The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  No, they didn’t. I am not putting them down for not understanding those things; they had never been involved in anything like this before. They didn’t have any concept of how much blood would fly if you hit somebody in the head with an axe. The Baldwin-Felts Agency manufactured a case against Howard Little, not intentionally, not maliciously, but they had to convict somebody in order to claim the reward. Their first step was to check out the known criminals in the area, and they had a hit. Howard Little’s alibi was weak, and he had stumbled home with a lantern that might have come from the crime scene.

  His angry wife jumped feet-first into the case against him, making allegation after allegation. From then on, everything became evidence against him. Perhaps his mistress could have testified that he was with her, but she was a married woman. Is she really going to testify that he was with her at the time of the crime? Almost certainly the investigators told her that he had plenty of time to have committed the crime after he left her bed. The case against Little comes down to five things:

  1. The earlier murder conviction,

  2. The lantern, which may or may not have come from the Meadows house; when the prosecution puts on more than twenty witnesses to testify that they recognize a lantern, that rather seems like too many,

  3. The cut on his leg, which may or may not be related to the crime; 99.99 percent of people who have cuts on their leg did not incur them while committing murder,

  4. The fact that he was away from his house on the night in question, and no one would provide an alibi for him, and

  5. The angry allegations of his wife, which were repeated endlessly in the newspapers, although she did not testify in court.

  Howard Little was a man of substance, but not a man of character. He had been a United States marshal earlier in his life, and he was the shift foreman at the lumber mill. He was the boss; not the big boss back in the office, but the guy out on the floor that you didn’t give any crap to. But, given his character flaws, why should we reject the notion that he might actually have committed this crime?

  Little’s earlier murder happened when he was a young man, almost a boy, and it was essentially a fight over a woman. I am not suggesting that it doesn’t count against him; when you are convicted of one murder, certainly that counts against you when we are considering another. But young people in love are crazy or half-crazy anyway, most of them, and that was a violent time and place, the mountains of eastern Kentucky in 1892. The earlier murder happened in the same time and place as the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. A lot of people got killed over there, and many of the murders were never prosecuted, or even really investigated. It was backcountry, mountain country, an area too rugged for the trains to get to, in the years before electricity or telephones or automobiles. People settled their business without recourse to the law, although sometimes the law interfered.

  This place, Hurley, is somewhat different, much the same, and this time period, 1909, is somewhat different. But this crime is really, really different. This crime is the work of a person who is truly depraved. If you hit small children in the head with an axe, you don’t have “character flaws”: you are a depraved degenerate sociopath. Howard Little, for all of his flaws, was not a depraved degenerate sociopath. And he has no motive that we know of to have committed such a crime. His wife claimed that he had stolen money in the crime and that she could lead the sheriff to the money, but she failed to deliver. There is no money; there is no motive. In order to believe that he committed this crime, we have to believe that this man who had a nice house and a good job and a wife and four kids and a girlfriend on the side, we have to believe that he suddenly decided, for no known reason, to commit this despicable crime. I don’t believe it. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you believe, but I don’t believe it.

  He was not the first person executed for a crime committed by The Man from the Train. And he may not have been the last.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  Beckley and Beyond

  The offer of a $1,000 reward by the county court served to redouble the efforts of those gentlemen with Sherlock Holmes propensities, but all of their time and talents have been used to no purpose.

  —Raleigh Register, November 25, 1909

  From Hurley, Virginia, to Beckley, West Virginia, is eighty-two miles of mountains. After the murders in Hurley, The Man from the Train would have jumped the first train that came through, whether heading north or south. It seems obvious that it was headed south. If he went south, he could have reached Beckley in a fairly short loop; in fact, if you google driving directions from Hurley to Beckley today, the quickest way is to head south to get out of the mountains, drive east fifteen to twenty miles on level ground, and then head back north. If he headed north out of Hurley, on the other hand, then it requires a much longer, wider loop to get over to Beckley.

  The murders of the Hood family took place on Halloween night, 1909, a month and ten days after the murders of the Meadowses. At this point we have to consider the possible significance of the calendar. The association of Halloween with criminal mischief, sometimes dark criminal mischief, did not begin with Michael Myers and the 1978 film. They’ve been connected for hundreds of years. It is more accurate to say that the modern Halloween is a sanitized, child-friendly version of the traditional Halloween than it is to suggest the opposite. It is possible that the first real “pattern” crime committed by The Man from the Train, the murder of the Kelly or Caffey family in 1903, was committed on Halloween; if not on Halloween, it was within a day or two of Halloween. For whatever that is worth, he also committed a crime on Friday the thirteenth.

  In general, we do not think it likely that The Man from the Train was calendar-focused or calendar-driven. He was a drifter; not a hobo, but he did not live a settled life. To be directed by the calendar is characteristic of an orderly life.

  Still, you have to wonder. We can be fairly certain that he was focused on Sundays; the number of attacks occurring on Sundays is obviously high. That’s the calendar.

