The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  Jackson favored the cult theory: a group of fanatics, perhaps religious, traveling the country and killing at the bidding of their leader, or if not that, a traveling maniac, riding the rails, killing and then moving on, waiting for the urge and the opportunity to kill again.

  —Roy Marshall, Villisca, page 79

  Jackson’s thinking was obviously influenced by the Clementine Barnabet episode, which we will tell you about later in the book. While I like both the Rundles’ documentary and Marshall’s book very much, the two sources do differ on hundreds of facts about the case. Since Marshall worked mostly from documents, while the Rundles are working largely from oral history, I have taken Marshall’s book to be the more accurate source in almost every case.

  There is another book about the case, Morning Ran Red, by Stephen Bowman, but that’s a fictionalization, so I haven’t read it and don’t know anything about it.

  The autopsy report from the Villisca murders can be found online or purchased. The Crime Library (crimelibrary.com) has a nineteen-part series on the Villisca murders, by Katherine Ramsland, which is really awful.

  In addition to the books and materials about Villisca itself, there are also books about what I call The Subsection. There was a long string of murders committed by The Man from the Train, and of that long string a Subsection is relatively well known. The Subsection begins in 1911 and ends in 1912. Before this book, no one has known that the series of murders actually goes on much longer than that, but many people in that era were aware of the Subsection, and a good amount has been written about the Subsection.

  We should mention, again, the college term paper of Beth Klingensmith, which was instrumental in restarting interest in this series of crimes, and which has been used since 2006 as a resource for information about them. Also, we should mention again the book Murdered in Their Beds, by Troy Taylor, published by Whitechapel Press in Decatur, Illinois, in 2012. This is subtitled “The History and Hauntings of the Villisca Ax Murders,” but it is about the series of crimes beginning where Klingensmith thought that they began.

  Dr. Edgar Epperly has also written extensively on the Web about the murders; when you find his name associated with postings connected to Villisca, you should regard those as authoritative.

  * * *

  The central question, of course, is whether Jones or Kelly could actually have committed the murders. It is my view that it is entirely impossible that either Jones or Kelly had anything to do with the crime.

  To believe that Jones committed the murders, first of all, you have to separate the Villisca murders from all of the other murders in the series. I believe that it is apparent that the Villisca murders were a part of a series. If they were, then the Jones and Kelly theories are out the window at the start.

  Getting past that, there is no actual evidence linking Jones to the murders, or, at best, the evidence is of such poor quality that it can hardly be called evidence.

  Third, whoever committed these murders was crazy, vicious, mean, and consumed with hatred. Jones was a clean, thriving, honest businessman in his late fifties, a leader not only of the community but of the state. It’s hard to reconcile the two. Dr. Edgar Epperly put it well, in an interview with CLEWS, a Web site:

  The one conclusion I do confidently draw is that F. F. Jones, Villisca banker and state senator, was not guilty. He lacked motive, did not have a sufficiently disturbed personality to contemplate the act, and his supposed hired killer William Mansfield can prove with sworn testimony and documentary evidence he was in Montgomery, IL, working on the railroad on the night of the murder.

  The Villisca murders are not rational; they are psychotic—highly organized, but psychotic. It is H.O.P.B.—Highly Organized Psychotic Behavior.

  Regarding Reverend Kelly, I absolutely do not believe that he was capable of committing a crime of this nature—not that he was not morally capable of great depravity, perhaps, but that he was simply not capable of it in the same sense that he was not capable of playing quarterback for the Green Bay Packers. And to the same degree; these murders were far, far, far beyond anything he was capable of pulling off.

  Whoever committed these murders was a horrible person, but he was also cunning, strong, organized, and relentless. Serial murderer expert Robert Ressler, interviewed for Villisca: Living with a Mystery, stated that the murderer would have had to be physically strong and agile. Lyn G. J. Kelly was timid, weak, and mentally disorganized at an extremely high level. Lyn Kelly, when people said bad things about him during his trial, would bury his face under his arms and sob uncontrollably. His wife, towering over him in the next chair, would cradle him like a child and pat him on the head.

  You think it is easy to break into somebody’s house in the middle of the night, kill eight people, and get away with it? You think that is something that just anybody could do? Even if it was something that 95 percent of men could do, Reverend Kelly would be in the other five percent—but in fact it is something that 99 percent of us could not do. Pardon the scatology or skip the rest of the sentence, but I’d shit in my pants if I found myself breaking into somebody’s house with an axe. Almost all of us would.

  And as to Reverend Kelly being a pervert . . . well, let me make this argument. It is actually quite common for men to like to look at young women naked. There are whole industries built on this fact—lots of them. It’s pretty much universal. All men are creeps; didn’t your mama ever tell you that?

  What is unusual about Kelly is that he was so bad at it. He was so bad at it that he got himself arrested and locked up for several months in a mental hospital for merely trying to do what tens of millions of men in every generation quite successfully do without any negative consequences. Kelly approached a common problem from a position of completely absurd incompetence, picked a young woman almost at random, and made a proposal to her that would make a hooker queasy. And left her with evidence that she could turn over to the police. Do you really think this man was capable of murdering eight people in a locked house and walking away from it clean?

