He ignored one, in which four more young children were sleeping, and crept into the room in which 43-year-old Joe Moore lay next to his wife, Sarah. Still carrying the ax, the stranger walked past one room in which two girls, ages 12 and 9, lay sleeping, and slipped up the narrow wooden stairs that led to two other bedrooms. Then, according to a reconstruction attempted by the town coroner next day, he took an oil lamp from a dresser, removed the chimney and placed it out of the way under a chair, bent the wick in two to minimize the flame, lit the lamp, and turned it down so low it cast only the faintest glimmer in the sleeping house. The door was not locked-crime was not the sort of thing you worried about in a modestly prosperous Midwest settlement of no more than 2,000 people, all known to one another by sight-and the visitor was able to slip inside silently and close the door behind him.

Shortly after midnight on June 10, 1912-one hundred years ago this week-a stranger hefting an ax lifted the latch on the back door of a two-story timber house in the little Iowa town of Villisca.

Louisiana serial killer pt 4