Skip to main content

The Author and the Ax Murderer

Hero or villain, detective or criminal: pulp author Jack Boyle had a choice in 1916 whether he wanted to be a good guy and crusading reporter, or a blackmailer and liar who let an innocent man suffer and a guilty man escape justice.

He chose wrong.

Boyle, the creator of the popular character “Boston Blackie,” could claim to write his stories of the criminal underworld from personal knowledge.

At one point he was a successful reporter and editor, working for newspapers in San Francisco, often covering the police beat. He was well known in San Francisco’s Chinatown, including the opium dens and among the bars and dives of the Barbary Coast frequented by professional criminals.

A gambler, a hard drinker and something of a reprobate, he became a opium addict, leading to the loss of his job and a descent into crime. He committed fraud, hooked up with a professional gang and even committed at least one brazen armed robbery.

For his crimes he served terms in California and Colorado. While in prison in Colorado, he wrote for The American Magazine under the name “Convict 6606”. His first piece in the magazine was an autobiography followed in the next issue by the first of the Boston Blackie stories.

Supposedly cured of his opium addiction, he was paroled and allowed to leave the state to take a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Post, a paper that had a sensationalistic reputation.

But Jack Boyle, was not just a newspaperman turned criminal, or a criminal turned pulp writer. He was also at one point an “investigator”, earning a “beat” for a sensational expose of one of the most notorious ax murders of its time.

Boyle, then working for the Post, accompanied Detective James Newton Wilkerson of the Burns Detective Agency in 1915 and 1916, when the detective investigated the notorious ax murder case that occurred in Villisca, Iowa. An ax murder case that remains officially unsolved to this day.

Four years before, on the night of June 9, 1912, an unknown assailant entered the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and used an ax to bludgeon to death the couple, their four children and two other children who were spending the night.

Wilkerson had spent several years, at first funded by the state and county at the request of the victim’s families and later by donations from the community, trying to prove his theory that a prominent local businessman and politician had put out a hit on a hated rival.

Boyle had come to Iowa hunting a lost treasure story and became interested in the Villisca case instead. He hooked up with Wilkerson and became a partner in the detective’s investigation.

By 1916, Wilkerson was pushing for the state to act. A series of postcards sent anonymously to Villisca residents presented the first hints of Wilkerson’s theory of the crime. While not proven, it is likely Boyle and Wilkerson were behind the incident to give them an excuse to publish the article that Boyle had been working on.

Boyle’s article exposed Wilkerson’s suspects and the detective’s theory publicly for the first time.

While the sensational revelations were widely reprinted, they were not always believed. As the Marshalltown, Iowa Evening Times prefaced their reprinting of the June 14 , 1916 story:

 “In connection with the sensational developments of the famous ax-murders, the Post here publishes a story as coming from Detective Wilkerson, in which there are, it is said by persons here in a position to know, some points that will require careful checking before they can be believed literally.”

In what can only be a coincidence, one of the main suspects, the one who Boyle’s companion Detective Wilkerson identified as the hit man, was one William “Blackie” Mansfield. Boyle also said he was called “Insane Blackie”.

Or was it a coincidence? The website www.villiscamovie.com claims that “A Kansas City Post newspaperman named Jack Boyle broke the story in June of 1916 and dubbed the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Army deserter: “Blackie”.”

This was two years after the first appearance in print of Boyle’s most famous character, “Boston Blackie” in the June 1914 issue of The American. In fact, numerous sources say that Boyle himself was known as “Blackie” although some Boyle historians think that he was being confused with his character.

Mansfield claimed that he had never been called “Blackie” or “Insane Blackie” and that furthermore, he had an alibi for the time of the murders. No one outside of the Wilkerson camp ever claimed that Mansfield had been called “Blackie” prior to Boyle’s article.

So it appears that, for whatever reason, Boyle gave Mansfield the nickname of his own creation. Although Wilkerson later testified under oath that he had first heard the name “Insane Blackie” from  some hobos he had questioned, according to Roy Marshall’s book Villisca: The True Account of the Unsolved 1912 Mass Murder That Stunned the Nation. However, the court felt that Wilkerson’s testimony in that case was less than convincing as he claimed he did not assault Mansfield when interrogating him yet the court found otherwise.

Wilkerson continued to crusade for the conviction of Mansfield and for the arrest of the man he claimed hired Mansfield to commit the crime, State Senator Frank Jones, despite a very thorough grand jury investigation that failed to indict anyone.

Boyle was not to enjoy the fruits of his “beat” for long.

He was arrested for cooking opium in the kitchen of his house in Kansas City, along with several others, in what may have been a politically motivated setup by the police. One of the men arrested with him, pickpocket Ollie Deeds, had an extensive criminal career, including peddling opium.

Boyle fled prosecution, settling in Wisconsin where he turned from newspaper reporting and once more found success as a fiction writer, writing about the original “Blackie”, “Boston Blackie” in print and on screen.

