The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  The murders are believed to have happened about 12:45 a.m., based on:

  1. A clock which was broken at that hour, and

  2. The fact that a neighbor’s dog launched into a prolonged fit of distressed barking at that time.

  The couple’s eight-year-old son had been murdered in his bed. The body of little Dorothy was laid out on the floor and was covered with bloody fingerprints. In my view, no reasonable person would doubt that this was the same man who had murdered the Casaways, the man who would go on to Colorado Springs and Villisca. The murders in Villisca occurred exactly one year after the murders of the Hill family, one year to the day.

  There was a famous bloodhound up in Seattle, a bloodhound named Brady, who had caught himself a few criminals over the years. After a delay of several days Brady was brought to the scene of the crime, which was actually in Ardenwald, then an unincorporated area seven miles south of Portland. Brady was instructed to trail the murderer. I will trust you to guess how productive that was.

  A month later Archie and Nettie Coble were murdered in their beds in Rainier, Washington. Rainier was at that time an unincorporated village of about a hundred people, identified in all sources as a “railroad stop.” It is 112 miles due north of Portland, 35 miles south of Tacoma. Archie Coble, aged twenty-five, did not report for work on July 11, and no one was seen stirring around the Coble house.

  The scene of the Coble murders seemed very similar to the house in Ardenwald, and police and quasi-policemen almost immediately drew a connection between the two. Coble and his wife had been murdered in their beds by an axe that was left in the room, but not by the blade of the axe; they were beaten either with the blunt side of the axe or with the handle of the axe.

  After the accusation of several innocent parties and some interloping from amateur detectives, a man named George Wilson, a neighbor of the Cobles, confessed to murdering them, sort of. Wilson was not of sound mind (no Dennis the Menace jokes, please). His wife told authorities that she feared that he might have committed the crime. Wilson said that he had no memory of having committed the crime, but that he did believe that he had done so. After a few days he retracted this “confession”—most of us remember when we have committed a murder—and began to insist that he had nothing to do with the crime.

  Wilson was put on trial in November 1911. There wasn’t really any evidence against him as to the specifics of the case, but the prosecution could demonstrate that Wilson had more than the normal number of eccentricities, and . . . well, that puts a nut case in the village at the time of the murders, which is good enough for government work. Wilson was convicted of the murders.

  It seems reasonably clear that the Coble murders were a part of the series. Some writers have written them out of the series because:

  1. A man “confessed” to that crime and was convicted of it,

  2. No children were murdered, and

  3. Later accounts of this case state that an adult woman, Nettie Coble, was raped and murdered, which would be a significant departure from The Man from the Train’s usual practices, were it true.

  But Wilson was a weak link who was convicted of the murders because nobody had any better explanation than that the crazy guy must have done it. Nettie Coble was actually not raped before she was murdered, and it’s not clear where modern writers have come up with the idea that she was. This is the account of the discovery of the bodies as reported in the most local newspaper, the Centralia (Washington) Weekly Chronicle, immediately after the crime was discovered:

  The Cobles had been married less than a year. Coble was a clerk in the Rainier Mercantile Company’s store and was first missed when he did not appear for work yesterday morning. As his wife was also not seen about the house, a neighbor, Mrs. W. B. McNett, entered the place but became frightened when she found it empty. She called in an acquaintance who was passing, and re-entering the house they found Coble and his wife laying in bed with the covers drawn over their heads. They lifted the spread and were horrified to find that their heads had been horribly beaten and mutilated. The couple had evidently been dead since Monday night.

  A bloody double bitted axe was found under the bed. Coble’s watch and valuables were untouched and nothing had been taken from the house. Coroner McClintock of Thurston County arrived in Rainier last night and took charge of the bodies. The authorities believe the outrageous double murder was committed for the purpose of revenge, but say that Coble was not known to have any enemies.

  That directly contradicts on two counts the notion that Nettie Coble had been raped: (1) she was found in bed, soaked in blood, with the covers pulled up around her, and (2) local authorities believed that the crime was committed for “revenge.” Covering of the heads of the victims with the blanket is a signature behavior for The Man from the Train.

  Rainier, Washington, was similar to Hurley, Virginia, Barber Junction, North Carolina, Byers, Pennsylvania, and many other places where The Man from the Train committed his murders. It was also, if accidentally, similar to Scappoose, Oregon, where we will go later in this chapter. The murder house was a short walk from the train. He liked to kill people in semirural settlements too small to have a regular police presence.

  The crimes in Rainier were committed thirty days and 119 miles from the murders in Ardenwald, which is a normal time-and-distance gap for The Man from the Train. We know that The Man from the Train had been in the vicinity a month earlier, because of the Hill family murders, and his next five crime scenes show him moving eastward, which presumes that he started in the West.

