The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  Death was instantaneous for all victims; the medical examiner, identified as “Baker,” believed that they had not even woken up before death and stated that “he was positive that none of the wounds were inflicted with the edge of the blade of the ax” (Boston Globe, January 11, 1898). The following Friday, after five consecutive days of heavy daily coverage, the Globe would conclude, probably erroneously, that the family had been drugged. An empty bottle of laudanum was found in the spare room and a local veterinarian had twice treated Newton’s horses for laudanum poisoning. The axe lay on the floor of the bedroom where the women had been killed, next to Elsie’s bed.

  The murderer had exited the house by crawling out a window, leaving the doors locked from the inside. A ten-gallon can of kerosene was open, and kerosene soaked a pile of wood. The murderer had flung a kerosene lamp, lighted, at the woodpile, but the arson attempt had failed; after “charring a few sticks the flame went out, as it did not catch on the oil which was flowing from the can and had not enough strength to ignite the hard oak wood.”

  Police initially assumed that the motive for the murder was robbery, the conventional first explanation. The top headline in the Globe’s first account of the event was KILLED FOR $40. It was not, in fact, a robbery, although the murderer had taken a few dollars. Newton did not keep large amounts of money on his person and had not withdrawn any recently from the bank. Newton’s gold watch was still on its chain, in its vest, hung neatly over a chair in his desecrated bedroom.

  Missing from the scene was the farmhand, Paul Mueller. He was last seen the night of the murder, heading toward the nearest train.

  * * *

  North of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, there is a body of water which is now usually described as Quacumquasit Pond, but which in 1898 was referred to as Quacumquasit Lake. There was a resort at Quacumquasit Lake, with stables, boats, a picnic area, a dance hall (also described as a roadhouse), and a small hotel. In early summer, 1897, Paul Mueller stopped by the Point of Pines resort, penniless, looking for work. The man who ran the resort, Captain H. D. Hodgson, offered Mueller a place to stay in exchange for work. Mueller, who apparently had some pretty solid carpentry skills, did carpentry and repair work at the Point of Pines in exchange for room and board but was never paid money by Hodgson, who was operating the resort on a shoestring.

  More remarkably, there was a horse with what was thought to be a broken leg. A horse with a broken leg was normally put down, in 1898 and often still today, because a broken leg pitches a horse into a painful death spiral. Mueller asked for an opportunity to save the horse, built a brace for the horse’s leg, and saved the horse’s life. This created something of a sensation around the neighborhood. Mueller said that he had learned how to do that in the German army.

  Probably in October 1897, Mueller and Hodgson were hauling a load of wood when a dispute erupted between them. Mueller got out of the wagon and stormed away. This happened on the road in front of the Newton farmhouse, which was three to four miles from the Point of Pines resort. Mueller walked up the driveway to the Newton house on Sturbridge Road, and asked Francis Newton if he could work for him.

  Newton hired Mueller, and Mueller later filed suit against Hodgson, claiming that he should have been paid for his work. Records of that lawsuit may still exist in some old box in the attic of a courthouse, but it is reported that Mueller collected nothing. Hodgson closed the Point of Pines, sold off his furniture, and went back to Gloucester to work on the sea—and, in an odd note, in mid-January, when the search for Paul Mueller was the biggest story in the Boston newspapers, one “Captain Hodgson of Gloucester” pops up on the front page of the Boston Globe in an unrelated story. His fishing schooner had lost a man at sea.

  After the tragedy at the Newton farm an unidentified newspaper editorialist blamed the victims for allowing the murderer to move into their house:

  The moral of this crime, like that of the murders of Mehitable White at Braintree, Mary Emerson at West Dedham and Bertha Manchester at Fall River, is that it is extremely unsafe for lonely farmers to employ any man who happens along without any knowledge of his character.

