The Man from the Train

by Bill James

7. Hitting each victim in the head, rather than on any other part of the body.

  8. The murder of an entire family in one incident.

  9. The presence among the victims of a prepubescent female.

  10. Special attention being paid to the body of the prepubescent female (staging or posing of the prepubescent female, while other victims are simply left as they were when they were killed).

  11. Masturbation near the body of the prepubescent female.

  12. The crimes occurring in the middle of the night, usually between midnight and 2:00 a.m. or very near to that time frame.

  13. Pulling a blanket over the victim’s head(s) moments before the attack, presumably to minimize blood spatter.

  14. Covering the victims postmortem with some item of cloth.

  15. Covering other items with cloth (such as windows, mirrors, or, in one case, a telephone).

  16. Attacks occurring on farms or in isolated places (up to 1908, and occasionally after) and in towns too small to have a regular police force (after 1908).

  17. Setting fire to the house after the murders (up to 1906, and sometimes after 1906).

  18. The crimes moving north and south along the eastern seaboard states, up until 1909, and moving from east to west across the country after 1909.

  19. The crimes tending to occur on the weekend, and particularly on Sundays.

  20. The crimes tending to occur in areas in which the primary industries are logging and mining.

  21. The moving of a lamp, the lamp left burning, without its glass chimney, at the scene of the crime.

  22. The “timing” or spacing of the crimes, normally a few weeks between attacks, and normally at a distance one from another of one hundred to four hundred miles.

  23. The clear and obvious geographical patterns formed by each set of murders.

  24. The extraordinary competence of the murderer in accomplishing his grisly purpose.

  25. Doors often locked or jammed shut after the crime to delay entry into the house.

  26. Window shades pulled/windows and doors covered on the morning after the murders.

  27. Crimes committed with extreme suddenness and with no warning of any kind.

  28. Victims attacked while soundly asleep (killer may flee from the scene if anyone is awake).

  29. Money and other valuables left in plain sight at the scene of the crime.

  30. All or almost all of the murders in this sequence were committed in houses that burned wood for heat. Somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of homes in this era burned wood as their primary heat source. All or almost all of the crimes occurred in those houses.

  31. Enters the house through the rear.

  32. Commonly removes a window screen, enters the house through an unlocked window.

  33. All or almost all crimes occur in warm weather.

  There is a thirty-fourth element which could have been listed here, which is the moving of bodies postmortem or stacking of bodies atop one another. This was done in at least six cases in this series and probably more, although I decided it was better not to list it as an identifying trait.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  Hurley

  My Dear Friend Tom—I arrived home last Wednesday evening. I stopped on my way home at the scene of the Hurley tragedy. It is one of the most horrible crimes ever committed. Eye or tongue or pen cannot describe it.

  —W. L. Dennis, county clerk of Buchanan County

  The murders of the Meadows family, which occurred in Hurley, Virginia, on September 21, 1909, are the beginning of the pivot in the series. The Man from the Train’s crimes can be divided into three main groups: the early or tentative crimes; the “southern” crime series, which begins in 1903; and the “cross-country” murders. The Meadows family murders and the murders in Beckley, West Virginia, which are very close to the Meadows murders both in place and time, represent the end of the southern incidents and the beginning of the cross-country crime spree.

  It has been several hundred pages since I told you the story of the Meadows family murders, so I will take two paragraphs here to summarize. A family of six was murdered near a mountain village, murdered in the manner that defines our book . . . axe, middle of the night, railroad stop, lumbering community, the whole nine yards. The house was set on fire. The next day the Bluefield Daily Telegraph described it as “one of the most horrible crimes . . . in the history of this section of the country.” Those who rushed to the crime scene found some footprints and got bloodhounds. The bloodhounds tracked the scent up and down mountains and through thick, brushy forests for several miles, perhaps into Kentucky, where they gang-rushed a family of three farmers who were digging their potatoes.

  The farmers fled into their house and defended themselves with firearms until the militia arrived and cooler heads prevailed. Those men turned out to be not involved in the crime. A man named Howard Little, previously convicted of another murder years earlier in Kentucky, was breaking up with his wife, preparing to leave her for another woman, or at least this is what he had told the other woman. The scorned wife accused her husband, Howard, of committing the Meadows murders. He was convicted of the crime and was executed early in 1910.

  There are three things that distinguish the “southern” murders, 1903 to 1909, from the “cross-country” murders of 1910 to 1912.

  1. The southern murders are concentrated in the South and along the eastern seaboard. The cross-country murders run east and west across the country.

  2. The southern murders occurred not in small towns, but (most often) right next to them, within a twenty-minute walk of a small town, usually an unincorporated town. The cross-country murders occurred (most often) actually in a town, and the towns are a little bit bigger, usually large enough that there is a small police presence in the town.

  3. In the southern murders the house is set on fire at the conclusion of the crime. In the cross-country murders the house (usually) is not set on fire but is locked up tight when the murderer flees.

