Larson becomes the latest in a series of Republicans to publicly put to rest rumors of potential gubernatorial aspirations next year. Monday, state Auditor David Vaudt said he would seek re-election rather than throw his hat in the ring to challenge incumbent Democratic Gov. Chet Culver. Former Gov. Terry Branstad and Vermeer Corp. CEO Mary Andringa said they were not running earlier this month, and Iowa Ag Secretary Bill Northey appears to be leaning towards running for re-election as well.

Meanwhile, former state Sen. Jeff Lamberti told Des Moines NBC affiliate WHO-TV that he is thinking about a run for governor. Lamberti, who co-owns the arena football team the Iowa Barnstormers along with Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn, said influential activists have been talking to him about running, and he will make a final decision by this fall at the latest.

Currently, two Sioux Cityans are the only Republicans publicly seeking support for a run, although nothing is “official” for either yet  — businessman and two-time gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats and former House Speaker Christopher Rants.

This map from FEMA shows which Iowa counties will be impacted by a project to modernize flood maps. The map also shows 16 Iowa counties that are slated for inclusion in a FEMA pilot mapping program happening this year. Click on the graphic above to download a full PDF version with a legend and additional information.

ELY — It was a cold February day when Pat and Cindy Nulty learned that their home in this town southeast of Cedar Rapids, untouched by last June’s massive flooding, was unexpectedly identified as being in a flood zone by federal authorities.

“It goes without saying that I was stunned,” Pat Nulty said. “We’ve never had any flooding problems and, as far as I know, none of our neighbors have had any either.”

The Nulty family and 50 additional property owners were notified of the Federal Emergency Management Agency flood map change by a letter from Aaron Anderson, Ely’s city administrator.

“I first learned of the change in December 2008,” Anderson explained. “I didn’t alert the residents right away, because I didn’t fully understand what the notice from FEMA meant to the residents and the town. I spent about two months trying to get more information, so that I could help the residents figure out what to do next.”

The Flood Map Modernization Program

Since 1978, FEMA has been charged with producing maps that detail geographic areas at risk for flooding. The maps, which identify areas at highest risk for flood, indicate which property owners should be required to carry flood insurance and also where communities should locate key facilities such as schools, hospitals and emergency services for disaster planning purposes.

FEMA, which is now under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, came under scrutiny by the department’s inspector general for not maintaining and updating maps. The report, filed in 2005, stated that “70 percent of the maps” were “more than 10 years old” and “hand-drawn” and “difficult to update.” Because the maps have not kept up with construction developments and local improvements, the inspector general summarized that the maps have “generally [been] rendered inaccurate and obsolete.”

The highly critical report was filed two years after FEMA embarked on a six-year program to modernize and digitize its flood mapping program. The program, which nearly all agencies and lawmakers agree is needed, is hampered by severe underfunding. The budget of $1.5 billion is less than half of what the Association of State Flood Plain Managers estimated in August 2005 was needed.

While the program has been criticized for poor management, oversight and contractor performance, most of those woes can be traced back to FEMA embarking on an unprecedented program without an adequate budget. As a consequence, the agency has used “best available” data to make flood zone designations. Unfortunately, the “best available” data is often old, out-dated and without precise topographical details.

To add to the confusion, the rules regarding what constitutes a flood zone have changed. Previously only waterways that had at least two-square-mile watershed were considered. Currently FEMA looks at waterways with a one-square-mile (640 acres) or larger watershed to make a flood zone designation.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Despite the use of questionable data to create new flood maps, the preliminary FEMA designation is considered valid unless local authorities or residents band together to disprove it.

“I understand what FEMA is attempting to do,” said Pat Nulty. “I can’t disagree with its importance, but I think they should be using the most accurate and up-to-date information possible to draw these new maps.”

Inaccurate flood maps may cause property owners to be mistakenly identified, which places significant current and future regulatory restrictions on property. In addition, property owners and local facilities erroneously omitted from flood maps could be in unknowing risk.

Once a preliminary FEMA designation has been made, local authorities have a short period of time to appeal it. Homeowners have no appeal process, but can band together to pay for a survey that could change the flood boundaries. FEMA’s technical review fee is $4,800, but homeowners would also need to have a flood study done by a licensed engineer, which typically costs several thousand dollars.

Believing that a mistake had been made in Ely, Nulty worked with the other residents in his Southbrook subdivison, city officials and the subdivision developer to present FEMA with accurate information. Developer Keith Schulte submitted a three-page bulleted list to the agency, outlining the history and surveying of Southbrook. The list included details of “significant channel improvements” that had been made to Southbrook Creek between 2000 and 2001, evidence of out-dated topographic maps showing 5-foot increments, and information on storm water easements.

