The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  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 pr
esume 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.