Most people tend to think that, Jack the Ripper notwithstanding, serial killers are a very recent phenomenon.
They ain't.
We don't hear much about them before the advent of modern forensic science and investigation methods, as they were rarely caught. Their crimes were frequently not considered connected, and, as here, were often barely investigated at all. Just take a gander at a list of pre-1900 killers, if you have a strong stomach, for just a few examples of those who WERE discovered, which begs the question: how many of these wolves in sheep's clothing among us have there been throughout human history? They certainly date to at least ancient Rome and Han China. One site from Minoan Crete, discovered in 1979, revealed numerous children's bones buried under a house at Knossos. More disturbingly, an estimated 22% - 36% had cut marks, indicating that the flesh had been stripped from their bones. It's unclear whether this entailed some religious ritual, the concealed evidence of a child serial killer who buried their victims under the house, or even cannibalism.
Another reason we don't hear about it is perhaps the mentality: there's still this prevailing myth of a former Golden Age, especially about small-town America, where people were virtuous, religious, chaste, and thoroughly law-abiding, with some stark exceptions, like the Wild West, or crime-ridden areas of inner cities - but, by and large, people often think that rural and small-town life were free of the violence and vice that plagued more heavily populated areas of the country. That may have been fairly true, but, as this book reveals, it often wasn't, even at the turn of the century. Notwithstanding small-town gossip about infidelity, corruption, fraud, slander and generations-long family or factional feuds, murderers also occasionally made inroads into the peaceful rural communities that were largely considered insulated from the strife that afflicted large cities.
This book is an example of how our assumptions about life in small-town and rural America are sometimes tragically wrong. It attempts to make a case that multiple, multiple murders were committed by a single, unimaginably deranged, demonic, sexually perverted family annihilator (yes, there is actually such a thing, one which apparently has occurred with such frequency that there's a technical term for it) who may have hunted from sea to shining sea, over the course of nearly twenty years, moving from coast to coast, killing everywhere in between. From Oregon to Maine to Florida to the Midwest, the killer left a bloody legacy... and a highly unique signature, which is how the author claims to have identified his decades-long trail of slaughter of innocents in every part of the country, and possibly overseas as well, once his reign of terror ended, as suddenly as it had began, in the US.
Although I have multiple issues with it, probably the most useful aspect of the book is a list of 33 elements of this maniac's VERY unique, ritualistic signature. I think I would prefer to combine them, however, into broader categories, as follows:
1) Proximity to railroad tracks, hence, The Man from the Train: Most of the killings occurred within a half-mile or so of a railroad track, and "most" (again, specific data are critical for building a credible case) occurred near an intersection of TWO railway lines. That would make it much more likely that the killer would be able to quickly hop a train out of town.
2) Use of an axe: The very unique signature is that he typically used the BLUNT end of the axe rather than the bladed edge to bludgeon his victims to death. Also, there were very few incidences of its use on an area of the body other than the heads, which he completely pulverized, in many cases. I'm also curious about the particulars for those he didn't do this to: I suspect almost all who were spared this gross indignity were adults, as children seemed to be the object of his most vicious assaults.
3) Victimology: Clearly a family annihilator, with a particular interest in "tween" girls, some of whom he assaulted, many of whom he staged after death in suggestive poses, while he... performed. He clearly preferred families with multiple children, but not always. He also methodically killed each household member, sometimes even in an outbuilding, but the latter was more common in rural settings than populated ones.
4) Setting the scene: This was a HIGHLY ritualistic killer, who, even by the time he started hunting in towns, circa 1909, had a highly evolved, almost perfected method, definitively indicating prior experience, probably a lot of it. His M.O. involved either sneaking in through the rear of a house after the family had gone to bed, or climbing in a window with a screen removed; covering the heads of his victims with cloth, either to prevent blood from splattering him or for some other psychological purpose; covering all the windows with cloth, either to prevent people from eventually seeing in, to buy himself more time to make a getaway, or, alternatively, for privacy, to avoid seeing even himself in the glass - this would explain why he also covered mirrors and, in one case, even a telephone (I wonder if he was so insecure that he didn't want any audience, including even his own reflection or the dead victims "watching," so he covered the mirrors and glass); removing the chimneys from the lamps he found in the house to effect very low lighting, almost like moonlight; leaving the lamps around the house with wicks altered; often leaving a vessel such as a bowl or bucket of bloody water behind, with which he ostensibly washed his hands; and leaving the axe at the scene of the crime, almost like a signature.
5) Locking and/or barricading doors and windows when leaving: He may have even broken things off in the locks to make it even more difficult to get in. This indeed hampered discovery of his crimes on multiple occasions.
