CHAPTER XVI

Villisca 4

Wilkerson will not be accused of being ashamed of himself. So much of his stuff is so utterly silly that it would not be given credence except by those who are living under the spell of extreme excitement. The situation in Villisca and Red Oak is as terrible as it is absurd.

—Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune,
July 1917, Storm Lake, Iowa

In late February 1917, J. N. Wikerson instigated an effort to burglarize Frank Jones’s store. This act would contribute somewhat to Wilkerson’s eventual undoing, but not right away.

Until 1917 Wilkerson had never lived in Villisca; he worked the case a few days at a time with other cases, in and out on the train. While in Villisca he stayed with a woman with whom he had developed a relationship; at least one woman, or at least one woman at a time. In the summer of 1915 a young schoolteacher named Nellie Byers was raped and murdered in central Kansas. It was relatively obvious who had committed the crime. The crime occurred in an isolated area but near a farmhouse, and a man who was staying in that house was a convicted felon with a history of violence against women. Although other people also lived at the house, the suspect acknowledged that he was there alone on the day of the murder. Nellie Byers had expressed a fear of him, and would try to avoid him. The suspect, Archibald Sweet, acknowledged being within two hundred yards of the spot where the crime had occurred, but claimed that he had seen and heard nothing. Men’s footprints at the scene of the crime were of the same size as Sweet’s shoes.

The county attorney, however, knew that he needed more to secure a conviction. He contacted the Burns Agency, asking for a private detective, and the Burns Agency sent him J. N. Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, within hours of arriving on the scene, enquired as to whether there was a reward in the case. No, the prosecutor said; the suspect is already in custody. Why would there be a reward?

Well, said Wilkerson, what if it wasn’t him? If that suspect was released, could there be a reward then? After meeting with Archibald Sweet and “interrogating” him for about three hours, Wilkerson announced that Sweet was innocent, that another man had committed the crime, and that they needed to write to the governor and see if they could arrange for a reward fund for the proper solution of this case.

Over the next few weeks, it became clear that Wilkerson—being paid by the county—was actually working hand in glove with Archibald Sweet to try to manufacture a case against another man, and that this was being done in order to pursue a reward. On several occasions, Wilkerson generously offered to split the reward with the county attorney, if a reward could be arranged.

Within a few weeks, the county attorney fired the Burns Agency, but Wilkerson hung around and gave interviews to the local newspapers, insisting that Sweet was innocent and that he was being framed by the county attorney. The prosecutor was able to convict Sweet of the murder, despite Wilkerson’s interference, but refused to pay the Burns Agency for Wilkerson’s services.

In 1917, about the time that Wilkerson’s program in Villisca was finally collapsing, Archibald Sweet signed an affidavit confirming that Wilkerson had proposed that the two of them work together to frame an innocent man, and outlining at every step what Sweet should say and how he should act to help bring this about. When Frank Jones and those on his side finally had Wilkerson on the run, this affidavit (and others related to the Nellie Byers case) became one of their weapons.

*  *  *

Frank Jones had lived among the people of Montgomery County all of his life and had won election to the Iowa senate by carrying a huge percentage of the Villisca-area vote. He was quite astonished, at first, to find himself outmaneuvered by an outsider, his reputation torn to shreds by a lowlife con man.

But after he lost the primary election in June 1916, Jones began to fight back, and in early 1917 the tide seemed to be turning. The town’s businessmen rallied around him. Jones hired his own private detective; that private eye, posing as a newspaperman, deeply infiltrated Wilkerson’s operation. By February 1917, Jones had a safe stuffed with affidavits about the Nellie Byers case and with other information damaging to J. N. Wilkerson. Wilkerson—who had almost certainly stolen files from the county attorney’s office in an earlier incident—now located a burglar who could break into Jones’s store and into the safe. It was a cloak-and-dagger operation; Wilkerson hired people through intermediaries, arranged to be out of the area and with an alibi at the time of the crime, and surreptitiously handed off the keys to the getaway car without actually going to the car, doing everything he could do to keep his hands clean.

