The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  The Dawson family lived on the wrong side of the tracks, in an area that was mostly black although the Dawsons were white. William Dawson had been convicted of a serious crime years earlier—stealing horses—and had done hard time. He had moved to Monmouth about 1903 and was working as the caretaker for the First Presbyterian Church. Dawson and his wife (Charity Dawson) had been married in 1875 and had had eleven children, but by 1911 the kids were mostly grown and out of the house, and of the three who were still at home, two chanced to be absent on the fateful night of September 30 to October 1, 1911, which was a Saturday night and Sunday morning.

  On Sunday morning Dawson failed to unlock the church and make it ready for services, which was his job. The minister was to say later that he was concerned that Dawson might be ill, and sent the deacons to Dawson’s house to check up on him. The first reports were rather different: the deacons were sent to the Dawson domicile to discuss with him his dereliction of duty. In any case, the Dawsons were dead.

  There were three dead here: William and Charity and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Georgia. Let us organize our comments as a discussion of whether we should or should not consider this a murder committed by The Man from the Train. There are four reasons why we should not consider it a part of the series. First, we don’t have enough information about it to say with confidence that it conforms to the patterns and reflects the fetishistic behavior that identifies our culprit. Second, it is believed now that the murders were committed not with an axe, but with a piece of lead pipe. Third, it is reported in the book Murdered in Their Beds, by Troy Taylor (2012), that the back door of the Dawson house was left unlocked, whereas The Man from the Train normally locked up the house as he left. And fourth, a man was eventually convicted of being involved in the Monmouth murders.

  Troy Taylor lives in Illinois, and he apparently was able to get access to the Monmouth daily newspapers from the time, which we have not seen. In any case, it is my opinion that the Monmouth murders most likely were committed by our principal culprit. For the following reasons:

  1. The extreme proximity to the railroad (about a quarter of a mile),

  2. The murders occurring in a small town very much like the other places his attacks occurred,

  3. The murder of an entire family in a single event, which is rare although it seems common because we’re reporting on one after another in this book,

  4. The fact that the murders were committed late at night, after the family had gone to sleep,

  5. The fact that a young girl was among the victims,

  6. The fact that the body of the young girl was found in a “staged” or “struggling” position, whereas the adults were killed in their sleep and their bodies left in that position, as is true in so many other of our cases (in many of our cases, the adults and male children are murdered in their sleep, but the young female is either awake at the time of her death or her body is moved after death),

  7. The blinds being drawn and the windows covered after the crime,

  8. The complete and absolute absence of any rational motive,

  9. The absence of any evidence of a struggle, and

  10. The absence of any factor that would make us think that it isn’t him.

  Getting back, then, to the two factors that might be considered not in keeping with The Man from the Train’s habits—the gas pipe and the unlocked door. At the time of the murders, it was reported in all sources that authorities believed the family had been murdered with the blunt side of an axe. Later, a leaded gas pipe was found in an area adjacent to the train track, and it was decided that the lead pipe had been the murder weapon. But (a) it is not clear that this was in fact the murder weapon, and (b) even if it was, that doesn’t mean it isn’t him. If he was intent on murdering someone and couldn’t find an axe, I don’t think that would have stopped him from committing murder.

  As to the door being unlocked, the reports that emerged at the time state specifically that the Deacons, suspecting that something was wrong, broke into the Dawson house. Even if one door was unlocked, again, it’s not persuasive that it is not him. All reports agree that the blinds were pulled and that the front door was locked, although one report says that the kitchen door was unlocked. He left a door wide open after murdering the Lyerly family (1906), and he would leave a door open after murdering the Showman family two weeks later. It’s not a big deal.

  As is always the case, a suspect was immediately identified, in this case a man who had once been William Dawson’s brother in the horse-stealing fraternity. Dawson had given evidence against this man, it was alleged, and the man had sworn to have his revenge when he got out of jail. The man was investigated and cleared. He was several hundred miles away on Saturday night and on Sunday morning, and could not have traveled to Monmouth and back in the time available.

