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WORK TITLE: The Man from the Train
WORK NOTES: with father, Bill James
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Lawrence
STATE: KS
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Rachel-McCarthy-James/478911560
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Daughter of Bill James (senior adviser to the Boston Red Sox); married; husband’s name Jason.
EDUCATION:Attended Hollins University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Bitch, Broadly, and New Inquiry.
SIDELIGHTS
Rachel McCarthy James studied creative writing in college and is a contributor to periodicals. She is also coauthor with her father, sports writer Bill James, of The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery. The book focuses on an unsolved series of murders that the authors believe was the work of one of the deadliest serial killers in American history. Bill James has extensive expertise in statistics and analytics. “He has been called the ‘Sultan of Stats,’ Major League Baseball’s analytics pioneer,” wrote Kansas City Star Online contributor Rick Montgomery. Montgomery added: “In researching ax murders of the early 1900s, however, James relied less on statistics and more on logic to conclude that a serial killer, riding the rails, invaded homes and unleashed mayhem on perhaps 100 victims.”
Over the course of nearly a decade and a half, from 1898 to 1912, numerous families across the United States were found bludgeoned to death, usually from the blunt side of an ax. Most were killed in their sleep. Nothing of value was taken from the homes, and the murdered people were typically arranged together with their faces covered with cloth and, in one case, hay. Although a couple of the cases received national attention, no one thought that the many murders were connected. The authors were able to make connections among the murders only through the Internet. “Online newspaper archives and obscure true-crime accounts via Google Books allowed the Jameses to compare far-flung killings that authorities back then had little means of chasing down,” wrote Kansas City Star Online contributor Montgomery. At the time of the murders, news did not spread rapidly, most homes still did not have telephones, and the federal government kept no national database of crimes. “The strength of the book hangs on their [the authors’] diligent research and analysis connecting crimes into the closing years of the 19th century,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
One of the things that the James’s learned that seemed to connect the murders was that all of the victims lived within a short walking distance of a railroad line. Sifting through thousands of various local newspaper articles, court transcripts, and other public records, the authors believe they learned the true identity of the murderer. Meanwhile, the book points out that in several of the cases innocent people were most likely charged with murder. Often, those accused were African American, and at least two were lynched after being accused of murder.
To connect the murders, the authors point out the many commonalities among them, including the fact that axes were typically left at the scene alongside a lantern without its chimney. In addition, many of the female victims were arranged in sexually suggestive positions. Furthermore, the murders typically involved entire families, most in the Midwest, and often seemed to occur after dark when the family had gone to bed. Sometimes the bodies were burned. Overall, more than thirty commonalities are cited, although not all apply to every murder.
One murder that is especially highlighted in the book is the slaughter of a family in the summer of 1912 in Villisca in Montgomery County, Iowa. The murderer broke into the home of a businessman and his family, bludgeoning eight people with an ax’s blunt side, including six children. The viciousness of the killings stood out, with all of the victims heads completely demolished. An investigation uncovered a number of suspects. One of them was tried twice, with one trial ending in a hung jury and the other in an acquittal. The crime was never solved. Jeremy Lybarger, writing for the Millions website, noted: “The idea that axe murders somehow represented America’s id during a period of runaway modernization is one of the book’s many fascinating theses” and went on to call the book “a riveting, evocative feat of reportage and historical sleuthing.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “The narrative becomes addictive, and it’s easy to get caught up in the elaborate search and the authors’ conclusions, which are plausible.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2017, review of The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery, p. 86.
ONLINE
Buffalo News Online, http://buffalonews.com/ (September 21, 2017), Gene Warner, review of The Man from the Train.
Kansas City Star Online, http://www.kansascity.com/ (September 14, 2017), Rick Montgomery, “What Do Baseball Stats and Century-Old Ax Murders Have in Common? This Guy.”
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (May 15, 2017), review of The Man from the Train.
Millions, https://themillions.com/ (October 9, 2017), Jeremy Lybarger, review of The Man from the Train.
Star Tribune Online, http://www.startribune.com/ (October 27, 2017), Adam Morgan, review of The Man from the Train.