Frank Jones’s spy within Wilkerson’s operation, however, had become one of Wilkerson’s trusted assistants, and was in on the plot. When the burglars showed up at Frank Jones’s store in the predawn hours of a bitterly cold February night, Frank Jones and Hank Horton were waiting for them inside the store with loaded shotguns. Horton’s shotgun misfired and the burglars escaped, but again, Jones had spies in Wilkerson’s nest; the escape was temporary. Wilkerson’s men ratted him out. Wilkerson acknowledged arranging the burglary but claimed that it had been merely an effort to recover evidence that would incriminate Jones in the murders.

The Burns Agency was now plagued by legal troubles around the nation. By early 1917 James Burns himself was under indictment for several different forms of illegal surveillance, and a judge in Florida had declared that the Burns Agency was “a menace to the public.” The Burns Agency lost $2,500 and got another black eye when William Mansfield successfully sued Wilkerson for assaulting him at the time of Mansfield’s arrest in June 1916. Wilkerson’s involvement in the break-in at Jones’s store was now suspected, although Wilkerson would not be charged with that crime until several months later. Jack Boyle, Wilkerson’s publishing partner, was arrested in Kansas City in January 1917 for possession of drugs, an offense with which he had a long acquaintance; that arrest took Boyle permanently out of the story.

Wilkerson hadn’t liked the previous grand jury, July 1916, which had failed to indict Mansfield or Frank Jones, but when Montgomery County and the state of Iowa took Wilkerson’s case back to the grand jury in late February 1917, there were two things that were significantly different—two things beyond this accumulation of hickeys. First, the second grand jury had access to Wilkerson’s dope sheet, outlining his case against Jones, explaining what each witness would say that would support the case. And second—in large part because of this case—the Iowa state legislature had authorized the Iowa attorney general’s office to hire a permanent staff of professional investigators.

Within days the members of the grand jury had begun to notice that witness after witness was saying things different from what Wilkerson’s dope sheet had promised they would say. In some cases they backed off what they had said before, in some cases witnesses flatly denied that they had ever said what Wilkerson claimed they would say, while in other cases they took what Wilkerson said they would say and ran on down the field with it, making new allegations that went well beyond the old. A man who was reported by Wilkerson to have seen Albert Jones and two other men standing outside the Moore house about midnight on the night of the murders now traveled back to Iowa from Montana to say that he had seen nothing of the kind and had never said that he had. Other recantations or denials were just as stark. The one constant was that the testimony never matched what was supposed to be said.

Wilkerson’s witnesses could be sorted into two groups. One group—70 percent of the witnesses, and more—seemed reliable enough but testified about matters peripheral to the case, not really damaging to Jones. The other group, the truly damaging witnesses, consisted of obviously and fantastically unreliable witnesses—notorious liars telling remarkable stories about how they happened to witness Jones and his partners plotting and carrying out the murders. In every case except one (Warren Noel) these people had withheld crucial information about a terrible and infamous crime for years after the fact, in almost every case denying at the time that they had seen or heard anything. None of these witnesses had ever reported having any information about the crime until interviewed by J. N. Wilkerson.

And when the professional investigators from the Iowa attorney general’s office checked out details from their stories, nothing checked out; nobody seemed to have been where they claimed to have been at the crucial times.

As the slander suit filed by Frank Jones against Wilkerson had switched poles and become a trial of Frank Jones for the murders of the Moore family, the grand jury proceeding looking into Frank Jones now flipped and became an investigation of J. N. Wilkerson. Noting remarkable discrepancies between the dope sheet and the testimony of one witness, Wilkerson was called to the witness stand to explain the discrepancies. Wilkerson refused to answer questions and was ordered to spend twenty-four hours in the county jail for contempt of court. His legion of supporters stormed around town demanding his release, but Wilkerson did his twenty-four hours in jail.

The grand jury report excoriated Wilkerson and debunked his allegations. The report stung Wilkerson, but he still had hundreds of passionate supporters in the small town. Wilkerson submitted a bill to the county for his investigation, $595.29; there was another contentious public meeting about whether the bill should be paid, but it was paid. The Burns Agency fired Wilkerson, apparently in April 1917. That didn’t finish him, either. He stayed in town and continued to hold public meetings.

A bill was passed by the Iowa legislature, the Thompson Bill, aimed directly at putting an end to Wilkerson’s operation. Wilkerson and a troupe of his supporters traveled to Des Moines and met with the governor, William L. Harding, pleading with him not to sign the bill. Wilkerson told the governor that the bill was aimed at him, in particular, and would restrict his freedom of speech. All of that was true, but on April 26, 1917, Harding signed the bill into law.

