A 90-year-old mystery

On a warm June night in Villisca, Iowa, eight people were brutally murdered with an ax while they slept - with no signs of struggle.

The entire family, including six children, were slain in one of the country's greatest unsolved mysteries, the Children's Day Ax Murders.

Ninety-two years later the murders remain unsolved. Was it a state senator, angry over his employee becoming business competition, a traveling minister obsessed with one of the child victims or an unstable transient who escaped without notice on a nearby train?

Unable to come to grips with the heinous crime, residents are torn between accepting the murders as part of the town's history or trying to forget they ever happened.

Now, Sunland residents are among the first to be given an opportunity to see a documentary about the murder and the town's continued fascination with it, including its little known connection to Beatrice.

"Villisca: Living with a Mystery" is being shown at 7 p.m. tonight (Friday) in the Truman Center at Southeast Community College-Beatrice Campus.

The event will feature the two-hour documentary by Kelly and Tammy Rundle, as well as a display that includes pictures from the town and the ax used in the killings.

The Rundles, who have spent the last 10 years researching every aspect of the crime, said the story has always fascinated them.

"We got caught up in it, for our first project I thought it was an interesting story. When we started we didn't realize how fascinating the people we talked to would be," Rundle said.

The documentary includes interviews and information from criminologists, former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, and Edgar Epperly, a retired Luther College, Iowa, professor who has spent the last 50 years researching the murders.

During their research, the Rundles uncovered a Beatrice connection to the crime. Bloodhounds from Beatrice were summoned to the scene to help track the murderer.

Beatrice Library Director and local historian Laureen Riedesel provided the film's makers with research about the bloodhound connection to the murder investigation.

"What surprised the filmmakers was that these people in Beatrice had the dogs," Riedesel said.

Riedesel said the dogs were owned by the Fulton family, who kept them as a hobby and didn't advertise that they had them until several years later.

"In everything we have (Fulton) is listed as a doctor. He started keeping the bloodhounds as a hobby," Riedesel said.

The dogs were taken by train to Villisca on June 11, 1912, the night after the murder and followed a trail from the house to the river.

Rundle said at the time, the town's residents thought bloodhounds were a waste of time, but he disagrees.

"The feeling at the time was that so much time had passed and so many people had violated the crime scene that the hounds wouldn't be useful," Rundle said.

But, Mrs. Rundle said, through their research they have come to disagree with that opinion.

"What we have decided after talking to the experts was that the bloodhounds were correct, they followed the trail of the killer," Mrs. Rundle said.

But the Rundles said their intention in making the movie was to show what happened to the town, not the identity of the murderer.

"We never set out to solve the murders, we wanted to show what happens to a community in the wake of something like this," Rundle said.

Riedesel, who was invited to an initial screening of the film in 2002, said the documentary of the murders is about more than the crime itself.

"It's not just the mystery but they have continued the story to show what it meant and what it did to the town," Riedesel said.

Riedesel said at the time, the murders impacted the entire region. So much so that the story of the murder ran on the front page of major newspapers throughout the region, including the Beatrice Daily Sun, the following day.

In 1987, a book titled "Morning Ran Red," was written by Stephen Bowman about the murders.

But, the Rundles said their purpose in continuing to tell the story was to separate fact from legend.

"Part of the problem is that a lot of what people today know they heard from others. It's a story of a community reacting to what they thought happened and in many cases, that's just folklore," Rundle said.

Tickets for the film are $11 and can be purchased at the door. For more information contact Kelly Morgan at 402-228-8244.

Tidbits

n The ax used in the murders was almost destroyed by the town's residents who wanted to forget about the murders. It was saved by a police detective and stored in his attic for more than 50 years.

n The grand jury transcripts from a suspect indicted for the murders disappeared and was later found in the basement of a lawyer's office in a neighboring community.

n The house where the murders occurred has been turned into a museum, and paranormal investigators say they have pictures of the killer's spirit, who still haunts the house.