The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  But none of those sixteen men was Mueller. He fled successfully; no one ever recognized him as the farmhand who had killed his employer’s family. Mueller was last seen headed for the train forevermore, and seven years after the crime happened, it disappeared almost entirely from record and memory, replaced by other victims and other towns.

  CHAPTER XLI

  Brookfield and Villisca

  On the morning of January 7, 1898, Paul Mueller did not truly believe that he would murder Frank Newton and his family. In his two months of working on the Newton farm Mueller had grown to intensely hate Newton. Newton was a big, strong man who insulted him, ordered him around, and treated him without much respect, although Mueller knew that he worked hard and that he did good work. He hated Newton and he fantasized about hitting him in the head with an axe, yes, but he had fantasized about killing people for many years, all of his life, really, and he had never done it. He did not truly expect that this Friday would be any different.

  Something happened that day, though, that would make it different. Friday is usually payday, and Newton was close with a dollar. It is possible that there was a disagreement about money. Perhaps Mueller broke something on the farm or in the house, and Newton was going to hold the cost of it out of his pay, or maybe Newton and Mueller had gone somewhere on an errand and had lunch, and Newton had paid for the lunch but now was going to charge Mueller for it.

  One newspaper report says that Newton was last seen alive when he took a neighbor out to the barn to show him a new piece of equipment, and a different report, published on a different day, says that Mueller had built a sled for Newton. One wonders if the “new piece of equipment” that Newton was showing off was not, in fact, the sled that Mueller had built. It makes sense; Mueller had only been working there a few weeks, so the sled had to be almost new, and farmers do not rapidly accumulate new pieces of equipment, or their barns would fill up with junk. This is speculation, but perhaps Mueller had expected to be paid a bonus for building the sled.

  Mueller had limited command of the English language, and almost certainly did not self-advocate effectively even in his native tongue, and probably he accepted whatever Newton said or did, but seethed about it. But it may not have been money; it may have been that Newton tried to get an extra hour’s work out of Mueller too late in the day, or that there was a misunderstanding about how some task was to be performed, or it is possible that Mueller, living in the Newton house, may have happened to catch a glimpse of Elsie Newton in a naked or vulnerable position, and this fired his perverted lust. Something happened that day, and we will never know what it was, but the volcano in Paul Mueller’s horrible heart could no longer be contained.

  Mueller cut firewood every day, and probably carried firewood into the house every day. On this day, he snuck the axe into the house, up to his room, and hid it there under his bed. The die was cast. He was waiting for the family to fall asleep.

  Paul Mueller was The Man from the Train, and Paul Mueller committed the murders in Villisca as well as many other crimes.

  A serial murderer must, of course, have a first crime, and it is common for the first crime to reveal information about him that in later crimes he will conceal. A serial murderer’s first crime is often poorly planned or completely unplanned. Often, in his first crime, he kills a person or persons with whom he has known ties, making him the obvious suspect in the crime.

  Let us begin by noting the following characteristics of the Brookfield and Villisca crimes:

  Brookfield Murders:

  All Doors Locked or Jammed Shut

  Villisca:

  All Doors Locked or Jammed Shut

  Brookfield Murders:

  All Window Shades and Blinds completely closed

  Villisca:

  All Window Shades and Blinds completely closed

  Brookfield Murders:

  Murder Weapon: Axe

  Villisca:

  Murder Weapon: Axe

  Brookfield Murders:

  Blunt Side of Axe or Sharp: Blunt

  Villisca:

  Blunt Side of Axe or Sharp: Blunt

  Brookfield Murders:

  Family attacked after they had gone to sleep

  Villisca:

  Family attacked after they had gone to sleep

  Brookfield Murders:

  All victims hit repeatedly in the head, some in the body

  Villisca:

  All victims hit repeatedly in the head, one also in the body

  Brookfield Murders:

  Victims’ heads covered with cloth

  Villisca:

  Victims’ heads covered with cloth

  Brookfield Murders:

  10-year-old girl (and mother) sexually exposed in death

  Villisca:

  12-year-old girl sexually exposed in death

  Brookfield Murders:

  Axe left on the floor next to little girl’s bed

  Villisca:

  Axe left on the floor next to little girl’s bed

  Brookfield Murders:

  Jewelry and valuables left in plain sight; some coins stolen

  Villisca:

  Jewelry and other valuables left in plain sight, nothing stolen

  Brookfield Murders:

  Paul Mueller was left-handed

  Villisca:

  Investigators believed that the murderer was left-handed. The fact that Lyn Kelly was left-handed was used against him when he was put on trial for the Villisca murders.

  In addition to these eleven points, many other elements tie Paul Mueller to the Villisca murders or to the series of murders. The articles written about Paul Mueller at the time of the Brookfield murders specifically note that he would travel around on trains, as a tramp, but that after doing this for a while he would settle down in one location and work—as it seems obvious that The Man from the Train must also have done.

  The articles written about Mueller specifically note that he was an efficient woodchopper, and that he had many other job skills. Two articles that we found say that Mueller had worked as a woodcutter.