*  *  *

This was the same era in which Rasputin was murdered, and J. N. Wilkerson was harder to stop than Rasputin. Under attack, Wilkerson attacked. In court on charges of arranging the burglary, Wilkerson filled the courtroom with his supporters, who cheered for him and snickered at the points made against him, just as they had during the slander litigation. He accused the attorney general’s office of stealing his investigative file, which he had worked on for years. He referred to Iowa Attorney General Horace Havner as a shyster, and began to mock him and deride him in his public meetings—just as he had done to Senator Jones, to Marshal Horton, to the previous attorney general, and to anyone else who opposed his operation.

It is a poor idea, for a con man, to make a mortal enemy of the state attorney general. If you are in the con man business, I would not recommend that you should do this. But Wilkerson had become a very serious problem. Theoretically banned from holding his public meetings in Iowa, Wilkerson moved his operation across the state line into Nebraska, at one point booking a special train to take people from western Iowa over to Nebraska to see the show; Wilkerson’s operation sold tickets for the excursion. He drew large crowds, but after a couple of meetings Wilkerson realized that the Nebraskans were just there to watch and wouldn’t give him money to support the investigation, so he moved back into Iowa; the Thompson Bill, aimed at stopping the public meetings, was unconstitutional and unenforceable, and Wilkerson just ignored it.

By now Wilkerson had convinced a large share of the area’s population—almost certainly over half of them—that the elected officials were conspiring to hinder the prosecution of Frank Jones. Rather than discontinuing his public meetings, Wilkerson increased their frequency. He held court in every little town and small city in the area. His supporters organized themselves as the “Citizen’s Investigative Committee,” also known as the Montgomery County Protective Association. They had dues, they had officers, they had committees, they had projects. They had an oath. I hereby promise under oath that I will not disclose the secrets of this organization, and that I will assist every effort this organization may make to uphold the law and further the cause of justice. I further pledge myself to defend this organization and its members against injustice of any kind. Wilkerson no longer had to reserve the hall and post flyers about his upcoming meetings; that was done for him by his support group. His organization collected dues, passed the money to him, and kept records of how much money was raised at each event. Wilkerson had a list of “100 questions” that he wanted to ask Frank Jones; the list was a regular feature of his meetings. His organization got copies of the questions bound into a pamphlet and sold copies at his rallies, giving the profit to Wilkerson. He no longer needed the Burns Agency or the county; he no longer dreamed of extorting a payoff from Frank Jones. He was living off the land.

And the Iowa attorney general was about to do him a tremendous favor.

Iowa Attorney General Horace Havner had taken personal control of the 1917 grand jury (the second grand jury). Havner became fascinated by the crime. He knew that Wilkerson’s case against Jones was a house of cards. But if Jones and Mansfield didn’t commit the crime, he wondered, who did?

Enter Reverend Kelly.

The term pathetic loser will hardly do him justice. Born in England, Reverend L. G. J. Kelly, Lyn Kelly, was a tiny little man who was weak in every facet of his nature. He was physically very weak, he was mentally weak, and he was morally weak. These categories miss his central liability, which was a weakness of will, of focus, of energy, of determination. Almost all of us are weak in some of these ways and stronger in others. Reverend Kelly was that rare and unfortunate man who was weak in every area. He was not stupid, exactly; but his mind was so disorganized that he acted stupidly. Married to a stern, dour woman who towered over him, he would occasionally be caught peeping into his neighbor’s windows and fleeing across the lawn, chased by an angry husband. When he got excited Kelly’s speech became so disorganized that it was impossible to tell what he was talking about. In his letters, portions of which were published and thus survive, he would lose his train of thought in midsentence.

Reverend Kelly had attended the Children’s Day service in Villisca, organized by Sarah Moore and attended by the Stillinger girls hours before the murders. He was not a real minister; he was a man in his forties who decided, after he had failed at numerous other professions, that he would try his hand at preaching. Although the word intern wasn’t used across the map then as it is now, he was essentially an intern, taking classes at a seminary in Omaha and traveling around the circuit of Presbyterian churches in the area, trying to learn the preaching business. He had absconded repeatedly to avoid paying his debts. After the murders but before he was prosecuted he had been thrown out of divinity school and denounced by the Presbyterian churches association of South Dakota.

