The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  The Man from the Train quite certainly did not check into local hotels when he was going to commit murder. If he had, he would have been put out of the murdering business very quickly, since looking for strangers in town was one of the first things the police always did while waiting for the bloodhounds to arrive.

  There is, however, something tremendously interesting in the John Smitherton side story, overlooked by everybody who has written about the case. The clothing. If he hopped off the train and found the bundle of clothing, we may assume that the clothes had been left or “dropped” down by the railroad tracks, perhaps by someone else who had hopped off the train earlier in the evening. Who do we know who might have left a bundle of clean men’s clothing down by the railroad tracks?

  We don’t know an awful lot about how The Man from the Train escaped detection, but we do know:

  1. That a person who hits people in the head with an axe is going to be hit by flying blood,

  2. That no one was ever caught fleeing the scene of one of the crimes with blood on his clothing, and

  3. That if The Man from the Train had been caught in the vicinity of one of the crimes with blood on his clothes, it is extremely likely that he would have been executed.

  It is a reasonable guess, then, that when he was ready to “hit” a house, he would hide a change of clothing down by the railroad track, so that he could get out of the bloody clothes, perhaps within minutes after leaving the scene of the crime. John Smitherton was not The Man from the Train—but he may have picked up The Man from the Train’s escape clothes.

  Once Smitherton was cleared, the focus returned to Charles Marzyck. Marzyck was finally located on April 30, 1912 (six months after the murders), living in Canada. Living in relative isolation, he was unaware that his name had been published from coast to coast in the forty-six states.

  Once Marzyck was located the case against him collapsed. Although Marzyck was from Ellsworth and was well known there, no one had seen him around Ellsworth near the time of the murders. He denied that he had ever been to either Colorado Springs or Monmouth, and there was in fact no evidence that he had. The story about his being wanted in Colorado Springs for writing bad checks was false, as was an oft-repeated story that Marzyck’s brother lived in Colorado Springs. He had been in Canada at the time of the murders.

  The book Murdered in Their Beds, by Troy Taylor, states that “he was brought back to Ellsworth and put on trial for the murders. . . . despite planted evidence in the form of a cigar cutter that he supposedly left in the Showman house, Marzyck was cleared of the crimes and a not guilty verdict was returned by the jury.” In fact, there was no trial; Marzyck was brought to Ellsworth but released after a preliminary hearing. Newspapers in this era sometimes referred to preliminary hearings as trials, which I would assume accounts for the confusion.

  * * *

  In discussions of the murders in the Colorado Springs newspapers after the Showmans were killed, letter writers began referring to the culprit as “Billy, the Ax man,” or, more commonly, as “Billy, the Ax Smasher.” In 1911 a vaudeville comedian, known as Billy Van, the Assassin of Sorrow, had a brief burst of popularity. He was not a huge star, but he was popular in Colorado Springs. He had appeared there in early September 1911, about two weeks before the murders, getting nice write-ups in the local papers. The nickname given to the murderer was almost certainly derived from Billy Van, as well as, of course, being a reference to Billy the Kid.

  The nickname “Billy, the Ax Man” has been picked up in the twenty-first century and is sometimes used to refer to our criminal. But while we have tried to minimize the gore, we are dealing here with perhaps the most despicable criminal in American history, a truly ghastly felon who enjoyed hitting small children in the head with an axe, and who may have killed around a hundred people. Giving him a cutesy nickname that sounds like it came from a kid’s cartoon seems to us not fitting, and there will be no further reference to that nickname in this book.

  In 2006, a woman named Beth Klingensmith wrote an academic paper about these murders for a college course. The paper was published on the Web and has since been used as a resource by almost everyone who has written about these events, including us. It is a very good paper, but Ms. Klingensmith draws a line between the midwestern murders and the murders in the Northwest, ruling those out of the series, based on her own misunderstandings about the murders in the Northwest and her lack of knowledge about them. In any case the public was aware, from mid-October 1911 onward, that someone was traveling around the Midwest murdering families. They got it, but they didn’t get it. From a modern perspective it seems very strange. On one level, the public and the newspapermen and the police now understood that these crimes were linked. They understood that some nut was running around murdering people—but they didn’t understand it at all. They were entirely unable to make that short walk . . . what seems to us now to be a short walk . . . from realizing that these crimes were linked to realizing that these were random crimes, rather than crimes that arose from conventional motives. They couldn’t process it. Does not compute. Random, but not random.

  The city cop in Ellsworth, Kansas, had direct, personal knowledge of the random nature of the crime. He had heard the culprit with his own ears trying to break into his house. One might think that this would have provided persuasive evidence, at least to that cop, that the Showman family was a target of opportunity—and yet the investigation went on as before. The investigation leaped instantly to the assumption that the Showmans were the murderer’s intended targets, despite the fact that the city marshal had direct knowledge that should have led him in a different direction.

  This continued to be true. When the next family was murdered—even though many people immediately recognized that it was part of the series—the investigation instantly began to revolve around the lives of the victims. The only way that authorities could conceive of to link the crimes was to find some person who knew the Showmans and had some grievance against them, and who also knew the Dawson family, and had some reason to hate them, and who also knew the Wayne family or the Burnham family, and had some reason to kill them.

