by Bill James
The sheriff—Sheriff F. Marion Chandler of Miami County—very specifically and repeatedly stated that it was his belief that the crime was committed by a stranger who had no connection with the Hudsons.
The quote with which we began this chapter is one of the most incisive comments made by a journalist in any of the places where The Man from the Train committed his atrocities. The writer’s observation that “the details were carefully arranged, even to spreading the sheet over the heads of the victims apparently to keep the blood from splashing on the murderer” is the exact same observation that six decades later would become the foundation stone of criminal profiling: the realization that this criminal was unusually well organized, that he had thought through the crime and was taking steps he had planned in advance. The newspaper editor infers from this—consistent with modern criminal profiling, and also correctly—that the murderer was experienced, that he had done this before. (This, again, seems inconsistent with the crime having been committed by someone emotionally involved with the Hudsons. The angry lover would not likely have experience as an axe murderer.) In part of the paragraph not quoted the writer listed the “linked” crimes, including the Bernhardt murders, which modern writers often overlook. The writer then realizes that the “linked” crimes almost all occurred in warm weather—a fact that I myself did not realize until I had been working on this book for more than a year—and then speculates, correctly, that the murders were committed by what he calls a crazy tramp. In the hundreds of thousands of paragraphs of old journalism that we reviewed in writing this book, that one stands out.
* * *
The assumption that the public should give a wide berth to the process of justice is a recent phenomenon in human history, and is a by-product of the complex and sophisticated police networks that we now take for granted, but that began to develop less than two hundred years ago. In almost all of the history of the civilized world, and in America up until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was an obligation of private citizens to arrest and detain those suspected of crimes until they could be given over to officials. With the development of robust police services, beginning about 1840 but not reaching maturity until about 1940, came a gradual acceptance that police investigations should be left to police professionals.
In Kansas in the nineteenth century there were 200 documented lynchings, all of them of persons believed to have committed crimes; the actual number of lynched persons is 200, not 199 or 201 or rounded off to 200. (The number of separate events is somewhat less.) In the twentieth century there were six such cases, three of those from 1900 to 1902. By 1912, when these murders occurred, lynching had essentially ended in Kansas, but was part of the state’s recent history. A lynching is, of course, the ultimate example of an inappropriate involvement of the public in the process of justice. We might expect, then, that where there are so many extremely inappropriate interactions between the public and the process of justice, there would also be many other inappropriate, if less dramatic, interactions between the public and the process of justice.
And, in fact, there were. Not only did much of the population of Paola go by the murder house to see what they could see, but hundreds of people from Kansas City jumped on the train to come join in the excitement. The understanding that it was inappropriate to involve oneself in a criminal investigation was a new phenomenon, an idea promulgated by some police since about 1880 but not yet adopted by the public, in the Midwest or beyond; two murders that occurred in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1922 so captivated the public that throngs of New Yorkers rushed out to invade the scene of the crime.
We tend to write about these murders that the police failed to protect the scene of the crime. They did, but the more important truth is that the public failed to observe boundaries. It is not that the boundaries keeping the public away from horrible crime scenes were violated; it is more that they did not exist. Those restraints had yet to be constructed. We see this in dozens of ways. In almost every case we see curious spectators flocking to the scene of the crime, often by the thousands. When a house burned down after one of our murders, a story to be told later, hundreds and hundreds of people stopped by the house in the following weeks and picked through the burned-out wreckage, looking for souvenirs.
In 1912 it was normal for newspaper reporters to be present when suspects in serious crimes were interrogated; if not present during the interrogation, reporters were often allowed to interview suspects in custody after the police interrogation was finished. Suspects in some cases were paraded to news conferences. Newspapers in many cases came into possession of items of evidence such as letters, wills, and other documents. Again, this is an inappropriate interaction between the public and the process of justice.
In The Great Detective, Zach Dundas quotes Paul Collins as saying that “Hans Gross published the first standard forensics text in 1893, and by the next decade police knew how to preserve crime scenes, maintain chains of evidence, proceed in an orderly and scientific way—all the staples of procedural detective stories now. They staffed cases in teams, with specialist bureaus taking on different aspects of investigations. It wasn’t just Inspector Lestrade coming out to ‘take the case in hand’ anymore.”
Well . . . in London, maybe. In New York, maybe maybe. Some police may have known how to do these things. In the places where The Man from the Train committed his crimes, no way in hell. What Collins describes, with teams and specialist bureaus, is an urban police force. The towns where these crimes were committed had a one- or two-man police force—if they had any police force at all.
In most of the cases covered later in this book, the scene of the crime will be invaded by large numbers of private citizens—sometimes thousands of them—before the first policeman is on the scene. And when the police do arrive, there quite certainly are no teams or squads or specialist bureaus. Eventually, these states would form state investigative bureaus, which were basically squads of former county sheriffs, who could be called in to assist the small-town police—but that would happen thirty to forty years after the crimes in this series. Of all of the dozens of crimes in this book, there are only four that were investigated in anything like the manner described by Mr. Collins, those four being the Schultz murders in early 1910, the Bernhardt family murders in 1910, the Casaways in 1911, and the Double Event in Colorado Springs in 1911.