On the night of the murders Kelly was a block away, sleeping at the house of the minister who had invited him to the Children’s Day service. He became fascinated by the Moore family murders as soon as he heard about them, obsessed by them at a disturbed level. He wrote to the Moores’ minister, explaining his background as a detective and begging the minister to arrange for him to tour the murder house. Pretending to be a private detective, trained in England before he came to the United States, he wrote many letters to the governor of Iowa and to others concerned with the crime, explaining his theories about the case. He tried to work with the two most legitimate private investigators in the case, C. W. Tobie of the Burns Agency and Thomas O’Leary of the Kirk Agency, who was brought in on the day of the murders. Tobie wrote Kelly a blunt letter, telling him to butt out, while O’Leary, privately suspecting that Kelly might be involved in the crime, indulged him and would listen to what he had to say. One time, in the lobby of the Villisca hotel, Reverend Kelly acted out his theory of how the murders had occurred with such intensity that the night watchman was called to tell him to go back to his room.

In December 1913, Reverend Kelly, by now trying his hand as a writer, advertised for a secretary. He had no money to pay a secretary; he was just acting out a fantasy, just as he was acting out a fantasy in trying to be a preacher or a detective. When a sixteen-year-old girl answered his ad for a secretary, through the mail, he wrote back to her, explaining to her that in this position she would sometimes be expected to pose for him in the nude; in typical fashion he rambled on for several paragraphs about the ins and outs of posing in the nude in places where they would be completely alone and no one would know where they were and it was critical for her to keep this secret, and how did she feel about that?

She felt that she should contact the police. Actually, she felt she should talk to her minister, and her minister felt that he should contact the police, but the outcome was the same; the police contacted postal authorities, and the postal authorities began to investigate Reverend Kelly for using the United States mail to solicit a minor female. In early 1914 Reverend Kelly was arrested, after which he was involuntarily confined for several months in a mental institution in Washington, D.C. While he was there Reverend Kelly impressed those who were in charge of the place as being perhaps not one of the crazier people in the house, but certainly one of the most annoying. He ranted, attempted suicide, asked others to kill him, groped other prisoners, and talked endlessly about the Villisca murders. One of his jailers reported that Kelly said that he had committed the murders. The jailer reported this up the ladder, and the Washington authorities contacted people in Villisca.

For what it is worth, I’m not convinced that Kelly ever told anyone, before he was arrested, that he had committed the Villisca murders, although numerous sources say that he had. Kelly, when he was excited, babbled incoherently. He talked a great deal about being suspected of committing the crime; that was part of his everyday, every-hour conversation. Somebody thought he said that he had committed the murders himself; God only knows what he had actually said.

Sheriff Jackson and the county attorney had interviewed Kelly before and concluded that he had nothing to do with the murders, but they now traveled to Washington to interview him again. Kelly pulled himself together, vigorously denied that he had committed the crime, denied that he had ever said that he had, and gave a largely coherent interview consistent with his earlier statements. The sheriff and the prosecutor once more concluded that Kelly had nothing to do with the crime. Those holding Kelly decided that he was not a menace to society and released him, and he was never prosecuted for sending the salacious letters to the sixteen-year-old.

There were, however, two consequences to the episode. First, the press got wind of the fact that the investigators had made the trip to Washington. And second, Kelly, fired up again, began again writing letters to Iowa authorities explaining his theories of the crime. He was now being targeted as a suspect in the crime, Kelly said, because of his work as a detective; he was getting too close to the truth, and the real culprits were getting nervous.

Iowa Attorney General Horace Havner was intrigued. In May 1917, Havner reconvened the Montgomery County grand jury—the same grand jury which, in the previous month, had failed to indict anyone. In four days, they returned an indictment, charging Reverend Kelly with the murder of Lena Stillinger. Of course, it could be presumed that whoever killed Lena Stillinger had also killed the other people in the house, but Kelly was charged with only the murder of Lena. This was done as a hedge against double jeopardy. If Kelly was acquitted of the murder of Lena Stillinger, he could still be prosecuted for any of the other murders.

The indictment was supposed to be sealed, but everybody had spies. J. N. Wilkerson had a spy on the grand jury, so he knew that Kelly had been indicted. Havner didn’t know exactly where Kelly was and didn’t want him arrested right away, because he needed time to assemble his case against Kelly.