  —Boston Globe, January 11, 1898

  Newton probably had heard about Mueller saving the horse. Certainly Mueller gave off what we would now call bad vibes, but Newton needed help on the farm, and Mueller was good help at a good price. Mueller slept in a room just off Newton’s own bedroom, a room so close it was “but a step from one to the other.” The only way in to Mueller’s room was through Francis Newton’s. This would make Mr. Newton the first to die that January night.

  Multiple sources stated to the newspapers that Newton was happy with Mueller’s work. Newton’s brother-in-law described Mueller to the Globe as “efficient and agreeable,” although he said that Mueller could be “cranky.” By all accounts, Mueller was a hardworking farmhand and an efficient woodchopper. Farmers used horse-drawn sleds to haul loads in the winter. Applying his carpentry skills, Mueller built a sled for Newton. The Boston Globe on January 13 reported that Mueller “was never known to be drunk, although he would take an occasional glass of liquor or beer.” The same article also notes specifically that Mueller was left-handed; not speculation, not theory: he was left-handed.

  The Globe noted that Newton had a reputation as a strict man, “in the habit of speaking sharply to his hired men and making them toe the mark. He had been heard to do so to Mueller and to tell him if he did not do the work better he would have to get out.” Newton was a hard man, and Mueller, too, was decidedly not interested in getting people to like him. He was often described as “sullen.” But sometimes two sour personalities can complement one another.

  Mueller may have been cheap labor because he did not look or sound quite right. He was notably Other. He was very short and stout (somewhere between five four and five five, weighing about 155 pounds), with long greasy dark hair, a poorly trimmed mustache and occasional beard. He was believed to be thirty-five years old in 1898. His English was recently acquired and sometimes hard to understand. The Boston Globe on January 14 states explicitly that he was German, although other sources speculate that he could have been Polish or Bulgarian. His most striking feature was tiny, widely spaced teeth; later on numerous men would be arrested for having tiny, widely spaced teeth and a German accent. His feet were size six. He had a scar running from his wrist to his little finger and another above his right eye, and he walked with a “sailor’s gait.” He was an “experienced tramp” who dressed like he didn’t have a place to sleep even when he did. He didn’t look like the rest of Brookfield’s community of affluent farmers.

  Now Mueller had disappeared. At 11:30 that Friday, a neighbor named Welch walked by the darkened house, thinking nothing of it except that it was almost midnight so they were probably asleep. Less than a half hour later, several people saw Mueller walking away from the farm, in the direction of the Brookfield train depot. According to the January 11, 1898, Portsmouth Herald, William Eaton on his way home from a grange meeting saw Mueller about a mile from the farm, just before midnight. Fifteen minutes or so later, George Pike and Arthur Rice saw him walking quickly along what is described as the plank walk. They had both said, “Hello, Paul!” but he did not reply and did not look in their direction.

  After that sighting, the account of Mueller’s actions dissolves into a pool of uncertain identifications and a bizarre fixation on his clothing, so easy to discard and replace with his new fortune of $40. Some claimed that Mueller wasn’t headed for the train that night, and relied on the kindness of strangers instead. An East Brookfield resident claimed that Mueller showed up at his house on Saturday night at 8:15, about twenty-one hours after the murders. A short dark man, drunk and hungry, asked for food and lodgings, saying, “I have got to get down east as quick as I can as they will murder me if I stay round here.” He offered card tricks as compensation. No one else in East Brookfield remembered this man, and the police apparently ignored the report.

  More probabl
y Mueller went right to the train. The New York express on the Boston and Albany railroad left the West Brookfield depot at 1:29 that morning. It was six miles by road from the scene of the crime to the West Brookfield depot, but the distance could be cut by almost two miles by walking the railroad track from Brookfield to West Brookfield. Mueller walked quickly, covering four miles or more in an hour or so. In the first Globe report, the all-night ticket agent was sure that no one bought a ticket that night, and the yard watchman didn’t recall anyone jumping on the train from the station side that night, either. Then in the late edition, they remembered a short, poorly dressed stranger who bought a ticket for Springfield, Massachusetts, at 1:05 a.m. that morning, and then quietly waited in the shadows for the train to come.

