Henry Lee Moore


Henry Lee Moore was an American forger, murderer and suspected serial killer who was convicted of killing his mother and grandmother with an axe in their home. While in prison, it was alleged by a Justice Department agent named W. M. McClaughry that Moore was possibly responsible for a string of unsolved axe murders in several states, among them being the Villisca axe Murders.

Early life and first imprisonment

Born and raised in Boone County, Moore lived on the outskirts of Columbia with his mother and grandmother, but worked as a blacksmith's helper at various car shops in Moberly, along the Wabash Railroad. Although described as a friendly-looking man, he had the morbid habit of visiting various morgues in St. Louis with the purpose of looking at the bodies. Not only that, he also collected newspaper scraps from infamous criminal cases, including that of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.
Moore communicated with various women through letters, and in May 1910, he was arrested in Wichita, Kansas for forgery. He was convicted and sentenced to a year of imprisonment in the Hutchinson Reformatory, receiving his parole in May 1911.

Double murders

Sometime after his release, Moore began corresponding with a 16-year-old Columbia girl named Queenie Nichols, eventually professing his love for her. However, Nichols rejected him because he had no home of his own. In response to this, he wrote a letter to her that soon his mother's home would be his, along with all the money in there.
A day before the murder, Moore travelled by train to Columbia and registered at the Central Hotel under the alias of L. Smith. On the night of December 17, 1912, he snuck into the house carrying a rusty axe with a broken handle which was normally used for handling coal. He crept up behind his 63-year-old mother Georgia, who was sitting in a chair and rubbing herself with an ointment for her joints, and began hitting her on the neck and head.
After killing her, Henry moved on to the bedroom, where his 82-year-old grandmother Mary Wilson was sleeping. Using this as an advantage, he struck her with the axe on the neck and head, killing Wilson before she could make a move to defend herself. Shortly thereafter Henry left the house, disposing of the axe in a nearby ditch. He then returned to his hotel room to clean off the blood, but in his haste left a lot of it on the bedsheets, his clothes and some on his arms.
The following day, he pretended to have just arrived and upon "discovering" the bodies, he called the neighbors. Police came to the scene, but after investigating Henry's whereabouts he was quickly arrested, as it was quickly revealed that he had stayed in the hotel and blood was found on his clothing and bed sheets for which no explanation was given. Authorities also found an insurance policy in Moore's pocket, but it turned out that it had been on Henry life, payable to his mother.

Trial, sentence and later life

While incarcerated, Moore refused to comment on the murders, but talked freely about his character, his poetry and his innocence. According to him, he had just arrived in town from Moberly to celebrate Christmas, and simply happened upon the grisly crime scene. He also denied all the claims made by the newspapers about his nighttime morgue visits, proudly stating that nobody in his family had even been convicted of a crime and that this was his first time in prison.
Upon further investigation, Prosecuting Attorney E. C. Anderson quickly debunked Moore's explanations, stating that there were witnesses and enough circumstantial evidence to connect him to the killings. He also noted that the accused's claim of being a student at the Kansas State Agricultural College was simply untrue, and concerning his prison sentence, Anderson said that Moore was most likely a drug addict. Despite all of his protestation of innocence, Henry Lee Moore was found guilty of the double murder on March 14, after a four-day trial with 80 jurors present, with the jury giving him a sentence of life imprisonment. His attorney tried to appeal to the Supreme Court, but his request was denied.
Moore's sentenced was commuted on July 30, 1956, and he was released. The then-82-year-old was last recorded as living at a Salvation Army Center in St. Louis, and after that, no further information about him is available.

Serial killer?

After some time, Moore's fingerprints and prison record were sent in for examination by W. M. McClaughry, an investigator in the Villisca axe murders, to J. H. Livingston, a fingerprinting expert in Jefferson City. Livingston suggested that the prisoner could have something to do with the string of axe murders, which, coupled with the coincidental timing that Moore had just been released at the start of the spree, led McClaughry to propose this theory. According to it, Moore was possibly responsible for these murders:
McClaughry's theory was overblown by the contemporary media, who claimed that he was stating it as fact and not speculation. An inquest was even started by Police Chief Burno, of Colorado Springs, into the Burnham-Wayne murders, as a man resembling Moore was seen in the city following the grisly killings, but had quickly left and was never seen again. However, this was later discredited by M. F. Amrine, Superintendent of the Kansas State Reformatory, who reported that Moore was corresponding with him at the time of the murders, and that Henry was at home in Columbia.
A similar inquest was also initiated by Chief Chargeois, for a 1911 axe murder that took place in Lafayette, Louisiana. Although Clementine Barnabet and one of her followers were suspected of that crime, the man had already been imprisoned at the time of the killings. The result from the investigation is currently unknown, but it is presumed that it was called off.
In regard to the Villisca murders, few of the residents believed the theory. However, according to Joseph Stillinger, father of the killed Lena, claimed that Moore very much resembled a man that once worked for him. That man, who had given his name as "Hellum", was hired in April 1912, and worked for only a week before disappearing. Stillinger and an officer later went on to confront Moore in prison, but, most likely, the mysterious man was not Henry Lee Moore.