The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  If a delayed-detonation device was used, that certainly would discourage us from believing it was The Man from the Train. But in the prosecution of Ray Pfanschmidt, a delayed-detonation device simply makes a further hash out of an already incoherent prosecution timeline. The prosecution argued that Ray Pfanschmidt had murdered his family on Friday night, and had returned to the house to set the fire on Saturday night. I understand how the clockface/bomb was of use to the prosecution, but of what exact use was it to Ray Pfanschmidt, assuming that he committed the crime? The family was dead; why do you need a delayed device to set fire to the house?

  A dollar bill with blood on it was found in a local bank. The bill was discovered in the bank more than a month after the crime, and more than a week after Ray had been arrested. The county sheriff seized the bill, a story was constructed about how Ray Pfanschmidt could have given that bill to a particular person, and that person could have deposited it in the bank. There was no evidence that this had happened; it was merely possible. This was introduced as “evidence” against Pfanschmidt in his first trial.

  The first trial started six months after the crime, in March of 1913. Days before the trial, a private investigator reported finding an axe head in the wreckage of the house, its handle burned off. Literally thousands of people had poked through the wreckage; one private investigator testified that he had been through the burned house, looking for evidence, virtually every day since the fire. Days before the trial started, they found the axe head.

  But of what use is the axe head anyway? Somebody murdered the family; we know that. How does the axe head tie Ray Pfanschmidt to the crime?

  It doesn’t.

  A gasoline can, supposedly from Ray’s work site, was found in the wreckage of the house. That testimony cannot be entirely discounted. Of course, one old gas can looks a lot like another one, and it apparently was Ray Pfanschmidt himself who found the gas can in the wreckage of the house and pointed it out to the police, but it’s possible that this means something.

  Ray Pfanschmidt was put on trial in his hometown, in an emotionally charged atmosphere, and a silver-tongued lawyer was hired with money provided by Emma Kaempen’s father to present the case to a jury. That jury found him guilty. The Illinois Supreme Court told them:

  1. To move the trial out of town.

  2. That the bloodhounds were not evidence.

  3. That the dollar bill with the blood on it was not evidence.

  4. That the hiring of defense lawyers was not evidence, either.

  And there were numerous other flaws in the trial. This led to two more trials, in which the juries said, “I’m sorry. Did I miss something here?”

  Some people have written that Pfanschmidt’s clever lawyers got him off. The truth is exactly the opposite: the slick lawyers in this case were the prosecutors. The prosecutors used smoke and mirrors and legal tricks—some of which were actually illegal tricks—to create the illusion that there was a substantial case against Ray Pfanschmidt where the mere outline of a case existed in fact. We can’t say with confidence that Ray Pfanschmidt did not commit the crime; it is just that three prosecutions produced almost no reason to believe that he did.

  If Ray Pfanschmidt did not commit the crime, then we have the motiveless, inexplicable murder of a random farm family, in the time and place in which The Man from the Train was doing a lot of that kind of thing. I won’t argue that it is him, because we don’t have any idea what happened here, even though there were several highly publicized trials. It could be that the murder weapon was not an axe, it could be that the family was systematically dismembered, it could be that a delayed-detonation device was used, it could be that Ray Pfanschmidt committed the crime. It was several miles from the railroad track. We couldn’t convince a skeptic that it was related to the other crimes in the series.

  * * *

  A good bit of Beth Lane’s book Lies Told Under Oath, about the Pfanschmidt case, deals with the love story between Ray and the woman to whom he was engaged at the time of the murders. Her handling of that story is extremely skillful and tremendously powerful. I regret that I can’t share any of the love story with you here, but:

  • It unfolds very slowly,

  • It is outside the compass of our narrative, and

  • I could never match the skill with which Ms. Lane has told that story, and I certainly don’t want to retell it and make a hash of it.

  For us, the central question of this crime is whether or not it could have been committed by The Man from the Train. The following facts argue for its inclusion in the series:

  1. A family was murdered, probably with an axe, without warning and for no apparent reason.

  2. The crime occurred in the time and place where The Man from the Train was most active—about a hundred days after the murders in Villisca, and a little less than three hundred miles from Villisca. The farm where the murders occurred is about forty miles from the closest point of Iowa, and is just over a hundred miles from Monmouth, Illinois, where The Man from the Train had murdered a family almost exactly one year earlier.

  3. After the crime was committed the house was set on fire, which argues strongly against this being a copycat murder or an effort to throw authorities off the track by linking it to the series of unsolved crimes. While some people did realize at this time that a murderous stranger was riding the rails, he had not set fire to the house in any of the recent murders with which he was connected, and absolutely no one, at that time, realized that he had also committed a large number of similar crimes earlier in his career in which he did complete the crime by setting fire to the house.

  4. The Pfanschmidt murders were probably committed at the time of night at which The Man from the Train usually attacked his victims, and were committed on a weekend, as most of his crimes were.