  The articles written about Mueller specifically note that he was a competent person and a competent worker, as The Man from the Train had to have been.

  It is generally believed that the Villisca murderer was very short. This is generally believed to be true because the upstairs ceiling in the Moore house was not very high. When the murderer swung the axe over his head, he just grazed the ceiling, whereas if he had been of average height or taller, the axe would have hit the ceiling when he swung it over his head.

  Paul Mueller was very short.

  Paul Mueller attempted unsuccessfully to set the Newtons’ house on fire, and this was not done in Villisca, but we know why that was. The Newtons’ house was rural. It would take time for neighbors to respond to a fire. The Moore house was in a small city, and people would have responded immediately to a fire, thus endangering the criminal’s ability to make a clean getaway.

  Other than that and the body count, there is no significant difference between the Brookfield and Villisca murder scenes.

  Paul Mueller had size six feet, very small feet. The first time that two murders in this series were linked by investigators was when private detectives noted the similarity of the crime scenes in Ardenwald, Oregon (near Portland), and Rainier, Washington. Among the things the detectives noticed was that the shoe prints in blood at the two scenes appeared to be the same size. They were size six.

  When the Allen family was murdered in Maine in 1901 there were shoe prints in the mud. They were size six.

  When the Casaways were murdered in San Antonio in 1911, there were shoe prints found outside the house. The reports do not tell us what the size of these prints was, but a man was arrested because (a) he had had a fight some years earlier with Louis Casaway, and (b) he was of the right size to have left the shoe prints. This suggests, not necessarily that the shoe prints were small, but that they were of an unusual size for a man’s foot.
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  Authorities investigating the Brookfield murders believed that the man of the house, Francis Newton, was the first to die. The Man from the Train almost always killed the man of the house first.

  Criminal profiler Robert Ressler, interviewed for Villisca: Living with a Mystery, speculates that the murderer there was over thirty-five years old, because he was very organized and very much in control of the crime scene. Although his exact age is unknown, Paul Mueller would have been near fifty by that time.

  After murdering the Newtons, Paul Mueller crawled out a window to leave the house. This was how The Man from the Train most often entered and left the houses he attacked.

  Of course, on a certain level it is not an answer to say that The Man from the Train was Paul Mueller, because we know so little about this Paul Mueller. We know much more about Lyn Kelly or Frank Jones than we do about Paul Mueller; hell, we know more about Hez Rasco and James Linkous and Nease Gillespie than we do about Paul Mueller. We don’t know where he was born or where he was educated or where he died. The name “Paul Mueller” is too common to be easily researched. Research for articles on him is complicated because there was an optometrist in San Antonio named Paul Mueller who advertised heavily in Texas, yielding hundreds of “bad hits” on the name. Mueller was not born in the United States, had probably only been in the United States for a few years before the murders, and presumably stopped using the name “Paul Mueller” once he had ruined that name. He’s hard to get background information about—not that someone could not do that, if he or she had the right research skills, but it would not be easy.

  After Mueller murdered the Newton family he was both thrilled and horrified by what he had done. He was a careful man, a cautious man, and he had put himself in great danger. More than that, I believe that Paul Mueller, up until that day, had tried to live by the rules. He wasn’t a thief; he wasn’t lazy. He was a poor man who had no advantages in life, but he had tried to do the things a young man is told to do: get out and see the world, yes, but work hard and develop your job skills. He had hoped, somehow, to find where it was that he belonged, and who it was that he belonged to.

  But playing by the rules had never worked for Paul Mueller. He was an ugly little man with no social skills. He dressed badly, had bad teeth, and he did not smile. People did not like him. They didn’t give him any breaks. They didn’t give him any respect. Affection? What was that? Who would ever love him, or kiss him, or hug him? Acceptance was a ship that was disappearing beneath the horizon.

  And so, the hatred grew. Resentment. Loneliness. Anger. Lust. He was a repressed man; following the rules was repression, until the point was reached at which he could be repressed no more.

  Mueller was not a smiling, deferential, Caspar Milquetoast of a man in his outward aspect. He was a man who showed a lot of anger. The Boston Globe on January 13 said that “it was known that Muller was allowed to do pretty much as he wanted to while at the Point of Pines on Quacumquasit Lake, as his employer, Capt Hodgson, was afraid of his treacherous and revengeful temper.” Newton’s brother-in-law described him as “cranky,” which is a little bit like describing John D. Rockefeller as “affluent.” One sentence from a Globe article that I can’t get out of my head says that among the duties Mueller was assigned at the Point of Pines was to act as a bouncer at the dance hall and the hotel dining room. I was surprised, first, to learn that the word bouncer was used in 1898, but more particularly, bouncers are almost always big, strong men. Bouncers are guys you don’t mess with. I’ve never seen a five-foot-four-inch bouncer. Certainly this reflects the fact that Hodgson, strapped for cash, was stretching his employees to cover roles that were not natural to them, but it also tells us something about Paul Mueller: that the chip on his shoulder was not difficult for others to notice.

