That evening, the visiting girls and the Moore family attended the Presbyterian church where they participated in the Children's Day Program, which Sarah had coordinated.

While Peckham stood on the porch, Ross went into the parlor and opened the guest bedroom door, where he found Ina and Lena Stillinger's bodies on the bed.

Moore immediately told Peckham to call Henry "Hank" Horton, Villisca's primary peace officer, who arrived shortly thereafter.

Horton's search of the house revealed that the entire Moore family and the two Stillinger girls had been bludgeoned to death.

Josiah received more blows from the axe than any other victim; his face had been cut to such an extent that his eyes were completely destroyed.

They thought that she was awake and tried to fight back, as she was found lying crosswise on the bed, and with a defensive wound on her arm.

Lindquist was upset by the constant influx of townsfolk interfering with the investigation and urged the sheriff to get the national guard to secure the scene.

[6] Although Linquist called members of the Coroner’s Jury together in late afternoon, it was several hours later before they entered the Moore home to view the bodies.

The fire station had been set up as a temporary morgue and it was close to 2 a.m. before all the bodies had been transported there, likely around 24 hours after the actual murders occurred.

Two spent cigarettes found in the attic suggested the murderer could have entered the house via a window or unlocked back door and hid until the family returned from church.

A gas lamp with its glass chimney removed, and its wick turned down so it would give off only the faintest bit of light was discovered upstairs.

[6] After this limited investigation, the coroner held an inquest the next day, June 11th, 1912 where 13 people where interviewed as potential witnesses.

[6] Over time, many possible suspects emerged, including Reverend George Kelly, Frank F. Jones, William Mansfield, Loving Mitchell, Paul Mueller and Henry Lee Moore (no relation).

This aroused suspicion and a private investigator wrote back to Reverend Kelly, asking for details that the minister might know about the murders.

His known mental illness made authorities question whether he knew the details because of having committed the murders or was imagining his account.

In 1914, two years after the murders, Kelly was arrested for sending obscene material through the mail (he was sexually harassing a woman who applied for a job as his secretary).

Another theory was that Senator Jones hired William "Insane Blackie" Mansfield, an ex-convict and former U.S. Army soldier stationed at Fort Leavenworth, to murder the Moore family.

A burning lamp with the chimney off was left at the foot of the bed and a basin in which the murderer washed was found in the kitchen.

Wilkerson managed to convince a grand jury to open an investigation in 1916, and Mansfield was arrested and brought to Montgomery County from Kansas City.

Wilkerson believed that pressure from Jones resulted not only in Mansfield's release but also in the subsequent arrest and trial of Reverend Kelly.

However, R.H. Thorpe, a restaurant owner from Shenandoah, Iowa, identified Mansfield as the man he saw the morning after the Villisca murders boarding a train at Clarinda.

Furthermore, it was reported that a Mrs. Vina Tompkins, of Marshalltown, was on her way to testify that she heard three men in the woods plotting the murder of the Moore family a short time before the killings.

Before and after the murders in Villisca, the very similar axe murders of his mother and grandmother were committed, and all of the cases showed striking similarities, leading to strong suspicion that some, or all of the crimes were committed by an axe-murdering serial killer and, just like "Blackie" Mansfield, the axe-murdering Henry Moore can also be considered a suspect in some of these slayings.

In Mueller's suspected crimes there was often but not always a sexual motive directed towards a pubescent girl, as with Lena's being partly disrobed.

In a blurb on the dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The Man from the Train, professor and crime writer Harold Schecter writes that the Jameses offered the most probable solution yet for the Villisca murders.