Wilkerson, however, tracked down Kelly and informed him that he (Kelly) had been indicted for the murders. Wilkerson befriended Kelly and persuaded him to return to Iowa, present himself to the county attorney, and demand that the prosecution begin immediately.

It is impossible to explain how crazy this story is, but here’s a detail that may help. When Wilkerson located Kelly in St. Louis, he whisked him away to a small town in Illinois, to make it harder for the prosecutors to arrest him. After a couple of days he went back to St. Louis, boxed up Kelly’s possessions, and mailed them to a storage center in Kansas City. When he did that, though, he signed the receipt “F. F. Jones”—Frank Fernando Jones.

Why?

Wilkerson wanted to claim that Frank Jones was the puppet master behind the prosecution of Reverend Kelly. He was trying to set up a claim that Jones, operating in conjunction with the prosecutors, had seized Reverend Kelly’s belongings in St. Louis, and had taken control of them, when in reality he himself had done this. That done, Wilkerson then escorted Kelly to Chicago, where Kelly stayed in a good hotel for a couple of days (at Wilkerson’s expense) and met with attorneys before heading back to Iowa. Arriving in Red Oak on May 14, 1917, Kelly presented himself to the county attorney. This was a complete shock to the county attorney, since Kelly’s indictment had been sealed, and Kelly wasn’t even supposed to know that he was under investigation.

After Kelly was arrested, awaiting trial, he was housed at a prison in Logan, Iowa, ninety-two miles northwest of Villisca. According to Dr. Edgar V. Epperly (web post):

The “Little Minister” had been interrogated repeatedly throughout the summer, but as the trial drew near, the state officials decided on one final all-out effort to get him to confess. Late in the afternoon of August 30, Kelly was brought into an interrogation room in the Logan, Iowa Jail and confronted by Attorney General Horace Havner, State Agents O. O. Rock and James Risden, and the Harrison County Sheriff, M.D. Meyers. Thus began a grilling that was to last throughout the night. All big men, they played the bad cop role with the diminutive Reverend Kelly, breaking occasionally to return him to his cell. In jail with him he now found two “thieves” who assured him from their long criminal experiences it would go easier on him if he confessed. One of these “criminals” was actually a deputy sheriff from Pottawattamie County, G.W. Atkins, and the other a newspaper editor from Missouri Valley.

Around 5:00 a.m. Kelly broke and dictated a confession. He claimed to have had difficulty sleeping the murder night, so he went for a walk. While walking down the middle of the street he saw a light in a house and two children (Lena and Ina Stillinger) getting ready for bed. He heard the Lord’s voice commanding him to “Suffer the children to come unto me,” and, in another portion, “to slay and slay utterly.” In a trancelike state, he walked to the back of the house, picked up the axe from inside the Moore family’s coal shed, went in the kitchen door, and proceeded to kill everyone. He stayed in the house until first light, then let himself out the front door and left town.

The confession was retracted as soon as Kelly got a lawyer and a good night’s sleep. It was inconsistent with the crime scene in numerous ways, and Kelly vigorously denied it for the rest of his life, but . . . there it was, a confession.

One of the mysteries of the murders is that the staircase in the Moore house creaked so loudly that investigators could never understand how the murderer reached the upstairs without waking the parents. I understand that and will explain it later, but one of Kelly’s stories had him running up the stairway twice before he killed the parents—upstairs to kill the boys, downstairs to kill the girls, back upstairs to kill the parents.

The evidence against Kelly was:

1. The confession,

2. The fact that he was certainly in Villisca on the night of the murders,

3. Some claims that he talked about the murders before they were publicly known,

4. Allegations that he had sent a bloody shirt to an out-of-town laundry, and

5. The clear and convincing evidence that he was a weirdo who throughout his life had dealt poorly with his sexual urges.

Also, Kelly was left-handed, and there were some investigators who believed that the murderer might have been left-handed (as, in fact, he was).

The day of the murders was Kelly’s first visit to Villisca. He was living at that time in Macedonia, forty miles northwest of Villisca; Macedonia was about one-tenth the size of Villisca. Kelly had preached at revival meetings in two settlements much smaller even than Macedonia on the Saturday before the murders, then had come to Villisca on the afternoon of the crime, where he attended the Sunday-evening service and spent the night at the home of the Moores’ minister. He caught a train back to Macedonia at 5:19 a.m. on the morning of the murders. An old couple on the train and one man in Macedonia claimed that Kelly talked to them about the murders before the bodies were discovered.