  Reverend Kelly absconded on his debts because he was incapable of earning money, and he engaged in poorly conceived sexual misadventures because he was incapable of getting sexual satisfaction in the normal ways. (His wife once told an investigator that the two had never had “normal sexual relations”.) The prosecutors in this case, who had little experience with sexual abnormality, thought about sexual deviance in a primitive way. They lumped together Reverend Kelly’s sexual peccadilloes—highly inappropriate but essentially normal—with abnormal behaviors of the most extreme nature. They thought that one pervert was the same as another.

  As to the possibility that Kelly could have committed other murders in the series, Dr. Epperly said (in the interview with Laura James, no relation to the authors), that “I have thrown away a lifetime trying to place Kelly in one or another of the murder sites at the crucial time.” Horace Havner dictated a memo in April 1917 in which he said of Reverend Kelly that he “was in some ways a brilliant man. He was erratic but at times would preach really brilliant sermons.” This sentence has justified later writers in exaggerating Reverend Kelly’s preaching skills, and in presenting him as an intelligent man. But Havner had never met Kelly at the time he wrote this memo, was working from third-hand and fourth-hand knowledge about him, and makes a number of statements about Kelly in this memo that are clearly false. Reverend Kelly never made it beyond an apprentice stage, as a minister, and the only preaching he ever did was to small audiences in rural areas.

  Hank Brewster, who wrote a book about the case, believes that Kelly committed the murders. Epperly has said that Roy Marshall believes that Kelly committed the murders, although Marshall’s book does not say so. Most of the political and cultural elite of Villisca one hundred years ago, because they were allied with Frank Jones, bought into the theory that Kelly was the real culprit, and a recent episode of The Dead Files promotes the belief that Kelly committed the murders.

  I am aston
ished that anyone would believe that Reverend Kelly could have committed these murders, so I am going to hit this one more time. People believe that Kelly could have committed these murders because the truth is so horrible that, when confronted by it, they avert their eyes. But let’s not avert our eyes here; let’s look right at it. We know three things about the man who committed these murders. We know:

  1. He was sexually attracted to prepubescent females.

  2. He preferred them to be dead and covered with blood.

  3. He loved doing violence to others.

  Let’s compare that now to Reverend Kelly. There is no evidence that Reverend Kelly was attracted to prepubescent females. His sexual misconduct, to the best of our knowledge, was directed at a sixteen-year-old girl that he had never met, and at wives of his neighbors. Strike one.

  There is no evidence that Reverend Kelly had an attraction to dead people or people who were covered with blood. Strike two.

  There is no evidence I am aware of that Reverend Kelly was ever violent.

  One of the arguments made against Reverend Kelly at his murder trial is that he hated children, that he was grumpy around children, that he was annoyed by them and didn’t want them around him. This is the exact opposite of the behavior of a man who is sexually attracted to children. Child molesters are overfriendly with children. Child molesters are able to get on a child’s wavelength, in order to befriend, and then take advantage of, the child. They don’t hate them, and they’re not annoyed by them.

  After the sixteen-year-old turned Reverend Kelly’s letters over to the postal police, they responded, pretending to be her, and Reverend Kelly responded with yet more graphic letters, apparently outlining some extremely unattractive sexual opportunities for the young woman. These letters were introduced against him at his murder trial, but they were not read aloud in court because they were so obscene. The specific contents of those letters is now unknown.

  Dr. Epperly has said that he doesn’t believe that Kelly committed the crime, but he half-believes it, and he would like to know what those letters would reveal about Kelly’s perversity. But (1) that content was heard and known by the jurors, who were completely unpersuaded, and (2) this argument suggests that we have 80 percent of what we need to hang Kelly, but we are missing that last 20 percent. The reality is that we have 2 or 3 percent of a case against Kelly; we are missing 97 or 98 percent.

  Reverend Kelly had socially unacceptable behaviors wrapped around psychologically normal sexual desires. Even if Kelly was sexually attracted to children (no evidence), and even if he was focused on postmortem sexuality (which is extremely unusual, and for which we have no evidence), and even if he was prone to violence (no evidence), and even if these three were all true, he still was not capable of having committed these murders. The murders required boldness, focus, and self-possession, which were beyond his capacity.

  * * *

  Almost every modern source of information about the Villisca murders will say that the small-town police failed to secure the crime scene, and one source says that “it was among the most mishandled crime scenes in American history.” In fact, the handling of the Villisca crime scene was well above the normal standards of the time.

  The mistake is based on three misunderstandings. First, huge crowds of people did go through the house on Tuesday and Wednesday of the critical week, after the bodies had been removed late on Monday. Oral history, in my view, has conflated the events of June 11 and June 12 (Tuesday and Wednesday) with those of June 10, when the crime scene should have been documented (and was, to a limited extent). Second, critics tend to assume that modern standards about the preservation of a crime scene can be applied to 1912, when of course they cannot. While the concept of preserving the crime scene to preserve the evidence was not entirely unknown in 1912, this understanding was primitive at best. Even the concept of a crime scene yielding evidence was at a primitive level in 1912. Combining that with the public’s lack of acceptance of the need to stay away from the scene, it was normal for citizens to overrun a crime scene. This happened in almost every case discussed in this book.