  Of those three, only the first is a bright-line separation. After the Meadows family and Logan’s Turnpike murders, no murders linked to the series happened in the Deep South or in a state touching the eastern seaboard, whereas in the years 1903 to 1909 almost all of the murders occurred in the South and in states touching the eastern seaboard. The other two distinctions are gradual and progressive. In the early part of the run he mostly attacked isolated farms near unincorporated settlements; at the end of the run he was committing crimes mostly in small cities of three to ten thousand residents, but he shifted gradually from one to the other. At the beginning of the run he mostly set fire to the houses as a part of the crime; at the end of the run he mostly locked up the house tight and pulled the blinds shut, but did not set the house on fire. But again, that was a gradual and inconsistent shift.

  I believe that our criminal left the South after 1909 because he had spent 1907 and possibly 1908 as well in a prison, most probably in Florida, Georgia, or Alabama. There is a good chance that he spent that time on a chain gang. Those states in that era would round up transients and sentence them to hard labor, often based on little evidence. I think The Man from the Train got caught committing some petty crime (perhaps breaking into the home of a prospective victim), spent perhaps eighteen months on a chain gang, and decided that he had had enough of the South.

  Of the thirty-three things that identify a crime committed or possibly committed by The Man from the Train, at least twenty-five can be seen in both the South and in the cross-country crime series. But perhaps the largest and most notable change that occurred at this time was not in what the vile little man did, but in what is known about the crimes.

  When The Man from the Train committed murders in isolated areas of the South, little information about the crime permeated the nation’s consciousness. Beginning with the murder of the Meadows family, this no longer was true. The North was very different from the South in terms of newspaper coverage and literacy, and 1911 was very diffe
rent from 1903 in terms of the organization of the wire services and newspaper syndicates. The combination of these two factors shined a bright light onto incidents post-1909 which were objectively similar to events that had gone almost entirely unreported pre-1909. Hurley was a rugged, isolated, inaccessible mountain enclave with no telephone. (The nearest telephone was in Grundy, Virginia, sixteen miles south.) But while the newspapers wrote about how difficult it was to get information about Hurley or to get information out of Hurley, the fact is that hundreds of newspaper stories about the murders in Hurley were published and can be found online today. With the exception of Byers, Pennsylvania (the Zoos family), and, to a lesser extent, with the exception of Rainier, Washington (the Cobles), that was always true from 1909 on.

  Let me tell you what I think happened in Hurley. This involves speculation, but . . . nobody knows; you can have a speculative explanation, or you can have no explanation; it’s up to you. First, I absolutely believe that The Man from the Train committed this crime. It is too good a match for the other southern crimes for that not to be true, in my opinion, and also (b) the case against Howard Little seems to me to be flimsy, and (c) the case seems to be almost certainly connected to the murders of the Hood family, six weeks later and eighty miles away.

  I believe that the fiend was hiding out in an outbuilding or in the cornfield next to the Meadows house. He had been there since dusk. As he approached the house the dogs began to bark. No source says so, but the Meadows family had to have hunting dogs; I just can’t see a family like this not having hunting dogs. It wasn’t reported because it was taken for granted.

  When the dogs wouldn’t stop barking, George Meadows stumbled outside half dressed, probably carrying a pistol in his right hand and a lantern in his left. (I didn’t spell this out in the opening chapter on this case, but Meadows came out of the house with one shoe on and one shoe off, wearing overalls with one suspender fastened and one not.) It was an overcast night, as dark as the inside of a closet. The lantern in Meadows’s hand gave The Man from the Train a tremendous advantage; it illuminated his target. He attacked Meadows from behind, hit him in the head with the axe, and took the pistol and the lantern. (The fact of Meadows being hit from behind with the axe is not supposition. That was reported.)

  The dogs barked furiously. The Man from the Train waited quietly for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, waiting to see whether another light would come on inside the house, waiting to see whether anyone was stirring around in the night. After a few minutes the dogs went quiet, more terrified than on sentry duty. The women and children in the house, hearing nothing except the dogs, drifted back to sleep, except for the two-year old. The body of the two-year-old boy was found in the doorway, leading to all manner of interpretation as to how he came to be there.

  After the crime was over inside the house, The Man from the Train returned to Meadows’s body and discovered to his surprise that Meadows was not quite dead. Dying but not dead, Meadows had pulled a pencil out of his pocket in a futile effort to leave a message about his attacker. (Meadows’s body was found with a pencil in his hand. I grew up among farmers who wore overalls 365 days a year. They almost always carried a pencil in the breast pocket of their overalls.) The murderer put two bullets into Meadows’s torso, hit him in the throat with the axe, picked up the lantern, jammed the pistol in his pocket, and headed down the road toward the railroad station. The fire was first seen by neighbors a little after 1:00 a.m.—100 percent consistent with the normal time frame of The Man from the Train. For reasons that are not clear the neighbors were slow to raise an alarm, and there was no real effort to extinguish the flames until the house had burned out.

