The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Dynamite Pfanschmidt

  C. C. related a conversation from the following evening, Monday, September 23. “Ray, I understand you are going into the auto business too.” He said, “Yes, there is lots of money in that.” I said, “Yes, with you it is always money, money, money.”

  —From Beth Lane, Lies Told Under Oath

  On Friday night, September 27, 1912, the family of Charles and Mathilda Pfanschmidt was murdered in a farmhouse near Payson, Illinois. Four persons died in the crime—Charles, Mathilda, their fifteen-year-old daughter, Blanche, and a nineteen-year-old schoolteacher named Emma Kaempen, who was boarding with the family while she taught school nearby. The murders were probably committed with an axe, and the house was set on fire after the family was murdered.

  Just across the Mississippi River from Hannibal, Missouri, is an area that is famously, and rather weirdly, isolated. The second time you drive through there, you will remember to fill up your gas tank before you leave Hannibal. You pass towns and cities every few miles, farmhouses everywhere around you, and then you hit this big infarction where there is just nothing. You don’t see houses, you don’t see little side roads with an occasional car on them. It’s like western Kansas, or southern New Mexico, or the Dakotas. If it’s nine p.m. and you notice that your gas gauge is hitting empty, you’re in big trouble because you’re not going to see an open gas station for a hundred miles.

  The Pfanschmidt farm was in that area, and was probably six to eight miles from the nearest railroad. Quincy, Illinois, was well served by railroad traffic. The Pfanschmidts lived eight to nine miles southeast of Quincy, and the railroad line did head south and east out of Quincy. It missed the Pfanschmidt farm by a good distance. If The Man from the Train committed this murder, I think we have to conclude that he departed from his usual pattern in this respect.

  Ray Pfanschmidt, the twenty-year-old son of Charles and Tildie, was three times put on trial for committing some or all of the murders and was eventually exonerated. Ray was the very definition of a young man on the make. Twenty years old, he had established a small business moving dirt around. He had taught himself to use dynamite by studying the sales instruction materials, and he used a lot of dynamite. He used dynamite to blow tree stumps out of the ground, loosen the ground for digging wells, and loosen the ground so he could move it around more easily. He had several contracts with other businesses to grade land for roads and for coal mining and for other purposes, and he had numerous workers, older men that he hired to run teams of horses that leveled land and hauled dirt. He had been referred to in the local newspapers, before the murders, as Dynamite Pfanschmidt.

  He was also getting into the auto sales racket. There were dozens or perhaps hundreds of little car companies around the nation, building automobiles of different types. Bright young men were trying to get a foothold in the automobile business in every way you can imagine—opening garages, selling gasoline, fixing autos, selling tires, selling auto parts, selling the cars themselves, etc. Ray Pfanschmidt was trying to shoehorn together enough money to become the local car magnate in Quincy, Illinois. He had already signed some contracts (with Rambler) to take possession of cars for the purpose of reselling them, and had borrowed money here and there—including from his father—to be in position to fulfill the contracts. Had not the tragedy intervened, Pfanschmidt Motors would very probably be selling cars in Quincy, Illinois, today.

  At the time that the Schmidt hit the Pfan he was living in a tent at a job site in Quincy. On the evening of September 27 he had visited his sweetheart, to whom he was engaged, at her house, several miles from the scene of the crime. He left there about 10:45 p.m. and was seen on the roads going in the direction of his tent, which was the opposite direction from the crime scene. The prosecution argued that, after going some distance in that direction, he had pulled off the road and doubled back to the house where his family was murdered.

  This was problematic, in that he was seen in Quincy before 1:00 a.m. (Saturday, September 28), and perhaps as early as midnight. There wasn’t much time there, but several people testified that they saw what they thought were Pfanschmidt’s horses and his buggy on the road that he would have taken to do this at about the time that he would have had to do it.