Rachel McCarthy James lives in Lawrence, KS with her husband Jason. She studied creative writing at Hollins University, and her work has previously been featured in publications including Bitch, Broadly, and The New Inquiry. The Man from the Train is her first book.
What do baseball stats and century-old ax murders have in common? This guy.
BY RICK MONTGOMERY
rmontgomery@kcstar.com
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September 14, 2017 11:45 AM
Updated September 14, 2017 12:22 PM
On Dec. 10, 1910, long before Leawood was a city, a concerned postman and neighbors around the Bernhardt farm found three men in the barn, bludgeoned to death.
A fourth body, that of 75-year-old Emeline Bernhardt, turned up in a bedroom closet. She appeared to have tried to hide from a killer swinging the blunt side of a pick ax.
The slayings went unsolved.
More than a century later, baseball historian and metrics nerd Bill James is on the case.
James, of Lawrence, links the carnage at the Bernhardt farm — which stood near what now is 135th Street on the Kansas side of the state line — to dozens of similar ax murders from Oregon to Maine to Florida. He believes all could have been carried out by the same monster, someone James calls The Man from the Train.
“The Man from the Train” is also the title of James’ forthcoming book that he co-authored with his daughter Rachel McCarthy James. It could only have been plucked out of history by a person with the obsessive curiosity and attraction to statistical probability as James.
He has been called the “Sultan of Stats,” Major League Baseball’s analytics pioneer. In researching ax murders of the early 1900s, however, James relied less on statistics and more on logic to conclude that a serial killer, riding the rails, invaded homes and unleashed mayhem on perhaps 100 victims.
“He just liked to kill,” James said in a recent interview. “He was good at it.”
McCarthy James, also of Lawrence, assisted in the research. Together they chronicled a 15-year spree of slayings across small-town America, peaking in 1912 with the unsolved slaughter of eight persons, ages 5 to 43, in a home in Villisca, Iowa. Coming days after the murder of a Paola, Kan., couple, the Villisca rampage is the most infamous crime tagged to The Man from the Train.
Supposing that he committed just half of the murders that the Jameses have identified, the man would rank among the most accomplished killers in U.S. history.
In some cases innocent persons were charged with the murders and executed, the Jameses contend. Commonly, African Americans were wrongly implicated; at least two were lynched in Georgia.
Late in their book, the authors out the true killer, they believe, by name. This story will not spoil the ending. But until the publisher Scribner releases the book Sept. 19, you would have never heard of this murderer by name anyway.
So many similarities
Bill James’ brain usually is engaged in matters less macabre.
“I dream about baseball every night,” he said. “I’ve never in my life dreamed about ax murders.”
James, 67, is a senior adviser to the Boston Red Sox. His writings on baseball-by-the-numbers — some argue way too many mind-numbing numbers — date to the late 1970s, when he offered crude publications while working in a Lawrence pork-and-beans cannery.
From the Bill James Baseball Abstracts to one previous foray into true crime published in 2011, the Holton, Kan., native has toggled between breaking down the national pastime and acts of violence with casual, sometimes playful prose.
(“Skeptical?” asks the preface of the latest book. “Of course you’re skeptical. You’re either skeptical or you’re stupid, and you don’t look stupid. But hear me out....”)
It’s a tale hard to fathom: A man travels the country finding families to kill, which he does with the grisly gusto of Hollywood’s “The Terminator.”
“If he got into a home, nobody inside would live through it,” said McCarthy James.
And the Man from the Train never was caught.
If the Jameses are correct, he murdered for more than a decade before anybody thought of connecting the crimes, despite their similarities:
▪ With rare exception, the victims died from the blunt side of an ax, not the blade.
▪ They lived in thinly populated areas within a short walk of a railroad track.
▪ The crimes occurred without warning, without a robbery, and typically around midnight on a warm weekend.
▪ Many victims were bludgeoned in bed while sleeping.
▪ The bodies of young females often were arranged in sexually suggestive positions. And nearly every victim — no matter the gender or age — was found with a cloth over the head. (The three men in the Bernhardt barn in Johnson County were covered with hay.)
▪ The axes were left at the scene, typically alongside a lantern with the chimney removed.