  A man named John Knight was convicted years later, but it is Troy Taylor’s conclusion—and ours—that the case against Knight is insubstantial. What happened was this. After the Dawson family murders, no arrests were made and no charges were filed for several years. A local attorney, John Hanley, got interested in the case, and began investigating it as a self-appointed private investigator, which, as I have mentioned, was not uncommon a hundred years ago.

  By 1915 John O. Knight, who lived in the neighborhood where the Dawsons were murdered, was in jail for burglary and larceny. John Hanley talked to Knight, who was a black man, trying to see whether he knew anything about the crime. Knight, thinking he could perhaps use this to con his way out of prison, hinted that he did know something about the murders. The murders, he suggested, had been committed by a man named Lovey Mitchell, who had been living in Monmouth at that time. He suggested that he might have helped Mitchell commit the crime, but that Mitchell was the chief culprit.

  Mitchell and his wife were arrested in St. Louis. By 1915 there was a widespread understanding that there had been a traveling midwestern axe murderer, so the arrest of Mitchell made headlines across the country. Mitchell and his wife were held for several weeks without access to a lawyer or to a reporter, and were pressured hard to confess to the crimes. A grand jury was supposed to hear the case against them—but didn’t. There was no case against them. The Mitchells were quietly released.

  Knight, on the other hand, had talked his way into a murder conviction. Prosecutors argued that he had confessed to the crime in the process of implicating Lovey Mitchell. They held a trial, convicted Knight, and added quite a few years to his prison sentence. But if there was anything of real substance against Knight, whatever it was has been lost to history.

  One more thing here: the flashlight. Months later, months after the murders of the Dawson family, a fence around the house where the murders occurred was being demolished and rebuilt. As the fence was being torn down a pocket flashlight was found, into the handle of which someone had scratched the words COLORADO SPRINGS.

  Colorado Springs??!! My God, that’s where those other murders occurred!

  That’s what you’re supposed to think—but here’s the thing. In early October 1911, when the Dawsons were murdered, no one had seen a pattern in the murders in Oregon and Colorado and Illinois. In mid-October, after the next family was murdered, that changed suddenly. Recognition by the press that these crimes were linked coalesced about two weeks after the Monmouth murders.

  The flashlight was discovered months later, after everybody was talking about the murders being linked. But The Man from the Train quite certainly did not carry a flashlight with him to the murders in Colorado Springs, which we know because he moved lamps in both houses there. He could have acquired a flashlight later, certainly, and he could have scratched COLORADO SPRINGS into the handle of it as a kind of memento of what he had done, I suppose, and he could have accidentally dropped that flashlight near the Dawson house, I suppose, but it seems terrifically unlikely. What seems a great deal more likely is that some mischief-maker or private detective had decided to manufacture evidence that the crimes were linke
d by scratching COLORADO SPRINGS into the handle of a flashlight “found” (or placed) near the Dawson house.

  CHAPTER XII

  Ellsworth

  Chicago, Oct. 17—The murder of a man, his wife, and three small children as they slept in Ellsworth, Kan., was almost identical to the slaying of six in Colorado Springs, September 21, and more lately the killing of Wm. E. Dawson, his wife and daughter in Monmouth, Ill., October 1. In each case an ax was the instrument of death. In every case each person in the house was killed apparently while asleep with a single blow of the murderous ax. . . .

  In no case can the slightest motive be discovered by the police.

  —Associated Press article, October 17, 1911

  You have heard, no doubt, of the actor who becomes an overnight sensation after ten years of hard work? So it was with The Man from the Train. After thirteen years of murdering families in relative anonymity and without recognition, in mid-October 1911, there was suddenly a realization that a maniac was traveling the rails. The Associated Press reporter in Chicago made the connection, but he was not alone. Newspapers all over the area, including many not using the AP wires, also immediately connected the stories. The Ellsworth, Kansas, newspaper, hours after the discovery of the bodies, stated as fact that the fiend from Colorado Springs has now come to our city.