  On Saturday morning, Ray Pfanschmidt took his watch to a jeweler’s in Quincy to have it repaired. The prosecution would argue that the watch clasp and casing were broken during the murders. On the other hand, the man set off dynamite for a living; it’s not difficult to imagine how he could have broken the watch; 99.9 percent of people who break their watches are not committing murder when they do so.

  Throughout Saturday, September 28, no activity was seen around the Pfanschmidt farm. Their mail, delivered early on Saturday, was never picked up from the mailbox. Their chores were never done, their horses not fed and not watered, the cows not milked. Several phone calls to the Pfanschmidt farm went unanswered.

  As the day went on, more and more people who passed by the farm began to smell something burning, something like burning flesh. The farmers supposed that the Pfanschmidts were probably burning some hogs, since there had been an outbreak of cholera, and people were burning livestock to stop the spread of the disease.

  Nothing was seen of the family that entire day, however, and in the early-morning hours of Sunday, September 29—after midnight on September 28—the house burst into flames. Even though it was the middle of the night a crowd gathered outside the house, watching it burn and making some futile efforts to put out the fire by carrying water from the animals’ watering tank. Ray Pfanschmidt and many of his cousins, aunts, and uncles were awakened by middle-of-the-night phone calls and were on the scene before sunup, as were a crowd of neighbors and passersby. The police chief from Quincy arrived not long after the sun rose. By early Sunday morning, according to some estimates, a thousand people were at the farm.

  Going back to the first hour of the fire, when neighbors saw orange flames bursting from the roof and raced to the house, terror stricken, hoping against hope that the Pfanschmidt family was not inside. It had rained about ten o’clock on Saturday night, not much, just enough to settle the dust. Giving it every possible benefit, let us suppose that glistening in the moonlight and in the glare of the fire, there is a flat, damp driveway, and through that driveway there is the muddy track of a single carriage entering the property, circling around and then leaving—a track apparently left after the ten o’clock shower and before the fire. Under the circumstances, one can see how spectral and sinister that track would appear to be.

  We don’t know that this was exactly what happened, but we do know that there was a track, and that the neighbors who were thrust into the role of first responders focused on that track at once, and took action almost immediately to preserve the track for its value as evidence.

  The Track became the basis of suspicion against Ray Pfanschmidt. By 6:00 a.m., when there were perhaps a hundred people on the scene, the gossip among them was that that was the track of Ray Pfanschmidt’s buggy and the track of Ray Pfanschmidt’s horses, that one could tell that it was by the width of the track and the tread of the wheels and the hoof prints of the horses and the peculiar sharp turn that the vehicle had made, which a conventional carriage could not have made. Once they were able to get inside the burned-out house and determine that the family had been murdered before the fire, the police and the gossiping neighbors immediately began to suspect—based mostly on The Track—that Ray had committed the crime.

  On Friday, September 27, the Pfanschmidt family had been in Payson, returning to their farm not much before midnight. The family must have been murdered soon after that, and the house must have been set on fire as the murderer left the house.

  On Monday morning, thirty hours after the house was found engulfed in flames, bloodhounds were brought in. The bloodhounds were given the scent from the suspected track, and they tracked the scent to Ray Pfanschmidt’s horses, nine miles away in Quincy
. Sort of. What actually happened was, they tracked the scent a certain distance to a public road, where the bloodhounds were put into a vehicle and driven to the next intersection, then they were taken out and tracked the scent across the intersection, then they were put back in the vehicle until the next intersection, etc. When the dogs lost the scent along oiled streets in Quincy, they were put in the car and released a mile away along the same street. It was estimated that of the nine miles the bloodhounds had tracked the scent to Ray Pfanschmidt’s horses, about six miles were spent in the vehicle.

  Ray Pfanschmidt’s clothes were central to the mystery. Pfanschmidt—a nice-looking young man—was a clothes horse, and he owned several “suits” of khaki clothes, which he normally wore with a red bow-string necktie. A week after the murders an outdoor toilet near Ray’s job site was being destroyed, and as it was tipped over a set of Ray’s khaki clothes was discovered in the vault of the privy, wrapped in newspaper and spattered with blood.

