The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  3. Asked under oath how old he was, Hensen said that he might be “forty-three or forty-five.”

  4. The witness who talked to Hensen shortly after Van Lieu and Williamson did was named “Stubbs.” During Hensen’s trial there occurred this exchange between Stubbs and the defense attorney:

  Attorney:

  How long have you known [Hensen]?

  Stubbs:

  About three years.

  Attorney:

  What time did you say it was?

  Stubbs:

  Between four and four-thirty.

  Attorney:

  How do you know it was that time?

  Stubbs:

  I just left Jones.

  Attorney:

  What time was it then?

  Stubbs:

  Four o’clock.

  Attorney:

  How do you know?

  Stubbs:

  I looked at the clock.

  Attorney:

  Can you tell the time?

  Stubbs:

  Yes.

  Attorney:

  What time is it now, by the court clock?

  The witness walked down from the stand and after looking at the clock said “Nine o’clock.” At the time it was 10:45. This raised a big laugh in which Hensen joined. “Look again,” said (the lawyer). “It is half-past ten,” said Stubbs, and again there was a big laugh at the witness’ expense. This seemed to please Hensen immensely and he laughed immoderately.

  It doesn’t matter what time the encounter on the road happened; it’s just color. The pertinent facts are:

  1. That Stubbs couldn’t tell time, and

  2. That the attorney and the spectators all felt that it was appropriate to laugh at him because he could not tell time but had pretended that he could.

  Van Lieu and the Williamsons were certainly literate, could tell time, and could read music, but it appears that most of the other people in the story, including Hensen, may not have been able to tell time. But Hensen may have been literate, since we know that he kept books in his jail cell.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Standing by Henry

  Never before has this section of Maine had a case which is so mysterious in every way as the horrible affair which took place at the Allen home. . . . The country around here has been infested by tramps for several weeks. [Mary Allen] always kept quiet when there was a rap at the door, and in her stead Mr. Allen would answer the knock. The little girl was handsome and attractive.

  —Boston Globe, May 15, 1901

  Piscataquis County, Maine, is the sort of place where Bigfoot could settle down and raise a family of little Bigfoots without anyone coming to film their morning romps for cable TV. The county is the size of Connecticut, but has a population of 17,000 people—then and now; 115 years ago the population was the same as it is now. This works out to about four persons per square mile, which is less than half the population density of North Dakota, but even that image is somewhat misleading, since most of those people were concentrated in the southern part of the county. 99 percent of the population of the county is trees.

  J. Wesley Allen, his wife, Mary, and fourteen-year-old daughter, Carrie, had lived for decades on a hundred-acre farm south of Shirley, Maine (which is also called Shirley Mills). The Allen house was just a few steps off of a sparsely settled road, so people walking the road would sometimes knock on the door to ask for water or something to eat. Mr. Allen was not friendly to strangers. He was a big, strong man—two hundred pounds, which would have made him much larger than the top athletes of the day—and he was physically fit at the age of fifty-three. According to the Boston Globe, “He was very much opposed to visits from strangers, and the neighbors say that on more than one occasion tramps who called at his house made up their minds quickly that they better do business with some other person.” Mary was not in good health. The nearest neighbors were three-quarters of a mile away, and there were so few people who used the road that the murder of the family and the subsequent burning of their house and barn went unnoticed for eleven hours.

  The road on which the family lived was called the stage road; it is now called the Greenville Road, Maine highways 6 and 15. Although of course nothing is left of the Allen house, the Appalachian Trail passes within an eighth of a mile of where the house was, just to the south of what are called the Spectacle Ponds. May 12, 1901, was a Sunday night. At about 9:45 p.m. a “neighbor” saw a reddish glow in the sky over by the Allen house. He thought nothing of it at the time. The next morning a man driving his children to the village school saw the burned-out house. Upon investigation he found the remains of Mr. Allen in the barn, two large pools of blood nearby. He went for help.

  The charred bodies of Mrs. Allen and her daughter were found in the ruins of the house, in separate rooms, in neither case in their bedrooms, from which it is inferred that the family was attacked in the evening, while they were still up and around. The house had burned to the ground and a large barn had burned out, but a stack of firewood between the two had not burned. On this basis it was believed that the assailant(s) may have set two separate fires. Note the stack of firewood; contemporary accounts of the case mention the firewood only because it failed to burn, but where there is a stack of firewood, there is an axe.

  After the murders were discovered it required more than twenty-four hours for the sheriff and county coroner to reach the scene of the crime. Mr. Allen, while a prosperous farmer, never kept money in his house and was not known to have enemies. The head of an axe was found in the yard, missing its handle but covered and caked with blood. What looked like the cap of a liquor bottle was picked up outside the house and was taken to be evidence, since the Allens did not drink.

  The first suspects were stagecoach robbers. A stagecoach ran periodically up the long, empty road beside the Allen house, and there were highwaymen who operated along the road, refugees, no doubt, from the sixteenth century. A stagecoach had been robbed at Willimantic, seventeen miles to the east, two days before the murders, and a man named William Johnson reported that he had been robbed by four drunk guys near the stage road on Monday morning.