“I would not have believed this could happen in this country,” Schulte wrote in correspondence with FEMA. “As a federal agency, FEMA’s emphasis should be more about accurate mapping and advising homeowners of realistic flooding potential than about generating maximum low risk flood insurance premium dollars by publishing ‘estimated’ flood maps that they know are statistically flawed.”

While Schulte’s comments on generating flood insurance premiums might seem far-fetched, the National Flood Insurance Program has been stretched thin. The 2005 claims resulting from hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma alone far surpassed the total of roughly $15 billion in claims that had been paid during the entire history of the program. One way for the government to recoup losses is to generate a larger insurance premium base.

For their part, Ely property owners met and began pooling money to fund their own engineering survey, but, before that process was complete, FEMA agreed a mistake had been made.

“Based on results of … re-evaluation of the contributing watershed drainage area, combined with discussions with a local developer pertaining to more accurate and recent topographical data, it has been decided that the new Zone A along an unnamed tributary to Hoosier Creek in the City of Ely will be removed from the preliminary map,” wrote Rick Nusz, an engineer with FEMA.

Not An Isolated Incident

FEMA is in the process of modernizing flood maps in roughly 56 Iowa counties, with 15 counties already completed. Currently, the city of Atkins, near Cedar Rapids, is investigating a new flood designation that has impacted roughly 40 property owners. In nearby Belle Plain, at least two property owners have discovered they have been placed in a flood plain.

“Benton and Linn aren’t the only counties that have been getting new flood maps — and they aren’t the only counties that will be given new maps before this process is over,” said Bill Cappuccio with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources Flood Plain Development Program.

“In the case of Ely and Atkins, they were presented with flood zones that had never existed prior to the map updates. That was because the criteria changed for drainage, for when FEMA would and would not map a stream. But in other places we have people questioning how the flood plain became so large, or how it expanded into a certain area. In those cases, it most often has to do with the approximate nature of the maps.”

Communities that have detailed ground surveys completed will likely see few surprises in the re-mapping process so long as FEMA is given access to that information, according to Cappuccio.

“Right now the state of Iowa is trying to collect 2-foot interval contour maps for the entire state,” he said. “That’s being done by using light detection and ranging methods, with the end goal of having two-foot topographical maps for the state.”

Most Iowa counties, even the larger ones, don’t have topographical maps that are accurate to that degree. The Linn County maps used to make preliminary flood maps in Ely, for example, were likely 5-foot intervals or greater. The Benton County maps were at least 10-foot intervals, likely a decade or older U.S. Geological Survey maps.

“The better your topography, the better your approximation,” Cappuccio explained. “In the case of Iowa, much of the approximation that’s been done to this point was done using 1960s- and 1970s-era [U.S. Geological Survey], 10- and 20-foot interval, contour maps. … But, where there is updated information, FEMA is using it.”

While there is little counties and communities can do before FEMA releases new preliminary maps, Cappuccio encourages any individuals with questions regarding new flood designations to contact him and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

“It’s not like every community that’s going to be mapped by FEMA is saying, ‘Oh no. We are going to be mapped by FEMA and we know it’s going to be bad.’ So, you don’t want to over-react on the belief that you’re going to be subject to a map that isn’t based in reality,” he said. “There are communities that have gone through this process and realize that the maps created showed areas that have historically flooded.

“That being said, if a community believes that they have a map that is not accurate, then they need to do everything they can to come up with data that shows the inaccuracies in terms of topography and in terms of surveys and studies.”

Rubashkin, who is current facing a myriad of federal bank fraud and immigration-related charges, was initially allowed to post bail following his arrest in late October for conspiring in immigration-related offenses. As a condition of bail, Rubashkin and his wife surrendered their passports and he was required to wear an ankle tracking device.

Roughly two weeks later on Nov. 14, Rubashkin was arrested again, this time on multi-million dollar bank fraud charges. Despite offering the court $3.75 million for bail at a Nov. 20 detention hearing, the former chief executive was ordered to remain in federal custody by Scoles. Just this week the judge refused a request by Rubashkin’s attorneys to reconsider the decision to keep Rubashkin behind bars.

While Scoles took several factors into consideration when making his decision to keep Rubashkin in custody, his thoughts concerning Israel’s “Law of Return,” which provides citizenship to any Jew and members of his family who express desire to settle in the country, has drawn the most attention.

Today the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that seeks to stop the defamation of Jewish people, wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey in relation to the Rubashkin case and cautioning that the “Law of Return” should not be used as leverage to deny bail to Jewish defendants.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, signed the letter that was sent to Mukasey, an Orthodox Jew. Foxman noted that the court did not stipulate that Rubashkin had direct ties to Isreal as a basis for its consideration of the “Law of Return.”

“The government and the Detention Order appear to conclude that simply because [Rubashkin] is Jewish, and because Jews may have a claim on Israeli citizenship, his religion is relevant to a bail hearing,” wrote Foxman.