The authors cite more than 30 commonalities — not all of them applying to every killing. But the bulk share enough similarities to allow the Jameses to float “a mathematical answer” to the question of how many homicides, in a given year, one would expect to be out of the playbook of The Man from the Train.
“Zero,” they write. “As a random set of facts, you wouldn’t expect any murders to meet all of those conditions, in a typical year or a typical five-year period.”
And yet, they wove a good enough case to lead Publisher’s Weekly to declare: “The strength of the book hangs on [the authors’] diligent research and analysis connecting crimes into the closing years of the 19th century. Even those skeptical at the outset that one man was responsible for so much bloodshed are likely to be convinced.”
Can there be more?
Why didn’t sleuths figure this out a century ago?
Elementary, my dear Watson: No search engines.
Without the internet, Bill James has no book. A simple search of “family and murders” was enough to rev up McCarthy James’ research on her laptop.
Online newspaper archives and obscure true-crime accounts via Google Books allowed the Jameses to compare far-flung killings that authorities back then had little means of chasing down.
Jennifer Gatewood Owens, a University of Missouri-Kansas City assistant professor of criminology, said that news of the era traveled slowly, no federal database of crimes existed and telephones were rare in homes, especially around small towns.
“Imagine how many calls you’d be making to even begin to know there was a connection between these murders?” Owens said.
The time and expense of stitching together a serial-killer case would’ve kept many investigators from starting down that path, she said: “Gathering this evidence a long time ago would’ve required someone thinking way out of the box.”
In then-rural Johnson County, investigators took the usual approach to the murders at the Bernhardt farm.
They keyed in on logical suspects.
Thinking the deaths in the barn had to be the work of more than one person, police rounded up former hired hands, a neighbor who quarreled with the Bernharts and drifter in a nearby town who was talking up the murders. All would be exonerated.
Eighteen days after the slayings, the press declared the investigation stuck and soon gave up on the story.
The Jameses picked it up from there.
Their internet searches revealed that the farm sat close to train tracks that still curve from Kansas into Martin City. And the crimes involved an unflinching killer bent on finishing the job. The Jameses think that the three victims in the barn — George Bernhardt, 40, and two younger hands — were felled by someone hiding in the hay and attacking as each ventured in alone.
A few years later some suspicion turned to a man named Dudley. He reportedly once worked for the Bernhardts and later was convicted for killing a Stillwell couple. Before being hanged by a mob for the Stillwell crimes, Dudley is said to have told an inmate that he committed the earlier murders.
So who crept through that Johnson County farm 117 years ago: Dudley or The Man from the Train?
“I don’t know,” Bill James acknowledged.
Careful not to apply his analytics too broadly (as critics of his baseball work have charged), James said it may never be known for sure if all 100 or so victims cited in “The Man from the Train” died by the same hands. Still, he and his daughter predict the book will spur deeper research into the cases that they found — and many others they missed.
Final score?
“I think the numbers might grow,” Bill James said.
As for now, the Sultan of Stats said he is happy to put a murderous “bastard” behind him and focus on behavior in baseball.
“I like athletes,” he said. “There is nothing to like about The Man from the Train.”
Rick Montgomery: 816-234-4410, @rmontgomery_r
The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery
264.21 (May 22, 2017): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery
Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James. Scribner, $28 (480p) ISBN 978-1-4767-9625-3
Pioneering baseball analyst Bill James (he created the Sabermetrics statistical analysis system) successfully transfers his detail-oriented mind-set to true crime in this suspenseful historical account, cowritten with his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James. The authors' focus is a series of murders, perhaps as many as 100, committed by a killer they call "the man from the train," who slaughtered entire households, mostly in the Midwest, during the first two decades of the 20th century. Beginning with the best known of the crimes--the massacre of the Moore family in Villisca, Iowa, in 1912--the Jameses identify the signature elements of the crimes: the murderer struck near train tracks, used the blunt side of an axe, left valuables behind, covered his victims' heads with cloth, and displayed a sexual interest in prepubescent females. The authors, who culled data from hundreds of thousands of small-town newspapers of the era to identify crimes not initially thought connected, build their case with an innovative mix of statistical analysis and primary sources. They conclude with a plausible identification of the culprit, but the strength of the book hangs on their diligent research and analysis connecting crimes into the closing years of the 19th century. Even those skeptical at the outset that one man was responsible for so much bloodshed are likely to be convinced. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery." Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099097/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c70bd96c. Accessed 11 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494099097
Review: 'The Man From the Train,' by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James
NONFICTION: A father-daughter team tackles a 100-year-old murder mystery.
