Moore was born in 1874 and lived as an itinerant labourer in the Midwest.
In December 1912, at Columbia, Missouri, he killed his mother and his maternal grandmother with an axe. He was convicted in 1913 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Between 1911 and 1912 a series of families had been killed with an axe at night in their homes across Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Colorado and Missouri, including the Moore family of Villisca, Iowa, in June 1912, where eight people died and which remains the most famous unsolved crime in that state. Investigators at the time noticed the pattern: an axe taken from the victims' own woodpile, killings in the small hours, the house left in darkness.
After Moore's conviction a federal agent named Matthew McClaughry, working from Leavenworth, compiled a case that he was responsible for the series, on the ground that his movements as a drifter fitted the geography and that the Missouri killings matched the method. The figure of twenty-six in this roster is McClaughry's arithmetic.
It was never tested in a court, no charge was ever brought over any of the other deaths, and his surname being the same as the Villisca family's is a coincidence that has confused the literature ever since. Villisca is still formally unsolved and several other suspects have been argued for.
He was released in 1949, after thirty-six years, and lived out his life at a Salvation Army centre in St Louis, dying there in 1963. What is established is two murders. The twenty-six is a theory advanced by one investigator a century ago, and the entry treats it that way.