She got no response, and so she tried the door and found it locked. And this is one of those areas that there is some conflicting information in various records, so many will say this was actually pretty unusual for the door to have been locked. Uh. The habitual locking of doors at night was not really particularly common practice at this time in Valisca or in fact many other places you know, in the early nineteen hundreds, there just wasn't that sort of level of uh lockdown at the end of the night. Mrs Peckham, who was troubled and also wanted to help let the Moore's chickens out as the family would normally have done themselves in the morning, and then she also telephoned Ross Moore, who was Josiah's brother, And when Rossmore arrived at the home of his brother's family, he shouted and he knocked. He attempted to peer into the house through the windows, but they were covered and he got neither reaction nor information like he couldn't there was nothing. So eventually he went through his keys until he found the one that unlocked the door. Like he had a copy of their key, but it took him a little while to sort out which one it was. Mary Peckham was there with Rosmore, but she didn't venture past the porch and into the house. The surviving Moore brother didn't go past the second room of the house. He opened the door to the bedroom off the parlor and he immediately saw the bodies of two children on the bed, as well as an enormous amount of blood. He went back to the porch and told Mary Peckham to call the police. Yeah, and this is a very small, i mean by today's standards home. So the bottom floor was only three rooms. It was like the parlor of the front room, the small bedroom, and a kitchen. So after they raised an alert, city Marshall Hank Horton responded. He quickly arrived on the scene and his investigation of the house revealed that in addition to the two bodies Rossmore had seen the young Stillinger sisters, there were six more bodies upstairs. The entire More family and their guests had been killed in their beds. It was about nine in the morning when the county coroner finally got there and took a look at the situation. He later reviewed his findings with the sheriff and the marshal and then he called a coroner's jury to the home. So once words spread of what had happened, uh in a small community, these things do spread rather quickly. Many townspeople made their way to the scene, and this ended up being a real problem. We've talked about similar things happening before with crime scene, So these people were all there, they were very interested, and so keeping the crime scene intact became something of an impossibility. There were accounts of dozens of people at a time walking through the house kind of with the you know, morbid curiosity, trying to catch a glimpse of the bodies or see what had happened. Some reports even put it at close to a hundred people at one point that we're all in the house, which again was not that large a structure, so you can imagine like keeping evidence intact was completely out the window at that point. Irritated by these looky loose yes, eventually the Valiska National Guard had to come and clear the area and keep onlookers out of the house. By that time, several hours had passed and a lot of the evidence was damaged or compromised, which just infuriates me. I want to take all the looky lose stern a stern lecture about how not to be terrible. Yeah, and I mean I have read some uh there was I forget which account it was that I was reading where they were kind of pointing out like, yes, this was terrible, But even so, there's maybe wouldn't have been that much more evidence that was really garnered in the investigation. Um, but we don't know. So the coroner's jury did not finish their investigation of the home until after ten PM, and it was at that point that the undertaker was given clearance to remove the bodies. UH. Those were taken to a local fire station which was being used as kind of a makeshift morgue because it was so many people at once uh and the undertakers did not finish moving the victims until roughly two am. So before we get into kind of the grizzly stuff, do you want to have a quick word from a sponsor so we don't interrupt all of this yuckness with an ad. Let's do, and now we will jump back to you discussing the horrific events at Veliska. Despite the herd of looky loose who had passed through the crime scene, there were some solid facts that they were able to glean about these murders. Yes, so the doors to the house, all of the doors were locked, and as we mentioned earlier, many people believed that this was not a normal state of affairs. The curtains and every room of the house had been closed, and in the case of two windows that had no curtains, Mrs Moore's clothing had been used to cover them. Uh, and I left it out of these notes, but her clothing had also been used to cover all of the mirrors in the house. Well that now I'm scared. Don't be scared. I don't. I don't mean to laugh at his tragic and creepy but I don't want Tracy to be scared. No, genuinely. And you said that I had a shutter. Sorry, So to get more