By ADAM MORGAN Special to the Star Tribune OCTOBER 27, 2017 — 11:00AM
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Bill James knows a thing or two about research. He’s the baseball analyst who invented sabermetrics, the data-based strategy made famous by the “Moneyball” book and film adaptation. Now in his late 60s, James has made a surprising career shift by writing about true crime, and with the help of his daughter Rachel may have stumbled upon something truly spectacular.
“The Devil came to Villisca on June 9, 1912,” they begin, demonstrating a flair for the dramatic that permeates “The Man From the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery.” In the middle of the night, someone broke into the home of an Iowa businessman and murdered eight people with the blunt side of an ax, including six children. “I apologize for the need to write this sentence,” Bill writes, “but the heads of all of the victims had been beaten to a pulp.”
The Villisca murders remain the Midwest’s strangest unsolved mystery. Even stranger, a series of similar attacks occurred across the country, all within a few miles of railroad tracks, all with the same modus operandi: families killed in their sleep with the blunt side of an ax, their bodies often stacked atop one another after death.
Early 20th-century police were unable to connect the crimes, but Bill and Rachel may have cracked the case by searching through thousands of old newspapers. In fact, they don’t just reveal the Villisca ax murderer’s identity — they also claim he was responsible for up to 100 additional murders across the country.
Beginning in Iowa, the bulk of the book is an exhaustive account of every incident that may have been the work of “The Man From the Train,” which range all the way from Florida to Washington state, including more than two dozen Midwestern murders in Iowa, Kansas and Illinois.
Though all well told, the chapters begin to feel as relentless and repetitive as “The Part About the Crimes” in Roberto Bolaño’s classic novel, “2666.” But the book shines when we get to see the Jameses’ thinking. Like the recent Netflix documentary “The Keepers,” it’s fun to watch these amateur detectives solve a puzzle.
“The Man From the Train,” by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James
“The Man From the Train,” by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James
And solve it they do — after 400 pages, when Rachel discovers the killer’s first crime way back in 1898. Did they get it right? I’m pretty sure they did. Either way, the final twist in the story — set 10 years after the Villisca murders on the other side of the Atlantic — gave me chills.
Adam Morgan is editor in chief of the Chicago Review of Books. He writes about books, culture and Chicago in the Guardian, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Chicago magazine and elsewhere.
The Man From the Train
By: Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James.
Publisher: Scribner, 464 pages, $30.
A baseball detective attempts to solve a homicide cold case.
With his statistics-driven “abstracts,” James (The Bill James Handbook: Baseball Info Solutions, 2017, etc.) is famous for revolutionizing the way fans look at baseball. Here, the author and his daughter deliver a provocative book that employs his prodigious research techniques in an effort to solve a famous, 100-year-old mass murder case. Murders, actually, as their research on this case led them to a startling conclusion. On June 9, 1912, in Villisca, Iowa, a family of eight was brutally murdered with an ax at night in their home. No one was ever convicted. James believed other, similar mass murders might have occurred around the same time: “And then I found one, and another one, and another one. I hired my daughter as a researcher, and then she started finding them.” The authors’ research uncovered at least a dozen similar murders from 1909 to 1912 that occurred from Virginia to Oregon to Kansas, 48 murders in all. They kept digging and found a few dozen more during the period 1900 to 1906, with the locations ranging from Nova Scotia to Arkansas to Florida. The authors became convinced they were committed by one person. The murderer’s modus operandi revealed a pattern: he worked for a living, probably in mining or logging, committed the crimes on weekends with an ax, often burning down the house, and didn’t steal anything. Since the murders were always close to train lines, the authors figured he traveled by train. Eventually, they came up with a suspect. They include detailed discussions of investigative techniques back then and stories about people wrongly (they feel) executed for the crimes. Told in workmanlike, journalistic prose with plenty of personal injections—“hear me out. Have I got a story to tell you”—the narrative becomes addictive, and it’s easy to get caught up in the elaborate search and the authors’ conclusions, which are plausible.
