The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  Over the following thirty years he was mentioned at least a dozen different times in the local newspapers. San Antonio in the 1870s was a fairly small town (about 15,000 people), and the San Antonio Light was a small-town newspaper. In 1885, an L. Casaway and Charles Casaway were included in an announcement of the Eclipse Minstrels, who were “composed entirely of colored members.” In 1887 he joined the “laborer’s board,” and in 1889 he organized a Juneteenth event commemorating the end of slavery. He was an active member of the Republican Party. He was mentioned often in that role, and in connection to his work as a porter, hall messenger, and janitor at the city hall. A front-page story in 1895 reported that he had been promoted. Later in 1895, his name was listed as part of a group thanking the mayor for taking down wanted posters of local rapists, which were creating a motive for racist violence. Three years later, his name was listed as a delegate in a wonderful report from the July 17, 1898, San Antonio Light on a squabble in the local Republican primary. The black caucus within the party walked out over a disagreement of some sort, but then both sides came together to record the following statement to “thunderous applause”:

  Resolved: That this convention rejoice in the fact that past differences in our party have been wiped out and we agree to work for harmony and success and for the principles of our party in the future.

  In addition to his professional and civic contributions, Louis also kept up a high-profile social life. His thirty-sixth birthday (he probably was actually forty-one) appeared at the top of a list of local events, recording “a stag party of his friends.” In 1898, a famous Cuban War vet stayed with his good pal Louis Casaway. In 1902, Casaway was credited with expanding the gymnasium. I believe that the Light’s editor’s theory was that local people would buy the paper if their name was in the paper, so he tried to get as many local people’s names in the paper as he could.

  Elizabeth Casaway, born Elizabeth Castalow, was from Hallettsville, Texas, a small town a hundred miles due east of San Antonio, and incidentally the only place in the world named “Hallettsville.” Born probably in 1874, she was married at about the age of fifteen to a man named Layne, who abandoned her soon after their marriage. The next year she moved to San Antonio, where she worked as a seamstress. There Louis and Elizabeth met, fell in love, and were married, which was not all that easy, considering that Louis was black and Elizabeth was white. He claimed to be thirty at the time of the marriage but was probably thirty-five; she was about sixteen. Unable to get married in Texas, they went to Mexico. According to a later article in the Chicago Defender, legal proceedings were begun against them based on the marriage, but a grand jury declined to indict them, and they were, in the words of the Defender, “allowed to go unmolested.” By all accounts they had a happy marriage, and by 1911 they had three children: Josie, aged six, Louise, aged three, and Alfred Carlyle Casaway, aged five months. After the birth of Josie in 1904 Louis curtailed his political activity, and took a job as custodian at Grant school, a segregated elementary school for black children. In the 1910 census Louis is listed as “W”—white—which may indicate that he sometimes passed as white, but more probably indicates that the census taker interviewed Elizabeth, saw that she was white, and simply assumed that her husband must be white as well.

  By 1911 the population of San Antonio was close to 100,000 people. Casaway had grown up with the city; he was one of the old-timers, thus known to all of the people who ran the city. The Casaways lived at 417 North Olive Street in San Antonio, which is four-tenths of a mile from the train track (three to four blocks), and seven-tenths of a mile from the train station, the depot.

  Louis Casaway’s sister was married to an attorney named R. A. Campbell, also black, and they lived in a house that adjoined the Casaway residence. The Campbells had a renter named Mrs. Drake, and Mrs. Drake had a son who would play with the Casaway children and often spent the night with them. On the evening of March 21, 1911, the Casaways and the Drake boy were playing around the neighborhood, but about sundown she went over to the Casaway house and brought him home, a casual decision that no doubt saved his life. As the children played around the neighborhood that night, we might speculate, a Quiet Little Man was watching them from the shadows, perhaps from a barn or a shed nearby.

