At 5:19 AM, following the murder, a man named Reverend Lyn Kelly left Villisca on board the westbound #5 train. He gets on and allegedly tells fellow travelers "There were 8 dead souls back in Villisca butchered in their beds while they slept." At this time the bodies hadn't been discovered yet.

Lyn Kelly had arrived in Villisca for the first time the Sunday morning of the murders and attended the Sunday School performance by the church kids. 2 weeks later, he returns posing as a detective and joined a tour of the murder house with a group of investigators. Investigators eventually got suspicious of Lyn Kelly a couple of weeks after the murder when people started coming forward about his questionable past. He's a minister that gets assigned to several small communities north of Villisca- where he becomes known as the guy with odd behavior. He took walks late at night and there were rumors that he was a peeping tom. There were also unconfirmed stories that he tried to get a young girl to undress for him.

He later had a breakdown and got diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. While in a mental hospital, he wrote that he expected to be arrested for the Villisca murders.