Between the evening of June 9 and the early morning of June 10, 1912, in the southwestern Iowa town of Villisca a horrendous murder took place. Killed, bludgeoned in their sleep mainly with the blunt end of an ax, were Josiah and Sarah (Montgomery) Moore, their children, Herman, Mary Katharine, Arthur, and Paul, and two house guests, sisters Ina Mae and Lena Gertrude Stillinger, who were spending the night with the Moores, having participated in the Children's Day Program (of which Sarah had been the coordinator) at the Presbyterian church on the evening of the 9th.

The case, unsolved for over a century, received nation-wide attention at the time.  It was one of several similar such heinous crimes which occurred throughout the country from 1898 to 1912, the year of the Villisca killings. Many of these cases involved identical aspects which in more recent times might be taken to point to an itinerant serial killer. At that time, most of such occurrences, were perceived to be the work of someone local and likely with a grudge.

An examination of this murder in comparison to others like it appears in a book by baseball statistician and writer Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James.  After researching the Villisca case, Bill James began to look for similar cases to determine if the Moore-family murders could be the results of a serial murderer. In The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery the Jameses identify several commonalities that tie the crimes together as the probable work of a single serial killer. Not only do they identify particular crimes committed by this person, but through their examination of thousands of newspaper items, court transcripts, and public records, they have been able to name that particular individual as Paul Mueller, an ethnic German. The authors suggest that the 1922 Hinterkaifeck murders (in Bavaria) may have been the deed of Mueller.

This video on YouTube mentions the killer's activity in Kansas,

and HERE is an article by the Jameses on the March 11, 1910 Schultz family deaths, believed at the hands of the same murderer, in the Houston Heights, Texas.

Landrace neat cattle (and landrace animals in general) are members of domesticated populations which have been left to pretty much "raise themselves" with no selective breeding conducted by humans; instead, these animals have undergone survival of the fittest (mainly through natural selection, though overseen by humans over time for economic exploitation). Landrace populations are representative of animals long endemic to a particular geographical area that thus manifest the characteristics best apt to be beneficial in that environment.

Cattle brought mainly from Spain as early as Columbus' second voyage (1493) contributed their genetics to the further spread of bovines into the mainland of the New World, such as the arrival of Hernán Cortés in Mexico in 1519 and the 1521 expedition to Florida of Juan Ponce de León. These stock introductions and the spread of small populations from them led to the development of landrace breeds such as the Florida Cracker (or Scrub) Cattle, Pineywoods Cattle of the U. S. Gulf Coast region, Criollo Cattle of Mexico (variously called Corriente Cattle in Sonora and adjacent areas, and Chinampo in Baja California), and Texas Longhorns. (The Texas Longhorn breed has become a standardized breed, now with breed standards, a breed registry, and breed association.)  Landrace breeds in the United States from non-Spanish ancestry are represented by the Lineback and Randall breeds which originated from cattle brought to the New England states from the British Isles.

(The bull in the top picture and the young brown bull in the second,  fourth, and fifth pictures are for sale.  If you are interested in purchase or desire more information about these particular cattle, contact me by using the contact form of this website).

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A few years back, I wrote an article (posted herein) called "A Nifty Site."  It deals with my use of the engrossing  website FindaGrave.com, and it mentions some of my postings to the site, as well as reviews some of its various features. One of the most interesting and potentially very useful aspects of FindaGrave is a feature called "Virtual Cemetery" which allows members to save and fave burial entries to a list or category of their own creation for their own and others' use in historical and genealogical research.  Virtual Cemetery list-creations can be made and utilized as a helpful tool to save research finds or to categorize items of a particular interest.

I have used the feature genealogically to create lists of family members of my various ancestral surnames as a finding aid to access particular details needed for further research. I have also created and from time to time add to a virtual cemetery for another interest: ghost stories.  This latter  listing, which I have titled "Shady Rests," contains the names of the dearly departed about whom the FindaGrave entries mention alleged paranormal attributions, or who are popularly ascribed (though not necessarily in their FindaGrave memorial) to the realm of the nearly departed.

As with its constituents, the list goes on.

(My website Brazoriaresearch.com contains three blogs that can be viewed by clicking their respective tabs near the top of the website homepage. Two in particular feature ghost stories with a focus on historical background and context.  One is Historical Ghost Stories of Texas.  The other is this site you are now reading, De Omnis, which deals not only with ghost stories but other topics as well.  I hope you'll visit them and check back from time to time for additions.)

Photo credit: FindaGrave.com