  On the morning of March 22 Louis Casaway did not report for work. The principal of the school, Mr. Tarver, called the Campbell house to ask if they had any idea why Casaway was not at work. Mrs. Drake answered the phone. She went next door, knocked loudly, and called to the Casaways, but received no answer. She went back and got Mrs. Campbell, Casaway’s sister, and Mrs. Campbell circled the house, calling to the Casaways and knocking on the doors and windows trying to find a way in. The house was locked up tight, and no one answered. Alarmed, she went back to her house and got her husband.

  R. A. Campbell, unable to enter the house by a doorway, pried off a screen and forced open a window. As he did so a pillow tumbled out. With the pillow out of the way he could see inside the house, and thus he could see the bloody bodies of Louis and Louise Casaway. He ran immediately back to his house, and called the police.

  The police from two different jurisdictions (city police and the sheriff’s office) rushed to the house in force; the next-day newspaper contains a long list of the names of policemen who responded to the crime scene. The Casaways were all dead. All five had been hit in the head with an axe, which was left in the house, and the walls were spattered with the blood cast off from the swinging of the axe.

  The police found that the back door, the door leading off the kitchen, was unlocked; the Campbells had thought that it was locked, but it actually was not. Probably the murderer had jammed the door, wedging something into the door as it closed so that it would be difficult to open.

  On the evening of March 21 it had rained hard, starting a little after eleven o’clock at night. The police found no mud or water tracked into the house, but found footprints in the mud leading away from the back door. From this they inferred that the murderer had entered the house around or before eleven o’clock, and had left the house after the rain. The first half of that assumption is not necessarily correct. He may well have entered the house after eleven, but not by the door. He usually crawled in a window.

  The neighbors had seen and heard nothing unusual. There was, however, an unusual thing that had happened, as there always is in any well-documented murder. Louis Casaway had gone to buy a bucket of beer on the night of the murders, not long before the rain began. Casaway did not drink and did not normally purchase alcohol, and his wife did not drink. From this it was surmised that the Casaways may have been expecting a houseguest, and it was speculated that the beer may have been drugged, which would explain why they did not awaken when they were attacked.

  San Antonio in 1911, I mentioned, was a city of 100,000 people. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only time that The Man from the Train committed one of his atrocities in an urban area; he killed a lot of people in towns of five or ten thousand, but never (other than this case) in a city. The railroad line, coming in from the north, just clipped the edge of town. It is our belief that the murderer did not see the city as he came into town, and just did not realize that he was in a city.

  Other than that, the murder of the Casaways is a perfect compendium of the signature elements of this series. If there is one crime in this series that we can be absolutely, one thousand percent certain was committed by the same man who committed the murders in Villisca, this is the crime. Consider this paragraph, from the San Antonio Light and Gazette, on the day after the murders:

  That the person who committed the crime was deliberate in his fearful work of slaughter is shown by the condition of things found upon the arrival of the officers. The faces of Louis Casaway and his wife were found covered with a cloth. In the window near which Louis Casaway lay a pillow had been placed. A pillow also was found in the window near the head of the woman and a blanket had been spread across the north window of this room. Josi
e Casaway was killed while lying on the bed nearest the wall of the north room, as shown by the blood at that spot. The body, however, had been picked up and afterwards thrown near the foot of the bed, the head being bent farther back than was the larger portion of the body. Other conditions found in the room indicated that the murderer was in no hurry to leave. In each killing the blunt end of the axe had been used.

  The covering of the faces of the adult victims is a part of the signature of The Man from the Train. He did this in his very first murder, many years earlier, and he did it many times in his career.

  The placing of cloth objects such as pillows and dresses in the windows near the victims is a part of his pattern.

  The covering of a window or multiple windows with blankets is a signature element of The Man from the Train.

  The moving of dead bodies is a part of his normal pattern.

  The special attention to the body of the prepubescent female victim, the moving or staging of her body, is an element of his pattern that appears numerous times.

  The lingering in the house after the crimes were committed is an element of his pattern.