In his refusal to reconsider Scoles chided Rubashkin’s attorneys for fixating on his consideration of Israel’s “Law of Return” and not offering new information as to Rubashkin being a flight risk. The mere fact that Scoles did consider the Israeli law when making his detention order, however, has been enough to spark heated comments from the Jewish community.

The lawyers have indicated that they plant to appeal Scole’s latest decision to U.S. District Court Judge Linda Reade.

Foxman and the ADL is not asking for specifics in the Rubashkin case, but is hoping Mukasey will set policy that will prevent use of the “Law of Return” in detention hearings for Jews. Such direction from the U.S. Attorney General might place pressure on Reade to view Scoles decision to hold Rubashkin in custody pending a September 2009 trial date as discriminatory.

Prosecutors in the case have stood by their decision to include the Israeli law as one of their considerations for the court when determining Rubashkin’s risk of flight. They have claimed Rubashkin tampered with case evidence while out on bail at the time of his second arrest. The court was also told of large amounts of cash discovered in the Rubashkin home at the time of the arrest. The existance of two other former Agriprocessors supervisors, one Muslim and the other Jewish, who are named in federal complaints but have not been apprehended because they are believed to have fled to Israel have also been brought up by prosecutors.

Agriprocessors, once the nation’s largest supplier of kosher meat, was the site of a massive immigration raid on May 12. The company has struggled to be solvent since that time and filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November, in the wake of a $35 million lawsuit by one of its creditors. Rubashkin and several other members of plant management are facing charges ranging federal aiding and abetting illegal immigration to state child labor law violations.

Midwest Enterprise Group, a 527 with Democratic Party leanings, sent this flyer to residents in Iowa Senate District 8.

If immigration issues were a political football in this year’s state legislative races, then Senate District 8, an area that encompasses Howard, Chickasaw, Allamakee and Winneshiek counties in northeastern Iowa and includes the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant, was the 50-yard line. It was in that race that Iowa Senate Minority Whip Mark Zieman lost his re-election bid to Mary Jo Wilhelm, a relatively unknown Democratic upstart. The defeat came amid whispers and campaign mailers about the immigration concerns surrounding Agriprocessors in Postville, Zieman’s hometown.

Zieman, owner of a trucking company that does business with Agriprocessors and one of the few sitting Iowa politicians who had taken campaign donations from executives at the plant, had to realize the political ramifications on the day of the raid. Perhaps he believed his standing as something of a political legacy — his father also represented the area in the Iowa Senate — or as a hometown prodigy would insulate him from direct attacks related to the issue of immigration.

The negative fliers use Zieman's comments to the Des Moines Register to paint the politicians as being soft on executives of corporations who hire undocumented workers.

If so, he could not have been more wrong.

Midwest Enterprise Group, a 527 advocacy group with Democratic ties, targeted Zieman with a mailer that highlighted Zieman’s own words in the Des Moines Register about the situation at the Postville Agriprocessors plant. As Iowa Workforce Development and the U.S. Department of Labor investigated allegations of child labor law violations and immigration documenation fraud at the plant, Zieman said he’d like the government agencies to point out plant deficiencies to Agriprocessors’ managers, to make sure such problems are corrected and “then leave them alone.”

“Is there some way to make this thing work? If there’s no way, so be it,” Zieman said. “But we owe it to the employees. If that plant isn’t there, all of a sudden getting a job around here gets quite a bit more difficult.”

Campaign Contributions

In 2000 and 2002 Zieman accepted a $1,000 campaign contribution from former Agriprocessors executive Sholom M. Rubashkin. Rubashkin, a son of company founder A. Aaron Rubashkin, has been arrested by federal authorities and released on bail while awaiting trail on charges that he conspired to harbor undocumented immigrants for profit, aided and abetted document fraud, and aided and abetted aggravated identity theft.

Although the Rubashkin family and Agriprocessors have given numerous campaign contributions to Iowa politicians, Zieman is the only current member of the Iowa legislature that had accepted such money. Former Iowa House Republicans Chuck Gipp and Leigh Rokow accepted $2,250 and $2,100 in campaign donations, respectively. The Republican Party of Iowa has also been a benefactor of the Rubashkin family, garnering $7,550 between 2000 and 2004.

Many other Republicans in Iowa, most of them candidates or sitting members of the U.S. Congress, accepted campaign contributions from either plant executives or the Rubashkin family:

• Bill Dix, U.S. House candidate — $1,500
• Chuck Grassley, U.S. Senate — $14,000
• Tom Latham, U.S. House — $2,000
• Stan Thompson, U.S. House candidate — $8,500
• Doug Gross, Iowa governor — $10,000
• Jim Nussle, U.S. House and Iowa governor — $32,500

In addition, a contribution of $5,000 was given in 2005 to a 527 group called Progress for Iowa. The group sought to influence local legislative elections for the purpose of electing more Republicans.