  Most probably, Paul Mueller had no sexual experience before the murders began, other than masturbation. He was a disgusting-looking little man, not clean, and he was living in a sexually repressive time. He had not developed normally from a sexual standpoint. He was fixated on young girls, but not completely; all sex was an abstraction to him, and it is easy for an abstraction to change shape.

  That night in the lamp-lit house, when he had possession of the bodies of Sarah and Elsie Newton and there was blood all over them but they were his, was the most exciting moment of his life. Although he was quite old for his sexual appetites to be formed, I believe that his sexuality took shape on that terrible night, and when he relived the event later in his mind. Blood was perfume to him.

  When he fled that night he put on a golf cap, a brightly colored, checked hat. It was a fashion among college kids. Perhaps he did that because he had figured out that the hat would distract people, that all they would remember of his appearance was that silly-looking hat, so that when he took the hat off he would be invisible. Perhaps, but I prefer a different explanation. I see the hat as emblematic of his naïveté and of his lack of an accurate self-image. It is difficult for a man to accept that he is a sexual zero. A desperate man will cling to anything that gives him the illusion that he has something. Mueller didn’t see or understand the difference between him wearing a golf hat, and a college kid wearing a golf hat. He had not come to terms with who he was, what his place in life was, and he had not come to terms with that because the terms that were being dictated to him were so harsh. You’re a nothing. You’re a nobody. You’re a loser. He just couldn’t deal with it anymore.

  He was appalled by what he had done, but at the same time it was the thrill of his life. He derived great satisfaction from having done it. It was the one bright secret in his dreadful little closet.

  We cannot be certain that Mueller did not murder the Van Lieu family in New Jersey in 1900, but I am going to assume that he did not. I will note that Mueller had a sister living in Paterson, New Jersey, about seventy-five miles from the scene of the Van Lieu murders, that he was last seen near there and heading in that direction, and that after his disappearance police believed that he might try to seek shelter with that sister.

  In either case, after the Newtons, Paul Mueller did not murder anyone for almost three years. If Mueller had been comfortable immediately with what he had done there would have been another murder sixty days later, but there wasn’t. He still fantasized about killing people, as he always had, but didn’t follow through on it for more than two years.

  And then one summer day he was walking down a lonely road in Maine, hot and tired, and he knocked on the door of the house of Wesley Allen, asking for a drink of water. What was that, a drink of water—but Allen emerged from the house in a bad temper and yelled at him to get his lazy butt on down the road.

  Wesley Allen was about the same age and about the same size as Francis Newton, both big men about fifty years of age, and the Allen house sat near the road in a manner similar to the Newtons’ house. Mueller caught a glimpse of Carrie Allen. Father, mother, daughter: it was the same setup as the Newton house! The beast inside him exploded once again. The second time was easier than the first, and after the second time that was who he was.

  Paul Mueller was The Man from the Train. I am not here to argue with you, and you can believe what you want to believe. I believe that Paul Mueller was The Man from the Train.

  CHAPTER XLII

  Where the Evening Is Spread Out Against the Sky

  The people who lived in small towns a hundred years ago lived lives every bit as rich and varied as your life or my life. Everything meaningful that has ever happened in your life happened just as often to people in small towns a hundred years ago as it does to people in New York or LA in the twenty-first century. People who lived in small towns a hundred years ago fell in love, fell out of love, got married, got divorced, and had affairs inside and outside of marriage. They got jobs, got promoted, and got fired. They started their own businesses, sometimes got rich, more often went bankrupt or just gave it up and closed the doors.

  They formed lifetime friendships; they fell into bitter rivalri
es with people they could not avoid. They joined groups of people who had interests like their own. They played sports; they got fat, got determined to get back into shape, sometimes succeeded and more often failed. They had children and raised their children. They suffered through their children’s failings, and sometimes those were terrible failings. They took vacations; they traveled far from home and brought back souvenirs. They bought a new house or, down on their luck, moved into a dumpy house and hoped to get into someplace better. They rooted for faraway sports teams. They buried their parents and buried their brothers and sisters and sometimes buried their children. They got cancer and had heart attacks and contracted diseases that they had never heard of. Most of them were honest people, but there were thieves among them and thugs and con men. They bought new things, new toys, new inventions, and they were as excited by these new things as you are by yours. They suffered through fires, floods, and other natural disasters. They drank, and some of them became alcoholics, and some of them became drug addicts.

  Amusements? I lived in a town of three hundred people in the 1950s. If we had wanted to, we could have gone to some type of organized event 365 days a year—football games, or basketball, or baseball, church, church picnics, church pageants, school plays, school programs, political rallies, parades, band concerts, VFW meetings, Knights of Columbus events, holiday celebrations, fund-raisers, community meetings, store openings, private parties, public parties. On average, these events were exactly as interesting as the events that you go to now.

  If you read about a crime in a small town, you will encounter frequently the comment that these people lived in the kind of quiet place where nothing very interesting ever happened. This is a despicable thing to say. It is a form of bigotry directed at the past, and bigotry directed at people who live in small towns—and worse yet, it’s ignorant. Pardon my French, but it’s an ignorant asshole comment, and if you ever say anything like that, you are revealing yourself to be an ignorant asshole.