The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  John Arthur Pender, known both as Jack and Arthur, was building a cabin near the Wehrmans’, and had been living in a tent while he was building the cabin. Levings found Pender in his tent and began to question him. Pender had deep scratches on his face, fingernail scratches probably, covered by two or three days of stubble. Pender claimed that the scratches were a rash. Levings had seen fingernail scratches before. He instructed Sheriff Thompson to place Pender under arrest.

  Pender would not confess to the crime. A gun could be connected to Pender by circumstantial inference. Ballistics in 1911 were primitive, but experts were certain that this was the gun that had killed the Wehrmans. The gun had a “gas pit,” and there was some rust in the gas pit, which gave bullets fired from this gun a unique and distinctive appearance; we don’t understand that, but it’s taken from the official report of the Oregon Supreme Court review of the case, which we take to be an authoritative source.

  Pender had written a letter to his wife shortly after the murders, urging her to join him immediately because he needed to make a trip out of the area. Additional circumstantial testimony from the neighbors alleged:

  1. That Daisy Wehrman appeared to be uncomfortable in Pender’s presence, and avoided having contact with him, and

  2. That Pender had not done his evening chores at the normal hour on Monday, September 4, but had done them late at night.

  Pender’s father was the captain of detectives in Ogden, Utah. Jack Pender Sr. went immediately to the Portland area and began trying to disassemble the case against his son. The case now had dueling detectives—two savvy, experienced police detectives, one trying to prove that Pender had committed the crime, the other that he had not. It was a fair fight; there was evidence on both sides. A shock of hair had been found clutched in Wehrman’s hand after her death. It could not be matched to Pender’s hair. There were bloody fingerprints on a towel in Wehrman’s bathroom. They did not appear to be Pender’s fingerprints (although how you can get fingerprints off a towel, I don’t know).

  Pender’s first trial resulted in a hung jury. In his second trial, despite the problems with the case and despite his father’s efforts, Pender was convicted of the murders based on the circumstantial evidence against him. The case against him was presented by District Attorney Tongue. Hearing his conviction announced, Pender shouted in the courtroom that he was an innocent man who had been framed by Levings and Thompson.

  He was sentenced to death.

  Pender, during his trials, became known as “The Beast of Portland” or “The Portland Beast Man,” either nickname implicitly broadening the accusations against him to include the other crimes. Nothing tied Pender to either of the other crimes, however, so that link gradually evaporated.

  Pender’s father, having exhausted himself and his fortune trying to clear his son’s name, died suddenly in the summer of 1913. Oregon eliminated the death penalty shortly after Pender was sentenced, and Pender’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. Doubts about Pender’s guilt played an important role in the public debate about the death penalty. In 1915 a man named John G. H. Siercks, an inmate at the Oregon insane asylum, confessed to having committed the murders in Scappoose. Here is an account of Siercks’s confession from a 1915 newspaper (edited to remove a few off-topic words):

  John Arthur Pender, convicted of the crime, and, until the recent passage of a bill abolishing capital punishment, under sentence to be hanged, will be freed by executive order in a few days.

  Pender was under sentence to be hanged October 25. He always had maintained his innocence. When it was determined to submit a measure for the abolition of capital punishment to the voters, Governor West reprieved him until after the election, saying he wanted Pender to have the benefit of the people’s verdict. Pender has been in the penitentiary ever since.

  George A. Thacher, a Portland criminologist, brought about yesterday’s development. He became convinced of Pender’s innocence at the time of the trial. Asylum authorities, as well as Thacher, declare there is no doubt as to the truth of Sierks’ confession.

  Setting out, after clearing Pender in his own mind, to find a person capable of committing such a crime as the Wehrman murder, Thacher said he made a canvass of those patients in the asylum who exhibited traits such as were manifested in the case. His investigation gradually led to Sierks, who he said had lived in the neighborhood of Mrs. Wehrman. Unsuccessful himself in obtaining a full confession, he enlisted the help of Rev. W. G. McLaren, the penitentiary chaplain.

