The Villisca Axe Murders and the Question That Became Burningtree

June 9, 1912

On the night of June 9, 1912, in Villisca, Iowa, someone entered a house and murdered eight people. Two adults. Six children. The town was small. The doors were unlocked. The kind of place where people didn’t lock things because they didn’t think they had to.

By morning, the house was silent. The entire Moore family—and two young girls who were spending the night—were dead. Bludgeoned in their beds. There was no sign of forced entry. No clear motive. No arrest that ever held.

More than a century later, the case remains unsolved. People still talk about Villisca. The fact that someone could walk into a house, do what was done, and vanish.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the violence. It was the patience.

What Stuck about Villisca

The person who did it didn’t rush in and out. He moved through that house patiently. Methodically. He waited. He chose his moment. He understood the rhythms of the place—the people inside it, the way the night would unfold. That kind of crime doesn’t happen by accident. It requires studying. And blending in to the point his studying wasn’t noticed. When it’s over, walking away like nothing ever happened.

That’s the part that stuck.

Not the act itself—but the idea that whoever did it didn’t just vanish. He vanished completely. No trail. No pattern anyone could prove. No ending anyone could point to and say, there, that’s it.

Which raises a harder question: what if that wasn’t the only time?

The What If

What if the person who walked into that house didn’t stop at just that house and that family?

What if he moved on?

Different town. Different name. Another place where doors were left unlocked and people trusted their neighbors.

What if he learned from it? Refined it. Got better.

What if he made a life out of it—quietly inserting himself into communities, becoming familiar, forgettable, invisible. Choosing. Watching. Waiting.

A family here. A house there. Then gone again before anyone knew what they were looking for.

No pattern. No connection anyone could see. Just isolated tragedies scattered across counties and states, written off as singular horrors instead of something connected.

That’s the kind of idea that doesn’t let go once it takes hold.

Because it turns a single unsolved crime into something far more unsettling. Not a mystery with no answer—but a story that never ended.

Burningtree

That’s where Burningtree came from.

Not as a retelling of Villisca, and not as an attempt to explain it. But as an exploration of that question—what if the person behind something like that didn’t disappear… he just moved on?

Burningtree is set in 1948 and follows Rusty Gideon, a private detective hired to find a missing teenage girl from Indiana—a girl who supposedly ran off with a man.

What Rusty finds instead is something much darker. A pattern. A trail of deaths that doesn’t look like a trail at all until you step back and recognize it.

A man who doesn’t stay anywhere long enough to be remembered—but long enough to learn everything he needs. It’s a story about patience. About invisibility. About the kind of evil that doesn’t announce itself—it waits patiently.

Because sometimes the most dangerous thing isn’t the violence.

It’s the fact that it can happen—and then walk right out the front door unnoticed.

Check out Burningtree here — or start with the Southern Noir Sampler if you want to get a feel for the territory first.