  He paid for the ticket with a half dollar coin from 1836. Arthur Rice, one of the neighbors who discovered the bodies and saw Mueller—we imagine that Mr. Rice was all up in the police’s face about this case—said the coin belonged to Newton, who had a coin collection that Rice had admired. The story of Newton’s coin collection survived in newspaper accounts of the crime for years, and was mentioned as late as 1902 as one of the key facts establishing Mueller’s guilt. It seems odd that a ticket agent would not at first remember selling a ticket at 1:05 a.m. to a shabbily dressed troll who paid for the ticket with an antique coin, but police relied on the ticket agent’s revised memory and followed Mueller’s trail to Springfield.

  The brakeman on the Springfield express night train, Arthur Cooley, remembered a small stout “laboring” man with long dark hair acting shifty, first on the Springfield platform (presumably while buying another ticket) and then in the smoking cab. “He kept eyeing me, and everywhere I went about the car I could see that he was watching. When I entered the door back of him he looked around, and that made me eye him closely. He would lie down in the seat every few minutes and try to sleep, then he would start up, look about the cab for a few minutes, and then try it again.” The man got off, or at least off the smoking car, in New Haven, Connecticut, but not before the brakeman noted his dress in some detail: “He wore dark clothes and his coat was a rusty color. He wore a light checked cap and had no bags.”

  Like the Brookfield ticket taker, New Haven ticket agent Harold Brotherton had a delayed realization about a man of Mueller’s description in the wake of attention from Globe reporters. He, too, sold Mueller a ticket, at 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, about five hours after the murders. The ticket was again for a short distance, only to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Though Mueller disappeared onto the train immediately thereafter, the agent also noted Mueller’s golf cap, of checked design, with a red thread.

  A baggage handler named Tracey saw the short, capped man get off the smoking train at New Haven and did not see him get back on. The apparently fashionable and observant man said: “We see a good many men wearing those caps, but they are all students, and so I was somewhat surprised to see a man of his appearance with this style of cap.” Brotherton seemed amused by the golf cap, calling it “singular” in contrast with his poor clothing. Tracey watched the man leave his area, and he did not return.

  The Globe was convinced that Mueller would have visited a lunch counter; they devoted considerable column inches to speculating on Mueller’s possible lunch counter activities. On January 11, the Globe reported that someone might have seen Mueller at a lunch counter in Palmer, maybe. Palmer was a small town halfway between Brookfield and Springfield. They were confident of no facts, and it’s not apparent why they reported it, but then, this is still what happens when reporters run out of facts.

  The Globe’s weird focus on the lunch counter reflects the clever function of Mueller’s contrivance to change trains as often as possible. Since there were no security cameras or photographs of any kind to confirm his appearance, police had to rely on fuzzy eyewitness accounts, degraded by time and distraction. Mueller’s frequent stops meant that no one saw or talked to him for very long. Each person who did notice him had a different perception of where he was going. Police tracking him had to chase those reports down, from station to station, two days behind a train, comparing and contrasting different accounts. Instead of clarifying, these reports did more to confuse than help the police, and Mueller’s trail vanished near the coast in southern Connecticut. Mueller had received mail from a sister living in Paterson, New Jersey, and it was suspected that he might be headed to Paterson to seek shelter with his sister. From New Haven to Paterson is eighty-eight miles.

  Running away is a skill. Like an athlete, the ones who are best at it make it look easy. His method seems simple, and it is. His method seems obvious, and it is. The Man from the Train makes it seem absurdly easy to evade capture, because he was good at it. The Boston Globe reported on February 13, 1898, that Brookfield authorities were losing hope about finding Mueller, and were planning to raise a $5,000 reward fund for his arrest. “This amount would set some professional detectives to work on the case,” said the Globe, “for it would be sufficient to pay for the time spent if Mueller was caught.” But Robert Pinkerton, interviewed on the subject, said that Mueller’s trail was too cold, that the money would do no good, and that if Mueller was ever caught it would just be a matter of luck.