  The killing of the victims with the blunt side of the axe, rather than the blade of the axe, is a clear sign that it’s him. Again, he did this in his first crime, and he almost always killed people with the blunt side of the axe.

  The locking up of the house as he left is another element of his signature. The proximity to the train tracks, the axe, the leaving of the axe in the house, the commission of the crime late at night, probably two to three hours after the victims had gone to sleep . . . all of this is 100 percent consistent with the pattern of his crimes, and we will see all of these elements again, and again, and again, as we go forward with this story, and then go back to look at the earlier crimes.

  The phrase “other conditions found in the room indicated that the murderer was in no hurry to leave” is a euphemism, the real meaning of which, I am virtually certain, is that he masturbated over the body of Josie Casaway, perhaps repeatedly. The “other condition found in the room” was ejaculate.

  “The skull of this child” reported the Light and Gazette, “was the only one that was not laid open”—further evidence of his special interest in that victim. “It was within two or three feet from where this child [Josie] lay that the axe was found on the floor.” After killing the family, probably in a mad rush of events lasting no more than a few minutes, he walked around the house with the axe, making sure that they were dead, and that no one in the house was left alive, hiding under a bed or cowering in a closet. When he was certain that they were all dead, he put down the axe and turned his attention to Josie’s body.

  From the same newspaper story quoted above:

  That robbery was not the motive, the officers say, is borne out by the fact that nothing in the house was molested. Not a drawer in a bureau or wardrobe was found disturbed. The trousers of Louis Casaway were still hanging on the foot of the bed and several dollars were in the pockets. His watch was still in the vest. The most plausible information gained by the officers is that tending to the belief that revenge prompted the wholesale slaughter.

  Of course, revenge was not the basis of the crime. Madness was the basis of the crime. They were trying to find a rational basis for a wildly irrational event. The Man from the Train killed people because he hated people, and he enjoyed hitting them in the head with an axe, and he enjoyed dragging their bodies around. It was his favorite thing to do in the whole world. Ghastly and appalling as this is, difficult as this is even to write, the fact is that he especially enjoyed hitting small children in the head with an axe. The police simply could not conceive of the possibility that this was what they were dealing with.

  Throughout the run of terror created by this man, fifteen years or more, people would try to “normalize” his actions by assigning the crime a rational motive. In most of our cases, the compulsive need to have an explanation for the crime expresses itself in the assertion that the victim was in possession of a large amount of cash, even though, in almost all of those cases, there is no actual evidence that there was any money. In this case, because the victims happened to be an interracial couple in a time and place where marriages between black and white people were slightly less common than marriages between horses and butterflies, the police immediately assumed—and asserted—that they were murdered because they were an interracial couple:

  That the murder of the entire Casaway family Tuesday night was the deed of a person crazed by the problem of miscegenation, and in his hallucination wishing to wipe out the entire family, is the belief of several of the detectives who are working on the case. The fact that Casaway was a negro and his wife a white woman, they believed, preyed upon the mind of someone until the wholesale murder presented itself as the only solution.

  There is no evidence for this. No one is known to have threatened them because they were a mixed-race couple. No one wrote racist slogans on the walls. The Ku Klux Klan at this time did not exist; it had gone out of business decades before, and was revived three years later in Atlanta.

  Several years earlier, perhaps six years earlier, Louis Casaway had been involved in a conflict with another man, a black man, and the man had threatened his life. His feet were about the right size to fit the footprints in the mud, and so he was arrested within a day of the crime. Nothing actually tied him to the crime, however, and he was released within a few days. An elderly relative of Elizabeth, a man named William McWilliams, forced his way into the crime scene and was arrested for suspicion of involvement in the crime. He was held for some time, but it became clear that he was suffering from dementia, and he was not prosecuted.

