Collecting the initial data. For purposes of getting the ball rolling, I have selected the victims of the "Midwest Axe Murderer" as my base data set. Because this killer was never caught, and we don't know exactly how many killings he was involved in, I will be attributing the murders in Villisca, Iowa; Ellsworth, Kansas; and Monmouth, Illinois to our man due to the similarities between the modus operandi in those three instances. I will include the many other unsolved axe murders of that time period on a secondary tier with far less effect on the numbers overall.