  5. Although this may be a personal reaction rather than evidence, I did not become convinced that the Pfanschmidt murders were a part of the series until I had almost finished writing this book. I had given a speech in Davenport, Iowa, and on the way back to my home in Kansas I decided that I would drive through Payson again (I had visited the area earlier) to look at something I had missed on the previous visit. But trying to drive to the scene of the Pfanschmidt murders, I accidentally drove directly through Monmouth, Illinois, where another family had been murdered earlier. That drove forcefully home to me how closely connected those two crimes are geographically, and I became convinced that they were probably linked. It’s a hundred miles, yes, but it’s a hundred miles in an area with very, very few towns and cities.

  Arguing against the inclusion of the Pfanschmidt murders in “our” list of crimes are the following:

  1. The farmhouse was not near the railroad—certainly not extremely near the railroad, as all of the recent crimes had been.

  2. The murders may not have been committed with an axe or similar instrument.

  3. A clock may have been used as a “bomb” to trigger the fire.

  4. Because the house was destroyed, there is limited evidence of the idiosyncratic behaviors that identify The Man from the Train, such as breaking in through a window, locking the house up tight, or covering windows and/or mirrors with cloth.

  Having studied the crime as best I am able to do, it is my personal opinion that the crime was a part of the series. However, I do not believe that I could convince a skeptic of this, so I won’t make a definite claim that it is related.

  SECTION III

  — 1900 to 1906 —

  CHAPTER XIX

  Stepping Backward

  We are all aware of the ways that inventions and developments that are like inventions can quickly reshape our lives; that is, we are aware of the way that this happens in the years that we remember. We tend to forget that the same waves of innovation rolled over society—and reshaped it just as rapidly—before we came along.

  It is difficult to describe how far-reaching the changes were that occurred in the first decade of the twentieth centu
ry. There is probably no other decade in American history, or even human history, that witnessed changes as profound as those which reshaped American culture between 1900 and 1910. In 1900 very few houses had electricity, but in this decade new houses were built with electricity, while millions of existing houses were retrofitted with light switches and lightbulbs and plug-ins (in urban areas. Electrification of rural areas didn’t gain traction until the 1930s). The endless development of household electronic devices began. In 1900 nobody had cars. In 1902 it is believed that fewer than 6,000 American vehicles were on the road. By 1910 there were 130,000 automobiles, 35,000 trucks, and 150,000 motorcycles—a fiftyfold increase in vehicular traffic in eight years, and of course the numbers continued to skyrocket. The roads had to be built and rebuilt to accommodate the new world; the laws had to be rewritten. In the small city in which I live, a law was passed in 1906 requiring an automobile to pull over to the side of the road when encountering a horse, so that the automobile did not frighten the horse. Less than three years later the law jumped to the other side of the bridge, and residents were banned from bringing new horses into town. If you had a horse you could keep him as long as he lived, but if you didn’t have a horse you couldn’t get one without special permission. Nineteenth-century roads were almost all unpaved; now they needed to be paved. Tens of thousands of American cities added either bus service or trolley car service in this decade, or both. The New York City subway system opened on October 27, 1904. Car dealerships were being built in every city in America, and tire stores, and auto parts stores, and gas stations. (In the early days of automobiles, gasoline was sold through drugstores and was sold in containers, rather than through pumps.) Livery services, which were called taxis, were being rapidly driven out of business, replaced by what we call taxis.

  In 1900 there was essentially no movie industry. By 1910 the movie business employed many thousands of people, nickelodeons were available in every town, and movie theaters were being built alongside the gas stations and the car dealerships. While sound recordings have more of a history before 1900 than do movies, the popular music industry by 1910 was being rapidly and radically reshaped by record players, which were becoming more affordable.

  In 1900 zero percent of American houses had telephone service—not zero houses, but zero percent, rounded off to the nearest one percent. By 1910, in the era in which we have been writing about, many people had telephones. Villisca had two competing phone systems; you couldn’t call from one system to the other. J. B. Moore’s John Deere store, like many businesses in Villisca, had telephones from both systems so that anybody would be able to reach them from either system. Few houses had indoor plumbing in 1900; certainly few houses had indoor plumbing in the small, semirural areas where The Man from the Train liked to attack. By 1910 many more houses had indoor facilities (although most still did not).

  It is reported in some places that violent crime rates exploded in this decade, although this is not well documented. Of course, the history of the airplane begins in this decade, but that didn’t have real impact until World War I, which is after our story. But the sweeping changes in American society from 1900 to 1912 invaded every corner of our story. Fingerprints. While the knowledge that fingerprints were unique dates back to the ancient world, and a murder was solved by fingerprints in Argentina in 1892, fingerprinting as a modern forensic enterprise began in 1900 or 1901, and awareness of fingerprints exploded in the middle of the decade. In 1900 few people were aware that the skin ridge patterns on their fingers were unique to them and could theoretically be traced to them. By 1910 everybody knew that.

  In 1900 the basic blood groups (A, B, AB, and O) were unknown; by 1910 there had been two breakthroughs in that field, and by 1912 police were beginning to study the blood at crime scenes.