  Upon making the confession, Sierks puffed on a cigar and said that he felt better than he had for a long time.

  Thacher was another of those amateur detectives who, in this era, were routinely allowed to meddle in criminal investigations. Authorities didn’t buy Siercks’s confession, and Pender remained in prison. Thacher mounted a campaign for Pender’s release, and in 1919 published a book entitled Why Some Men Kill: Or, Murder Mysteries Revealed, in which he editorialized on behalf of Pender. The book can be read online today. Pender was pardoned by the governor of Oregon in 1920.

  On April 22, 1924, telegraphing our story, a fifteen-year-old girl named Martha Gratke was beaten and stabbed to death in Portland. The crime was never solved.

  On October 28, 1927, another fifteen-year-old girl named Charlotte Crawford went to police with a story about an older man who had been trying to get her to meet him in a park. Police thought they were dealing with a pervert, not quite realizing the seriousness of the situation. They arranged for two policewomen to shadow the girl as she kept the assignation. This very nearly went terribly wrong. The older man lured the girl deep into the tangled brush, put his hands around her throat, and choked her into unconsciousness. By the time the policewomen reached them he was poised over her with a hammer raised above his head. Another few seconds would have been too late.

  The man was taken into custody with the hammer, a large knife, and an imitation handgun. At the police station he was recognized by older policemen as John Arthur Pender.

  Pender pled innocent by reason of mental defect (insanity), was convicted of the attempted murder of Charlotte Crawford, and was returned to prison with a life sentence. Police could never tie Pender to the murder of Martha Gratke, and no evidence at all links him to the crimes in Ardenwald and/or Rainier.

  Summarizing the Oregon/Washington crimes:

  • The murder of the Hill family in Ardenwald on June 10, 1911, was quite certainly committed by The Man from the Train.

  • The murder of the Cobles in Rainier, Washington, on or about July 11, 1911, was probably committed by The Man from the Train, even though a man named George Wilson was convicted of that crime.

  • The murder of the Wehrmans in Scappoose, Oregon, on September 4, 1911, was an unrelated murder committed by John Arthur Pender, and the crime scene was staged to confuse it with the other two crimes.

  • The murder of Mrs. Somomura in Rainier in December 1911 was an unrelated incident, probably a domestic murder.

  • The murder of Martha Gratke in Portland in April 1924 is unsolved, but it is a good guess that it may have been committed by John Arthur Pender.

  • The attempted murder of Charlotte Crawford in Portland in October 1927 was the work of John Arthur Pender.

  CHAPTER X

  The Double Event

  After midnight in the wee hours of September 30, 1888, Jack the Ripper murdered a prostitute in London’s East End. Within hours, he had murdered another one. This is known among those who write about Jack the Ripper as the Double Event.

  It is common for serial murderers to have a Double Event. Ted Bundy had a Double Event, the Lake Sammamish murders, on July 14, 1974. Many other serial murderers have had double events—killed one victim, and then immediately killed another. The Man from the Train’s Double Event occurred on September 17 to September 18, 1911, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

  The little house at 321 West Dale Street in Colorado Springs is just a bit less than a hundred yards from th
e railroad tracks. It is still occupied today; if you compare photos from then and now it is obviously the same house, with a porch roof now in danger of collapsing. Like few other crimes in this book, the scene is not forgotten. If you stop by the house, the current neighbors will know which one you’re looking for and will point it out to you. The unfortunate residents of the house in September 1911 were the wife and children of A. J. Burnham. A. J. had tuberculosis, or consumption, as it was then called. Whatever you call it, in that era it was killing more than 100,000 Americans a year. People who had tuberculosis were advised to move to the mountains, which was 10 percent more effective than telling them to keep their fingers crossed. Colorado Springs was in the mountains, so there was a tuberculosis sanatorium, where people who had TB went to get better or, in most cases, die.