  If you have ever walked on a mountain road in pitch blackness you know how treacherous that can be, so The Man from the Train carried the lantern with him until he got back to the railroad line, then set it down on the roadway and abandoned it, still burning. Howard Little had been with his lover, Mrs. Mary Stacy, or perhaps with some other woman, never identified. Now it’s 2:00 a.m., later, maybe; he is walking home in the dark, and . . . here’s a lantern burning in the middle of the road. Weird. He picks up the lantern, looks around for its owner, perhaps calls out “Anybody there?” No one answers. He is not the most honest man in the county; he decides to take the lantern and goes on home. He does not know it, but the moment he picks up that lantern, he is a dead man. He has put into motion the sequence of events that will lead to his execution. He stumbles into his house and sleeps the rest of the night on the couch (a fact testified to at his trial).

  By the time he wakes up and stirs around in the morning, the town is buzzing with the news of the Meadows family murders. He is expecting to go to work, but the Ritter Lumber Mill has shut down to allow the workers to participate in the manhunt. He begins to worry about the lantern, so oddly left burning in the middle of the road, and he looks it over. He sees blood on the lantern. Now he is really worried. He tries to clean the blood off the lantern. He does some yard work, puts the lantern in the barn where he hopes and expects that no one will find it.

  Just my opinion, but I don’t believe that Howard Little had any intention of leaving his wife and running away with Mary Stacy. He told Mrs. Stacy that he was going to do that, yes, but men like Howard Little say things like that. It is reported everywhere in connection with this crime that Little had given Mrs. Stacy $20 to buy a new dress, just days (or the day) before the murders. But he had been giving her money regularly for four years. He was just stringing Mrs. Stacy along. It could have gone on that way indefinitely had not fate intervened, but now there was this crisis; there were these horrible murders, and Howard Little had blundered into the middle of them. All of the tensions inherent in deceit came suddenly to a boil. His wife has reached that moment that happens at the end of a marriage, at which she believes to be true of her husband every evil and wicked thing that you can say about a person, that there is no terrible act which is beyond him. His mistress knows, as soon as he is arrested, that it is all over between them, and that it has not ended the way she had been promised that it would end, and now she is as angry as the wife.

  The murders happened on a Tuesday night. Mr. and Mrs. Little spent Wednesday night in their bedroom together but without sleeping, having the longest and most terrible argument of their lives (this also was testified to in the trial). Hurley is in that triangle in far western Virginia where, if you go five miles west you are in Kentucky, but if you go a few miles east you are in West Virginia. After another bad night and a drop-by visit from private investigators, Howard Little decides that it might be in his best interests to leave town, but he is too late. As he heads east into West Virginia his wife is talking to investigators. A telegraph passes over his head, and Little is arrested by a group of five armed men as soon as he hits town.

  When it becomes known that Little has been arrested in connection with the murders, rumors begin to swirl around Hurley. People begin to say things about Howard Little, damaging things. It’s just talk. Most of the testimony that will be introduced against him at trial is rumors and gossip, but by picking up the lantern he has created actual evidence against himself. He has a cut on his leg, which the prosecutors will insist must have occurred during the murders.

  I mentioned that the private detectives who arrested Little were headquartered in Bluefield, West Virginia. The Bluefield Times on September 28, 1909, reported or alleged:

  Little is a man of unsavory reputation, having killed a man in Pike County, Kentucky, for which he served four years and was pardoned by the governor. It is said that he is seldom engaged in any honest employment, and that he has been implicated in countless bootlegging transactions. He vibrates among the three states, Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia, as the exigencies of the law demand.

  You can see how fairly Little was being treated? “It is said” that he is seldom engaged in any honest employment; in fact he had been regularly employed for many years, and was the shift foreman of the town’s largest
employer. Bootlegging, really? Every male in that county had been involved in countless bootlegging transactions, including the ministers; I exaggerate, but not by much. The people of that area then and now distill their own alcohol, and deeply resent the efforts of outsiders to regulate the sale and distribution. They’ll buy their beer from the store, sure, maybe their whiskey, too—but moonshine is a tradition, not a commodity. Rachel was married in the mountains in Virginia in 2011, and moonshine was passed around at the wedding dance. And as to the claim that Little bounced from state to state “as the exigencies of the law demand”: it’s five miles from Hurley into Kentucky on one side, West Virginia on the other. Everybody in the area crossed state lines routinely, going to church or the store or visiting relatives.

  We know that Little had substantial real property. We know that he had cows; we know that only because Ms. Lee alleged that on the morning after the murders he went out and did yard work first, whereas he normally milked the cows first thing in the morning. The lumber mill was closed for the day, giving him space to do things a little differently than he normally would. We know that he had sheep; we know that only because the private investigators who came to his house on the day before he was arrested used a pretext that they wanted to talk to him about buying some sheep. We know that he had or had control of some land, because his explanation for the cut on his leg was that he had cut it days earlier while chopping down a pine tree on his property. This is why I am skeptical that Little was actually going to run away with Mary Stacy; he would have been giving up a lot. He would be giving up a wife, four kids, cows, sheep, and a good job, to run away with a woman that he had been involved with for four years. It doesn’t seem likely.

  It is said to be evidence against Little that his jacket was damp on the morning after the murders, as if he had washed it and hung it up to dry. Did these people have any idea a) how much blood you would have on your jacket if you wore the jacket while murdering six people with an axe, or b) how difficult it is to wash blood out of a wool jacket?