Fans of true crime—as well as detectives in homicide bureaus—will relish this book.
Pub Date: Sept. 19th, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9625-3
Page count: 416pp
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 15th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1st, 2017
Bill James has gone from baseball stats to old crime stories
By Gene Warner | Published September 21, 2017
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TRUE CRIME
The Man From The Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery
By Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James
Scribner
464 pages, $30
ADVERTISEMENT
Bill James is one person who COULD quit his day job.
Baseball fanatics, especially those who revel in statistics and numbers crunching, know James as the father of sabermetrics, the scientific analysis of baseball's seemingly infinite statistics.
But James also has another fascinating "job," transferring his painstaking research from the baseball field to the world of true crime, especially old crime.
Really old crime.
"The Man from the Train" is a beautifully written and extraordinarily researched narrative of a man who may have killed 95 -- or more -- people, dating back more than a century, mostly in small-town Middle America.
More than 450 pages of true crime may be too much for many readers, but James, the great writer that he is, grabs the reader with his half-page pre-preface:
"It is a warm night, most often on a weekend. There is a very small town with a railroad track that runs through the town, or sometimes along the edge of it... He is looking for a house with no dog. He would prefer a house on the edge of town, just isolated enough to provide a little bit of cover. A big two-story house would be best, with a family of five. A barn where he can hide out from sundown until the middle of the night ... He is looking for a house with a woodpile in the front yard, and an axe sticking up out of the woodpile."
Talk about haunting. This is the story of The Man from the Train.
The serial killer settled on a set routine, at least after his first few brutal killings. He murdered families, usually in their sleep in the middle of the night, wielding the blunt end of an axe and often targeting families with young daughters. James, fortunately, spares us most of the ghastly details on that last point.
A man who ruthlessly kills dozens and dozens of family members all over the nation can't escape scrutiny, even in the days when "breaking news" didn't race across the country in nanoseconds. A pattern did emerge, mostly because of this crazed killer's signature: killing whole families that lived near railroad tracks (for a quicker getaway), doing them in with the blunt axe end and spending time with their bodies afterwards.
Super creepy.
That's distinctive enough to draw attention, even in the horse-and-buggy days, long before the advent of federal and state police agencies that crossed local jurisdictions to investigate crimes with hauntingly similar M.O.s. Ultimately, authorities began connecting the dots in 1911.
James uses an interesting time structure here, teasing the reader first with the most notorious case, the killing spree that left eight people murdered inside a Villisca, Iowa farmhouse in June 1912. The author then puts that event into perspective, tracing the killer's path from 1909 to 1912. But then James, having stitched together an irrefutable killing pattern, doubles back to 1900 -- and even before -- to prove his thesis, that the Train Man had been killing randomly chosen families for a decade and a half before Villisca.
"I have long been fascinated by the notion that knowledge can be created about the past," James writes, in a statement tying together his baseball and true-crime research. For this book, he, along with daughter Rachel McCarthy James, pored over hundreds of thousands of old small-town newspaper stories, public documents, even ancient railroad schedules, to prove his case.
Sometimes, alas, James the researcher overwhelms James the writer. This book is long, filled with quite a few detailed crimes that Train Man probably didn't commit. To his credit, James doesn't exaggerate the number of Train Man's victims; he lays out the facts in many possibly related cases, cites the pros and cons of including them and then gives his opinion. Still, some readers might appreciate a slimmed-down version of these cases.
This is no pure whodunit, but rather a how-many-did-he-do. This crazed man, who enjoyed the act of killing and fled from his bloody rampages by quietly riding the rails, left unsophisticated, overwhelmed, small-town police agencies looking to pin the crimes on local residents with any connection to the family or any motive, no matter how flimsy. Those rushes to judgment even led to some lynchings, executions and lengthy prison sentences for totally innocent suspects.
James craftily keeps the reader in suspense until the last few chapters. Was Train Man ever identified? Was he ever caught? And how did he meet his demise?
The author has another great tool to keep you hooked, his folksy, informal way of addressing the reader as if you were sitting together on a park bench or adjoining bar stools.
