The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery

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What element of this story would you find fantastic? Do you not believe that a man could be so evil as to do this? Do you not believe that that man could be clever enough to develop this simple scenario. He could escape detection (towns too small to have a police force, access to multiple railroad lines, and strike late at night, be gone before dawn)? What, really, is improbable about it?” The Man from the Train is a beautifully written and extraordinarily researched narrative…This is no pure whodunit but rather a how-many-did-he-do.” — Buffalo News

Nathaniel Rich (June 2, 2011). "Crunch the Numbers; Solve a Famous Murder". New York Times. Archived from the original on December 1, 2017 . Retrieved November 30, 2017. The important thing in behavioral analysis is understanding what a trait is and what a behavior is. Dave Kingman was a guy who played baseball a lot differently from most people, and he was a guy who had a lot of traits, and those traits get used to explain his behavior a lot. Example: I would have also liked to read some outside analysis of James’ conclusions – the crimes he believes were committed by one person, the murders he thinks were unrelated, his identification of the Man from the Train, and the likelihood that “The First Crime” actually came first. Surely he could have presented his work to some law-enforcement professionals and amateur detectives to confirm his findings and, where appropriate, raise doubts about them. A man named George Wilson, a neighbor of the Cobles, confessed to murdering them, sort of. Wilson was not of sound mind (no Dennis the Menace jokes, please). Between Sunday, June 9, and Monday, June 10, 1912, the Man from the Train may have entered the Villisca home of the Moore family. While the family slept, the murderer used the family’s ax to bludgeon them all to death. The dead included 43-year-old Josiah B. “Joe” Moore, 39-year-old Sarah Moore, 11-year-old Herman Moore, ten-year-old Katherine Moore, seven-year-old Boyd Moore, five-year-old Paul Moore, 12-year-old Lena Stillinger, and eight-year-old Ina Stillinger.The crime was discovered by the Hugheses’ neighbors, who, on December 8, found the family’s home ablaze. After the fire calmed down, searchers found the body of 42-year-old Benjamin Hughes, 42-year-old Eva Hughes (Benjamin’s wife), 19-year-old Emma, and 14-year-old Hattie. All had died in their sleep, with their heads crushed completely by the blunt side of an ax. We don't absolutely know the answers to any of those questions, but we have thought about them a lot more than you have or will, so we'll share our thoughts with you; take them for whatever you think they're worth.

I hadn’t heard of this particular series of murders and mayhem before reading the book. To my great surprise, two of the murders occurred in my adopted hometown. Two families living next door to one another were viciously killed on the same night. Coincidentally, I received a notice that a downtown “Murder Walk” will take place this summer. I don’t know if they will include these two, as they are not exactly located downtown, but they would be an interesting if gruesome addition. With modern computers, we can search tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of small-town newspapers, looking for reports of similar events.They very effectively (perhaps manipulatively, considering your perspective) present the most compelling crimes to assign to the man from the train, followed by those less apparently connected, and various seeming outliers. They create a profile of the killer and skilfully build up a case against him. There are some interesting things to be learned in this novel for sure, and the comparisons made between police work then and now will definitely give you pause (how have we changed? How, sadly, has society stayed the same?) . The crimes of the “original axe murderer” are grisly and heartbreaking, to be sure, and the ease with which the murderer seemed to go undetected for years is absolutely terrifying. Do his patterns and intervals make sense, and are they meaningful? How likely is it that he was actually inactive in the periods James infers? What might some of his signatures – most notably, using the blunt side of the axe – suggest, psychologically?

In The Man from the Train, the authors claim to have discovered the identity and existence of a previously overlooked serial killer active in the late 1800s and early 1900s. According to the authors, this criminal was named Paul Mueller, [2] who operated throughout North America and killed a minimum of 59 people and possibly over 100.Anyone who knows me will tell you I am addicted to true crime stories, especially cold cases and those involving serial killers. Movies, television, books—it doesn’t matter. I am there. Which is not as morbid as it sounds. It’s the motivation behind these types of crimes that fascinate me. Between 1898 and 1912, families across the country were bludgeoned in their sleep with the blunt side of an axe. Jewelry and valuables were left in plain sight, bodies were piled together, faces covered with cloth. Some of these cases, like the infamous Villasca, Iowa, murders, received national attention. But few people believed the crimes were related. And fewer still would realize that all of these families lived within walking distance to a train station. To give you an idea about what’s involved, let’s try a thought experiment. I am going to give you the statistics of three players from the 1979 Chicago Cubs; you tell me which of them is Dave Kingman: 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. In other cases James’ tone is almost conspiratorial which make me feel in need of a shower. Something in the room would later cause the chief detective to describe the perpetrator as a “moral pervert”; what that was was never revealed, but you and I know. Shudder!

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. On December 8, 1904, the small town of Trenton, South Carolina, woke up to the horrific news that the local Hughes family had been murdered by an axman. The Decatur Daily Review of Decatur, Illinois, reported that the entire Hughes family died in their sleep. [7] But, I did find myself caught up in his enthusiasm, and was determined to keep an open mind. It is obvious that besides the research, that much thought went into how these crimes were connected- or not- in some cases. He explains why those arrested or suspected were probably innocent, and proceeds to lay out a case for the defense or prosecution, as the case may be.

This book is so poorly written. Grammatically, fine. But the tone and overall organization leads me to highly “un-recommend” this title to anyone. James write in a conversation tone, using ellipses, asking the reader questions, and saying the reader is “off the reservation” if s/he doesn’t agree. Not just unprofessional but strange. I have long been fascinated by the notion that knowledge can be created about the past. Dinosaurs are the easiest example. For tens of thousands of years, humans had no awareness that the world had once been inhabited by gigantic beasts. Now, we know not merely that these animals existed, but we have identified hundreds of species of them. We know what they looked like, generally, and what they ate. We know which type of dinosaur lived where, and in what era. We know what happened to them. We have not merely created this knowledge, we have disseminated it so widely across our culture that the average five-year-old now can name a dozen types of dinosaurs, and has a collection of little plastic models of them. Using a conversational tone and including just the right amount of detail to bring these one-hundred-year-old crimes to life. The victims are humanized—even the incidental ones—while the perpetrator goes unnamed until the very near the end. I believe Howard Little to have been an innocent man, although I can't explain to you *now* why I believe that. Much later in our book, in chapter XXXV, we will return to the [...] murders [...]. When we return to the story I will explain what I believe happened, and why I believe that, and you can decide then whether you agree or disagree. Perhaps, until then, you will be kind enough to suspend judgment? Appreciate it."