  The Showmans, like the Burnhams, Waynes, and Dawsons, were people of limited means. In 1911 automobiles were relatively new, and much more difficult to operate than they are now. Most adults did not know how to drive. William Showman worked at what would later be called a garage or filling station. He would pump gas and help out the mechanic who owned the garage. He was described at the time as a “chauffeur,” but the work he did was closer to what we would call a taxi driver or an Uber driver. When someone got off the train in Ellsworth and wanted a ride to a farm five miles out in the country, Showman would drive them out there in a car owned by the garage. In 1911 you could rent a car and a driver for $1 a day.

  Like Dodge City, Deadwood (South Dakota), and Tombstone (Arizona), Ellsworth, Kansas, was one of the signature towns of the Wild West. The railroad lines reached Ellsworth in 1867, and for a few years, until other lines were built farther south and west, the cattle drives from Texas headed to Ellsworth. It was a rough town, with open prostitution, gambling, rows of dance halls, and many gunfights. A hotel built in Ellsworth in 1872 would accommodate 175 guests—one of the largest hotels west of the Mississippi at that time.

  That era ended in Ellsworth about the time it began in Dodge City, and the cattle drives were over everywhere by the mid-1880s. On October 15, 1911, the Ellsworth city marshal, a man named Morris Merritt, stayed up late at night, reading the newspaper in his front room. It was a Sunday night. Merritt’s house was just steps away from the railroad track. As he read his paper he heard a scratching sound at the back of the house, as if an animal was pawing at his back door. He paused for a minute, wondering what the noise was, but the noise stopped and he went back to his paper. The next morning, the marshal would discover that the screen from a window at the back of the house had been removed, and an effort had been made to pry open the window itself. The screen was left leaning against his house. Someone had tried to break in.

  The significance of this became apparent that evening. The Showmans lived two houses up the street, on a small hill overlooking the railroad tracks. Laurie Snook, a friend of the Showmans, lived a couple of blocks away. On the morning of October 16 the Showmans’ dog was hanging around her front yard. She shooed him away, told him to go back home. In the afternoon he was back. Mrs. Snook tried to call the Showmans on the telephone, asking what was up with the mutt, but the Showmans didn’t answer. In the evening the dog was still there. She called the garage where Showman worked and was told that Will Showman had not shown up for work.

  A family of five had been murdered in their beds, their heads crushed with the blunt side of an axe. The axe had been left in the house. The blinds had been pulled tight, although in this case a back door was left open. The murderer had removed a window screen and entered the house through the window.

  Mrs. Snook ran screaming from the house. Attracting no attention, she retreated to her own house, where she called Showman’s brother on the telephone. John Showman called the police.

  The murderer had removed the chimney from a lamp, leaving the chimney under a chair in the kitchen and the lamp still burning in the room where the last of the murders occurred. He had washed his hands, and washed off the axe, in a bucket of water inside the house. He had covered the telephone in the Showmans’ house with a dress. He had posed Pauline Showman’s body in a disgusting manner postmortem, but had left the other victims in their beds where they were murdered. The axe had been taken from a neighbor’s yard.

  The sheriff sent for bloodhounds, which were imported from Abilene, Kansas, about sixty miles east of Ellsworth. The dogs led to the intersection of two railroad lines, a short distance west of the Showman house. Taken back to the house and turned off their leashes, the dogs circled the house, sniffed the bushes outside the house, and then returned to the same point as before.

  No matter who puts on a Christmas party, they can always find somebody to play Santa Claus. No matter who is murdered, there is always someone who can be cast into the role of First Suspect. If a victim is an ex-con, the natural suspect is someone he knew in prison, or someone that he betrayed during his life of crime. If the murdered woman has ever had a lover, the lover is the First Suspect. If the man has ever been in a fight, the man he had the fight with is the First Suspect. If the dead people lived in a nice house, it will be reported, without evidence, that they kept money hidden in the house. When an interracial couple was murdered in San Antonio, the police were certain they were murdered because of racial animosity. When the husband was absent from the murder house in Colorado Springs, the absent husband was immediately a suspect; he didn’t act right, for a grieving husband, you know. In Oregon it was a neighbor with whom the family had a minor dispute. In Washington it was a neighbor who was a bit of a nut. In South Carolina it was tenant farmers. No matter what, there is always some motive that can be inferred from the victims’ lives, and some person whom the newspapers can load up with a sinister costume.