  The flashlight was invented in 1899 and commercially marketed beginning in 1904. In 1900 night watchmen carried lanterns. In 1910 they carried flashlights. One of the ways we can surmise that The Man from the Train was probably over thirty-five in 1910 is that he lighted his way around dark houses by carrying kerosene lamps, rather than by using a flashlight, as he would probably have done had he been ten years younger.

  Let me break now from the disembodied narrative voice that we normally use to write books and speak to you one on one, writer to reader. I need to explain my problem to you, and I don’t know how I would do that, other than in the first person.

  I began researching this series of crimes with the murders that center around Villisca, the murders in 1911 and 1912. In doing that, I realized there must be other murders that were part of the series but that had not been associated with the series at the time. Many writers have written about the series as if it began in Colorado Springs, but that can’t possibly be right. The murderer in Colorado Springs, who killed six people in two houses in one night, is way too comfortable in what he is doing to be a first-time explorer. This was not his first rodeo.

  So if this wasn’t the first time he had done this, let’s look for the others. I started walking backward in time from September 17, 1911 (Colorado Springs), looking for other events that could be related. We have tools to conduct that search now that were beyond the imagination of people trying to connect the dots in 1911. In 1911, what happened a hundred miles away from you might as well have happened on the dark side of the moon; that’s not exactly true, but I have a point and I’ll get back to it in a moment. Anyway, I started walking backward from 1911, and I found several similar cases in 1910, and at least one in 1909.

  But then I hit a wall; for more than a year before the murder of the Meadows family in 1909, I could find no record of a similar case. So this is where the series starts, OK?

  Except that it isn’t. It isn’t for two reasons. First of all, the Meadows family murders, as much as the Colorado Springs murders, do not look like the work of an inexperienced, out-of-control amateur getting his sea legs in the homicide industry. It looks like he knew what he was doing. And second, in the interest of thoroughness, I hired my daughter, Rachel, to search for similar murders occurring before 1909. And she found one.

  And another one.

  And another one.

  And another, and another.

  At first, of course, I thought she was just seeing monsters in the shadows, that these wouldn’t turn out to be related cases—but no; when I finally made the time to look into her stack of cases, it seemed much more likely than not that at least some of them were related.

  So the series begins somewhere before 1909, but where? We have a string of crimes before 1909, some of which probably are connected to The Man from the Train and some of which probably aren’t.

  But here’s the thing: the year 1900 is very different from 1912. The world changed enormously between 1900 and 1912. One of the things that changed tremendously from 1900 to 1912 was small-city newspapers.

  Although the Associated Press has a prehistory dating back to 1846, until 1893 it was basically a cooperative arrangement among a few big-city newspapers. Between 1893 and 1921, under the leadership of Melville Stone, the AP grew enormously, embracing thousands of small-town newspapers, providing news services to them but also, and perhaps more importantly, taking news from them and circulating it around the nation. Wireless news transmission began in 1899, and greatly increased the speed and ease with which news could be shared. The United Press Association, later UPI, United Press International, was founded in 1907 and grew rapidly as a competitor to the Associated Press. By 1912, most small-town newspapers were either AP papers or UPI papers.

  The invention of the Bildtelegraph (1900) greatly eased the transmission of photographs. In 1900 small-town newspapers printed few photographs, and almost never printed photos taken a long distance away. Many newspapers illustrated their stories with drawings—some detailed, others crude. By 1910 some small-town newspapers routinely printed photographs taken far away. In 1900 no American college offered a degree in journalism. By 1910 there were journalism programs. In 1900, sm
all-town newspapers were stand-alone operations. They stole stories from big-city newspapers and from nearby towns, because copyright restraints were weak or nonexistent, but for the most part their stories were self-generated, and for the most part they ended where they began. Information had little ability to move around the country.

  By 1912 small-town newspapers were plugged into a nationwide network. The story of a spectacular murder in a small town would be picked up and discussed coast to coast. It was this development that facilitated the recognition that a horrible axe murderer was traveling around the country; not that this could not possibly have happened earlier, but it did not. It was not until the newspapers were plugged into the national network that people connected the dots.

  Newspapers in that time period grew rapidly in their depth and sophistication. By 1912 newspapers were bigger, physically bigger. They had more pages. They had room to cover more stories and to cover them in more depth. They had more room to allow and encourage comment from their readers. Newspaper reporters became more professional.

  Public literacy was advancing rapidly. In 1900 50 percent of white children and about 29 percent of black children aged five to nineteen were enrolled in school—meaning that most children in those age ranges were not in school. By 1910 the percentages were slightly over 60 percent for white children, and about 43 percent for black children. By 1920 we were at about 65 percent for white children, and probably over 50 percent for black children.

  Education and newspapers, of course, go hand in hand. If you can’t read, you don’t need a newspaper. In 1900 a significant percentage of the population was illiterate. By 1912 this was less true.

  So stepping backward in time from 1909, in small-city newspapers, is almost like stepping off a cliff. In the stories that I have told you about, from 1909 to 1912, we have good detail; we can find hundreds of newspaper stories about many of these crimes, and the newspapers provide leads to documents and other sources. But in 1902, we have nothing like that in many cases (although some cases, in some towns, are well documented even back to the beginning of our timeline).