For example, after going back in time from 1912 to the turn of the century, James directly addresses the reader:
"Let me break now from the disembodied narrative voice that we normally use to write books and speak to you one-on-one, writer to reader. I need to explain my problem to you, and I don't know how I would do that, other than in the first person."
Nice touch, but it's the storytelling, the exhaustive research and the suspense over the killer's identity that keep you turning the pages of an otherwise too-long book.
Gene Warner is a retired Buffalo News reporter well-acquainted with writing about both crime and baseball.
An Aneurism of Axe Murders: On ‘The Man from the Train’
REVIEWS Jeremy Lybarger October 9, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 6 min read
Between 1898 and 1912, a madman was loose in America. Dozens of families across the country were murdered in their beds, bludgeoned with the blunt side of an axe. Some of their houses were set on fire. The bodies of many victims—if they were prepubescent girls—were posed after death, and there was evidence that the killer masturbated at the crime scene. The most notorious of these murders, the June 1912 slaughter of the Moore family and their house guests in Villisca, Iowa, shocked the nation and remains a staple of lurid Midwest folklore. The case was never solved.
The Man From the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery, by noted baseball statistician Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James, offers an explanation not only for the Villisca murders, but for scores of other cross-country killings that spooked America at the turn of the century. The Jameses have an advantage that contemporary reporters and investigators did not: namely, access to newspaper archives, digital maps, and spreadsheets. Based on deep-dive analysis, they argue—elegantly and persuasively—that these seemingly haphazard murders were connected, and that one man is to blame. If that’s true, and if we attribute all of these slayings to him, we’re talking about the worst serial killer in U.S. history, responsible for more than 100 deaths. That body count dwarfs those of our heretofore most industrious bogeymen Gary Ridgway, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy.
It’s a seismic allegation, and the Jameses acknowledge that readers are right to be skeptical. After all, how did a killer this prolific evade capture for so long? And more unbelieveable, how did subsequent generations of crime buffs fail to connect the dots on these killings? The Villisca murders alone have been dissected in at least two books, a documentary, several podcasts, an infinite heap of Reddit threads, and a widely panned horror movie. Yet, the case is as cold as ashes.
One reason that the crimes remained disconnected a century ago was that information was disconnected. There was no FBI, no federal crime databases, and most investigations were left to small-town police or private detectives, some of whom were either amateurs or actual con men on the make for a quick buck. As the Jameses note, it was an era when cops relied on psychics and bloodhounds to unearth leads. Forensic science as we know it didn’t exist. Fingerprint records were still in their infancy. Crime scenes became mob scenes as neighbors and rubberneckers gathered to gawk and inadvertently taint evidence.
Then there’s the matter of publicity. “Many people either never read the newspaper or skipped disinterestedly over stories about out-of-town murders,” the Jameses write. “Some people were illiterate. Farmers spent long days in the fields, particularly in midsummer, and went irregularly into town. Not everybody got the news.” In this kind of vacuum, crowdsourcing information or witnesses was like asking someone for directions to a town they’d never heard of.
The third and most important reason that the crimes went unsolved, however, also explains the name of the book. The killer targeted houses that were a stone’s throw from railroad tracks. As the Jameses tell it, he rode the rails, roving from one murder to another, as anonymous and footloose as the hobos who still traveled by boxcar. He got work where he could, logging wood in some isolated camp for a few months before moving on to his next kill. His bloodlust took him as far afield as Florida, Washington state, Maine, Texas, Kansas, and points in between.
But how do we know that these far-flung murders are related? The Jameses list 33 unique “signatures” that define the killer’s methodology and that recur with startling frequency at numerous crime scenes. Among them: victims’ proximity to railroad tracks, death by the blunt side of an axe, the killing of an entire family at once, the posing of bodies for erotic stimulation, blankets pulled over victims’ heads (perhaps to minimize blood spatter), covering windows and mirrors with cloth, doors locked or jammed shut, lamps without their chimneys left to light the crime scene—the list goes on. While any of these characteristics, or even a handful of them, might be observed at different crime scenes, it’s unlikely that they’d be observed at multiple crime scenes over several years and not be the handiwork of a single killer. And to their credit, the Jameses aren’t overeager to convince you that they’ve cracked the case. “I am not here to argue with you, and you can believe what you want to believe,” they write.