6) Lack of robbery or theft: to the degree that the author suggests that he may have even LEFT money at the scene, specifically to make the statement that he wasn't there to rob; he was there to take something else. There is little evidence that he stole anything, probably more as a statement than out of fear that he would be caught with the victims' property, in my opinion. Still, it's a unique signature that he didn't blatantly take money or valuables, both of which were often left in plain sight.
7) Other factors: hunting in predominantly warm weather, the interval between killings, and several other signature elements of his highly developed style. A word on the arson: there were almost certainly TWO serial family annihilators in operation in the late 19th/early 20th century, but unlike the authors, I remain unconvinced that they were unquestionably the same person. Killer A murdered families in a rural setting by apparently bludgeoning them to death, perhaps with an axe, and then burning the house down; Killer B was Train Man. Killer A MAY be Killer B, but there's a fair degree of possibility that many of the arson murders weren't connected to the later killings. That's a horrifying prospect, that TWO inhuman monsters were on the loose at roughly the same time, killing in a similar manner, but we have to at least entertain the fair possibility that they weren't the same man.
Regarding the author's list: this would be a good opportunity to include some statistical analysis, which I was frankly expecting much more of from a sports writer. This degree of research should produce some high-quality geographic profiling, which could determine the speed of travel, towns where he was most likely to strike based on probability (i.e., proximity to a railroad within a half-mile), etc., so this was one of the areas where I was really disappointed. I was expecting to see a much greater use of statistical analysis - as a former data analyst, I know it's often a daunting task, but it would have added a significant degree of original research to this topic which hasn't been done previously.
For example, victimology: especially critical are demographics of the victims, towns, suspects, data regarding geographic proximity, and especially percentages of the occurrences of his signature elements, hell, weather, and the like would make this account MUCH more convincing and professional. The author had the data at his fingertips. Performing some basic analyses, such as factor or cluster analysis, hypothesis testing to determine to what degree the crimes were likely related or committed by the same person, and running just some basic tabs would have made a significant contribution to an at-least decent book, even if some of the conclusions are questionable. It would also cut down on the author's problematic speculation. The primary reason these tools exist is to eliminate to the greatest possible degree the outliers which are not statistically significant, to bolster the author's thesis that the murders which can be included were indeed statistically demonstrated to have been committed by the same man.
The author does include, however, a table which tracks, over the course of 30 years (1890-1920) the incidence of the MURDERS OF ENTIRE FAMILIES! WHAT THE #***?! And this happened frequently! 6, 7, 8, 9, 6, 7, 11, 10 ... 14, 10, 10, 9, 9 ... per YEAR! IN THE LATE 19TH/EARLY 20TH CENTURY! These were the murders of entire families: and these were only the ones they could find in newspaper reports!
This book also had some problems, as noted below. First, I have to say that the overall writing style really irked me. It was often just outright cringey, and not infrequently even disrespectful to the victims, in my opinion. What this book REALLY needed was an aggressive editor to rearrange its content and to clean up the messy prose and awkward language throughout. Final assessment: interesting content; poorly written.
Haphazard and Disorienting Organization: In short, this book is totally disorganized. The primary problem is that the narrative quantum leaps around in time and location. This just occurs all too frequently in this book (lit. "I have a point and I'll get back to it in a minute" [pg 202] is an oft-repeated statement throughout - but not always true). This approach requires a high degree of knowledge and familiarity from the reader. That's easier and more acceptable if the account has been widely publicized (i.e., the Cielo Drive-LaBianca murders). Most people who read about those events will be at least moderately familiar with the persons and details involved, but for a book of this type, which is attempting to break (almost) completely new ground in offering a theory that hasn't gained widespread acceptance (a whole string of coast-to-coast murders occurring over two decades involving dozens of families and possibly into the near-hundreds of victims was committed by one man traveling by train, working his way from town to town), almost no one will be familiar with even the most rudimentary details.
Another example: the chapter "Stepping Backward" is CHAPTER 19: the author waits half the book to address crimes which may have occurred prior to, in his view, the precipitating event in 1909, the murder of the Meadows Family, which heralded all the hallmarks of this killer's already-developed M.O. Not sure how I would have arranged this book, but I don't think I would have ended with the beginning. Perhaps including that material first, with the proviso that they may or may not have been connected to the later string of murders, would have been preferable.
The author does a decent job overall of explaining some (but not all) concerns readers may have about usable evidence and how he selected his cases, but I think he's still highly, problematically speculative, when, due to the amount of data at his disposal, he didn't need to be. Some of the factors he cites as to difficulties in evidence collection and documentation include the almost total lack of crime scene investigation as basic as fingerprinting. Issue with evidence also involved the manner in which events were reported and information was disseminated to the public. News publications went international in the early 20th century, with the advent of transmission technology, which, by 1910, started to routinely involve even photographs. As the author notes, however, mistakes and outright fabrications were spread far and wide, too, as copyright restrictions were virtually unknown. Everyone cribbed from everyone else's story, often repeating glaring inaccuracies and contradictions, not to mention small-town gossip and rivalries, which now became national news, as in the case of the well-known Villisca murders. That leads to...
