VIILISCA — The Rev. Lyn George Jacklin Kelly, the only man tried for the eight Villisca axe murders of 1912 and a preacher with a well-documented reputation for deviant sexual behavior, served as minister at the Carroll Presbyterian Church for nearly a year following the internationally notorious slayings, as southern Iowa officials focused on other suspects.

To be sure, the nearly century-old still-unsolved southern Iowa murder spree is one of the creepiest, compelling episodes in the history of the state, and the fact that more Iowans, particularly in the western part of the state, don’t know about this case is evidence of a breakdown in the teaching of Iowa history.

Then again, that oversight might preserve good nights of sleep, because delving into the history of this monstrous case of seemingly inhuman evil is not for the faint of heart.

With a documentary, “Villisca,” now out, the late Rev. Kelly posthumously remains a central figure in one of the more sensational murder cases of the 20th century.

One longtime historian of the case has spent years developing a theory that Kelly not only killed eight people in a Villisca home on a June night but may be connected to more of the estimated 30 axe murders that were reported in the Midwest, the Great Plains and Colorado from the fall of 1911 to the summer of 1914.

“That would be the Holy Grail, to show Kelly was a serial killer,” says Ed Epperly, a retired Luther College education professor who has studied the murders for 50 years since his own college days at the University of Northern Iowa.

Epperly told me he can’t say conclusively that Kelly is the Villisca butcher, but he said, “I’ve been more inclined to Kelly.”

Additionally, Epperly has been able to place Kelly in locations where it is at least possible that he committed more murders.

“Kelly would have been a psychopath,” Epperly said. “He didn’t have empathy for other people.”

No evidence ever has emerged linking Kelly to any deaths in the Carroll area, but the preacher discussed the Villisca murders at length with people in Carroll, and two teenage girls, members of the Carroll Presbyterian Church in 1913, told a grand jury that Kelly sexually harassed them, testimony that played a crucial role in characterizing the English immigrant as a peeping Tom with an intense attraction to young girls.

It is that behavior as much as anything that led the Iowa attorney general’s office to charge Kelly with the Villisca murders and prosecute him in two trials, the first leading to a hung jury and the second an outright acquittal.

During Kelly’s time in Carroll, some closely involved with the case in Villisca suspected he might be the culprit, but most of the attention in the first years after the slayings focused on a prominent state senator from Villisca, Republican Frank Fernando Jones, and a spectacular swirl of politics, greed and sex, with rumors of lurid, even incestuous liaisons.

For that reason, Kelly came to Carroll in the fall of 1912 like just another preacher fulfilling an assignment — although people quickly found him to be disturbing.

Meanwhile, tracked by Texan James Newton Wilkerson, a dogged, colorful, larger-than-life private detective from one of the Pinkerton-style agencies that flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jones was called before a grand jury and accused of orchestrating the murders. Jurymen declined to indict one of Jones’ alleged associates, opening the door for the cases against Kelly to proceed.

With the Villisca case there is a virtual cottage industry in theories. Visitors to the city can take “axe murderer” tours and the local Casey’s General Store sells books and memorabilia right along with Diet Cokes, gasoline and pizza. But to this day, what is known about the Villisca axe murders beyond a reasonable doubt, ironically, are essentially the same facts the first law-enforcement officials on the scene discovered on the morning of June 10, 1912.

“We call it America’s greatest unsolved mystery, and I don’t think that’s too much of an exaggeration,” says Kelly Rundle, producer of “Villisca.”

“You could not make this up. I think it was Tom Clancy who said, `There is a difference between fiction and reality. Fiction has to make sense.’”

Eight people, including six children under 12, were massacred in a Villisca home just hours after attending a service at the Presbyterian Church. All of the victims were struck first with the blunt end of an axe as they slept. The dead included Josiah Moore, 43; his wife, Sarah Moore, 40; and their four children, Herman, 11, Katherine, 9, Boyd, 7, and Paul, 5.

Two friends of the Moore children, Lena Stillinger, 11, and Ina Stillinger, 9, had the misfortune of staying overnight there and also were butchered – with Lena left in a sexually suggestive position. There was no evidence – using the science of 1912 – of rape or sexual penetration.

A coroner’s report estimated that each of the victims had been savagely bashed with the flat side of an axe 20 to 30 times, the killer moving from bed to bed until the bloody scene was complete, according to the exhaustive 2003 book, “Villisca,” authored by former Iowa state fire marshal Roy Marshall.

On the night of June 9, 1912, both Jones, the politician, and Kelly, the preacher, were in Villisca, Kelly at the Presbyterian Church as a visitor from Macedonia where he was then serving, and Jones at the Methodist Church as a prominent, perhaps its most illustrious, member.

To this day, according to Rundle and Epperly, many people in Villisca believe Jones, the late state senator, was involved in the crime, either as a murder-for-hire scheme or in some other fashion, because of business disagreements with Josiah Moore as well as alleged jealousies stemming from unsubstantiated claims of a sort of supercharged love triangle.

“The majority of people believe Jones was behind it,” Epperly said. “They believe it because they heard it from their grandparents and parents. They believe it in the same way they believe in religion.”

The night of the murders in retrospect seems like a setting straight out of central casting for horror movies. The streets were darker than usual because of a dispute between the city council and the electric company, which actually turned off the city lights, according to Rundle.

After church, Kelly stayed at the home of the local pastor and his wife, and Kelly had the house to himself as the hosts preferred sleeping in a tent on their property in the summer.

One major reason students of the case today and prosecutors in 1917, including then Attorney General Horace Havner, believed Kelly to be the killer is an obvious one: He confessed to the crimes in a signed statement, saying God called him from the Villisca preacher’s house to commit the murders.