According to Boyle expert Curt Ladnier, there is more to that story than first appears. Ladnier is a former member of the Pulp Era Amateur Press Society and is a well-known researcher and collector of pulps.

Boyle, according to Ladnier’s research, had quit his job at the Kansas City Post to become an investigator for Chief of Police Hiram W. Hammil.

Newspaper accounts from the time describe a “war” between political forces which pitted Hammil against the board of Police Commissioners. During an election in April, 1916, the commission stripped Hammil of command of officers assigned to polling places. More than a hundred people were arrested and held for 24 hours for “investigation” on polling day in an attempt to keep them from voting.

Ladnier believes that Boyle was trying to find evidence of corruption on the part of one of the members of the Police Commission.

“Some cite his flight as evidence of his guilt, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Ladnier said. “All he was facing on the drug charge was a $100 fine.

“But Boyle claimed that he had received death threats from members of the commissioner’s staff.  I find it far more plausible that he fled the state to get away from the death threats, not to get out of paying a fine.”

Whatever the reason, it marked the end of Boyle’s career as an “investigator” and as a reporter. He returned to fiction writing, eventually finding success not only in the pulps, but also in Hollywood both with original screenplays and adaptations of his work, including a number of silent Boston Blackie movies.

Boyle died in Portland in 1928, as a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse finally caught up to him.

Ladnier is writing the definitive biography of Boyle which will be included in a project to reprint all of Boyle’s known works. He maintains an extensive blog on Boyle at jackboylefan.wordpress.com.

While there were a number of suspects, no one was ever convicted of the Villisca crimes and they remain unsolved.

 The murder house has been restored to its historical state and the curious can arrange to spend the night in the supposedly haunted house. The case has spawned blogs, a documentary, TV shows, a play and a couple of true-crime books.

Was Boyle right about the Villisca killer’s identity? Who really killed eight people that dark morning in Iowa. More than a hundred years later, there is still no definitive answer.

But Boyle’s theory is clearly not correct. There’s simply too many holes, changed testimony, lack of evidence and a pronounced lack of reliability on the part of Boyle and Wilkerson and their star witnesses.

The Wilkerson/Boyle theory of the case relies on a respected member of the community hiring an unknown Chicago bad man to hire a serial-killer hobo to do the deed because his daughter-in-law was supposedly having an affair and because one of the victims was a former employee turned business rival. No evidence of money changing hands was ever produced.

While there were a number of unsolved ax murders in the years surrounding the Villisca killing, the evidence linking them is scant. Yes there are reported, and I stress “reported,” similarities in some of the cases. But the lack of proper investigative techniques, the questionable nature of press reports and the understandable tendency for the survivors to construct some narrative to explain the events makes connecting these cases highly speculative.

Wilkerson claimed that he identified Mansfield as “Insane Blackie” after a long search. But in truth, he first knew of Mansfield when he was sent by the Burns agency to look into the ax murder case at Blue Island, Ill. The estranged wife, child, father-in-law and mother-in-law of Mansfield being the victims.

The trouble is that Mansfield didn’t do it. Not only did he have an alibi, but another man, a former boarder who knew the family, confessed and was committed to an insane asylum. And there were bloody fingerprints left on the Ax used at Blue Island when Wilkerson made a big deal about Mansfield being careful not to leave fingerprints because he knew his were on file.

Wilkerson had to not only claim that the employment records that gave Mansfield an alibi for the murders were forged, he had to claim without any evidence that Mansfield had yet another alias to prove he was in Villisca at the time of the murders.

Mansfield was cleared of the Blue Island massacre even before Wilkerson named him as a suspect in the Villisca case.

The grand jury refused to indict, probably because under oath Wilkerson’s witnesses stories changed.

As the Leavenworth Post put it  when reporting on the third degree that Wilkerson was subjecting him to:

“While Mansfield also was being questioned about the murder of his wife, their child and his wife’s parents at Blue Island, Ill., a telegram from Chicago informed the questioners that the murders of these persons was solved four months ago when Casimir Areiszewski was declared by a jury to have committed the crime. Areiszewski made a confession in which he admitted his guilt.”

The evidence against Mansfield and Jones and the ever expanding list of conspirators was non-existent. The witnesses changed their stories. Wilkerson had a reputation for using violence when interrogating prisoners and for suborning perjury, inducing witnesses to lie and blackmail.

So who did commit the murders? I am in agreement with Villisca author Roy Marshall who pins the crime on the Reverend George Kelly and puts the blame on his escape from justice partly on Jack Boyle.

“A jury, influenced by Wilkerson, by Boyle’s newspaper articles, with Moores and Stillingers escorting Kelly in and out of the courtroom, could not bring themselves to convict an ordained minister of so heinous a crime,” Marshall ends his definitive look at the killings.

“But they should have.”