  The first suspect in the Ellsworth murders was Charles Marzyck. Marzyck was an ex-con who had been married to Pauline Showman’s sister. She had divorced Marzyck and remarried while he was in prison (1906 to 1910). It somewhat understates the facts to say that Marzyck was a “suspect” in the Ellsworth murders. For a period of several months, it was widely believed—and was reported in hundreds of newspapers—that Marzyck was probably responsible not only for the Ellsworth murders, but also for the murders in Colorado Springs and in Monmouth. Belief in Marzyck’s guilt erupted in Ellsworth immediately after the crime, and spread from coast to coast within the next two days. Ira Lloyd, attorney at law, had defended Marzyck in his 1906 criminal trial. “I believe Marzyck will remain in the neighborhood until he completes his vengeance,” Lloyd said. “After his sentence he told me that when he was released he would come back and kill the people who were responsible for his conviction and also their children. ‘I will put them all in hell,’ he said.” Marzyck’s ex-wife, now named Minnie Vopat, reported that he had recently been living in Colorado Springs and was wanted by authorities in Colorado Springs on a bad check warrant.

  For a month or so, Marzyck sightings outnumbered pigeons. Minnie Vopat, her new husband, and her family lived for months in terror of Marzyck’s return—well-founded terror, I might add. Marzyck had issued broad death threats against the family in 1906, and Mrs. Vopat’s sister and her sister’s family had been brutally murdered. While almost all of the information about Marzyck would later prove to be nonsense, it was not at all irrational or paranoid for her to be terrified at the time.

  The day after the bodies were discovered it was learned that a stranger had registered at a local hotel on the night of the murders, drunk, signing th
e register as John Smith. John Smith left the hotel the next morning without checking out, leaving a bundle of clothes in his room. There was blood on the shirt. The investigation immediately conflated John Smith with Charles Marzyck, concluding that it was Marzyck who had signed the register as John Smith. A coroner’s jury reached the legal conclusion that John Smith was the person most likely responsible for the crime, a sort of quasi-indictment.

  “Back to the salt mines” is not just an expression in central Kansas; there are actual salt mines, which still operate today. Police scrambled for several days on the trail of John Smith, finally arresting him at the salt mines in Kanopolis on October 20. Kanopolis is five miles from Ellsworth, and October 20 was four days after the murders were discovered.

  Once in custody, however, Smith no longer seemed like a good candidate for the murders. First—and who would have guessed it?—his name was actually John Smith; Smith or Smitherton, he used both names, but he wasn’t using the name as a blind, and he wasn’t Charles Marzyck. Second, he had told people where he was going when he left Ellsworth, which is not in the tradition of a fugitive. He had actually gone to Kanopolis, on foot, and had in fact applied for work in the salt mines, as he had said that he was going to. He seemed to have checked into the hotel in Ellsworth about the same time that the city marshal had heard someone trying to break into his house.

  Smith was so drunk when he was arrested that the police were unable to question him. After he was given a night to sober up he was interviewed at length. He didn’t seem to have any notion what the questioning was about. His story was that he had gotten off the train in Ellsworth on Sunday night (the night of the murders), had found a bundle of clothing wrapped in a blanket, and had picked up the clothing and carried it with him to the hotel room. In the middle of the night he had a nosebleed, and had used the shirt from the bundle of clothes to wipe his nose. He had abandoned the clothes in the hotel room. He apparently thought that he was being questioned about stealing the clothes, and seemed shocked to learn the real reason he had been arrested. His wife confirmed that, when he drank a lot, he would have nosebleeds.