In many of these cases, but in the Paola case more than any other, it is difficult to be sure what actually happened. You would think that people would have the common sense not to tell whoppers that place them in the middle of a terrible crime story, but people like to tell stories. Without the boundaries that we have now, people told stories that put themselves in the center of the action. I believe that two people in our cases (George Wilson in Rainier, Washington, and John O. Knight in Monmouth, Illinois) accidentally talked themselves into murder convictions. This still happens occasionally in the twenty-first century, but it was more common in a more primitive system.
There are facts in this case the size of a pea, and a layer of gossip surrounding them that is the size of a grapefruit. I wish that I could simply ignore the grapefruit, but there could be something useful in there, and I would feel I was cheating you if I just let it all slip away. One of the problems is that Paola at this time was served by two local newspapers and by several other regional newspapers. The two local papers were intensely competitive, and they printed different and sometimes irreconcilable accounts of the investigation.
The gossip can be sorted into two magazines: those stories that allege Mrs. Hudson’s involvement with another man, and those stories told by neighbors about the night of the crime(s). In our judgment, the stories about Mrs. Hudson may or may not be true, but they are irrelevant to the murders. Most of the stories told by the neighbors are probably not true.
The narrative about Anna’s involvement with another man began with comments allegedly made by George Coe shortly after the crime. Coe certainly was in a position to know
intimate details of the Hudson marriage, but it is not clear what exactly Hudson said to Coe, or what exactly Coe said to a reporter. Coe is reported as saying that Hudson told him he had three times found Anna “with” another man, but what exactly did that mean? Did it mean that he had three times found them naked in the bedroom, or did it mean that he had three times found them walking together on a public street, or sitting and talking in a manner that he (Rollin) felt was inappropriate, but she (Anna) didn’t think was wrong?
People who have written about the case, in 1912 and in the twenty-first century, have generally rushed to the conclusion that it was the former. I think the latter is a better guess. We don’t know the character of George Coe. The fact that he would spill slanderous gossip about the couple to a newspaper reporter hours after their murder certainly speaks poorly of his judgment, but we don’t know whether he was a reliable man, or whether he was a fool and an inveterate gossip. Rollin Hudson’s father was a successful attorney; according to a newspaper of the time he “is a prominent attorney at North Industry [Ohio] and has been prominent in politics there. He knew the late President McKinley and Judge Day well and was counsel in cases there with them and against both of them. He is a man of education and refinement.” Mr. Hudson—also in a position to know—came to Paola after the murders, denounced the rumors against his daughter-in-law, and told reporters that she had been a good wife and a virtuous young woman (according to one of the local newspapers. According to the other one, he was surprised to learn that Anna and Rollin were back together).
The printed speculation about the event sometimes links the pig-faced man to Anna’s supposed paramour, but this is unlikely. Rollin Hudson worked on the day before his murder. The pig-faced man waited until Hudson was at home to knock on their door. For a man to visit a married woman alone in her house in the middle of the afternoon starts rumors—then and now. This man was observing propriety.
Anna and Rollin Hudson had had a loud argument in public just days before they were murdered—an argument related in some stories to a letter she had received. This is my take on all of this, and you can make of it what you want. Rollin and Anna were married when they were very young, and, as is generally true of those who marry too young, they were working through things inside of their marriage that are better worked through before marriage. They were still growing up. Rollin was insecure, jealous, and suspicious of Anna; Anna resented it, and probably told Rollin that she would talk to whomever she wanted to talk to and it was none of his business.
These stories mushroomed from a thin factual record. Quite similar stories are told about young wives connected to many of the crimes recounted in this book. It is the back side of Victorian prudishness, that women who are expected to be above all suspicion are condemned to live perpetually in the shadow of the suspicion cast by the most ordinary events.
In relating the story of the break-in at the Longmeyer house, I left out a relevant detail. Mrs. Longmeyer insisted that she, her husband, and her daughter had been drugged with chloroform before discovering the break-in at her house. Not only did Mrs. Longmeyer insist that she had been the victim of an attempted drugging, but another neighbor, Mrs. Cora Pryor, also claimed that she and her two children had been chloroformed by the assassin before he broke into the Hudson and Longmeyer houses. “I had a hard time wakening up Thursday morning,” Mrs. Pryor said. “My head ached terribly and the two children complained of the same thing, we were sick all day yesterday. Just as if we had been chloroformed.”
Mrs. Pryor lived two doors down from the Hudsons, next door to the Longmeyers. Myrtle Coe, who lived across the street, reported hearing a scream coming from the Hudson house just about midnight, and the woman who lived between the Hudsons and the Pryors reported that she had seen the shadow of a man pass by her back window shortly after midnight. The whole damned neighborhood appears to have been vaguely aware that the chloroform monster was on the prowl.