  The Boston Globe (and other newspapers) explored the possibility that Mueller had done this before. In July 1897, a sixty-five-year-old widow named Hattie Woodward was found dead in her isolated farmhouse, her feet under a stove, her large and able body showing signs of a struggle. The culprit was thought to be another short dark foreign man named Joseph Borres, who had been hired at a neighboring farm for the previous two months and then promptly disappeared. The newspapers discussed the possibility that Borres and Mueller were one and the same. It seems clear to the authors that they were not.

  It’s not $5,000, but the Brookfield community raised a fund of $500 as a reward for Mueller’s capture, and detectives tracked him north and south to Connecticut and New York. At one point they thought he took a boat from New York to Europe. Detective Tarbell, one of the lead investigators on the case, brought back from New Haven “a pair of trousers that were left by a man in that city” with stains on them that might or might not have been human blood. A worker at Point of Pines was unable to positively identify this random pair of pants as belonging to Mueller. The mysterious trousers were the last physical evidence connected with Mueller.

  The most puzzling omission in the chase for Paul Mueller was the failure to make a drawing of him. There were dozens of people in Brookfield who knew what Paul Mueller looked like. While it was not Standard Operating Procedure for police in 1898 to make a drawing based on witness reports, it had certainly been done in many other cases. Wanted posters from the Wild West era routinely included a drawing of the suspect. It would seem that one would have been useful in this case. The Boston Globe printed line drawings of Arthur Rice, the last man to see Mueller on the road, and of Tarbell, the policeman in charge of the case, as well as many other items, such as a drawing of the kerosene can, but we located no published drawings of Mueller.

  The story of Paul Mueller lived on in New England newspapers for several years. Gradually the newspapers began to conflate his story with that of others. They would refer to him as Mueller, Muller, or Miller; the spelling of names was much less fixed in 1900 than it is now. Many people were marginally literate; they might spell their name one way one time, another way another time . . . what did it matter? Most of the people in this book had their names spelled different ways by different newspapers. New England newspapers began increasingly to bring into the Paul Mueller story reports about a man named Ed Gigner, Gignor, Gignon, or Gognon, who spent some time in Athol, New York, in the summer of 1896, and who once received a letter from a sister addressed to him as “Ed Miller.” It seems obvious to us that Gigner, whoever the hell he was, was not Paul Mueller, and that talking about him just confused the issue and contributed to Mueller’s eluding justice.

  But the Mueller/Newton/Brookfield crime was not invisible or
underreported. It was as widely reported in its day as the Villisca murders. Enough information exists that a short book could be written about the case. The New York newspapers published long stories about the Brookfield murders and the search for Paul Mueller. Reports of Mueller in one prison or another poured in across the country. In the first month after the event, seven different men, mostly transients, as close as Worcester and as far away as Nebraska, were arrested and held on suspicion of being Mueller. Another five were arrested in the year after. The mistaken arrests were made until 1905, with a total of sixteen or more men arrested for being short and poorly dressed in the presence of an officer who couldn’t forget about the Newtons.

  Chapter XXIX of this book was about the murders of the Stetka family near Sydney, Nova Scotia, in February 1906. In late February 1898, a man was arrested in rural Sydney, within fifteen miles of where the Stetkas would be murdered, after talking a lot about the crime in Brookfield. Somebody noticed that he answered the description of Paul Mueller: German, short, stout, long dark hair, and poorly trimmed facial hair.

  The arrest of these ersatz Muellers always made the papers; their release did not always make it and apparently did not in this case. But while we assume that this man must have been cleared of suspicion of being Mueller, the fact that this happened so close to the place where the Stetkas would be murdered eight years later, in an isolated, thinly populated area hundreds of miles from anything else connected with this story, seems worthy of note.