The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  The community could have known that the little girl was sexually assaulted, it would seem, only if her body was staged in some manner suggestive of sexual assault—for example, if her underwear was missing and she was found with her limbs in an unnatural position. Which, of course, is exactly how The Man from the Train left young girls, in a number of other cases.

  In this book we have seen that there is always someone who can play the role of first suspect. There is always someone who can be immediately identified as having probably committed the crime. In many of these cases, most of these cases, that first suspect is able to clear his name when given the opportunity to do so. Paul Reed, at the beginning of the investigation, was pitched into the role of first suspect because of some thrown-away shoes and a poor reputation in the community. The question I would ask is, Was Paul Reed ever given any real opportunity to clear his name?

  The belief in Reed’s and Cato’s guilt, I think, is sustained by the belief that innocent people would not confess to a crime that they did not commit; therefore, while these stories are clearly not true, they must include some basic truth. Take that away, and the case against Reed and Cato collapses like a tent without a tent pole.

  But, in fact, innocent people confess to crimes that they did not commit all the time. I believe that, in the aggregate, there are more confessions to murder by innocent people than by guilty, although most of these false confessions are accounted for by crazy people. If you take almost any fifteen- to eighteen-year-old boy and put him in a room with a bunch of police officers and tell him repeatedly that “don’t you lie to us, boy, we know that you committed this crime, and we’ve already got all the proof we need about that,” that young man will confess to the murder, even if he is completely innocent. Vulnerable people will confess to murder, in that situation, because they are afraid of the authority figures, and they have been prohibited by the authority figures from saying that they did not commit the crime.

  As people get older, more mature, more confident, they gradually gain the ability to resist being bullied into false confessions. But from the moment they were accused, Paul Reed, Harriet Reed, and Will Cato would have known that they were in serious, serious danger of losing their lives. I am aware of the risks of speculating based on negative stereotypes—in this case negative stereotypes of segregation-era southerners—but is it unreasonable to speculate that Paul Reed was put into a roomful of men, one of whom said, “Don’t you lie to us, boy. We know that you are involved in this, and you had better tell us the whole truth right now or you are not going to see the sun come up tomorrow morning.”

  We cannot assume that this happened, but it is reasonable to think that Paul Reed, Harriet Reed, and Will Cato were all interrogated in this manner. Harriet Reed was the weakest link; she broke first, telling a story that fit the facts of the Hodges family murders as best she understood them. Reed and Cato said the things they did after that in an effort to minimize the damage. Probably Reed accused one person after another because he was trying to guess who might actually have committed the murders, in the hope that that person would then be arrested, would confess to the crime, and would admit that Reed was not involved. It was a lost cause. Once Harriet Reed had implicated her husband and Cato, they were Dead Men Walking. At that point it was merely a question of whether they would be executed by the state or murdered by a mob.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Hughes

  Two railroad lines crossed in Trenton, South Carolina; actually, because of the consolidation of rival lines in 1894, two branches of the same railway system, the Southern Railway. In 1904 something less than 200 people lived there, in what was normally called a railroad stop. When the Hughes family was murdered in Trenton on December 8, 1904, the first reports immediately connected the crime to the murders of the Hodges family:

  Another Crime Laid to Blacks

  Family Murdered in South Carolina Under Peculiar Circumstances

  TRENTON, S. C.—Dec 8. An entire white family, living near here, has been murdered. Meager details received resemble the killing of the Hodges family at Statesboro, Georgia last August. The Hodges family was murdered by an organized band of negroes formed for purposes of wholesale murder.

  —Decatur (Illinois) Daily Review, December 8, 1904

  Early in the morning of December 8, the residence of Benjamin Hughes, in Trenton, was discovered by neighbors to be on fire. (Almost 100 percent of newspaper reports say that the crime occurred on December 9, 1904, but it was, in fact, December 8.) By the time the neighbors gathered it was too late to get into the house and save anything. Once the fire had died down, however, searchers found the charred, mostly unrecognizable remains of Mr. Hughes, aged forty-two, his wife, Eva, same age, and their daughters, Emma, aged nineteen, and Hattie, aged fourteen. The bodies of all three women were found in their beds and were undisturbed, suggesting that they had been murdered in their sleep. Their heads had been crushed, probably (according to contemporary news reports) with an axe. Eva Hughes’s face had been covered with a pillow.

  The confounding fact of the Hughes family murders is that Mr. Hughes was shot, and also that he was clothed, rather than wearing pajamas or some such. Setting aside that one circumstance, it would be perfectly clear that these murders were a part of our series. Trenton, South Carolina, is almost exactly a hundred miles due north of Statesboro, Georgia. The Hughes family was murdered 133 days after the Hodges family, a normal space-and-distance relationship for the series. The Man from the Train was moving, as he almost always did, in a consistent geographical pattern, drifting north from Florida to Georgia, from Georgia to South Carolina, from South Carolina to Virginia, where a family would be murdered (and a house set on fire) two weeks later.

  The Hughes family was murdered without warning and without any rational explanation. The house was set on fire. A young girl was among the victims. Money and jewelry were left in plain sight. The murders were apparently committed sometime after midnight.