“I was lying in bed at the home of Reverend Ewing on the night of the murders and heard a voice say, `Rise, Peter, slay and eat,’” Kelly told investigators, according to Marshall’s book.

In his confession Kelly also would say: “I thought I was the grandson of God. I am ready to do it again.”

At one point Kelly told his interrogators, according to court documents, that “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.”

Epperly, who has six file cabinets of documents on the case, said there is plenty of evidence to buttress the confessions and build a case against Kelly. Besides the admission, Kelly took a bloodied shirt to the cleaners and, according to one couple, talked of the massacre in animated detail on a train in the early morning hours of June 10, 1912, well before the crime scene was discovered by the Moores’ extended family and authorities.

Epperly chalks up the juries’ decisions in the cases to the myths and politics surrounding Senator Jones, a banker-businessman many people just flat didn’t like, and a person who possessed a motive that, was, well, human.

“He was a hard man to owe money to,” Rundle says. “He was not well-liked.”

On the other hand, to believe that Kelly, a 5-foot, 2-inch nervous man known for getting so excited that he often spit while talking, committed the murders would be to accept and understand a level of sexual pathology not comprehensible to most Americans in 1917.

But many believed in the Kelly case.

And significant evidence about his character surfaced in Carroll, Epperly said. That’s backed up by Marshall’s book as well.

“They (prosecutors) would show he had a history of window-peeking and was known to walk the streets late at night,” Marshall writes. “They believed the window peeking and the urge to gaze at the private parts of a young girl were keys in sending Kelly over the edge that night.”

In the fall of 1912, just months after the murders, Kelly came to Carroll to serve the Presbyterian Church, then located at what is today the site of Carroll County State Bank on Highway 30 and Adams Street. The church would move to its present location, 927 N. Carroll St., in 1929.

While in Carroll, Kelly, who was married to a woman who claimed later the union was never consummated, first stayed with Dr. C.W. Spaulding, a member of the Presbyterian Church. The Villisca Review printed a statement from Attorney General Havner reporting that Kelly had talked to people in Carroll about the murders and had even asked an unnamed doctor, possibly Spaulding, about whether an insane man could be punished for killing people.

According to Marshall’s book, Kelly is believed to have threatened to shoot some people in Carroll with whom he had disagreements.

At the very least, Kelly made many people in Carroll uncomfortable, said G.W. Thomas, an employee with the Green Bay Lumber Co. here and a member of the board of trustees at the Presbyterian Church in Carroll.

“I think the majority of people in Carroll could say after he left that there was something the matter with him all the time,” Thomas told a grand jury in Montgomery County. “I think he was a fellow that at night – that people would see him on the street at midnight. I don’t think he slept much. I believe he told me he didn’t sleep more than two or two and a half hours at night, and he would be liable to get up and take a walk around town, you know, nervous.”

Some of the more damaging and defining testimony against Kelly came from two teenage girls in Carroll: Margaret Struck and Beulah Calloway, the latter who would go on to work for years at the Daily Times Herald as a bookkeeper.

“Under the guise of teaching them stenography, he enticed girls to his room,” Epperly said. “Instead, he spent most of his time trying to get them to take their clothes off. He tried to tell them that it was perfectly normal, that it was in the Bible.”

Citing court documents, Epperly said Calloway told authorities Kelly lured her to his room and tried to get her to pose nude and fondle the then-15-year-old.

“He talked only about art and wanted me to pose,” she told the court. “… He tried to kiss me, too. He kept me there for about an hour pleading with me.”

Calloway said she was reluctant to tell anyone about the harassment but confided in her sister, who in turn told her mother.

After Kelly left Carroll sometime in 1913, he soon turned up in Winner, S.D., where he was arrested and successfully prosecuted for writing to a girl in an attempt to get her to pose nude and engage in other activities. He reportedly wanted to see the girl naked as inspiration for a religious book.

For their part, the juries in the two cases against Kelly didn’t buy the attorney general’s theory. The defense was successful in arguing that the Carroll evidence and other testimony related to Kelly’s character wasn’t germane to the case and that he was given to wild pronouncements.

Rundle, who in his documentary covers the case against Kelly but offers another theory, says Kelly at various points thought he was President Woodrow Wilson, confessed to sinking the Lusitania and didn’t have the attention span to carry out the murders. Moreover, Rundle says that as a peeping Tom and voyeur, Kelly appears to fit the look-but-don’t-touch mold of a man who wouldn’t have the stomach for the gory axe slayings.

The documentary “Villisca” raises the possibility that the murderer was a railroad worker who killed his mother and grandmother in Missouri with an axe in December of 1912, months after the Villisca massacre. Rundle said Henry Lee Moore, no relation to the slain in Villisca, could have committed the murders there and elsewhere randomly. The film doesn’t draw any firm conclusion on a culprit, though.

For Kelly’s part, he spent some time in a national mental hospital in Washington, D.C., as well as a facility on Long Island, N.Y., before he died. He is believed to be buried somewhere on Long Island, according to Epperly. Kelly served for a time at a Congregational Church in Chester, N.J., and had to leave in the middle of the night without any of his possessions.

Years ago, Epperly interviewed an old member of the New Jersey church who remembered Kelly and the reasons he left but wouldn’t disclose the information.

“I infer that to mean that it was something sexual,” Epperly said. “I don’t think it means he preached a bad sermon.”

After reviewing thousands of documents over a half century, Epperly said, much can be construed about Kelly from a simple, single black-and-white photo of the preacher and his wife.

“There’s a touch of madness about his eyes,” Epperly said.

(Photos: Top — It was the sinking of the “Titanic” that finally knocked the Villisca murders off the world’s front pages. Middle — The Rev. Lyn George J. Kelly and his wife. Bottom — The Moore house, which stands to this day. It was the location of the murders.)