  May Alice Burnham had a sister named Nettie Ruth. Nettie and Alice were working together on a sewing project. On Wednesday, September 20, Ms. Ruth walked to her sister’s house at 321 West Dale, carrying some clothes that were in need of mending. May Alice did not answer the door. The house was locked up tight, and all of the window blinds were drawn. A grocery bill had been tacked to the front door by a grocer’s clerk who had been unable to raise anyone inside the house. Nettie thought that May might be visiting a neighbor who lived down the street, but the neighbor said she hadn’t seen May for several days. Concerned, they placed a call to the sanatorium where Albert (A. J.) lived and worked as a cook. Albert said he hadn’t been to the house in a week.

  The neighbor had a key to the Burnham house. As they placed the key in the lock, Nettie said, “Oh, suppose we find May and her babies dead in the house. It would be terrible, terrible.” The lock stuck.

  Newspaper reports say that the lock stuck. I doubt that that’s actually what happened. The Man from the Train often jammed something into the lock to make the door hard to open. When the door was forced open, whatever it was would fall to the ground, and people would never realize it had been there. I suspect that it was not that the lock was stuck, but that the door was jammed shut. Whatever. As they pushed the door open the stench of death overwhelmed them.

  The house was exactly as it had been on Sunday evening, when Nettie had last visited. Sunday night’s dishes still sat on the table. Seconds later the two women ran screaming into the street.

  There were three victims—May Alice, John, and Nellie Emma. John was a three-year-old boy; Nellie Emma a six-year-old girl. Their skulls had been crushed with the blunt side of an axe. May and John had been killed in their sleep. Nellie either had awakened or her body had been moved after she had been killed; in any case she was not found in the aspect of sleep. Something in the room would later cause the chief detective in the case to describe the perpetrator as a “moral pervert”; what that was was never revealed, but you and I know. The blinds were drawn, and the house, as we mentioned, locked up tight except for a window through which the murderer had exited. There was a bowl of bloody water, where the murderer had probably washed his hands, and there was a small pile of ashes in front of the stove. A crumpled portion of the Sunday newspaper was found on the floor, partially burned, and the lower part of a lace curtain had been burned.

  A bottle of ink had been setting in the window ledge through which the killer left the house. The murderer had knocked it over as he left, leaving ink and smudged ink fingerprints all over the windowsill, and printing a perfectly clear ink thumbprint on the handle of the axe.

  At first it was assumed that the killer had tried to burn the house down as he left, but a newspaper photographer would say later that he had accidentally set fire to the curtains when he used too much flash powder in taking a photograph. (Many fires, of course, were actually started in this way.) Because of the photographer’s statement, authorities would conclude that there had been no effort to burn down the house. It is my opinion that he had attempted to burn down the house, based on these facts:

  1. The Man from the Train frequently did set fire to the house after completing his crime, although we have not yet told you about most of the cases in which this had happened,

  2. A crumpled Sunday newspaper, partially burned, is just too coincidental. Tinder made from newspaper is what people use to start a fire.

  In any case, before the issue of the fire arose the rush of policemen to the scene had drawn a crowd of hundreds. After about an hour one of the onlookers noticed something curious. While every other house in the neighborhood was a hive of anxious activity, the neighboring house—just a few feet from the Burnhams—had about it the silence of the grave.

  It was the house—no longer standing—of Henry and Blanche Wayne, ages thirty and twenty-six, and their baby daughter, Lula May, who was two. Henry Wayne, another consumptive, had moved his family to Colorado about a month before the murders. He had met Burnham at the sanatorium, and Burnham had told him that there were houses for rent in his neighborhood. The two families were becoming friendly. Predictable details. Police knocked on the door. No answer. The screen door had been cut open. Police forced their way in. Three more bodies, all murdered with the blunt side of an axe. The bloody axe which had killed both families, borrowed from a neighbor, was found resting against the Wayne house.

  Police began a normal course of investigation, starting with Albert Burnham. Burnham was arrested as soon as the crimes were discovered, and the Colorado Springs Gazette reported the next morning that “police were working on clews that may make it extremely difficult for him to disprove their theories.” Burnham had an alibi, and in any case was too sick to have committed the murders. He would die of tuberculosis a few months later.