Mrs. Pryor was probably loopy and nobody paid much attention to her, but the police bore down hard on Mrs. Longmeyer, who, since she had reported the break-in before the murders were known and had come into possession of an item taken from the Hudson house (the kimono), could at least be suspected of having had some involvement in the crime. She was interviewed repeatedly by police, who tried to make her back off her statement about the chloroform, which she adamantly refused to do. A detective named JL Ghent, detailed to the case from the Kansas City police, told reporters at one time that he believed the murders were the work of a jealous woman, bent on revenge at Anna Hudson.
One newspaper is deeply into the chloroform stories and Anna’s love life, while the other observes quietly that “it is thought both were chloroformed before the fatal blows were struck.” Really? Let’s think that one through.
The reports about The Man from the Train using chloroform began after the Ellsworth murders; someone who was in the house in Ellsworth thought that he smelled chloroform, and then chloroform would become a standard element of the narrative of subsequent crimes. But we know that The Man from the Train was carrying an axe. The question is, was he carrying an axe and chloroform? If so, what did he need the chloroform for? If you have an axe and you’re intending to kill people with it, and you’re comfortable doing that, what exactly is the purpose of the chloroform?
The use of chloroform as a weapon was a hot-button topic in this era. From 1899 to 1901 a criminal gang in Pennsylvania known as the Chloroform Gang used chloroform to subdue their victims for the purpose of robbery. The leaders of the Chloroform Gang were brothers Ed and Jack Biddle. One of their victims died, and they were arrested for murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. They became famous eight decades later because the warden’s wife, Kate Soffel, helped them to escape from prison and ran away with them; she had fallen in love with Ed Biddle. Mrs. Soffel; maybe you saw the movie. William Marsh Rice, for whom Rice University is named, was murdered with chloroform in 1900, a very famous crime. As a result of these events and a few others, the use of chloroform as a murder weapon was prominent in the imaginations of naïve people.
Of course it is stupid to suggest that The Man from the Train was carrying chloroform, but nonetheless this is instructive. What I believe to be the first paragraph ever published about the murders in Villisca, published on the day the crimes were discovered, says that no one smelled chloroform in the house—not that someone had smelled chloroform in the house, but that no one had. What this tells us is that the reporters had immediately connected the murders in Villisca to the earlier crimes, and this assumption is what made the Villisca crimes instantly famous: the immediate realization that this was not merely an isolated crime, but rather, the latest in an ongoing series.
On June 10, five days after the crime, a rambling, four-page letter was found on the stairway of a restaurant in Paola; it was dated May 27, addressed to Anna Hudson, and pinned to it was a note asking that the letter be turned over to the proper authorities. The contents of the letter were never released, but those who read it described it as a passionate love letter, obviously from someone other than her husband.
That’s bogus. It’s a mischief-maker’s prank, like the flashlight planted at the house in Monmouth, Illinois. Prudish people will get themselves all worked up about illicit sex. When the rumors about Anna Hudson’s infidelity became a part of the story, people ran wild with it.
* * *
The Man from the Train murdered fourteen people in fourteen weeks in late 1911, then was inactive for seven months, then was hyperactive again in the summer and fall of 1912. The last murder in 1911 and the first murder in 1912, separated by seven months, were both committed in Kansas.
This suggests the possibility that The Man from the Train was incarcerated somewhere in Kansas from October 1911 until June 1912. Serial murderers who are incarcerated in the middle of their run spend their time in prison fantasizing about killing people and often have a burst of murderous activity beginning hours after they get out of prison. Ted Bu
ndy did this, and Arthur Shawcross, and Kenneth McDuff, and others. The Man from the Train killed ten people in a week in early June 1912. This suggests to me that he may have gotten out of prison just before then.
He would not likely have been incarcerated at the Kansas State Prison in Lansing, because people sent to Lansing were usually held for more serious crimes, and usually more than a few months. But he could have been held in any of a hundred county jails, or in any of dozens of city jails. We made an effort to find the records of people released from prisons in Kansas in the first days of June 1912, but we came up empty. We don’t know what name he was using at that time; we don’t know what he was arrested for; we don’t know exactly when he was arrested, or where. There just isn’t enough information to work with.
This is a chronology of the forty-nine murders that are discussed in this first section of the book, omitting the murders that we believe not to have been connected to the series:
SECTION I
Where
Who
No.
Date
Year
Hurley, Virginia
Meadows family
6
September 21
1909
Beckley, West Virginia
Hood family
4
October 31
1909
Houston Heights, Texas
Schultz family
5
March 11
1910
Marshalltown, Iowa
Hardy family
3
June 5
1910
Johnson County, Kansas
Bernhardt family
4
December 7
1910
San Antonio, Texas
Casaway family
5
March 21