  Let’s say that there were thirty crimes. We would expect, at random, that there would be one date that would repeat in the thirty crimes—one. In fact, there are several. Two events occurred on September 21: September 21, 1905, and September 21, 1909. Two murders were committed on February 7 (February 7, 1905, and February 7, 1906), and the Villisca murders were committed on the first anniversary of the Hill family murders, near Portland, Oregon. The murders in Paola, Kansas, were committed on the second anniversary of the murders of the Hardy family in Marshalltown, Iowa. This is a suggestion, not a statement, but it is possible that these dates had some significance to him.

  The Man from the Train committed or may have committed crimes in Texas and along the KATY railroad in April of 1908, March of 1910, and March of 1911. That was his time of year to be in Texas; that was where his seasonal work patterns took him.

  Halloween, of course, is sometimes called the Night of Shadows. Shade and shadow, as concepts, have tremendously pliable metaphorical value. The transitory dimensions of darkness can be cast on anything just for being near another object, and then it’s gone and it was never there.

  Today to “shade” means to insult someone by phrasing it as an innocent observation or by not directly mentioning the subject of the insult. In the first decade of the twentieth century, it often referred to what we’d call ghosts. Ghosts haunt all stories of murders, following up the facts with their apparitions in oral narratives around the campfire, cable television con jobs, and horror tourism.

  A few chapters ago, you read a ridiculous story about a man believing a mule spoke to him. In a few more chapters, there will be stories of voodoo for the purpose of covering up crimes. If you’ve heard of this series of crimes before, it may be because of cable channel ghost investigations of the former Moore home in Villisca. But you will find no night-vision camera ghost stories in this narrative. This is about real people who died violently, and a man whose life mission was to eliminate those l
ives.

  In 1909 black people were also called “shades”; that was a relatively benign derogatory term for black people, Shades. The apparently not-too-whippy detectives from Beckley, after a few weeks, consulted a psychic to help them solve the crime. Who did she blame for the murders of the Hood family? Black people, of course.

  We mentioned that fact in chapter II of this book, but it didn’t mean to you then what it means now. Black people were lynched—murdered—for crimes almost certainly committed by The Man from the Train in Statesboro, Georgia, in 1904, in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1906, and possibly, although less definitively, in Frazier, Georgia, in 1908. Unidentified black men were assumed to be responsible for the murders in probably a dozen other cases. This was a potentially deadly charge.

  We mentioned in passing that Beckley investigators consulted a psychic named Elizabeth Blake. That’s actually a rather remarkable story. In 1907 a businessman from Oklahoma, David Abbott, wrote a best-selling book called Behind the Scenes with the Mediums. The point of the book was to expose the tricks and deceptions used by psychics to bamboozle people.

  In 1908 he wrote a follow-up book, The History of a Strange Case, and for this one he visited Elizabeth Blake, intending to expose her as well—and she beat him. He wound up concluding—and writing—that she was a genuine psychic. Abbott claimed that he asked her nineteen questions to which she could not possibly know the answers, and voices in the room answered all nineteen questions correctly—in daylight, and in multiple places.

  But when it came to revealing the murderers, who did George Hood’s ghost reveal? Nameless black men. Real useful, Elizabeth.

  * * *

  After the Logan’s Turnpike murders the next crime in the series is the murders of the Schultz family in Houston Heights, Texas. To refresh your memory, this is the case in which a twenty-one-year-old married woman, Alice Schultz, had been juggling a couple of extra men. Alice, her husband, her two children, and one of her side pieces were found murdered in a three-room shack by the railroad track in Houston Heights, Texas; see chapter III. The sheriff who investigated the Schultz murders, Archie Anderson, realized early in the investigation that the crime had to have been committed by a maniac from the railroad; nothing else made sense. Later, though, he got so distracted by the stories of Alice Schultz’s interesting love life that he ginned up an obviously bogus prosecution of Sandy Sheffield, one of the men who was involved with her.

  Early in the book, I wrote the story of the Schultz murders in understated terms, because I was afraid that what happened to Sheriff Anderson would happen to the readers: you would get so distracted by the stories about who Alice was screwing that you’d lose focus on the real evidence. But as long as you don’t do that, it’s actually obvious that this crime is a part of the series, rather than having had anything to do with Alice’s amours.

  Both the Schultz and Hood family murders hit all of the major checkmarks:

  • A family was murdered

  • Late at night

  • With an axe

  • Very near to a railroad

  • With no evidence of a robbery

  • Entirely without context in the sense of any rational explanation for the crime

  • In both cases a prepubescent female was among the victims.

  The victims were struck with the blunt side of the axe (or some other bludgeon), and neither crime was ever solved. In addition to those facts, the Hood family murders are tied to the series by their close connection in time and place to the Meadows family murders, and the Schultz family murders show the characteristic traits of the house being locked up tight and with all of the window shades pulled so tightly shut that it was entirely impossible to peek in the windows, and also of the heads of the victims being covered with cloth.

  In both the Hood and Schultz cases, the bodies were “stacked” in one room, although at least some of the murders were committed in a different room, and in both cases the murder weapon was not left exactly at the scene of the crime. In both cases the victims were white but were living very near to black neighborhoods.