  To a demanding modern reader, the blood-spattered clothing is the essence of the case. The rest of the evidence against Ray Pfanschmidt can be easily dismissed; it is the clothes that matter. The trials of Ray Pfanschmidt revolved around endless, repetitious, conflicting, and confusing testimony about what clothes he was wearing at what time.

  Pfanschmidt’s defense attorneys argued that they could account for all of his khaki clothes on the Monday after the murders; in other words, all of his clothes were clean and accounted for at that time. No one is convinced by this argument. His defenders believed that one of the many private investigators hired to help out in the case had stolen a set of Ray’s clothes from his tent, splattered some blood on them, and hid them where he knew they would be found. This argument cannot be easily dismissed. On its surface, it does seem powerfully convenient that Ray supposedly hid his clothes in an outbuilding that was scheduled for demolition just days later. The clothes were found wrapped in an out-of-town newspaper and tied with string, but Ray Pfanschmidt did not subscribe to that newspaper and did not have copies of that newspaper in his tent, nor did his family subscribe to the paper. Some of the red marks on the clothes were tested and found not to be blood but red dye (although others were in fact blood). The sheriff believed that the red dye had come from Ray’s red bow-string necktie, but another witness alleged that he had overheard a private investigator talking about putting red ink on the clothes.

  A private detective sent by a neutral third party testified that he had searched the toilet thoroughly days after the murder, including the privy vault, and the bloody clothes were not there. That P.I. was the former chief of police in Quincy, and the future sheriff of the county. The real problem, though, is the amount of blood; there were spots of blood on the khaki clothes. The defense argued—and I believe—that if Ray Pfanschmidt had been wearing those clothes at the time he murdered four people with an axe, there should not have been “spots” of blood on them, but large splotches of blood, at a minimum.

  While most of the Pfanschmidt clan supported Ray, his grandfather, C. C. Pfanschmidt, believed that Ray had committed the crime. Ray and his grandfather had clashed before, and C. C. had come to believe that Ray was way too interested in making money. The grandfather had more money than the rest of the family, and he hired private detectives to assist in the investigation.

  The Track was the basis and foundation of the prosecution of Ray Pfanschmidt. But it is clear, from a careful study of the evidence, that Ray Pfanschmidt was not at the farm on the Saturday evening before the fire broke out—not clear that Ray was innocent, not clear that The Track was not made by his vehicle at some other time, but absolutely clear that the prosecution’s theory of the case, founded on and derived from The Track, was bubkes.

  The prosecution’s theory was that Ray Pfanschmidt, having murdered his family on Friday evening, returned to the farm on Saturday night to set the house on fire. This never happened, and we know that it never happened for the following reasons:

  1. Ray Pfanschmidt was alerted to the tragedy about 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 29, 1912, had his horses brought to him, and raced to the scene. The prosecution put on a string of BS witnesses to say that Ray’s horses were excessively fatigued after he raced the nine miles to the farmhouse, more tired than they should have been had they made only that one nine-mile trip. But two young men who handled the horses in the morning, getting them ready to go to the fire while Ray talked hurriedly with his relatives, both testified that the horses were fresh and full of energy at that time. There is no reason whatsoever not to believe them.

  2. Ray’s time is well accounted for in Quincy until about eleven o’clock on Saturday night. The prosecution’s theory is that after eleven o’clock, Ray raced to the farm, set fire to the house, and then raced back to Quincy.

  But dozens of witnesses had smelled fire and smelled the odor of burning flesh hours earlier—as early as ten o’clock that morning. By six o’clock that evening the smell had become thick and pungent, although no one could place where it was coming from. It is obvious that the house was set on fire on Friday night, but that the flame had burned out, then the fire had smoldered within the walls of the house for about twenty-four hours before it reignited. The Track of the single vehicle after the rain, spooky as it was, had nothing to do with the fire, because the fire was already burning long before the rain.

