Thanks for posting this.
After reading this article and some other things about the case, I have a hard time believing that any of the suspects at the time of the crime were truly responsible. The bare known facts of the case make it more than likely it was one killer, methodical, a planner and the killings seemed somewhat ritualistic in nature, with the covering of the faces, the mirrors, the positioning of one of the child victims, and some of the other things found at the scene. He was very skilled at this because it's not easy to kill that many people and hardly anyone of them even saw it coming, or so it seemed. It wasn't his first time doing this kind of crime that's for sure. I believe that profilers divide these kinds of killers into organized and disorganized. He was definitely organized. It's a double tragedy that the scene was so compromised at the time, leaving little to go on forensically, even if today's LE wanted to try and get into this and figure out who may have done it. There could have been DNA left on clothing, though without refrigeration it would have no doubt degraded to nothing useful. What about crime scene photos? Not that I want to see children who have been hacked to pieces, but I'm not an investigator who would need those to try and figure out what happened. Items from the scene would have been very useful too, but no doubt souvenir hunters and time have made all the physical evidence go away long ago. I don't know, as I said I don't think any of those who had the finger pointed at them at the time did it. I think this guy, and it definitely was a man IMO, was either long gone and completely unknown to anyone by the time the crime was discovered, or he lived there and was a person whom no one would have ever suspected and lived a horrid double life, as a nice quiet respected person of the town and also an ax murderer. If my second theory was true, I think he stayed there for a reasonable time afterward, living his regular life, maybe even had a family, not bringing any attention to himself, then figured out a plausible excuse to move far away, maybe to California or another western state. Maybe to Europe. They talk about other ax crimes committed around the same time in the Midwest but I can't find any details on any of those crimes that might link any of them to Villisca murders. I would like to know if there were other mass killings after this one in any of the places I mentioned he may have absconded to eventually that bore resemblances to this one. I think he just melted into history. It's quite possible he did some minor crimes during his life like even the most skilled serial murderers do, but it was either so unrelated to anything like burglary or anything violent that no one even had the most remote idea it was him. Very unfortunately, this is unsolvable.
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