  This story, however, turned out to be smoke; the “robbery” by the four drunk guys was nothing more than some mildly aggressive panhandling. Johnson had been walking along the train track two miles west of the Allen house when he encountered a hobo camp, a group of four tramps lying on abandoned mattresses, smoking and drinking. One of the tramps asked Johnson for tobacco to fill his pipe; Johnson refused and went on his way.

  Four tramps were arrested and hauled in for questioning—it is unclear whether they were exactly the same tramps—but even before they were arrested the sheriff had more or less announced to the press that he didn’t believe they had anything to do with the crime. Johnson had exaggerated his report and had tailored his description of the four men to match the suspects from the stagecoach robbery. The sheriff thus concluded that the four men had nothing to do with the stagecoach robbery, were not criminals, and were not legitimate suspects in the murders, all fair enough. From our standpoint, 116 years later, the fact that a hobo encampment stood along a railroad line two miles from the scene of the crime, in an area in which the houses were literally a mile apart one to another, is immensely interesting, but let’s move on for now, and we’ll circle back to this.

  On the day the crime was discovered, before the sheriff and the coroner arrived, the neighbors and newspapermen had decided that the purpose of the crime was to sexually assault the two women of the house; the newspapers left out the word sexually, but it is clear what they meant. The sheriff signed on to this theory. On the back of the Allen property, some distance from the house, stood a cabin called the Huff cabin. Neighbors rushed there, hoping to find Mary and Carrie Allen safe. The cabin had been broken into, a bolt removed. They informed Mr. Huff, and he replaced the bolt, but the cabin was broken into again that night. A revolver was stolen from the cabin, and some odd matches were abandoned there, matches of a t
ype investigators had not seen before. When two crimes are committed on the same property on the same day, you figure they’re related.

  When the sheriff and the sheriff’s men arrived on Tuesday morning, they went to the neighbors to start asking questions. To their astonishment, one of the neighbors, Mrs. Telos Smith (Ida Smith), emerged from her house in high dudgeon and barked at the officers that “we are going to stand by Henry.” The officers didn’t know what Mrs. Smith was talking about, but she explained that people were saying that Henry had something to do with this, but she and her husband knew better and they were standing by Henry.

  Henry Lambert was an illiterate twenty-six-year-old French Canadian who worked as a logger and occasionally as a hunting guide. Despite the isolation of the farm, hundreds of people had swarmed the property after the discovery, and they had gossiped among themselves as to who did this. Henry Lambert was the first target. Lambert had built the Huff cabin in the fall of 1900, months before the murders, after living for four years in a camp or cabin across the road from the Allen house, but on the Allens’ property. About a year before the murders, Allen had told Lambert that he wanted to farm that piece of property, but that Lambert, if he wished, could build a camp on the back end of the property. Lambert built the cabin, but after living in it for a month or so he sold it or gave it to a man named Elmer Huff, and spent the winter of 1900 to 1901 lodging with the family of Telos Smith.

  If you’re thinking it is unusual to build (and sell) a cabin on someone else’s property, you’re not into the mind-set of the era. In this book we have encountered (and will encounter) numerous people who were living in temporary shelters, tents, or crude cabins—Ray Pfanschmidt, and John Arthur Pender in Oregon, and others. Many farm people in that era were generous with their neighbors; it was normal for them to share things like horses, labor, and farm implements. It was normal for people to assume personal responsibility to help care for those who were less able to care for themselves. We saw that in the last chapter, in which numerous people helped to feed and care for Bob Hensen, knowing full well that he was a derelict with anger management issues—just as you might drop two dollars into the cup of a homeless man, knowing full well that his mental condition was unsound. As to the ownership of the land, there was (and is) so much unused land in that area, thousands of square miles of unused land, that to concede usage of a small portion of land was really nothing. Lambert would do fieldwork to balance the scales.

  On the Saturday before the murders, which occurred Sunday night, Lambert had gone twice to Greenville, which is about ten miles north of the murder scene. There was a woman in Greenville. Lambert spent Saturday night and most of the day Sunday in Greenville, returning to the Smiths, they said, about 8:30 Sunday night. Lambert had bought a bottle of whiskey in Greenville, and the whiskey was all gone by the time he was interviewed the next Tuesday.

  Footprints at the scene of the crime appeared to have been made by new or nearly new “rubbers”—rubber boots. Lambert had recently purchased new boots, but the boots were missing and could not be directly compared to the prints.

  Lambert was arrested and charged with the crime on Thursday, May 16.

  The officers claim to have found prints from new rubber overshoes near the Allen house and also near Lambert’s log cabin, and, in addition, a trail from one building to the other, marked by spots of blood. Just what actual evidence there is against Lambert is not known. Lambert is not disturbed by his arrest, and said last night that he had been very friendly with the Allens, visiting them evenings with considerable frequency.