  Borrowing again from Ms. Klingensmith’s paper, a quote taken from the Colorado Springs Gazette of October 18, 1911:

  Is another family, somewhere, slated for massacre . . . on Sunday, October 29? If there is anything in sequence or in the theory now accepted by the authorities of five states, one family, perhaps two, living in a small, two-room cottage on the outskirts of some town in the United States, will be murdered with an ax sometime between midnight, October 28 and midnight October 29 to satisfy the seemingly insatiable thirst for blood of the most cruel and heartless beast ever known in the history of crimes.

  The Man from the Train didn’t care anything about the two-week interval, and he didn’t care anything about the size of the house, and he didn’t care much about it being a Sunday night. He just enjoyed killing people; the rest of it was incidental. These assumptions—as much as the assumption that there must be some connection between the murderer and the murdered—are a denial of the true nature of what was happening. They are a way of trying to put limits around the edges of the crimes, limits that were not there.

  Random, but not really random. They’re not really random; they happen only on Sunday nights. They happen only at two-week intervals. They happen only in the Midwest. There is an explanation here, they told themselves; there is a logic to the crimes. It is just a little different from the normal logic. The press and the authorities “understood” that the Monmouth, Illinois, case was a part of a pattern—and yet, all the same, another man was put on trial and convicted of participation in the Monmouth murders.

  When there were additional murders, the investigations into those murders went on exactly as before. Suspects were rounded up, exactly as before, from ex-lovers and family members and business rivals and neighborhood crazy people. All they did was, they occasionally stretched the pool of suspects so that it inc
luded multiple murder sites.

  To a large extent, this is still true today in discussing these murders. There are still people today who are trying to blame the Villisca murders on someone from Villisca—even though it could not possibly be more obvious that this is merely one crime in a series that stretches in both directions.

  You will read in some accounts of this series that panic and paranoia were spreading throughout the Midwest. The exact opposite is true. The people who were afflicted by this one-man plague didn’t overreact. They underreacted. They underreacted by a wide margin. They didn’t begin to do what reason would have told them needed to be done.

  When they realized that there was a madman on the rails, they had a choice between panic and denial—and they chose denial. Pretending that the Showmans had been murdered not by a random crazy person but by an ex-brother-in-law was a part of that denial. Pretending that the murderer worked on a clockwork schedule, every other Sunday night, was a part of that denial. Pretending that the Oregon crimes were unrelated was a piece of that denial. They simply were not able to face what they were actually dealing with.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Paola

  A fact worth remembering in this case is that the details were carefully arranged, even to spreading the sheet over the heads of the victims apparently to keep the blood from splashing on the murderer. This denotes a calm preparation which would not be likely in one inexperienced in this line of work. The similarity in the crimes gives rise to the question, were they all done by the same party? Another fact is that nearly all of them were committed during the warm months. Was it a crazy tramp?

  —The Miami County Republican, Paola, Kansas, June 14, 1912

  The neighborhood in Paola now swarms with children; probably it did even in 1912. It is a neighborhood of small “first houses.” The neighborhood rises up above the railroad lines at a steep grade, as if presenting itself to the viewer; the street is wide and open, the houses are tiny and packed together and they stagger up the hill. The old train depot is gone, but if you stand where the depot was you can see all of the houses where the people in this story lived; they’re maybe 150 yards from the railroad line. And if you stand in the yard of 710 West Wea and a train goes by, it feels like the train is 10 feet away.

  Rollin and Anna Hudson were married in Massillon, Ohio, in April 1910. Hudson was nineteen years old at the time of their wedding, Anna twenty. After their marriage they moved to Centerville, Ohio, where they boarded with Mr. and Mrs. George W. Coe. (We might say they coe-habited with them; it’s a very dark story, and we’re desperate for relief. Anna’s maiden name was “Axxe”—really—but we’re going to let that pass without comment.) Mr. Hudson, a young man without education or professional skills, worked as a cone grinder in a factory, a job that involved breathing metal dust. He quit that for health reasons, did some manual labor for a railroad. Rollin and Anna had problems. They split up for a while, and Coe would say that Rollin had told him he had three times found Anna with another man.

  Later, spinning perhaps off of a few ill-chosen words, the legend of Anna’s unfaithfulness would grow to epic proportions, obscuring the more relevant facts of the case, but that is later. In March 1912, Mr. and Mrs. Coe moved to Paola, Kansas, a town (then) of 3,300 people. Two railroad lines met in Paola, the Frisco line and the M. K. & T., which stood for Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. The Hudsons joined them in April. They bought a few pieces of cheap used furniture and rented a small house across the street from the Coes, at 710 West Wea Street. The house still stands, is in good condition, and is occupied today.

  About June 4, 1912, a large, pig-faced man appeared in Paola, staying at a rooming house, and asking questions about Rollin and Anna. He said that he was an old friend from Ohio. Around 8:30 p.m. on June 5, a Wednesday evening, the pig-faced man appeared at the Hudsons’ door, wearing a blue suit. He was greeted warmly by both Hudsons and invited in. Whether or not the man was seen leaving the house is in dispute; in some reports he was seen leaving the house about 11:00 p.m.; in other reports he was not.