  As to the theory that the beer was drugged, which is presented in some newspaper accounts to explain the failure of the Casaways to rise and defend themselves—ridiculous. To us, looking at the case from our vantage point, it is obvious why the Casaways didn’t awaken in time to save their lives. The Man from the Train, by this time, had been killing people in their sleep for more than a decade; he had done it many times. He knew what he was doing.

  By far the most likely explanation for the bucket of beer is that it was simply a mistake. The saloon keeper reported that Casaway bought the bucket of beer not long before the rains began, after eleven o’clock. How likely is it that a man who does not drink, and who had to be at work at seven o’clock the next morning, would go and buy a bucket of beer at eleven o’clock at night, even if he was expecting a houseguest? It doesn’t make sense. It never happened. Either the saloon keeper confused the date of the purchase, or—more probably—he confused Casaway with someone else.

  Of course, Casaway may have drunk quite a bit more beer than his sister and brother-in-law thought that he did, and he may have purchased the beer and drunk some beer at some other time. I am merely arguing that he did not go out and purchase the beer at eleven o’clock on Tuesday night. If we believe the story of the bucket of beer, it distorts the timeline and fractures every other fact with which it comes in contact. People get very excited when an event such as this occurs in their neighborhood, and they say all sorts of things that are not true. This is simply one of those things.

  Louis Casaway was a man who was respected and admired by those who knew him, and his murder made a deep impression on his community.

  * * *

  The 1970s serial murderer Dennis Rader, known as BTK, was sexually fascinated by a young girl, an eleven-year-old girl named Josie Otero. As in this case, he killed the entire family, and then masturbated over the body of the young girl. He had seen Josie Otero playing around the neighborhood, and became obsessed with her. Rader was to say after his capture more than thirty years later that his sexual obsession with Josie Otero launched him into the killings, even though he never again killed anyone younger than twenty-one years of age.

  This is relevant to our story in this way: some of you may think that, since the villain in many of these cases was sexually fixated on young girls, t
hose crimes that did not involve the death of a young girl must not be related to the series. But the BTK story shows that this is not always true. A serial murderer may be sexually fixated on young girls, but this obsession need not be the trigger to all of his crimes.

  The house where the Casaways were murdered is still standing today but is unoccupied and is in such bad repair that it would appear unlikely to last much longer.

  CHAPTER IX

  Oregon

  In spring 1911, William Hill, thirty-two, a plumber who worked for the Portland Natural Gas Company, bought a small house about half a mile up the hill from the streetcar stop. . . . Here, a short train ride from the city, where William could earn good wages, he and his family could live the rural life that urban Americans idolize so much.

  —JD Chandler, Murder & Mayhem in Portland, Oregon

  The first faint realization that what we now call a serial murderer was at work came about as a result of three crimes in the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 1911. By that time The Man from the Train had been murdering families for thirteen years, but up until then—setting aside two crimes in 1904 which were briefly connected one to another but not to the series—no one had connected the dots.

  On the morning of June 10, 1911, a neighbor noticed the lack of activity around the house of William Hill. It had been eleven weeks since the murder of the Casaways. The observant neighbor asked his wife to go check on the family. She knocked on the door, got no answer, and tried to look in the windows. The windows had been covered with clothes, but through a small gap she could see the bloody body of Dorothy Hill, aged five, laid out on the floor of the front room. She ran screaming from the scene.

  Like the murder of the Casaways, although not as much so, the murder of the Hill family was a compendium of the signature elements of The Man from the Train. There were four victims. The house was near the railroad—a half mile from the streetcar line, less than a mile from the railroad itself. The murderer had picked up an axe from a neighbor’s yard, where it had been left leaning against the house. The murderer had entered the house after the family was asleep and had murdered the father in his sleep; police believed he had been struck with the handle of the axe. His wife had apparently stirred a little bit, but had also been murdered in her bed. Clothes had been hung over the windows. Jewelry and a purse with cash were left in plain sight, although police also believed (probably incorrectly) that some jewelry may have been taken. The house was locked up tight as the murderer left.