  The Pinkerton Agency in Denver was hired to investigate the crime, and the Denver chief of police also volunteered his men. They put together what would now be called a task force, and actually, a very good task force—the sheriff, the local police chief and assistant police chief, an assistant district attorney, plus the Pinkerton Agency and the Denver police. In charge of the Pinkerton crew was a man named Prettyman. Prettyman was pretty certain that they would soon solve the case. “No person can commit a crime of this kind without leaving some sort of a clew,” Prettyman told the Colorado Springs Gazette. “And once we find such a clew, the whole story will unravel like a ball of twine—and with a rapidity that will surprise the men working on the case. It may take a day, it may be several weeks, but sooner or later we will be in a position to announce that we have a footing. From then on it will be easy sailing.” (It is unclear whether Prettyman knew that a “clew” was in fact a ball of twine. The modern word clue evolved from the word clew, which meant a ball of string or twine.)

  A gold bracelet was left untouched on the arm of Blanche Wayne, and a gold watch on the mantel of the Burnham house. In each house a lamp had been moved, and its chimney had been removed. A fingerprint expert was called in from Leavenworth, Kansas. He tried to lift fingerprints from the lamps, and photographed the ink fingerprints from the axe and the metal basin in which the murderer had washed his hands.

  Although the Burnham house was tiny, it did have a spare bedroom with a door that locked. The neighbor who had the key to the Burnham house ran a boardinghouse a few houses away, and occasionally Alice Burnham had allowed an overflow lodger to sleep in the spare bedroom, and also sometimes in a hammock on her porch. All of these lodgers were now suspects, but as they were just names in the wind, not suspects of any value. Other people became suspects—rejected boyfriends, neighborhood creeps, transients, etc. May Alice had a questionable relationship with an ex-boyfriend who lived in the neighborhood. His personal life wound up in the newspapers. No case could be constructed against any of them, no one was ever brought to trial for the crime, and the investigation stalled out.

  The police and Mr. Prettyman explicitly rejected the possibility that the crimes could have been committed by a madman with no connection to the Burnham and Wayne families.

  * * *

  Jack the Ripper’s Double Event is often attributed by Ripperologists to
his frustration or lack of satisfaction with the first murder. It is believed that he was interrupted in the process of committing the first murder, and driven away from the body before he could eviscerate her or whatever it was that he had in mind to do. He then selected the second victim.

  But noting the frequency with which serial murderers who are sexually motivated do have a Double Event, I have always wondered whether it was not the opposite—if, in fact, the murderer was so “high” and so excited after the first murder that another murder was just his way of keeping the good times rolling. We come to these six murders: why, then, did he go from the Waynes to the Burnhams?

  It could be either motivation. We’re not 100 percent sure that the Waynes were murdered first, by the way; that is police conjecture, and I think it is most likely correct, but we can’t be certain. The key is the spilled ink. If he had gone to the Waynes after spilling ink and getting some of it on his hands, there would probably be some evidence of ink in the second house. Therefore, police believe that it happened the other way—but on the other hand, the axe was found resting against the Wayne house, which would suggest that that was the final venue.

  The Burnham and Wayne families were friendly, and their children often played together in the yard that joined their houses. The Man from the Train may have been watching the children play, perhaps walked by the house two or three times in the daylight hours, and may have focused on Nellie Burnham as his primary target. He may then have broken into the wrong house and killed the Wayne family by mistake, which is not to say that he didn’t also enjoy it. But realizing his mistake, he then broke into the Burnham house and completed his mission. This, I think, is the most likely explanation.

  CHAPTER XI

  Monmouth

  Monmouth, Illinois, in 1911 was a town of 10,298 people, a little bit larger then than it is now. It rests in the far western part of the state, eighteen miles from the Mississippi River and a little more than two hundred miles from Chicago. The railroad track cuts into Monmouth from the south, runs through the southern part of Monmouth, and then bends back southward again, putting about 15 percent of the town on the wrong side of the tracks.