On the morning of December 18, 1912, Henry Lee Moore arrived at his mother's house in Columbia, Missouri, and called in the neighbors. His mother, Georgia Moore, fifty-nine, lay dead in the room where she had been sitting the night before, and his grandmother, Mary Wilson, eighty-one, lay dead in her bed. Both had been struck on the head and neck with an axe. Moore said he had just come in from Moberly to spend Christmas with them. The police found out almost at once that he had been in town since the day before, registered at the Central Hotel as L. Smith, and that the sheets in his room and the clothes he had worn were stained with blood he could not account for.
He was thirty-eight. He had been born in Columbia on November 1, 1874, and grew up there in a household that took in his parents, his grandparents and his brothers and sisters, and he had worked as a blacksmith's helper in the car shops of the Wabash Railroad at Moberly. People who met him described a friendly-looking man. He had a habit, reported in the papers after his arrest, of going to the morgues in St. Louis to look at the bodies, and he clipped newspaper stories about notorious crimes, among them the case of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. In May 1910 he was arrested in Wichita, Kansas, for forgery. He served a year in the reformatory at Hutchinson and was paroled in May 1911.
After his release he began writing to Queenie Nichols, a sixteen-year-old girl in Columbia, and told her he loved her. She turned him down because he had no home of his own. He wrote back that his mother's house would soon be his, along with all the money in it. It was that letter, the hotel register and the blood that the prosecution built its case on.
The killings themselves were reconstructed in detail. On the night of December 17 he let himself into the house carrying a rusty axe with a broken handle, the one the household used for coal. He came up behind his mother as she sat in a chair rubbing liniment into her joints, and struck her on the neck and head. Then he went into the bedroom and killed his grandmother in her sleep. He threw the axe into a ditch near the house and went back to the hotel to wash, and in his hurry left blood on the bedclothes, on his clothes and on his arms. When he was arrested an insurance policy was found in his pocket. It was on his own life, and his mother was the beneficiary.
In jail he would not talk about the murders, though he talked freely about his character, his poetry and his innocence. He denied the stories about the morgues and said that nobody in his family had ever been convicted of anything and that this was his first time in prison. The prosecuting attorney, E. C. Anderson, said there were witnesses and enough circumstantial evidence to connect him to the killings, that his claim to have studied at the Kansas State Agricultural College was false, and that he was probably a drug addict. The trial lasted four days. On March 14, 1913, the jury found him guilty of both murders and spared him the death penalty; he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and his attorney's attempt to take the case to the state supreme court failed.
It was while he was in prison that his name was attached to something much larger. Between 1911 and 1912 whole families had been killed with axes in their homes at night in several Midwestern states, and the press had given the killer a name, Billy the Axeman. Moore's fingerprints and prison record were sent by W. M. McClaughry, a Justice Department agent working on the Villisca murders, to J. H. Livingston, a fingerprint expert in Jefferson City. Livingston suggested that the prisoner might have something to do with the series, and McClaughry, struck by the fact that Moore had been released in May 1911, just as the killings began, took the idea up. In May 1913 he set out a theory that Moore was responsible.
The list McClaughry's theory covered was long. It took in the burned house near Allentown, Florida, where William Glenn Acreman, his wife Amanda and their seven children were found in May 1906, though Moore's opportunity to have been there was never shown; May Alice Burnham and her children Nellie and John, and Henry and Blanche Wayne and their baby daughter Lula, killed in neighboring houses in Colorado Springs in September 1911; the Dawson family at Monmouth, Illinois, and the Showman family at Ellsworth, Kansas, in October 1911; Roland Hudson and his wife at Paola, Kansas, in June 1912; and, a few days later, the eight people killed in the house of Josiah Moore at Villisca, Iowa, among them two visiting girls, Ina Mae and Lena Stillinger. The Villisca family were no relation to him.
The newspapers reported the theory as though McClaughry had stated it as fact, and for a while it drove inquiries of its own. The police chief of Colorado Springs opened one into the Burnham and Wayne murders, because a man resembling Moore had been seen in the city afterward and then vanished. It collapsed when M. F. Amrine, superintendent of the Kansas State Reformatory, reported that Moore had been writing to him at the time and was at home in Columbia. A police chief in Lafayette, Louisiana, looked into whether Moore could be tied to an axe murder there in 1911, for which Clementine Barnabet and one of her followers were suspected. In Villisca few people believed it. Joseph Stillinger, Lena's father, thought Moore looked very like a man calling himself Hellum who had worked for him for a week in April 1912 and then disappeared, and went with an officer to confront him in prison; the man was most likely someone else.
No charge was ever brought against Moore over any death but the two in Columbia. The Villisca case is still formally unsolved, and other suspects have been argued for ever since. The theory rested on the timing of his release, his life as a drifter, and a resemblance between the Columbia killings and the others, and on nothing more.
He served thirty-six years. Governor Forrest Smith paroled him in December 1949, and in July 1956 his sentence was commuted. That year, at eighty-one, he was living at a Salvation Army center in St. Louis. He died in St. Louis of heart and kidney failure on September 30, 1963, at the age of eighty-eight.