coverAlthough the Jameses speculate that the killer began murdering people in 1898 and continued over the next decade (whereupon he either died, was imprisoned, or emigrated), they pinpoint 1911 and 1912 as “an aneurism” for axe murders. There were approximately 248 familicides in the U.S. between 1890 and 1920, an average of about eight families murdered per year. In general, entire families aren’t often killed together, and when they are there’s usually a suspect and a motive. By 1911, though, “axe murders start appearing like dandelions.” Besides the eponymous man from the train, an unrelated axe murderer simultaneously terrorized New Orleans (recounted in Miriam C. Davis’s excellent The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story), and a string of family murders rattled Acadia Parish, La. A creole woman named Clementine Barnabet confessed to the latter crimes, relating a gothic tale of voodoo, human sacrifice, and backwoods religion. The Jameses doubt that Barnabet actually killed anybody. It seems that the authorities may have agreed, since she was released from prison in 1923, only 10 years into her life sentence, never to be heard from again.
The idea that axe murders somehow represented America’s id during a period of runaway modernization is one of the book’s many fascinating theses. “There are trends and fashions in crimes as much as in any other area,” the Jameses write. They cite the gunfighters of the 1870s, the train robbers of the 1880s, the celebrity gangsters of the 1930s, and the political assassinations of the 1960s. To that list we can add the airplane hijackings that were a hallmark of the 1970s, the rightwing extremists of the 1990s, the suicide bombings of the 2000s, the terrorism that is ubiquitous still, and our current national moment of white male rage.
coverA similar point is made in Monica Hesse’s American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, which tells the story of a troubled couple who burned down dozens of abandoned buildings on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 2012/13. “America fretted about its rural parts,” Hesse writes, itemizing the region’s economic backslide, “and the arsons were an ideal criminal metaphor for 2012.” Likewise, at the dawn of the 20th century, axe murder was a visceral rebuke to a period of technological disruption, including the spread of automobiles, airplanes, telephones, and electricity.
Of course, it’s easy to overstate the symbolism here. Axes were a common household tool back then, left visible and easily filched in a woodpile near a family’s house or barn. It was a weapon of convenience rather than connotation. Still, you can’t help but read these murders as a parable of alienation. The lone drifter stalking the country by train, itself a mode of transport from a bygone era, to literally smash apart families with an instrument that evoked America’s timbered frontier. The murders suggest a melange of sexual frustration, dislocation, nostalgia, and anomie. It was one of the last criminal sagas in our national history to exploit the idea of America as a wilderness unspoiled by modernity, a country where you could still get away with murder.
Indeed, “murder leaves the idea of murder hanging in the air,” the Jameses write, and in certain places it can also leave the residue of racism. The killer haunted the Deep South at a time when lynch mobs and vigilante justice were waning but still possible. “When a terrible crime occurred, people immediately assumed that black people had done it,” and local newspapers were often quick to parrot that notion. At least seven men were lynched for the killer’s crimes, and The Man From the Train records their names and suggests that they were innocent.
The most unexpected (almost breathtaking, really) moment of the book comes 400 pages in when the Jameses tell us the name of this mysterious killer. The disclosure attests to the heroic nature of archival research. Chasing a reference from a 1901 Boston Globe article, Rachel McCarthy James used Google Books to browse an obscure 1904 history of the Worcester, Mass., police department, and there, in a brief note about the 1898 murder of the Newton family, was the name of a suspect who was last seen boarding the 1 a.m. train. “Not a trace of him has been found since,” the note added.
The Jameses have found more than a trace of this vanished killer, and The Man From the Train is a riveting, evocative feat of reportage and historical sleuthing. It’s a true crime thriller, but it’s also an audacious whodunit in which the mystery is both who the killer was and how the authors managed to excavate his identity more than a century later. It’s also, finally, a testament to the forgotten casualties of history, those unlucky victims who were murdered and buried without justice, and blameless people who were accused of the crimes.. The book serves as an epitaph for them. Ghosts are written into its pages.