These allegations, however, arose years after the murders. Kelly had come to Villisca without a change of clothes. When he boarded the 5:19 a.m. train those clothes were clean, or at least without obvious blood. The wife of the minister with whom he spent the night in Villisca testified that his bed had been slept in, and that there was no evidence that he had gone anywhere or done anything. To get back to Macedonia had required two train rides. Kelly had taken the same train passage two weeks later; after five years it was difficult to be certain that the conversation had not occurred on the latter journey.

Kelly went to the murder house, told those watching the house that he was a private detective, and was allowed to go through the house as dozens of other private detectives had been. The real evidence was that Kelly was a goofball, a pervert, and a petty criminal. He had no job skills; he was too weak to do manual labor and too unstable for anyone to hire him to be a store clerk, so he was unable to earn money in any conventional manner. He skipped out on his debts, because it is unclear what else he could have done. This speaks, again, to his quite unusual incompetence, but the Villisca prosecutors didn’t need a hopeless incompetent; they needed a murderer; actually, a supercompetent murderer. Kelly was brought back to Red Oak, charged with murder, bullied into an obviously bogus confession, and put on trial.

Reverend Kelly’s first trial (telegraphing the story) began on September 4, 1917. There were four lawyers on each side of the case, which a regional newspaper promised would be “the hardest fought legal battle ever staged in the middle west.” On the day the trial began, Iowa Attorney General Horace Havner was arrested at the courthouse. One of Wilkerson’s nutty witnesses was a prostitute named Alice Willard; I am sorry, a lady named Alice Willard, who, according to her own testimony, was hiding in a plum thicket with a traveling salesman when she witnessed a conversation between Frank Jones and one of his coconspirators. Havner had examined Willard very roughly during the grand jury proceedings of the previous March, and she alleged that Havner had met with her later, at a hotel, and had threatened to charge her with perjury if she repeated her stories under oath. A grand jury decided that this was witness tampering—“oppressing the witness”—and indicted him for it. Havner posted his own bond and returned to the courtroom for the prosecution of Kelly.

The first Kelly trial lasted three weeks and went to the jury on September 26. Wilkerson’s supporters disrupted the trial constantly, crowding around Kelly to offer encouragement, patting him on the back and shaking his hand. The judge lectured the bailiff to put a stop to it, but the emotional crowd was uncontrollable. Two more bailiffs were added to the courtroom, and still the disruptions continued.

Within hours after the testimony ended the jury deadlocked, eleven to one; one juror stuck on not guilty by reason of insanity, while the other eleven were all committed to an outright acquittal. The judge, as he would do today, ordered them to go back and complete their assignment. After two more days and twenty-one ballots, all of them eleven to one, the judge accepted the impasse, and a hung jury was declared.

Despite the obvious impracticality of it, Havner had committed the state to a retrial. First, though, Havner had to fight his own legal battle, against the charge of oppressing the witness Alice Willard. The trial was an odd one. With a change of venue back to Logan, Iowa, Havner was back in the courthouse where he had extracted the confession from Reverend Kelly, with Reverend Kelly now housed in the same building awaiting a second trial—while Havner, the Iowa attorney general, was being prosecuted by the same Montgomery County attorney who was his cocounsel in the prosecutions of Reverend Kelly. After a few hours of testimony the judge ruled that even if everything Alice Willard said was true there was no crime, and threw out the case.

The trials were flying fast and furious now. About the same time, a grand jury in a neighboring county refused to indict Wilkerson for arranging the burglary attempt at Frank Jones’s office. Wilkerson acknowledged that he had arranged the break-in but claimed that it was a lawful effort to obtain evidence about the murders. This was transparently false; one cannot presume that there is evidence about a murder in your neighbor’s safe and steal the safe, and in any case Wilkerson had taken elaborate precautions to cover his tracks. It was nonsense, but it created a smoke screen. Actions had been taken in several different counties to plan the burglary. Because half of the population of Montgomery County regarded Wilkerson as a knight in shining armor, prosecutors attempted to indict him in an adjacent county where elements of the crime had occurred, but the residents of that county were well aware of the madness that had consumed Montgomery County, and understandably regarded the prosecution as an effort by Montgomery County to dump their trash over the backyard fence. They refused to indict Wilkerson.