  However, there is a meaningful “pattern break” between these two crimes. The Meadows and Hood murders are a transition out of the “southern” crime series, but are still connected to that series. The houses were rural or semirural. The houses were set on fire after the crime was committed.

  Although Texas is still sort of a southern state, and Houston is as far south as Jacksonville, the Hood murders in West Virginia represent the absolute end of the “southern” crime series, and the Schultz murders in Houston Heights represent the beginning of the cross-country crime spree. After Houston Heights, the crimes are generally in small towns, rather than just outside small towns. The houses are locked up tight and the windows completely covered, but the houses are not (usually) set on fire. The pace of the murders quickens dramatically; he goes from one or two crimes a year to a crime every few weeks. The victims are not as carefully selected as they were in the past. His routines become more obvious. Probably they become more obvious because he is not burning up the houses anymore, so we have more ability to study the crime scenes after the fact.

  Beginning with the Hood family murders, we see a new pattern emerging. The victims are almost always entertaining guests on the night they are murdered. This is true of the Hoods and Schultzes; it is also true of the Casaways, the Moores (Villisca), the Hudsons (Paola), the Burnhams (Colorado Springs), and probably in other cases as well.

  We believe that early in his run The Man from the Train was researching and preselecting his victims, but that by late 1909 he was just hopping off the train and picking a house. Probably he went skulking around the neighborhood for a couple of hours in the darkness or near-darkness, and when he saw a door open and people coming and going, lights on, that gave him a sense of who was in that house. That was a targeting mechanism.

  By 1910 The Man from the Train was forty-five to fifty years old. He was getting careless, yes, but he was also a very experienced murderer. He could be more aggressive. Probably by this time he was dropping clean clothes where he could get to them after the event. At least sometimes he carried a gun that he could use if he had to use it, although he preferred not to. The connection of the crimes to lumber regions becomes less obvious, although several of the crimes are still committed in lumbering areas.

  It doesn’t look like he is putting down shallow roots anymore; it looks like he is just blowing into town, committing the murders, and getting back on the train. Still, the pattern of the crimes being committed on weekends and particularly on Sunday nights—while that pattern stretches back to the beginning of the series—becomes more obvious and more consistent beginning with the Hood family, and that fact suggests that he was still working during the week, although he must have been changing jobs more frequently than he had before.

  * * *

  While we feel that the Hood and Schultz murders were clearly committed by this villain, we could not say the same about the next two crimes in the series, the Hardy family murders near Marshalltown, Iowa, on June 5, 1910, and the Hubbell family murders, in Barnard, Missouri. Both murders could be a part of the series but might not be (and we are passing over here the Zoos family murders, which we believe were not him).

  We feel strongly that Raymond Hardy did not murder his family near Marshalltown, but was falsely accused by a sheriff who was using a hammer to make the puzzle pieces fit together. However, the Hardy family murders deviate from the patterns of The Man from the Train in several important respects. The Hardy family murders are farther from the railroad track than any other murders discussed in this book, other than the Pfanschmidt murders and the murders in Woodland Mills, Alabama. The murder weapon was not actually an axe, and the murders did not take place in the middle of the night. The family was attacked while they were up and active, which would be atypical for The Man from the Train. There are no children among the victims.

  None of that proves absolutely that i
t isn’t him. He was certainly capable of wandering three or four miles away from the railroad track, and might have done so. The murder weapon was not an axe, but it was a heavy bludgeon of about the same size, and it was a weapon of opportunity, as The Man from the Train always used. They didn’t happen to have an axe around, so he used something else; it’s not a big deal. The manner of the attacks, each victim being hit in the top of the head from behind, is the same as the other cases. By 1910 The Man from the Train had a well-established pattern of attacking in the middle of the night, but there were other cases in which farmers were attacked while going about their evening chores.

  But there is evidence of “taunting” or “warning” behavior here. It is believed that someone saddled and bridled the Hardy family’s horse, without their knowledge, on the day before the crime. The Man from the Train never, ever gave any other family a warning shot like that. He always struck out of the blue, with no warning whatsoever.

  Again, doesn’t absolutely mean it isn’t him. There are also numerous elements of the Hardy murders that are consistent with the series of crimes. There are two other possibilities. First, this may have been The Man from the Train, but it may have been an unplanned and unexpected event from his standpoint—almost an accident, as he would see it. He may have been hiding out in the Hardy family barn, just waiting out the weekend, perhaps planning to steal their horse, when he may have been discovered and confronted by Mr. Hardy, and then he murdered the family just more or less on autopilot. And second, it may have been The Man from the Train, but he may have had a partner in that crime. Several crimes in 1910 to 1911 have the appearance of being almost The Man from the Train but not quite. Something is going on there that we don’t quite understand.

  Whoever murdered the Hardy family in June of 1910 almost certainly also murdered the Bernhardt family in December of 1910. Those two crimes seem to be definitively linked together. However, whether those crimes were committed by The Man from the Train or some other nefarious actor, or by The Man from the Train in combination with some other nefarious actor, we do not know.