The Man From The Train

On Monday morning June 10, 1912 a neighbor noticed the chores were not done at the Moore house and their chickens were squawking in the coop.  She knocked on the door, found it locked, and called Ross Moore, brother of the head of the Moore family, who had a key.  While waiting she was able to force open the door and went into the house.  Inside eight people lay dead, murdered by an axe wielding killer.

At the time, Villisca, Iowa, located in the southwestern corner of the state, was a town of about 2,000 people with Montgomery County in which it was situation having a population of 17,000.  For the prior twenty years the county averaged one homicide a year.

The Villisca murders remain unsolved.  The dead were Josiah Moore and his wife Sarah, well respected members of the community, along with their four children, and two young girls, friends of Moore's nine year old daughter, staying overnight at the house.  All had been struck, most multiple times, with the blunt side of an axe head, the murders evidently being committed during the night.

I normally don't read true crime books but made an exception for The Man From The Train because the authors are Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James.  Bill James is the father of baseball sabremetrics and someone of whom I've written several times on this blog.  He is also fascinated with unsolved murder mysteries and had already written a prior book on the topic when The Man From The Train was published in 2017.

Initially James started from the premise of trying to solve the Villisca murders but along the way the story became much bigger.  He and his daughter believe they have identified a previously unknown serial killer, active from 1898 through 1912, who slaughtered entire families across the U.S.  They identified fourteen attacks in which 59 people were murdered as definitely done by The Man From The Train, another seven attacks in which 30 died as probably by the same killer, and eight other incidents in which 27 died as possibly by the same man.

The name given to the killer derives from his pattern of arriving by train at isolated hamlets and small towns, getting off, murdering a family and then hoping another train, leaving before anyone realized a crime had been committed.  The murders were committed with the blunt end of an axe and usually around midnight.  James assembled a list of 33 common characteristics of the murders, some mundane, some puzzling, some perverse.

The Man From The Train combines an account of the killings, the detective work by Bill and Rachel to undercover the story, and a tale of America at the start of the 20th century.  Along with playing to Bill's analytical skills in examining each incident as to whether it was part of the pattern, the book explains well why a serial killer could operate without detection for so long.  It was an era before mass communication, when many small communities even lacked newspapers (particularly in the southeast), where police investigators were unknown.  The amateur nature of the investigations, combined with prejudice against the poor, the transient, and, in the south, against blacks led to terrible miscarriages of justice, including lynchings, legally sanctioned executions, and lengthy prison sentences for innocents.

At book's end the authors reveal what they believe to be the first killing in the series and the identity of The Man From The Train.

The James make a compelling case and I highly recommend the book.  My only reservation is that, at times, I find Bill's writing style, which has always been idiosyncratic, to be irritating and could have used an editor.