serious, all eight of these victims have been bludgeoned, apparently in their sleep with an ax, and each victim's head had been covered with bed linens or articles of clothing after their skulls had been crushed. Based on the medical examination of the bodies, it's believed that the murders took place shortly somewhere between shortly after midnight and three am, so it's kind of a three hour window. In the two rooms where Josiah and Sarah Moore and Lena and ailis Aina Stillinger had been killed, a scene lamps were found at the ends of the beds with their chimneys removed and their wicks turned back, as though the killer had wanted to dim the lights. The murder weapon had ben Josiah Moore's. It was found in the room with Lena and Aina, and the ceilings in several of the rooms had been hit during the killer's upswing as he raised the axe. On the kitchen table, there was a plate of food and a pan of water, and the water had blood in it. The downstairs bedroom where the still injured girls were slain, contained a number of clues and sort of odd aspects. Uh Aina was sleeping on the portion of the bed closest to the wall when she was killed, and a coat had been used to cover her face afterwards. Uh Lena was situated part way down the bed. This led to some speculation that she may have been struck and then shifted or wiggled down the bed a little bit. Initially before she died, she was wearing no undergarments and her nightgown had been shifted upward. There was blood on the inside of one of her knees and injuries to one arm, which appeared to be defensive, as though she had tried to protect herself against the attacker. She's the only one that exhibited any sort of defensive injury. There was a two pounds slab of bacon on the floor, wrapped in what was either a rag or a dish towel, and there was a nearly identical slab of bacon in the kitchen ice box. And additionally, there was part of a key chain on the floor. And I know what some of you people are probably thinking based on a couple of these details, and I promise you we are coming back to them now. We will get to sort of the coroner's inquest the day after the Grizzly discovery, So on June eleven, the coroner's jury began their official inquest into the murders, and they eventually called fourteen witnesses for testimony. So their first witness was Mary Peckham, who you know, was the first woman, the neighbor that discovered that there was something not quite right. And she's stated that the last time she saw the family was when they were leaving for the children's day activities at the church on the evening of the ninth. She was already in bed when the family returned home, and she said that she didn't hear any noises during the night. She related how she came to be curious about the family's whereabouts in the morning because of the unusual stillness of the house uh and that she had seen Mr Moore's employee, Ed Selly arrive and head to the barn to tend the horses. Not long after she contacted Ross Moore. The second witness was Ed Selly, and as we just said, he was an employee at Javy Moore's store, and his testimony indicated that he had opened the store as normal the morning of the discovery before being contacted by Ross Moore about the suspicious situation. After speaking with the victim's sister in law, Jesse Moore, Selly contacted the Moore's parents and Sarah's parents to see if the family had gone to visit any of them. So at that point they were trying to figure out where they were, not realizing they were in the house. He was then contacted by Mrs Peckham about the moors livestock, so he left the store to attend to the horses and then went back to work. Not long after, Mrs Peckham called again, this time to tell him to get the marshal and come back to the house and Selly's testimony, uh contradicts Mary Peckham's just a little bit, and it's not really anything terribly important. I just wanted to point it out. He indicated that he had joined Mrs Peckham and Ross Moore in entering the house, whereas Mrs Peckham indicated that she had never gone past the porch. After the Marshal had a preliminary look at the scene, Selly indicated that the house was blocked and that he went to the store to contact business associates about the situation. Yeah, he wanted to let the people that they had business dealings with know that uh, Mr Moore had been killed and that they were gonna have to make some arrangements. Selly was asked if J. B. Moore had any enemies he knew of, and he indicated that he had told him that his brother in law, Sam Moyer had it in for him. The third witness was Dr J. Clark Cooper. Cooper was the first physician on the scene after the bodies were discovered. Cooper described his first access to the bodies, first encountering the Stillinger girls, who he didn't recognize. He also mentioned the lamps without their chimneys. Cooper indicated that he didn't touch the bodies on site. He sort of performed just a visual assessment at that point. Yeah, he didn't do uh any real hands on examination. His statement also included that estimated time of death that we talked about, and that was based on his observation