On November 12, 1917, Kelly’s retrial began. The crowds were gone this time. At his first trial spectators had lined up at 5:00 a.m. to get into the courthouse. At the second trial, in the same courthouse, there were empty seats. On November 24, Kelly was acquitted on the first ballot.

I don’t mean to demean those who prosecuted Reverend Kelly by suggesting it was all a put-up job to take the pressure off of Frank Jones; those who were involved in the prosecution appear to have sincerely believed that Kelly was guilty. But the Wilkerson investigation was becoming a serious problem for Iowa officials; it was eating into the politics of the state. Villisca itself was hopelessly, and angrily, divided between pro-Wilkerson and anti-Wilkerson factions. Customers who were pro-Wilkerson would not shop at stores that were pro-Jones; children from families that were pro-Jones were not allowed to play with children from families that were pro-Wilkerson. The schism tended to divide along lines of religion. Since Jones was a Methodist, most of the Methodists supported him. Since the Moores had been Presbyterians and their minister was in Wilkerson’s camp, most of the Presbyterians supported Wilkerson. Havner and the others who arranged the prosecution of Reverend Kelly almost certainly hoped that putting another suspect in front of the town would divide and weaken Wilkerson’s support.

Far from it. The prosecution of Reverend Kelly was a wide-open door for Wilkerson, and he rushed through it. In a political campaign, in a debate, in a trial, the worst thing you can do is to hand the truth to your opponent. It is vastly easier to defend a true proposition than it is to defend a lie. The prosecution of Reverend Kelly, which bordered on being silly, allowed Wilkerson to say things that were true. He would describe Kelly as a “poor nut,” which was true, and would say that Havner was trying to railroad him, which was essentially true.

Now living full-time in the Villisca area, Wilkerson set up the Reverend Kelly Defense Fund, and raised money on behalf of Kelly’s defense. As long as Kelly was in legal jeopardy, Wilkerson was paid by the defense fund. When Kelly was acquitted that pipeline dried up. Wilkerson looked for some way to sustain his campaign. He decided to run for office. He was going to be the new county attorney.

Actually that understates it; not only was Wilkerson running for county attorney, but one of his chief supporters was running for Sheriff, and another for county supervisor. They all ran as Republicans. Wilkerson by now was the most famous man in the county. He had conducted dozens and dozens of high-profile public meetings. His picture had been on the front page of the newspapers countless times. He had fantastic name recognition, and while it was true that many people hated him, at least as many and probably more regarded him as a hero. He wanted to be the county attorney, a modest goal for such a man. If he could attain the office, Wilkerson could finally prosecute Frank Jones for arranging the murders of the Moore family, but first he had to get licensed to practice law in Iowa. That’s when the part about being mortal enemies with the Iowa attorney general raised its head.

In April 1918, J. N. Wilkerson petitioned for a license to practice law in Iowa. Horace Havner acted immediately to deny the petition. That battle was still being fought out when the Republican primary came around in June. Wilkerson was originally listed on the ballot, despite not being legally eligible to take the office he sought, but then was taken off the ballot after it was decided that this was a problem. No problem; Wilkerson was a fantastic campaigner. He started a write-in campaign, and won the primary easily, while one of his supporters won the election to be the Republican candidate for sheriff, another, the candidate for county supervisor.

Frank Jones was now fighting for his life. If J. N. Wilkerson was elected the county attorney, Jones was in serious, serious trouble. There was, however, another step in the process; there was a county nominating convention, which had the authority to resolve disputes. This was a dispute: Was Wilkerson eligible to appear on the ballot, or wasn’t he? This dispute would be resolved by the Montgomery County Republican Party, and if there was one place left where Frank Jones still had friends, it was the Montgomery County Republican Party.

*  *  *

This finally came to an end in late June 1918.

There were crime scene photos taken of the Villisca murders, although only one photo is known to survive. Warren Noel was the owner of the crime scene photos, having purchased them with a photography business. J. N. Wilkerson, learning of the photos, visited Noel, who became one of Wilkerson’s most active supporters. He was an excitable young man with an attractive young wife.