In early October Portfolio magazine published a profile of Agriprocessors that contained a photograph of family patriarch Aaron Rubashkin at his Brooklyn, N.Y., butcher shop. On the wall behind the desk there, according to the article, there is a photo of Aaron Rubashkin with Sen. Chuck Grassley. Grassley’s office is not aware of when or where this photograph was taken.

On the Democratic side, the Rubashkin family and the plant have donated a total of $18,000 between 2005 and 2007. Upon launching her unsuccessful bid for governor, Patty Judge was given $10,000 by Sholom Rubashkin and his wife, Leah. When her campaign merged with that of Chet Culver, the joint venture received $3,000 from Sholom. Culver has since taken $3,000 from his campaign fund and donated it to charity.

A corporate donation of $5,000 was also given to the Democratic Governors Association in February 2007.

U.S. Rep. Tom Latham, who was the only other politician with ties to Agriprocessors or the Rubashkin family that appeared on the November ballot, had little difficulty being re-elected to his seat. Agriprocessors sits in the far northeastern corner of Latham’s district — Iowa’s second largest with 28 counties.

If there is more political hay to be harvested in connection with Agriprocessors, it is likely to come during the next election cycle when Culver and Judge will again face the voters. There is little doubt that it will be a hotly contested race as Republicans seek to take control of Terrace Hill. The amount of impact Agriprocessors will have on the contest will most likely depend on the amount of headlines the immigration raid aftermath continues to make at that time.

Barring any new developments coming to light, Grassley, who hasn’t faced a significant opponent since John Culver in 1980, might suffer at worst the political equivalent of a mosquito bite — a nuisance, but far from a fatal blow.

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.)

“I’ve lived in Muslim countries even though I’m Christian,” Obama said.

The line was a winning one that night with the audience in the southwest Iowa town of about 2,200 people 30 miles south of Carroll.

But with only days until the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, some of Obama’s Democratic opponents are stressing that his foreign-flavored biography and family (he has an Indonesian sister named Maya Soetoro-Ng) are no match for the foreign policy credentials of more experienced pols with their stamped-up passports and long lists of nations visited.

“Fresh doubts over Barack Obama’s foreign policy credentials were expressed on both sides of the Atlantic last night, after it emerged that he had made only one brief official visit to London — and none elsewhere in western Europe or Latin America,” The Times of London reports.

When asked about this in a phone interview this afternoon Obama said he’s quite familiar with Europe.

Here is Obama:

I’ve been to Europe multiple times. I haven’t taken an official congressional delegation meeting to Europe, but I have to tell you, official delegation meetings to Europe, that’s not how you get to know Europe. You get to know Europe by its people and its culture and its traditions. Obviously, knowing some of the players there is important. This is sort of the silly season in politics where people try to make assertions like this just to underscore their point which is that there are others who have been in Washington far longer than I have.

When asked specifically about Obama’s foreign policy experience — and the Times report on European travel that Obama disputes — on Christmas Eve, presidential candidate and veteran U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said he had some thoughts on it because “problems are mounting up by the hour.”

“This is not a time for on-the-job training and I say this with all due respect for people who have just sort of arrived on the scene without any proven ability to bring people together to make a difference,” Dodd said.

Added Dodd, “This is not a time for celebrity here. Iowans know that. They’ve managed to cut through that fraud in the past of celebrity and choose candidates who can go on and win a general election.”

Dodd said he was not making the comments on a personal level but rather as fact.

“If anyone thinks that you’re not going to hear that being wrapped around the neck of a candidate come next fall here, about the lack of experience, they’re deluding themselves here,” Dodd said. “Be prepared as we look at these issues here of having people who have experience, the ability to produce results.”

Some bloggers critical of Obama are making the case that if elected the Illinois senator would be the first president since Calvin Coolidge to have so little European experience.

Former Iowa Lt. Gov. Art Neu, a Republican, said U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton has more experience than Obama. No question there, Neu said in an interview.

“On the other hand we’ve seen people with experience who weren’t very good presidents.”

Clinton frequently notes that she has visited more than 80 nations as First Lady and a U.S. senator from New York.

“That’s certainly one point Clinton has over Obama is on foreign policy experience,” Neu said. “There are so many intangibles you really don’t know who would turn out in the end to be the best president.”

Pedro Rodriguez, an Hispanic activist in Denison, says Obama has a bird’s-eye view of many cultures — something no other candidate in the field has.

“He’s got a knowledge of how to approach things from a different cultural level,” said Rodriguez, 51, a supervisor with a packing house in Denison.

For his part, Obama can make the case that he doesn’t need to travel to understand foreign nations, that through the less formal, deep bonds of family, he connects with the hustle and flow of life outside of the United States.

“As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a U.N. General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe,” Obama writes in his best-selling book, The Audacity Of Hope.