  Third, modern writers seem to assume that Marshal Horton had available to him a police network that could have immediately rushed to the scene and taken control. In fact, there was no such network. Marshal Horton:

  • Displayed immense courage by going through a dark house filled with dead bodies, holding a match in front of him for light, with no reason to believe anything other than that the murderer was still in the house.

  • Called the county sheriff, who was the only off-site police official available to him.

  • Immediately called a private detective experienced in investigating homicides.

  • Instructed the night watchmen—his only assistants—not to let anyone into the house without good reason.

  • Sent immediately for bloodhounds.

  • Sent immediately for a fingerprint expert.

  • Almost immediately called out the National Guard to establish a perimeter around the house.

  He met with the people who had been through the house and made notes about what they had seen, and he organized a volunteer search of all the outbuildings in the city. Within the first thirty-six hours, he canvassed the neighborhood to see what evidence the neighbors might have. He made notes about those conversations, which later proved to be vital in obstructing the malicious prosecution of Frank Jones. What more could he have done? What other options did he have?

  None. He did everything he could have done, except that probably he should have insisted that the photographer be allowed to finish his work, and he should have taken possession of the crime scene photos. It has been written that Horton and the county sheriff, Sheriff Jackson, spent the day waiting for bloodhounds to arrive. When I started writing about the case I believed that to be true, but when you bury yourself deeply in the details of the day, you can see that they were actually very busy, that they worked hard, and that everything they did was reasonable and appropriate.

  Two years later, when J. N. Wilkerson came to town, Horton immediately spotted him as a con man, and refused to cooperate with him. Wilkerson treated Horton as he treated Jones, as he later would treat Horace Havner; he ridiculed him in public meetings, trying to destroy his reputation so that Horton would not be an obstacle to Wilkerson’s operation. He would claim that Horton was a part of the criminal conspiracy that was obstructing the investigation of the crime.

  I’m not saying that the control of the crime scene was perfect, merely that it was above the standards of the era. Some people were permitted to enter the crime scene who should not have been there. Items in the house were handled that should not have been handled.

  But modern writers act like they are shocked, shocked that perhaps fifty people went through the crime scene before noon on the day the bodies were discovered. If similar murders were committed tomorrow in New York or Chicago, I would bet that more than fifty people would go through the crime scene before noon—and I would bet that items of potential evidentiary value would be mishandled.

  The people who would go through the crime scene in a modern investigation would be police, crime scene technicians, an official photographer, medical personnel, police supervisors, and prosecutors. The people who went through the crime scene in Villisca were mostly in parallel positions—doctors, police, local officials, a photographer. There were some people who went through the murder house who were in other categories—a minister, relatives, family friends. This may be interpreted as a difference in crime scene protocol; it is hardly an outrage.

  Large numbers of people did go through the murder house after the bodies had been removed, and this is different from a modern crime scene; in the twenty-first century we don’t do that. There were people who went through the Moore house who had no business being there, but there is no reason to believe that any evidence was lost as a consequence of these extras going through the crime scene, or that any subsequent act of the tragedy woul
d have been different if the crime scene protection had been perfect.

  Fingerprints? Give me a break. Fingerprints in 1912, although everybody talked about them and everybody was aware of them, were not far beyond the level of a theory. Villisca authorities did send for a fingerprint expert on the day of the crimes; he showed up drunk and had nothing to offer, but they did send for him. There were no murders very much like this solved by fingerprints in 1912, or for many years after 1912. Even sixty years later, it was immensely difficult—and extremely rare—to solve a stranger-on-stranger homicide based on fingerprints. Fingerprint powder and fingerprint tape had not yet been invented in 1912. The cases in that era in which fingerprints proved vital were cases in which the perpetrator (1) was an obvious suspect, and (2) left fingerprints in blood. The Man from the Train was aware of fingerprints and had begun several years earlier to wash fingerprints from the handle of the axes that he used (although he had spilled a bottle of ink in Colorado Springs, and may have left his fingerprints there in ink). He had wiped the axe with Lena’s underwear; there was lint clinging to the axe, and blood on the underwear, as if it had been used to wipe away blood, and also the axe had been wiped on the sheets of one of the beds. Other than fingerprints and possibly a shoe size, what evidence exactly would have been at the crime scene? You think maybe he dropped his wallet?

  What needed to be done to solve this crime was vastly beyond the level of “securing the crime scene.” What needed to be done was more on the scale of locking down the railroad system in a range of 150 miles to limit the criminal’s ability to flee, organizing a multistate, multimillion-dollar investigation to piece together information from many different crime scenes, and systematically identifying and checking out tens of thousands of men who lived on the rails to see what they might have heard, might have seen, where they might have been. Unless those things were done, securing the crime scene wasn’t going to do anything.