of the blood and brain matter on the scene and the level of dryness and congealment it had achieved. Uh. He was also the one that introduced the detail that the faces he believed had been covered after the bludgeoning, and this was based on the fact that none of the covering fabris were stuck to the wounds, They had just kind of been draped over afterwards, and none of those fabrics or articles of clothing had any holes or damage of any kind other than normal wear and tear. Witness for was Jesse Moore, who was Rossmore's wife. Jesse spoke with Mrs Peckham when she first called for Ross and her statement echoed ed Sally's regarding what their conversations were like. She also mentioned that she later entered Josiah's and Sarah's home to retrieve photographs of the family for the local paper, and she didn't know of any possible enemies that the family might have had. Yeah, there are some accounts that suggests that she had gone in and kind of like posed for pictures, but those seem like embellishments. She did go in, but she was trying to get pictures from the household for the press um so that they could be used in news stories. Witness number five was Dr F. S. Williams, And whereas Dr Cooper that we mentioned just a few moments ago had only done a visual inspection on the bodies at the crime scene, Dr Williams was the one that actually examined the bodies. His testimony described the crushed heads of each victim and their positions in their beds uh. And he was the one to introduced the idea that Lena Stillinger had squirmed on the bed after having been struck. Some people have theorized over the years that Lena had been sexually assaulted, but Dr williams testimony runs really counter to that. He indicated that he had investigated the possibility of a rape, but he didn't find any evidence of that kind of violation. Yeah, she was the one we mentioned. She didn't have any undergarments on, and that her night dress had been shifted up. She may have been the object of some um, you know, visual stimulation for the killer, but her body was not in any way um molested to the best of this doctor's knowledge. Uh. Witness number six was Edward Landers, and Landers was a neighbor. He was actually the son of a neighbor. He was staying a few houses down from the moors at his mother's house for the summer, and he stated that he had gone to bed shortly after nine pm on the night of the murders, but that he had heard a noise during the night that to him at the time sounded like people hooting to one another outdoors. And he was kind of pressed by the examiners over what time this might have been, and he guessed it was probably around eleven p m. But he wasn't certain. Uh. And after the news of the murders broke the next morning, he began to wonder if the noise that he had heard had not been people hooting, but in fact a woman moaning. The seventh witness was rossmore so beside his brother, and he relayed the events of the morning of the tenth and how he had come to discover the bodies of the two styliner girls before exiting the home. He mentioned that before opened the opening the bedroom door and making the discovery, nothing in the home seemed like it was out of place, and he also couldn't offer any information about possible enemies that the family may have had. Witness number eight was Fenwick More and this was another More brother. There were several brothers in the mix here. His testimony was not particularly illuminating. He indicated that he really didn't know anything about his brother's business or if he had any enemies, and he was dismissed from the stand pretty quickly. The ninth witness was Marshall Hank Horton, and the Marshall's testimony was really brief. He basically said he had been contacted by Seally to go into the More home. He corroborated entering the house with Sally and then again with the doctors. Witness number ten was Levin Gilder and this was Josiah's nephew, but he also did not have a whole lot of information to impart. He had briefly been considered a suspect because he had some kind of shady uh happenings in his background. His record was not entirely clean, but he was cleared pretty early on. Witness eleven was another More brother, Harry More, and he also had really nothing new to add in the proceedings. Like Finwick, his other brother, he had neither knowledge of Jav's business nor of any post well ill intentions against him. Witness twelve was Blanche Stillinger, and remember this was Lena and Ainah's older sister. She was the one that had spoken with Jsiah over the phone about the girls sleeping over at the Moorhouse, and she was the one that kind of said, yeah, I think that will be fine. I will tell my parents. And the thirteenth witness was Joseph Stillinger, so Lena and i Dinah's father. He also didn't know of anyone who might commit such a crime, and he indicated that his wife had phoned the Moors several times in the morning, uh the morning that the bodies were found, because she had expected the girls to be back before school time. Yeah, this had happened on a Sunday night into the Monday morning hours, and so she thought the kids were