  Authorities and amateur detectives who visited both crime scenes absolutely believed that the crimes were linked. A shoe print at each scene was measured at three and a half inches across (very small), and was believed to be the same shoe. The Cobles were murdered in their beds in the middle of the night. Valuables were left in plain sight, as The Man from the Train often left them.

  It does not appear that mirrors or windows were covered with cloth in this case or that a lamp was moved, although it is not clear that these things were not done, either. Since Rainier was an isolated community with no local newspaper, reports from the scene are sketchy, and leave many of these details up in the air. It is clear that the Coble house was not locked up after the murders.

  I am more inclined to believe that the Coble murders were committed by The Man from the Train than that they were not. However, the evidence of which I am aware is not sufficient to convince a skeptic one way or the other. The press (and the police, up to a point) believed that the crimes were linked, and this created a certain level of suspicion that a serial murderer was at work. This is a milestone in our story. There would be fourteen more weeks and fourteen more murders before this suspicion burst into bloom, but a seed was planted. When there were additional crimes, that seed would grow.

  A month after Wilson was sent away, another woman was murdered with an axe in Rainier, a Japanese woman identified only as Mrs. Somomura. Rainier was a tiny little village; they should have had about one murder a century. I don’t know what happened in that case, whether anyone was ever convicted of it. The real function of the Somomura case—clearly unconnected to The Man from the Train—is to further muddy the waters of an already murky situation.

  Going back to the Hill and Coble murders, let me explain the amateur detectives. You have to understand how primitive criminal investigation was at this time. There was no FBI. Almost without exception there were no state investigative services on call as a resource for local authorities, although there were crime labs in some states. The US Marshals Service would not get involved in local crimes. Local police were largely on their own except for the resources volunteered by neighboring authorities, and 99 percent of the local police had little or no experience in dealing with a crime of this nature.

  Because local police were on their own, when they were confronted with a high-profile murder case it was common practice to hire private investigators to help out. This was actually the
second thing the local officials would do; the first thing they had to do was to raise money to hire a private investigator. There wasn’t even an organized, regular system to fund such investigations. Local officials would try to raise funds for an investigation by:

  1. Asking the victims’ family for financial assistance,

  2. Establishing a reward fund to which citizens could contribute,

  3. Appealing to the city government for funds, and

  4. Asking the state government to help out.

  More or less in that order. If the family of a victim had any money, they were expected in the normal case to establish a reward fund. Sometimes the money would be used to hire investigators. In other cases private investigators would flock into the case, working on spec. If the private investigators were able to create a case against someone, they would claim the reward.

  This was a dreadful system. It encouraged the framing and prosecution of innocent people. It encouraged kickbacks to elected officials, who could be bought off to make arrests and pursue prosecutions. It wasted valuable time at the start of an investigation, while resources were assembled. It left many crimes essentially uninvestigated, if no one took the initiative to organize an effort to fund a real investigation (and in particular, it left uninvestigated crimes against poor people and against minorities).

  In 1911 there existed no organized system of licensing, regulating, and authorizing private investigators, except perhaps in a few larger cities. This left private citizens probing into open murder cases in significant numbers without warrants and without legal authority. Some of them were good, many of them ex-cops, but some of them were just people who had read too many Sherlock Holmes stories and appointed themselves private eyes. They would start poking around in unsolved murder cases, hoping to get the reward money or acting out fantasies of being master detectives. The cream of the crop were the Pinkerton and the Burns detective agencies, but even the Pinkerton and Burns agencies were shot through with shysters, con men, unscrupulous thugs, and rank amateurs. It was truly an awful system.

  The Cathey brothers, George and Collins Cathey, were self-appointed private investigators. They seem like reputable people, identified as Dr. George Cathey and Dr. Collins Cathey. Dr. George was a blood specialist, and Dr. Collins had studied the Bertillon system, which was a failed effort to identify criminals by a detailed set of physical measurements. They were amateur detectives who became prominent in this investigation, as private investigators became prominent in many of these cases. The Cathey brothers were the first to insist that these crimes were linked.

  Unfortunately, the Cathey brothers also insisted that a man named Swann Peterson had committed the crimes. Peterson was an innocent man who had been accused of involvement in the murders by George Wilson. You wouldn’t think that amateur detectives with no background in criminal investigation would make a mistake like that, but somehow it happened.

  After most of the murders committed by The Man from the Train, local people were accused of the crime, and there is always a story to be told there. There are always many more facts known about the prosecutions of innocent people than are known about the murders themselves. If we were to relate all of those stories in any detail, this book would go on for thousands of pages.

  A man named Nathan Harvey had property that bordered the Hills’ house in Ardenwald, and had been involved in a property dispute with them. On the night of the murders Harvey had arrived home late; in fact, apparently he had arrived back at his house near the time of the murder, but he did not go into his house. Not wishing to disturb his family at the late hour—OK, he was probably drunk and didn’t want his wife to find out—he had slept in a shed outside his house, emerging from the shed the next morning to discover the neighborhood overrun by police.