Kelly was a known sexual deviant with impulse control issues and a history of trying to get young girls to pose naked for him. He was in Villisca the day of the murders. He had a habit of prowling at night and window peeping. He confessed to the killings. He was present at a church function earlier that day where the Moore and Stillinger children performed. He could have easily left the house where he was staying undetected during the time of the murders, a home that was a short distance from the murder site.

After the murders, he left town on an early train before the murders were discovered. He allegedly made comments to witnesses on the train about the murders before they were discovered in the town. He was obsessed with the case, inserting himself in the investigation, returning to the town and touring the murder site claiming to be a detective, writing bizarre letters to relatives of the murder victims.

He had a history of mental illness. He thought God was telling him to commit crimes and was paranoid that the police were after him to arrest him for the crime even before he became a suspect.

I think that Kelly, a visiting preacher, saw the elder Stillinger girl at the church function and became obsessed with her. He killed the members of the Moore family and the younger Stillinger girl so that he would not be interrupted with his real target. He killed 11-year-old Lena Stillinger, exposed her in a sexual manner for his own gratification and then fled, consumed by his feelings of guilt.

Kelly was found not guilty, spent some time in a mental institution for sending obscene material through the U.S. mail and then disappears from history. He may have returned to his native England.

Curt Ladnier has a point that some of the criminal acts attributed to Boyle aren’t proven. However, Boyle was not an innocent type, he was a criminal and during his life he was almost continually either being convicted of or accused of crimes. Boyle always had an excuse for why the accusations against him were not true, but he isn’t a credible source.

He knew exactly what he was doing to innocent men when he backed Wilkerson’s lies.

“No one who has never lost the freedom of the “outside” - that perpetual elusive dream of every convict-can realize what “doing time” means,” Boyle said in his sketch in The American Magazine. “The horror of prison life, the monotonous, hopeless sameness of each hour, each day, each month, each year.”

But Boyle did know what it was like to be hunted by the police, to be charged for a crime he claimed he didn’t commit, to languish behind the tall grey walls of prison. And he still participated in the framing of an innocent man.

He voluntarily and for his own short-term benefit actively participated in Wilkerson’s investigation. According to some accounts, he was the one who initially interviewed a key witness to the purported conspiracy. He had a front-row seat to Wilkerson’s railroading of an innocent man and must have been responsible for tagging him as “Insane Blackie”.

He and Wilkerson tried to blackmail Jones to make the charges go away, and when rebuffed claimed that the extortion attempt was to see if Jones would bite.

His reporting on Wilkerson’s investigation is a mass of ridiculous hyperbole that he certainly knew was false. The story may even have been partly of Boyle’s invention. It certainly has all of the marks of poor dime novel fiction with a mysterious fortune teller, a late-night confession in a graveyard and coincidences that would make any competent crime fiction writer wince.

It was “a chain of circumstances stranger than the weirdest invention of the master minds of fiction ,” Boyle wrote, admitting that the story he was selling was hard to swallow.

Had Boyle, at the right moment, come clean and written an expose of Wilkerson he could have been a hero, freed an innocent man and establish a national reputation as an investigator.

Instead, he chose to print lies, participate in a blackmail attempt and allow the crazed murderer of an innocent couple and six children to go free.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Pygmy Dynamo of Crookedness

The career of "Midget Bandit" Henry J. Fernekes is largely forgotten today, but he rose from a beginning as a bumbling stickup man to a criminal mastermind rarely seen outside of thriller novels. In fact, it turns out that his criminal career was even inspired by popular fiction. Fernekes, a “pygmy dynamo of crookedness” according to the newspapers of the day, was a brilliant pint-size general of crime, the scourge of bank officers, police and the Pinkertons across the north east. As the head of an army of crime, he plotted and executed bank robberies from New York state to Florida to Chicago. He was known for the meticulous scientific planning of his jobs and the military precision used to carry out bank robberies. Fernekes had but a high school education and a few months of law school, but he educated himself by reading books at free libraries, becoming an expert in welding, acetylene cutting, explosives, chemistry, gas and physics. When they weren’t calling him “

Bank Robbery Afternoon

He walks into the bank, right up to the teller, a Big Mac in one hand and a straight razor in the other. "Where's my money?" The teller had made a mistake that would end her career. Twenty minutes before, he had walked up to her window. He had handed her an empty pillowcase. He had told her to fill it up. Then he had turned and walked out the door, walked across the parking lot and walked into the neighboring McDonald’s. She had thought it was a joke. She had thought it was in poor taste, but she had thought it was a joke. So she hadn't called the police. Now it was too late. Now he was back. "Bitch! Where's my money!" He vaults the counter and begins to fill the bag himself. The teller, the other tellers, their customers flee. The robber sits down at one of the desks, puts down the razor and counts the money he'd just stolen. He takes a bite out of the Big Mac. Counts some money. Another bite. He stacks the money in nice