  —North Adams Evening Transcript, May 17, 1901

  There were rumors that Carrie Allen, the fourteen-year-old girl, was uncomfortable around Lambert; Lambert denied this. The boots now became central to the case, and the alcohol; the theory was that Lambert had shown up at the Allen house under the influence of alcohol, and gotten into a dispute with Mr. Allen.

  With regard to the blood spots, let me point this out. What we now know, but what people did not know until about 1950, is that “transfer blood”—that is, blood carried from the scene of the crime on clothes or on a weapon or on the body—will not drip off for more than the first few feet. Transfer blood coagulates quickly. You get a blood trail only from an open wound. Henry Lambert did not have open wounds. If, in fact, a blood trail linked the Allen house and the cabin, that would be strong evidence that Lambert was not the murderer.

  Lambert was convicted of the crime, and if I have said too often in this book that someone was convicted based on weak evidence, I will nonetheless say it again here, because this is not a case in which anyone would argue with me. Lambert was convicted and appealed. The state supreme court upheld the conviction, and Lambert would spend more than twenty years in the state prison, which, you will be surprised to learn, was not actually Shawshank; it was Thomaston.

  Lambert was a model prisoner but continued to insist that he was an innocent man. Over the years a few people began to listen. He became a cause célèbre: justice for Henry Lambert. A number of lawyers worked to try to set him free but, until 1923, without success. In May 1923, a very good lawyer named Charles S. Hichborn persuaded the governor to appoint a panel of leading citizens to listen to Hichborn’s arguments on behalf of Lambert, while the attorney general’s office appeared on behalf of the state. The panel concluded that Lambert was innocent in fact, that he had been wrongly convicted, and the governor issued him a full and complete pardon based on a claim on actual innocence. Hichborn’s plea on behalf of Lambert was published as a pamphlet, entitled “Henry Lambert, a plea for humanity and an argument for justice before the Governor and Council.” The introduction to the pamphlet was written by one of Maine’s most prominent journalists.

  This is quite rare. In the history of Maine there are only four cases in which convicted murderers, incarcerated for years, have been declared to be innocent in fact.

  Let’s go back now to the trial. In July 1902, when Lambert’s appeal was being heard at the state supreme court, the Boston Globe printed this summary of the case against him:

  The case of the state summed up is as follows: That Lambert was guilty because of these facts and circumstances, that certain matches were found in a camp formerly owned by him on the Allen place which were purchased by him, as it is claimed; or certain tracks which were made by some person who wore rubbers, and it is claimed these tracks were made by Lambert; of the story which Maj. Hartnett, the detective, claims was told him by Lambert, which shows that Lambert was the guilty party; that Lambert cannot give an account of himself from 4 o’clock until late in the evening of the 12th of May. The motive which the government claims was infatuation for the daughter Carrie Allen.

  It was a long, hard-fought trial; every point made by the prosecution was vigorously opposed by the defense—perhaps too vigorously. The possibility exists that the jury convicted Lambert in part because they disliked his lawyer. The trial, starting November 16, 1901, lasted into December and was reported at that time to be one of the longest murder trials in the history of Maine. The jury convicted him in two hours once the lawyers finally shut up.

  The boots in question were missing; Lambert had purchased boots recently, but the boots were missing. The man who sold him the boots testified that they were a size six and a half, which would make them too large to have made the prints in question. The men who found the prints and measured them—men who had known Lambert for years—testified on his behalf, insisting that the dimensions of the prints they measured were inconsistent with the boots brought into court by the defense, identical to those Lambert had purchased. The president of the company that manufactured the boots testified for the defense. The defense also presented evidence that Carrie Allen had recently been given new rubbers, and that the prints were more compatible with her boot size than with Lambert’s.

  Henry Lambert was wearing a white shirt at the time most in question; he had put on the white shirt with a high collar in order to go to Greenv
ille to see the “girl,” but he was wearing a kind of dress shoes, and his feet had gotten blistered, so he had ripped a strip off of the bottom of the shirt, from the part that tucks into the pants, to wrap up his blistered toes. Lambert testified that he had purchased the shirt a little more than a year earlier, and that the shirt had never been washed—not relevant, of course, but instructive as to how Lambert lived, thus as to how he was perceived by the community. The prosecution claimed, fairly incredibly, that a piece of charred cloth found in the ruins of the home was the strip of cloth torn from the bottom of Lambert’s shirt.

  The description of Henry Lambert overlaps with that of Bob Hensen on many points. Both were unmarried men, essentially homeless; both stayed with people who were good enough to give them a bed to sleep in. Both men drank; Lambert was illiterate, while Hensen may have had some very limited literacy. Both hunted and ate small game. Both did odd jobs to pick up a few dollars. When a terrible crime occurred, the police in both cases looked at those people who were known to be in the vicinity, and focused on Hensen and Lambert not because there was any real evidence against them, but because—like Reverend Kelly—they were the weakest links among those people known to be near the scene of the crime. In both cases, police arbitrarily discounted the possibility that the crime was committed by someone with no links to the community, and focused instead on the most marginal persons who were members of the community. But whereas Hensen did have a history of violence, and thus was a more reasonable target, Lambert had no history of violent or aggressive behavior.