going to come home and get ready for school, but they didn't, so they were trying to contact them and getting no answer. The Laps witness was Charles Moore. This is yet another more brother. Charles testified to the coroner's jury that he knew Josiah kept an AX, but when he was questioned, he couldn't say with certainty that the murder up and was the one that Josiah owned. He just wasn't sure. H. He also indicated that it was in fact his brother's habit to lock the house from the inside at night. Um. One thing that always kind of rings odd to me and is not really discussed all that much in a lot of these is that the whole house was locked, but somehow the killer or killers got out. So that's always stayed a little bit of a mystery. Whether they had a key or not is unclear. Yeah. Well, and then that gets into me super wondering what lock technology was like at the time, Like now we have door knoblocks that you just looted the thing and then you go out. Well, and there was also you know, uh, skeleton keys that could open multiple doors were a little more common still than uh, you know, it just wasn't quite the same as what we're dealing with today, So, and that may be one of the reasons that it's not really talked about that much. It's not that insane a thing. It's not like, uh, even in some of the and I'll talk about them briefly at the end, but even in like some of the sort of supernatural investigations of it, it doesn't really seem to come up as like a weird thing, like an entity locked all the doors. Uh doors are just locked. They don't really it doesn't get embellished a whole lot. But before we start talking about suspects and what may have driven someone to do this, let's have another quick word from a sponsor. Will take a break from all of this sort of dark material for just a moment, so to return to this horrifying subject. There were many early leads in this case and really no shortage of suspects, but nothing ever panned out, and this horrific crime is still unsolved. It's not possible in the scope of a podcast episode to cover every single suspect, but we're going to talk about the more high profile ones. Yeah, this really sort of turned this town on its head, and a lot of people characterize it as basically making a place where people would invite a stranger into their home for a meal and you know, be very open and very friendly, into a place where suddenly everyone was suspicious of everyone else, and you know, sort of fear driven suspicion kind of led their behavior beyond that and as a consequence, a lot of different people were accused of participating in this crime, but one of the primary suspects that comes up in almost any discussion of this case is Frank F. Jones, and he was an Iowa State senator. He had been Josiah Moore's boss for many years, but in nineteen eight More had struck out on his own, opening a farming implement company, and he took several of their lucrative business partners with him, including the John Deere company, So Jones was a little i rate with him from that point on. There were also rumors that Josiah had had an affair with jones daughter in law, So Frank Jones and his son, so the husband of this daughter in law, we're even accused quite publicly by a detective agency of having hired a killer named William Mansfield to take out the More family, and William Mansfield was arrested the murders in nineteen sixteen, four years after they had taken place. According to Detective James Newton Wilkerson, who had been the one that had leveled those accusations against the Joneses uh, he asserted that Mansfield was in fact a serial killer and that he also had a cocaine habit. Mansfield was also linked via Wilkerson's research, to other brutal murders, including those of his own wife, child, and his wife's family in nineteen fourteen, so that would have been a couple of years after Veliska, as well as murders in Kansas and Colorado, and in all of these cases, the victims were bludgeoned with an ax in homes where the windows and mirrors were all covered, similar to the morse Lings. Detective Wilkerson was so convinced that Mansfield had been hired by Jones that he posted flyers all over town with Mansfield's face on them that read, this is the axe murderer he murdered the more family at Veliska. The hypocrite whose dirty money paid for Hellis job wants your support for the state Senate. Will he get it? So? I'm sure delighted Jones. Uh, and I have to say, I think, if you have just accused a man of hiring someone to kill a man who has made you angry, making him angry and this way seems like a really bold and foolish move. Um. But while Mansfield does seem like an obvious solution to who killed the Moors, and while Detective Wolkerson really seemed for the rest of his life that he was certain that what that Mansfield was the killer. Uh. Mansfield had an art alibi for the time of the Veliska murders that placed him in Illinois. There was some payroll happenings that indicated that he had had been working there at the time. There were some eyewitnesses that placed Mansfield in Vliska and not Illinois, but none of those UH eye witness accounts