Excessive speculation: other reviewers have noted the multiple contradictions and grossly speculated claims throughout, so I won't go into detail about too many, but the following is a good example: regarding a 1906 murder in North Carolina where the killer actually left people alive - he hadn't previously - the author states that this was because he "heard a train coming," (not "may have" or "possibly heard") and, ostensibly, taking a tremendous risk, decided to high-tail it out of town then rather than do what he always had previously - kill everyone to cover his tracks. I also agree that, on several occasions, when the author has decided that Train Man was responsible for a particular murder that only marginally fits the profile, he cherry picks evidence to make it fit.
The author also makes a quantum leap in attempting to identify the killer: based on rather inconclusive evidence at best, eventually, but ONLY at the very end of the book, he claims that the Man from the Train's identity is [spoiler alert] a man named Paul Mueller, a German who worked in the lumber and woodworking industry - hence (possibly) the axe - and that his attacks likely began in logging communities in Oregon, Washington, Texas, Maine, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida. He apparently began killing in the Florida area from 1900 to 1908, but the murders are almost unknown, for a number of reasons. From 1909 onward, the killer began his reign of terror in the Midwest.
The author also states that if Train Man was responsible, his highest body count was not the infamous Villisca murders, which stand at eight, but the May, 1906 murder of the Ackerman family in Milton, Florida, although details about the crime are difficult to discern, so the conclusion is at present questionable. This account was so horrific, however, that it even appeared in the New York Times. That article states that an "itinerant preacher," his wife and SEVEN children, the oldest, about 13, were murdered at a remote site in Santa Rosa County, about ten miles north of Milton. The house was then set ablaze by the killer, which was a feature of an M.O. of a probable serial killer active in that area, at that time, even if it wasn't actually Train Man - although I concede, that was certainly possible.
But was it Train Man? Unfortunately, with some of these early crimes, the hallmarks of his unique signature - removal of the chimneys from the lamps he used and left in the house, the covering of the victims' heads with cloth, the hanging of cloth or even clothing in all the windows, and, in the case of the Villisca murders, even on the mirrors, the presence of a bowl or bucket of bloody water, and the locking/barricading of all the doors and windows after his departure, are not discernible due to fire damage, which is the case with many other arson cases the author alludes may have been the work of Train Man.
Not much is known but that the victims were killed with a blunt object in their beds, apparently as they slept, possibly an axe, but since the bodies were burned and the instruments never found, it's speculation at best. What is convincing regarding the arson is that if Train Man was responsible, once he started to hunt in more populated areas as opposed to rural farm sites, he left off burning the houses down because it would attract too much attention. That's certainly a reasonable conclusion. Final answer: I'm not UNconvinced; I'm LESS convinced about these early murders being the work of the same man.
Lack of consistent citations, bibliography and an index: With this amount of research (the author states that he and his daughter pored over thousands of newspaper articles ranging over decades) the account would have been more convincing if source citations appeared in footnotes, along with a well-stocked bibliography. The evidence the authors rely on to formulate their theories should be included. Newspapers, court records, letters and other documents, oral histories, and other publications - both primary and secondary sources - should be cited so that readers can review the evidence for themselves to determine whether the theories are well-founded. With as much speculation that went on about these murders, both at the time and by later generations, citation of source material is critical. There isn't even an index with names, places, or dates: that's also vital for a book of this kind with so much information, which, as described above, is arranged in a less-than-logical fashion.
What is undeniable, however, is that these murders were nothing less than a nightmare of epic proportions, unprecedented in American history. It's staggering that someone could slaughter possibly in excess of a hundred souls, MOST, children (the adult victims often had large families), and remain undetected for possibly two decades, if the murders continued into the 20s in Europe, as the author alludes. It also demonstrates how many advances have been made with regard to forensic technology-here, fingerprinting was in its infancy, and, in the areas where the killer hunted, most LEOs had literally NO training in criminal investigation. Their recourse was to often coerce or beat a confession out of a usual suspect, or, failing that, attempt to raise money, including from the victim's families, to hire slightly, maybe-more-professional private investigators, to do it for them. However, these were often charlatans and con men, as in the horrific case of the Villisca murders, which resulted in a years-long fiasco that had nothing to do with the murders, yielding predictable results-an astronomically high bill for an unsolved crime.
Despite the atrocity, it's no wonder that, even in the case of the Jack the Ripper murders, they were never solved and no one was ever caught, or even potentially identified, other than the falsely accused, railroaded victims, some of whom were quite possibly executed for crimes they didn't commit.
gsisk reviewed The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery on + 193 more book reviews 