In late summer of 1917, Warren Noel purchased a flashy automobile that he fairly obviously could not afford. In September 1917, Noel was being investigated by the county sheriff on charges of writing bad checks. In the course of that investigation, investigators learned that Noel was also suspected, by the other officers in Wilkerson’s operation, of not turning over to the group all of the funds that he had collected. He was stealing the money before Wilkerson could steal it.

In October 1917, Noel staged an incident in which he claimed to have discovered a plot to derail a train and thus murder Wilkerson, who would be on the train. He thought there should be a reward, from the railroad, for his having prevented the train derailment. Officials from the railroad didn’t even consider paying the reward, but didn’t have enough information to prosecute. About the same time, officials from Wilkerson’s band confronted Noel about holding back money. Unable to come up with the money, Noel sold his flashy car, reported it stolen, and filed a false insurance claim. The insurance company, like the railroad, didn’t give a thought to paying the claim but didn’t have enough information to prosecute.

On October 31, 1917, Noel took a train east from Villisca, getting off the train several times for various reasons. He mailed a letter back to his wife, claiming that he had been seized and was being held hostage by a mysterious group of ruffians. The next morning Noel was found on the platform of the freight depot in Albia, Iowa, 120 miles east of Villisca, with a bullet in his head. His revolver was on the ground beside him.

Noel was well insured, overinsured, and his suicide left his young widow a wealthy woman. In late June 1918, as the battle raged over whether Wilkerson would be allowed to practice law, thus allowed to become the county attorney, Mae Noel and J. N. Wilkerson traveled together (with her baby) to Ottumwa, Iowa, southeast of Des Moines. Arriving about eleven o’clock at night, they walked to a hotel, where they registered under assumed names in two adjoining rooms.

If it now occurs to you Warren Noel may actually have been murdered, welcome to the club; this has occurred to others as well. The coroner ruled it a suicide. But entirely by chance, Wilkerson and Mae Noel were spotted on the street by state agents. The state agents were low-level police officers, generally assigned to bust up poker games, hassle bootleggers and prostitutes, and enforce other laws of a type that, in the modern world, we would classify as “why don’t you people mind your own business?” One of those laws prohibited adultery. Wilkerson was a married man. In 1918 it was a violation of the law, in Iowa and probably every other state in the nation, for him to get too friendly with a woman not his wife.

The agents who spotted Wilkerson knew immediately who he was, and the state agents worked indirectly for Horace Havner; that is, they worked for somebody who worked for somebody who worked for Horace Havner. When they spotted Wilkerson with a woman not his wife, they got interested fast, and in a few minutes there were three state agents hiding in the next room, ears pressed to the door, and standing on furniture so that they could watch the hallway from behind the transom of a darkened room.

Wilkerson and Mae Noel were found to be sharing a hotel room and arrested on a charge of adultery. The next morning that charge was dropped, but they were rearrested on a charge of conspiracy to commit adultery; apparently the agents, in their eagerness, had jumped the gun and arrested the couple before they had actually got around to adulterizing each other. It was a violation of the manual; the agents were supposed to wait until they heard the bedsprings creaking—again, I am not making up these details—but they got anxious and moved in too early.

Wilkerson’s arrest made headlines across Iowa. Perhaps it was not a serious law and not a serious violation, but to do this with the widow of a man who had been completely devoted to you and who had recently killed himself was seriously unseemly.

At long last, Wilkerson’s support melted quickly away. The Montgomery County Republican Convention decided that Wilkerson would not be their candidate. Wilkerson dropped his petition for a license to practice law in Iowa and filed instead for a license to practice law in Nebraska. Nebraska turned him down.

In late 1918 there was one more trial, Wilkerson’s trial for conspiracy to commit adultery. Horace Havner personally prosecuted the case; Wilkerson, as always, was active and aggressive in his own defense. The trial was nasty but brief and ended in a hung jury identical to Reverend Kelly’s, eleven to one for acquittal. Havner could have retried the case but chose not to, and the case against Mae Noel was never brought to trial.

The great J. N. Wilkerson left Villisca in disgrace. He came back at least one more time, about Christmas 1918. He ran into Frank Jones on the street; they were both headed to the same bakery. They snarled at one another, spat insults, and made motions as if they were ready to fight. Frank Jones pulled back his foot and kicked Wilkerson, so they said, like you would kick a dog, and then they were pulled apart.