for ever substantiated, and Mansfield was eventually set After his release, Mansfield sued Wilkerson for slander and he was awarded more than two thousand dollars. Wilkerson alleged that Jones had in fact managed to use his position of power to secure Mansfield's release. Yeah, he also kind of blamed Jones for orchestrating the decision In Mansfield's favor during the slander case, and he suggested that Frank Jones set up the next suspect to kind of take the fall, and that next suspect was Reverend George Kelly, who was a preacher who had moved to Macedonia, Iowa in nineteen twelve. So after the trail went cold with Mansfield, Kelly was arrested and charged with the More murders in nineteen seventeen, and he was in the Liska for the children's day activities and he left town the next morning. He was even alleged at one point to have spoken of the murders on the train out of town, which is early in the morning, before the bodies had even been discovered. He also returned to Veliska a week after the murders and he pretended to be a detective from Scotland Yard to gain entry into the More home. He actually had some mental problems that were on record, and Kelly was considered to be a sexual deviant, obsessed with sex, and known to have been a peeping tom. There have been some theories about the rolled up bacon slab that was found downstairs in the bedroom had been used as a sexual aid by the killer, and that made people really willing to connect the dots to to Kelly, who had this reputation. Unlike Mansfield, Kelly actually did confess to the murders, and in his confession he wrote, I killed the children upstairs first and the children downstairs last. I knew God wanted me to do it this way. Slay utterly came to my mind, and I picked up the axe, went into the house and killed them. So that makes it seem like an an in shut case. But it all fell apart. He wound up recanting his confession, and the witnesses that initially claimed he talked to them on the train about the murders before it was public knowledge all changed their story. He was also a really small man, at five ft two inches tall, and he weighed less than a hundred and twenty pounds, So the idea of him being able to deliver the crushing blows that killed the family was a little difficult to support. I imagine at that height it might have been also difficult for the upswings of the axe to hit the ceiling. Yes, I couldn't find anything. I thought about that as well, And I couldn't find anything substantial. I'm sure we could do it if with a little bit more time to find out what the height of the ceilings were in the length of the axe. But I did not have time to work out the math on that. And while somebody that size could probably easily until children, Mr Moore was like six ft tall and weighed about two hundred pounds, you know, he was a full grown man, so it seemed like that would have been a little bit more of a stretch for Kelly to be able to manage. Kelly was actually tried twice for this crime. The first trial resulted in a hung jury, and in the second trial the jury freed him because there was really no evidence other than sort of the suspicion that he was weird and deviant and might be the kind of person to do these things. The third suspect was Henry Lee Moore, and in May of nineteen thirteen, almost a year after the murders, a federal investigator on the case named m W. Mccloudy announced that he had solved it, as well as twenty two other similar cases. Mcclardy believed all of the slings to be the work of serial killer Henry Lee Moore, who was not actually relation to the More family. It was not yet another More brother. Yeah, it was just coincidental that they had the last name. UH. A few months after the Veliska incident, Henry Moore was convicted of murdering his mother and grandmother in Missouri. The brutality of the victims was quite similar. They were legend with an ax and UH. It should be pointed out that one of the things that differs is that he was allegedly motivated by money in this he was hoping to gain their assets after they died. As the Valiska investigation had gone on, multiple similar acts murders were uncovered in Colorado, Illinois, and Kansas, and some of these were crimes Mansfield had also been linked to by other investigators, but McClary thought they were all Henry Moore's doing. More actually served thirty six years of his life sentence for the deaths of his mother and grandmother. UH, and then he was paroled in nineteen forty nine. UH. He ended up having his sentence commuted some years later when he was in his eighties. UM. He kind of falls off the public record after that. No one really knows, like where he went or how he died, but he was never formally charged for the murders in Valiska, despite mccloudy's insistence that he was clearly the one who had done it. In addition to these three high profile suspects, there were so so many others, And initially it was because of the shocking nature of the hot side. Citizens of Aliska suspected anyone who wasn't from around there. Some of them were legitimately suspect, although not not ever actually linked to the murders, and