  3. What the prosecution alleges—that Ray drove his team to the house and back to Quincy in two and a half hours on Saturday night/Sunday morning—borders on being impossible. The prosecution put on witnesses to demonstrate that it was possible to drive a team of horses that distance in that amount of time, and I don’t doubt that it was possible—but it would have been highly unusual. It is not clear that it was even possible with Ray’s team and Ray’s buggy.

  4. About eleven o’clock on Saturday evening, Ray Pfanschmidt attempted repeatedly to persuade his cousin, who sometimes stayed with him at the tent, to come out to the tent with him. There are multiple witnesses who testified that this happened. But the prosecution’s theory of the crime is that, by 11:15, Ray was racing toward the farm to set the fire. This doesn’t make any sense.

  There is little or no evidence supporting the prosecution’s theory of a Saturday-night return to the farm. They started with that, so they stuck with it.

  Were the Pfanschmidts murdered with an axe? Well, the first people on the scene believed that the family had been hacked to death with an axe, and an axe was introduced into evidence against Ray Pfanschmidt. However:

  1. The fire did a pretty effective job of destroying the crime scene, and

  2. The investigation of the crime was completely inept.

  We don’t know what the murder weapon was. We know that at least two of the victims were murdered in their beds, because their bodies were found in their beds, burned almost beyond recognition. Parts of the body of Charles Pfanschmidt were never found.

  Ray Pfanschmidt’s first trial was a local sensation, with so many people crowding into the courthouse that it compromised the structural integrity of the building. The trial lasted three weeks. Ray Pfanschmidt was found guilty in the first trial, and sentenced to death. The Illinois Supreme Court threw out the conviction, citing numerous errors in the trial, and stopping inches short of stating that there had been insufficient evidence to submit the case to a jury. The county retried Ray, charging him only with the murder of his sister, Blanche, and, when he was acquitted of that charge, tried him again, charging him only with the murder of Emma Kaempen. He was acquitted again.

  The Illinois Supreme Court ruling established a legal precedent which is still observed and still cited today, the precedent being that the actions of bloodhounds are not evidence against the accused. Bloodhounds may be used to uncover evidence; bloodhounds may lead the police toward evidence or toward a suspect. The tracking of the bloodhounds is not evidence in and of itself, since no one knows what is in the bloodhound’s mind that causes him to go one direction or another.


  Ray Pfanschmidt did have some criminal tendencies. While taking a short course at the University of Illinois he had been accused of stealing $35 from a roommate, and later, after he was acquitted, he was arrested a couple of times for things like dealing in stolen auto parts and stealing tires. The real problem with the prosecution’s case is not that it is contradicted by other testimony. The problem with the prosecution’s case is that, even if there was no conflicting evidence of any kind, even if you assume that everything the prosecution says is true and add in the fact that Ray Pfanschmidt was later shown to be a petty criminal, it still falls short of a convincing argument.

  The prosecution argued that Ray Pfanschmidt, at the scene of the crime, seemed detached, that he did not act appropriately at the time for an innocent person. This is an argument that prosecutors always make, but it is contradicted by the best evidence on the subject. The Pfanschmidts were stoic German people who were trained from birth not to display emotions in public. Pfanschmidt testified that at the time of the fire he had gone into an outbuilding, out of view of the other people, and was in there crying when his aunt came in and told him to brace up. The aunt and another relative testified that this did in fact happen. His fiancée and his other relatives all testified that he was distraught about the murders, but that he had fought hard to maintain his composure in public. Numerous family members caught him crying (and trying to hide it) over the course of the next week.

  Days after the crime, a man and his young daughter were poking around in the remains of the house where the tragedy had occurred. The daughter pulled out of the wreckage a burned clockface, with wires wrapped around the hands. This was immediately turned over to authorities.

  Because Ray Pfanschmidt was experienced in the use of dynamite, the prosecution presumed he was capable of using a clock as a detonation device. But Pfanschmidt testified that he had never used any form of delayed-detonation device, had never been trained to do so, and wouldn’t know how to do so. There is no evidence to the contrary.