  If we believe that this crime was committed by The Man from the Train—which I do—this crime becomes a “first” in two ways. Early in his run, The Man from the Train murdered farm families living near small towns but never actually committed a murder in a small town. Later, of course, that became his dominant pattern; later on almost all of his murders were committed in towns too small to have a regular police force, like Trenton, but this would be the first.

  Also, this would be the first time that two crimes committed by The Man from the Train were connected by the newspapers. Of course, neither of these is any barrier to believing that the crimes were part of the series, since, if he was committing murders early on in rural areas and later on in small towns, some murder has to be the first one in a small town.

  But Mr. Hughes was shot. In the case with which we began this book, the murders in Hurley, Virginia, in 1909, a man was shot, apparently outside the house, while his family was murdered in their beds, with an axe. It is difficult to understand how this happened. If the man was shot first, why didn’t the family wake up? And if the family was murdered first, well, where was the father, and why was he found outside the house? This is the same problem exactly: neither scenario seems to make sense.

  The scenario that does make sense was summarized nicely by the Eau Claire Weekly (Wisconsin) December 9:

  Investigation revealed the fact that unknown parties, believed by the tracks to be three men, entered the house through the rear door, murdered Mrs. Hughes in her room with an axe, then went to the room occupied by her daughters Emma, aged nineteen, and Hattie, aged fourteen, and murdered them in like manner without the girls awakening. Hughes evidently heard the noise and went from his room into the hallway, where he was shot down, a revolver being found by his side.

  A special train was sent to Columbia for bloodhounds to track the murderers. Citizens are guarding the ground about the rear door of the house, where the tracks were found, to prevent disturbing the only means of arriving at a clue.

  Yo
u may be surprised to learn that the bloodhounds didn’t find a damned thing. I don’t believe there were three murderers; I believe there was one, but otherwise I think the Eau Claire report has it right—he entered through the rear of the house (as he always did), murdered the women in the rear bedrooms, and then was confronted by the man of the house, who slept in a different room, but who happened to be awake. And armed. The Man from the Train sometimes carried a gun, and would use it if he had to. We have seen indications of that on other occasions, but this seems more definitive. Also, in many of these cases it is unclear whether the young girls were assaulted while alive or postmortem, but if we accept this scenario we have evidence about that issue. Hattie’s body was not staged or molested because, just after she was killed, the murderer was confronted by an armed man and had to shoot his way out.

  Many newspapers would speculate, because Hughes was killed with a gun and a gun was found near his body, that Hughes had killed his family and then set fire to the house before committing suicide. That crime, of course, is much more common than for a family to be murdered by an intruder for no known reason. The human mind searches for the familiar; we always tend to believe that what has happened is what usually happens. In the words of a wire service story about this case: “The theory of suicide rests largely on the absence of motive for murder and the fact that bloodhounds were unable to discover any trail leading from the house.”

  But that’s not right, and we know that it’s not right for several reasons. First, the coroner’s inquest ruled that the Hughes family was killed by intruders, not that I would be hesitant to argue with them if I didn’t agree. (Parenthetically, the county solicitor who presided over the inquest was John W. Thurmond, the father of South Carolina’s most successful twentieth-century politician, Senator Strom Thurmond.) Second, it would be extremely unusual for a man to murder his family with an axe and then kill himself with a gun; in fact, I have never heard of that happening. A man will kill his family with an axe (on rare occasions) if he doesn’t have a gun, but if he has a gun . . . well, why would he do that? Third, the fire was set some distance from where Mr. Hughes’s body was found, which, again, would be unusual in a murder/suicide scenario. And fourth, there is no indication that Hughes was a troubled man or an unstable man, no indication that he had a drinking problem or his wife was running around on him or anything like that. He was not in financial trouble; he was well-off, well-to-do. There is no indication that the family was unhappy. A ship will sink in a storm; it doesn’t sink in calm waters. Murder/suicides do not normally happen without context.

  CHAPTER XXV

  The Christmas Day Murders

  James Linkous was six foot four and weighed 170 pounds, a string bean who had settled in a mountain town of 3,500 people and was making a living painting houses. He had small, beady eyes and an exceptionally long mustache. He walked slowly with his arms swinging at his side in a way that reporters associated with people from the mountains. He was fifty-five years old in 1904, married to a woman the same age who had the same name as his state, Virginia Linkous.

  Several years earlier a man named Frank Vaughn had abandoned his wife and three small children at a time when their mother was terminally ill. Destitute and near death, she had given her children away. One of the three, Willie, had been adopted by Virginia Linkous. In 1904 he was nine years old, and Willie and Virginia were entirely devoted to one another. The Linkous family lived in Radford, Virginia, in a building that had been built as a store with an apartment on the second floor. The store had failed, and the lower half had also been converted to living space; the Linkouses lived in the upstairs apartment, which was nicer, and a woman named Mrs. Texas Butterworth lived in the lower half with her mother and son; that’s right, the women of the house were named Texas and Virginia. I’ll let you snicker about that as long as no one says anything about pancakes. There were no locks inside the house or on the outside door; the landlord would say at trial that “the tenants” had requested locks but that they had not been installed.