  Harvey had not lived a spotless life. There had been rumors of his involvement in violent and unsavory acts at other times. It was probably inevitable that Harvey would be charged with murdering the Hill family, and he was, on December 21, 1911.

  Harvey’s friends immediately went to work on his behalf. Large public meetings were held, rallying against his prosecution, and more than 500 signatures were gathered on a petition calling for his release. On December 27 the charges against Harvey were dropped and a judge ordered his release, although the sheriff, assisted by a private investigator, continued to insist that Harvey had committed the crime.

  With the sheriff agitating publicly for his prosecution, the case against Harvey was presented to a grand jury in January 1912. The district attorney’s last name was “Tongue,” which is a wonderful name for a lawyer. District Attorney Tongue presented the evidence against Harvey to a grand jury, but ridiculed the case as he presented it, and directed the grand jury not to issue an indictment. The sheriff and the private investigator continued to harass Harvey for another month, until a judge issued a cease-and-desist order commanding them to back off.

  Over the following years at least four people would confess to murdering the Hill family, including a man named Leroy Robinson, who would confess in 1931 to having murdered the Hill family, and also to having committed the murders in Villisca.

  * * *

  In early September 1911, there occurred another two murders in the Portland area that we will have to cover here, although in the end it is clear that they are unrelated to our main story.

  A man and woman named Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wehrman lived in an isolated mountain cabin near Scappoose, Oregon; it was not near a railroad track, although the railroad does go through Scappoose. They had recently moved to Scappoose from Marshalltown, Iowa, a small town that also figures in the Hardy family murders (Chapter IV), the Bernhardt murders (Chapter VII), and the aftermath of the Villisca murders. Scappoose is just south of the Oregon-Washington border, twenty miles north of Portland. Scappoose, now a thriving Portland suburb of about seven thousand people, was at that time an isolated, unincorporated village, basically a logging camp with no more than two hundred people. According to the Oregon Supreme Court, “(t)heir little cabin was situated in a lonely place in the mountains, with no means of communication with the outside world, except a wagon road, which during a large portion of the time, was in bad condition.”

  Frank Wehrman was a chubby, cheerful baker who had a regular job in Portland, spent his weeks in Portland and his Sundays at home with his young and attractive wife, Daisy, and their four-year-old son, Harold. In the week ending on September 3, 1911, a Sunday, he did not go into Portland to work, reporting illness. September 4 was Labor Day. Wehrman returned to Portland that morning. On September 5 a friend and neighbor of Daisy Wehrman, Elizabeth Siercks, knocked on their door and got no answer. Looking in through a window, she could see Daisy lying on a bed with her son next to her, but the cabin was locked with a padlock, and she could not raise Daisy and could not get into the cabin. Returning on September 6, she saw Daisy and Harold lying in the same positions as the day before, and still could not raise them. On September 7 she brought the sheriff to the cabin.

  Daisy and her four-year-old son had been murdered with an axe. Actually, they had not been murdered with an axe, but I lied to you for a reason. What appears to have happened is that they were shot three times each with a Colt revolver, and then, after they were dead, they were hacked up some with a hatchet, probably in the hope of linking this crime with the fact that an axe murderer was on the loose. This was entirely successful, as far as the newspapers were concerned; the newspapers immediately reported the case as another in the series of the Portland-area axe murders. The police, however, quickly realized that such was not the case.

  Daisy Wehrman’s clothes had been pushed up around her midsection. She had apparently been shot resisting a sexual assault. The sheriff, Sheriff Thompson, checked out Wehrman but could not tie him to the crime. Within three days county authorities had hired an experienced private investigator, L. L. Levings, and, in this case, instructed Sheriff Thompson to work at Levings’s direction.

  Taking the
sheriff with him for legal authority, Levings went to the Wehrman cabin, where he noticed a newspaper dated September 4 (Monday) mixed in with a batch of mail. Daisy had not been seen by anyone except her husband since September 2. Levings went to the general store, which served as the local post office, and asked whether Mrs. Wehrman had picked up her mail on Monday. No, said the man in the store; the people up in that area commonly picked up one another’s mail. He thought that Daisy’s mail had been picked up by a man named Arthur Pender.

  Levings found a set of new lace curtains in Wehrman’s cabin, unopened. The curtains had been made for Mrs. Wehrman by a woman named Rachel Bates, and had been left in Wehrman’s mailbox on September 3. There were no mail deliveries to this rural area. There was a community mailbox on a stump at the entrance to the road, several hundred yards from any house. When somebody went into Scappoose they would pick up everybody’s mail, bring it back, and drop their neighbors’ mail in the community mailbox. People would also drop other stuff in the mailbox to be distributed later, particularly if the road was wet.

  Rachel Bates said she could prove she had left the cloth in the mailbox. “Ask Jack Pender,” she said. “He was passing by just at the time I dropped off the cloth. He saw me do it.”