some of them were simply guilty of being strangers. And I wanted to make a note about the similarities among the murders UH that were discovered in other states and other areas, and the use of an AX as the murder weapon. It's worth considering just food for thought that this was a time when almost every home would have an X, often readily accessible UH. Mike dash, who was a writer that wrote an article for the Smithsonian in twelve about the Valiska killings, makes the point that this sort of could be considered a weapon of convenience for the times, like in the Midwest, if you just wanted to go on a killing spree, an act was pretty easy to get a hold of. Additionally, as is the case often with high profile crimes, confessors came out of the woodwork for decades. People were confessing to the crime well into the nineteen thirties, although many of these confessions got details wildly wrong. Yeah, you know that. That happens with any big UH murder case. Or there are people that confess that could not have done it for whatever reasons, but those, of course, we're pretty easily dismissed in most cases. Um So jumping to sort of the modern day UH in The house where J. B. More and his family were killed was purchased by Darwin and Martha Lynn, and the Lins restored the house to its nineteen twelve condition and the residents was placed on the National Historic Places Regis Stree. Prior to the Lens purchase, the house had passed through many hands of ownership and it had been repeatedly renovated, so it was really quite a significant restoration effort. Today you can tour the home. It's actually a museum and for a little less than five hundred dollars a night you can book sleepovers in the murder house. It's actually one of the main draws of Valisco, which is pretty rural town. If you want a book on the anniversary of the murders, though, there's a lottery, and there have been many discussions and debates through the years about whether it's right for a business to grow out of such a tragedy and so much brutality. These debates probably go on for as long as the museum is open. Yeah, I mean a lot of articles if you search for this that talk about it kind of from the modern standpoint. They really do discuss kind of that this is a problem and something that continues to be debated, and and they kind of look at like the Valisca murder houses, this odd money making been sort of but you know, that's something that you can draw your own conclusions and have your own opinions of um. Paranormal investigators and ghost hunters have of course kind of flocked to this house hoping to get some activity that they can record or discuss. It's been featured on a lot of numerous television reality and making the air quotes shows, uh, And there have been several documentaries made about the murders that are less about sensationalizing it and making a haunted house, a ghost story, but really just trying to break down the actual crime. Um. I kind of feel like a broken record when I do this wrap up, because we do it for almost any of the cases where they're go unsolved. But odds are that this one is not ever going to be solved, and the further away we get from the date of when it actually happened, the less and less evidence there will be to go on. So it will remain a draw for crime history buffs and visitors to the Valiska murder House. Uh, probably for quite some time. But that is the Valiska Murderer, which, as I said, we're requested by a large number of people. Very unsettling and disturbing to think about. Uh, but you know, good Halloween fodder. And again it is a huge tragedy. I mean, like I said, I'm not a kids person, but reading these testimonies about what happened to these children was so rough for me. Yeah, I kept I kept like going, like, let's go hug a kitty. I having to go out to cartoon for fifteen minutes, just anything to kind of break the intensity of that. Well. And in addition to how I got genuinely creeped out sitting here when you said all the mirrors were covered up with their clothing. Um. The part about their you know, the parents of the children who were visiting the home calling over there because they were expecting them to be home for school, that really got to me. It's it's very upsetting to think about. I mean, these were, you know, kids that were part of someone's lives and it was just it could be it's one of those this could happen to anyone kinds of things. Um. And I think especially when these kinds of crimes happen in rural community, these that were very you know, friendly and and pretty free of this kind of thing. It's really shocking. It kind of reminds me of when I first read In Cold Blood by Dream Capodi as a kid, because it's kind of a similar There's some parallels there. Um. It's hard to think about what a mental shift that has to be for the entire community to be like one day life is one way and the next day you see it all completely differently. Yeah, there was a similar actually even at the same similar time period, mass murder in the tiny, tiny rural town that I grew up in, and it had similar horrific elements and similar like family members found in