  One of Hudson’s coworkers on the M. K. T. was named Longmeyer. The Longmeyer family lived three houses up the street. A little after midnight on June 5 (the wee hours of June 6) Mrs. Longmeyer was awakened by the crash of breaking glass. Stumbling into the hallway, she saw the dark shadow of a man fleeing from her kitchen. She ran into the kitchen; the kitchen door banged open, she heard footsteps crossing the wooden porch, and he was gone.

  Mrs. Longmeyer had an eight-year-old daughter named Sadie. Panic-stricken, she rushed into Sadie’s room, and discovered that Sadie’s bed was empty. Sadie was huddled in a corner, terrified but unharmed. There was a man, she said. She had seen him crouched over her mother’s bed. Mr. Longmeyer had slept through the intrusion, and was groggy when awakened.

  Returning to the kitchen, Mrs. Longmeyer found that the broken glass was the chimney from an oil lamp, shattered on the floor; its wick was turned low so that it emitted but a faint glow. Also on the floor of the kitchen she found a woman’s kimono-style dressing gown that did not belong to her. The man had broken into the house by prying off a window screen, which was left leaning against the house next to the window. When dawn came Mrs. Longmeyer walked to the courthouse, reported the break-in, and handed the kimono over to a deputy sheriff.

  Also that morning, Rollin Hudson did not report to work. I wince to use this phrase again, having used it so many times, but no one was moving around at the Hudson house. Knowing of the break-in at the Longmeyers’ and concerned about the Hudsons, a group of three neighbor women gathered at the Hudsons’ front door. Pushing the door open a little they could see into a back bedroom, where they could make out the forms of two people lying in the bed. As they looked nervously around—one of the three women had reportedly already fainted on the front lawn—they saw a buggy coming down the street, which they recognized as belonging to Herman Hintz, a deputy city marshal. He had another man with him. Hintz and the other man went into the house, where they discovered, in the words of the Miami Republican, “a ghastly sight. Turning back a coverlid and sheet that covered their heads, they found Mr. and Mrs. Hudson dead. Mr. Hudson was lying on his right side with the left side of his head and face crushed. He was evidently murdered while he slept, without having made a struggle. Mrs. Hudson was apparently awakened when her husband was killed and raised her head, when she was struck of the back of the head and of her face with some partially sharp instrument an inch or an inch and a half wide.”

  Sitting on a box next to the bed was a lamp without its chimney. A window was open in the other bedroom, and the screen had been removed.

  The previous night’s dishes were undone, serving dishes for three people, and photo albums were opened, as if the doomed couple had spent their last hours reminiscing with an old friend. A box of letters sat on the table next to the photo album. Of course the pig-faced man in the blue suit was the first suspect in the case. From comments made later by the county sheriff, Sheriff Chandler, I would infer that he had identified the stranger and eliminated him as a suspect; however, this is never quite explicitly stated. Police were to decide that the kimono found in the Longmeyer house had belonged to Anna Hudson.

  The subsequent newspaper stories focused heavily on the rumors about Anna Hudson’s love life, but from a logical standpoint there wouldn’t seem to be any doubt that this crime was committed by The Man from the Train, and not by either the pig-faced visitor or Anna’s alleged “affinity,” which was the term used by newspapers to refer to a lover. There are three levels of evidence that lead us in that direction. First, the circumstances of the crime are consistent with The Man from the Train. By “circumstances of the crime” I mean the following:

  1. A two-minute walk from the intersection of two railroad lines,

  2. Multiple murders without apparent motive,

  3. No robbery (Anna Hudson’s jewelry was left in her bedroom),

  4. Access to the house through a window,


  5. Crime committed in the middle of the night,

  6. Murders committed with an axe or some similar instrument,

  7. Clear and obvious evidence that the criminal was experienced at committing crimes of this nature,

  8. Crime committed in the time and place where The Man from the Train was most active.

  This crime was committed four days before the murders in Villisca. Paola is in the northeast corner of Kansas. Villisca is in the southwest corner of Iowa. Northeast Kansas almost touches southwest Iowa. You could probably walk from Paola to Villisca in four days; it is 177 miles. Villisca is slightly to the west of Paola—odd, since Iowa is almost entirely east of Kansas.

  Second, there are the telltale clues, the criminal signature of The Man from the Train—the lamp without its chimney, the removed window screens at both houses, the bodies being covered with cloth (preventing the blood from flying), the fetishistic moving or carrying of clothes, sometimes for no apparent purpose.

  Third, the assumption that the Hudsons were murdered either by an ex-lover or by the pig-faced man in the blue suit seems to be trumped by the break-in at the second residence. If Anna Hudson’s lover had killed the couple, why would he wander up the block and break into the Longmeyer house, apparently bent on continuing the mayhem? And if the evening’s visitor had committed the crime, why was the Hudsons’ window screen pried off, after the visitor was seen entering through the front door?