The style of Villisca: Living with a Mystery is familiar to anyone who has ever seen one of Ken Burns's well-made and often intellectually satisfying productions on PBS, but the Rundles have placed their own unique stamp on the story. Through interviews with elderly residents and former residents of the town as well as chats with authorities on certain types of crime (like famed profiler Robert K. Ressler) they weave a story that combines the feel of family talks taking place at twilight on the front porch with a slowly intensifying true crime story well-worth the full-length documentary treatment.
Aged folks speaking with a rough eloquence about a past that to many of them was anything but distant share the screen with tastefully chosen photos of the crime scene, as well as modestly rendered recreations. Underpinning all of it is a pitch-perfect soundtrack, incorporating original music as well as traditional American music — I was struck by the eerie way the filmmakers incorporated a piano version of one of my favorite hymns, "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" under scenes about the beginnings of the ultimately misbegotten investigation into what happened after the Moores got home that night.
Some time that night someone entered the Moore home. Locking up your home wasn't a habit for residents of Villisca in 1912; it may not be a habit still. So the killer didn't need to force entry.
The killer held in his hands an axe he'd picked up as he rounded the side of the Moore home.
He took out Josiah Moore and his wife Sarah first. The killer used the blunt edge of the ax initially, but upon returning to the master bedroom he must have been concerned that Josiah Moore was not yet dead, and he went to work with the blade.
Then the killer attended to the children, Herman, Catherine, Boyd, and Paul.
The Stillinger girls were murdered while sleeping in a downstairs bedroom. It was in the attack on the sisters that the killer's real motive may have been revealed. That, or a psychopathic killer decided to take additional advantage of a situation not previously anticipated. Found near the bed where the Stillinger girls died was a slab of bacon taken from the Moores' icebox. One of the girls had been positioned in a sexual manner, though it was never reported that either girl was raped. Investigators have long suspected that the slab of bacon was used as a masturbatory aid by the killer.
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