their beds, and I was like, wow, this is uncanny when I got her outline. Can we move on to some perhaps less disturbing listener mail and so much less disturbing. I have two short pieces because I know this episode has been a little bit lengthy. UH about Ethan Allen? And the first one is from UH our listener Hannah, and she says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. My paternal grandfather made a hobby of tracing his family ancestry. My other three grandparents have straightforward lineages, but Papa's family was rather more convoluted. One of the things he discovered and is searching was that he was descended from Ethan Allen. And besides old, perhaps less than reliable records, the evidence of this is actually in the names of the men in my father's family, back and back and back. The men of one of my grandfather's lines all have the middle name Allen and variations thereupon, in honor of perhaps their most famous progenitor. It's such a cool I always love it when people have connections to history like that. Um, we got a lot after a FIDUA episode and then there is another Ethan Allen one from our listener, Vincent, and he says love the podcast. And for some reason, I never wrote you all before, probably because I usually listened in the car, But today I happened to be at my desk when I finished listening to part two of your Ethan Allen podcast. I wanted to let you know how I first learned of him. I didn't learn his name from the furniture store. We didn't have one near me that I knew of until I was in high school. I actually learned his name from a box of pencils. I always wanted to draw comics as a kid, and I still draw them now. And once saw a photo of Charles M. Schultz's desk and got a good look at the brand of pencils he used, So I bought a box the next time I was in an office supply store to get school supplies. On my box of Dixon Ticonderoga Number two pencils is the story of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. I kind of love that. I love that he got his connection to Ethan Ellen one three pencils, which is sort of charming. And to that there's a Charles Schultz connection, because perhaps one day we will discuss peanuts on the podcast, if you would like to. Oh, and I want to mention briefly before I go to that. I know we've gotten some flak over our pronunciation of Bella Lagosi's name. I will tell you why. It's because when I pronounce it correctly in the Hungarian language, which is Bela, I sound like the count from Sesame Street and just or like I've mentioned to one of our fans that posted about it on Facebook, like or some Hungarian variation of Tina Phey's character from Muppets. Most wanted it, but comes very comedic, and I did not want to do that well, and mine becomes comedic in an entirely different way. That embarrasses me so much that I'm not even going to try to say it, because somehow every ounce of Southern drawl that I have, so I can see that a three syllable word, I could understand how that would happen. And I will say that I watched a lot of footage of him, like in interviews and stuff whatever I could get my hands on, and he seemed to not mind when people pronounced it Bella, so I was not worried too much about it. Yeah, sorry, I'm sorry if that dismayed anyone who actually speaks Hungarian and thought you yol well, and having having, for my part, having mostly seen uh like documentary footage about him that was made and produced in the United States. There are a lot of American actors and commentators who pronounced it that way. So I genuinely was unaware that there was a different way to pronounce it, and so we got into that discussion. Yeah, I would sound like the count. I really do. Uh. So I apologize if that bothered anybody. I made that decision based on my desire cannot make it a comedy. If you would like to write to us, you can do so. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History at missed in History on Twitter, missed in History dot tumbler dot com, Interest dot com, slash missed in History, and you can check out our selection of missed in History goodies at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com. And you would like to get a T shirt or a mug or any number of other fun accessories with our logo and some other fun designs on them. You would like to learn a little bit more about a related topic to what we talked about today, go to our parents site how stuff Works. If you type in the phrase pivotal murders in the search bar, you're going to get an article. It's pretty new, called top ten Historically Pivotal Murders, and it talks about some murders that kind of did things. Uh, they had an effect similar to what this one had, where it really shifted the way a community or you know, uh, even the world looked at things after it had happened. So you can do something that at our website at our parents site, how stuff works dot com. You can also visit us at mist in history dot com or show notes all of our episodes archive and the occasional fund blog posts. We hope you visit us at mt in history dot com and hous dot for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com