  There are no reports of Linkous being abusive or difficult to live with or of strife within the family; in fact, the reports are entirely the opposite—he was kind, sober, and he treated his wife and adopted child very well. Mrs. Butterworth said that she had heard no arguments between the couple with whom she had shared a house for several months. Christmas Day in 1904 happened to fall on a Sunday. On Saturday night Virginia Linkous was cheerful and in good spirits, and invited the Butterworths to share Christmas dinner with her family.

  A little before 4:00 a.m. on Christmas Day, Mrs. Texas Butterworth awoke to find the house filled with smoke. The next thirty minutes were divided between confusion and terror. She rushed upstairs, pounded on the door of the Linkous apartment, and tried to rouse the family, but the doorknob was red hot. Returning down the stairs she got her aged mother out of the house, but the old woman went back in to find her grandchild, got disoriented, and couldn’t get out. Eventually the grandson found her and led her to safety. Everyone downstairs got out of the house.

  The same was not true of the upstairs, however, and in that half hour Mr. Linkous’s behavior would cost him his life. His story was that he was awakened by screaming, perhaps someone screaming “Fire,” and, choking through the smoke, exited the house, believing that his wife and child were following behind him. Apparently the couple slept in separate rooms, which many couples did at that time. Reaching the ground, he rushed to the stable, which was near the house, to take care of his livestock, to get them to safety; this was his story.

  But the story from others was different, or told in a different way; to others he seemed indifferent to the fate of his wife and adopted son and worried only about the livestock and about some “fodder”—firewood—that was stacked up next to the house. He seemed very concerned to get the fodder away from the house, lest it should feed the fire, but unconcerned about his family.

  Mrs. Butterworth is always referred to in the papers as Mrs. Texas Butterworth, except occasionally she is called Texas Shelor, Shelor being her maiden name. She also had apparently been abandoned by her husband, and it appears that she drank a bit. Mrs. Texas Butterworth—the most damaging witness against Linkous—testified that when she got out of the house she called to Linkous to go save his family, but he ignored her and continued to move his fodder away from the house. A town policeman testified that when he appeared on the scene the fire was “no larger than a railroad torch” and that he tried to get Linkous to focus on saving his family, but that Linkous ran past him and ran a block away to sound the fire bell. Numerous other neighbors reported to the scene quickly. Several of them insisted that when they arrived on the scene, the fire was such that they still could have gone into the house and would have done so, had they known that the Linkouses were still in there, but they assumed that the Linkous family—like the Butterworths—had already taken shelter with the neighbors. One neighbor said that he asked Linkous why he did not go back into the house, the fire still being fairly small, but that Linkous said it was too late.

  When the fire was brought under control, it was learned that the victims had been bludgeoned to death with “some dull object” before the fire was set. Immediately on learning this, a lynch mob began to form, and in the evening of Christmas Day Linkous was brought to a jail in Roanoke, fifty miles away, to protect him from being lynched. At first some suspected that Linkous might have been involved with Texas, but that suspicion went nowhere, leaving Linkous with no apparent motive.

  Linkous was charged with the murder of his wife and adopted son and was put on trial about three weeks after the murders. The evidence against him consisted entirely of support for these two facts:

  1. That if he didn’t kill them, it would be a complete mystery who did, and

  2. That his behavior in the half hour or hour after the fire was discovered seemed to numerous people to be inappropriate.

  That’s it; there was no testimony against him of any other kind. The judge
instructed the jury that they did not need to know what Linkous’s motive was if they were convinced that he had in fact committed the crime. Linkous was convicted of first-degree murder after two days of testimony and fifteen minutes of deliberation, and was sentenced to death.

  After Linkous was convicted the community split as to his innocence or guilt. During the trial he had sat motionless, holding his head in his hands. Away from the trial he made an exceptionally good witness for himself. As he neared death he spent time with two local ministers, who reported to the community that either he was entirely innocent or he was “the best hypocrite they had ever met.” On the night before he was to be executed he asked that Mrs. Texas Butterworth be brought to his cell so that he could ask her some questions. “Have I ever done wrong to you?” he asked. “Have I not always treated you with kindness?” She agreed that he had always been kind to her, and that he had done her no wrong. On Christmas Eve he had given her a bottle of whiskey. “And now I am to pay for my kindness with my life,” he said. Old friends arrived late in the night to say their good-byes. He was served a “sumptuous” breakfast, which went untouched. He was informed that morning that his body was to be sent to Richmond for study by medical students. “My God,” he said. “I did think the Governor would allow me to be buried by the side of my wife.”

  He was executed in Radford at 7:39 a.m. on March 17, 1905, St. Patrick’s Day. On the day of his execution he conducted himself with courage and dignity, his head held high. On the scaffold he shook hands with his jailers and executioners, and thanked them for the kindness with which they had treated him. About fifty people were there to witness the execution. Before his death he made the following statement: