The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  The murders at the Moores’ home in Villisca and the murders of the Ackerman family in Milton, Florida, in 1906 highlight the contrast. The murders of the Moore family are quite famous; magazine articles are written about them, television shows are made about them, and the case is often described as the greatest unsolved crime in American history. But in fact, the eight members of the Moore family killed by The Man from the Train in 1912 are probably not even the most people he had killed in one event. Nine members of the Ackerman family were killed in Florida in 1906, probably by the same man.

  But whereas the Moore family murders are famous, the murders of the Ackerman family are so obscure that we were unable to come up with more than a basic outline of what happened. The murders of the Ackerman family are so unknown that I was unable to find anyone in the historical society of the county in which the murders occurred who had ever heard of them. Without a few old newspapers, they would be totally and absolutely forgotten.

  In part, this is the difference between 1906 and 1912, but in the larger part it is the difference between the Midwest and the rural South. Not wishing to speak ill of the South or to denigrate southerners in any way, but the fact is that literacy in the South, in that era, lagged far, far behind the rest of the nation. In 1912, according to a Web site maintained by the school of education of Chesapeake University, southern states accounted for 34 percent of the American population, but only 3 percent of state funding for education.

  In 1911 and 1912, The Man from the Train was killing people in the Midwest. But in the years 1900 to 1908, he was killing families mostly in the South—in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. Literacy in those areas was at a low level, and if you don’t read, you don’t need newspapers. Many or most of the areas in which he committed his atrocities, in the years just before 1908, had no newspaper coverage in the immediate vicinity.

  Not only that, but . . . I know you are going to find this difficult to believe. Many of these crimes were never really investigated. I don’t mean that there was zero investigation, but for many of these crimes, there is no evidence that there was ever any real effort to find the murderer.

  You have to understand how primitive the system was. There were no investigative agencies at the state level in most states. Investigating a murder was the responsibility of local and county authorities—who normally would have no murders or maybe one murder a year in a county, and who had no budget to investigate a mysterious homicide. A study of Montgomery County, Iowa, where the Moores were murdered, found that in the twenty years before the Villisca murders were committed, the county had averaged about one homicide a year. When those murders had an obvious solution, then someone was convicted, but when they had no obvious solution, they were never solved. Half of the murders in the county had no obvious solution, so they were never solved. Montgomery County was probably no different in this respect from any other rural county.

  Rural counties had no budget to pursue an investigation, so the first thing they had to do, even to make an effort to solve the crime, was to come up with the money. If the relatives of the victims had money, they might offer a reward fund, or the city or the county might kick in some money, or, in many cases, the governor would put up a reward. But if, like the Ackermans, the murdered family was poor or new to the area, there was less pressure to mount an effort. They’d talk to the neighbors, talk to the family, hassle a few local criminals, and then they would shrug their shoulders and put it aside.

  So can you see why it was not practical for us to begin the book with the earlier murders? By starting the sequence in 1909, we were able to talk to you about cases that we actually know quite a lot about. By doing that, we were able to establish a base of knowledge about The Man from the Train, sufficient for you to make your own educated guess about whether these earlier cases, that we will tell you about now, are a part of the series or are not a part of the series. We told you about those later cases in chronological sequence, and now we are going to go back in time, back to 1900, and tell you about more cases, again in chronological sequence, but starting from a different point, several years earlier.

  CHAPTER XX

  Trenton Corners

  When Bob Hensen visited the Van Lieu family on November 6, 1900, he brought them a chicken. I am certain they didn’t ask where he got the chicken. The Van Lieu family were honest, upstanding, hardworking people. Hensen, on the other hand, was infamous, notorious. Which is worse, infamous or notorious? Whichever one was worse, that was what Hensen was. The newspapers would say that he had a bad reputation. He had a bad reputation in the same sense that Michael Jordan had a jump shot. He was fine when he wasn’t drinking; he had a temper even then, but he was likeable, and he would take jobs and he would work hard—when he wasn’t drinking.

  On November 6 a dispute erupted between Hensen and Mary Elizabeth Van Lieu. Hensen left clothes at the Van Lieu house, and he would often stay there, even when George Van Lieu was away. Mary told him that she was tired of taking care of his clothes, and he needed to get them out of her house. In the subsequent argument Hensen may have threatened to kill her, although it is impossible to determine whether this crucial detail is fact or merely gossip.

  Van Lieu was a working weekend musician, a violin player, and on November 17, 1900, which was a Saturday night, he had a gig in Trenton (although the term gig is not known to have been used until the 1920s). In the early afternoon he met up with a friend and neighbor, Stephen Williamson, and the two of them walked to Trenton Junction, where they would catch the train into Trenton. It was about a three-mile walk into Trenton Junction. At the edge of Trenton Junction they ran into Bob Hensen, who had spent the morning drinking.

  The place where the Van Lieu family was murdered no longer exists. The story of the Van Lieu family murders is rich with references to bars and roadhouses, to small settlements that hoped to grow into towns, and to roads which had names, before the roads had merely numbers, and to hills, when even the hills had names, and the creeks had names, but none of these things exists anymore, not the bars, nor the small towns, nor the roads, not even the hills or the creeks.

  In 1900 the population of Trenton, New Jersey, was 73,000 people—actually not very different from the population of Trenton now, but whereas modern Trenton sits in the lap of a giant metropolis, in 1900 it was surrounded by farms and fields. In 1900 the population of the rest of Mercer County was 22,000; now it is more than 300,000. Seven miles northwest of Trenton was the settlement of Trenton Corners. Trenton at that time was almost 100 percent white, whereas Trenton Corners was a mixed-race enclave, and every person mentioned by name in this story was black except Ellen Quinn. Leaving Trenton Corners there was a lonely road called the Birmingham-Harbourton road. The Van Lieu family lived along that road.

  Hensen said that after meeting Van Lieu and Williamson he visited a couple of taverns in Trenton Junction and in the evening, at dusk and after, took a nap under a bridge. He was awakened when a team of horses and a heavy cart rolled over the bridge, and about the same time some dogs started barking loudly. He wandered aimlessly, heard a violin playing but didn’t know where it was coming from. Hensen didn’t have any idea what time this was (he may not have been able to tell time), but the eleven-year-old boy who was practicing his violin at that hour was one of the Williamson family. The boy testified that he started playing the violin about 10:30, and that the dogs broke out in a ferocious barking spell shortly after that. A little bit before 11:00 the Van Lieu house was discovered to be on fire. By the time the neighbors got to the scene the house was entirely engulfed in flames. The neighbors salvaged a clock and a table, but otherwise the house and contents had burned to the ground within an hour.

  At the time, it was assumed that Mary Van Lieu and her two-year-old son, Willie, were in Trenton with their father/husband, but when George Van Lieu got off the train about 1:00 a.m. another man, also named Williamson, met him on the road and informed him of the fire. Van Lieu asked where his wife and baby were. In
vestigating further, the neighbors now found a large pool of blood at the back of the house and a bloody axe, taken from the coal shed, discarded in the backyard. After that, they found the remains of the wife and child in the burned-out basement, charred beyond recognition. There was a pump at a well in the yard. The wooden handle of the pump was covered with bloody handprints. The murderer had washed his hands before he fled the scene.

  Police arrived. When Van Lieu told the sheriff that he had met Robert Hensen near Trenton Junction and that he assumed Hensen was headed toward his house to pick up his clothes, that for all practical purposes was the end of the investigation. It would be an understatement to say that Hensen was suspected of the crime. He was immediately assumed guilty. One of the first newspaper accounts contained the following rather memorable summary:

  Robert Hensen, a Trenton colored man with an unsavory reputation, is the one suspected of having done the shocking deed. He is now confined in a cell in the county jail and the civil authorities are at work collecting evidence which, it is expected, will fasten on him, beyond a doubt, the monstrous crime, and send him to the gallows to expiate the lives that were sacrificed to a murderer’s lust.

  —Trenton Times, November 19, 1900

  We don’t have the evidence yet, but we know who did it. Two days later:

  The fact that the evidence so far brought to light is entirely of a circumstantial nature is in favor of the prisoner. . . . Hensen’s life of crime is so well known all over Mercer county that it will be difficult to secure an unbiased jury to try the case. A close and careful watch is kept over the accused by the authorities because they know that he is dangerous and must be watched.

  —Trenton Times, November 21, 1900

  Hensen had been prosecuted for larceny or petty larceny in October 1888, May 1892, and October 1898, and for assault or atrocious assault in January 1885, October 1898, and January 1900. “Atrocious assault” sounds as if it could mean “rape” and it could mean that, but usually didn’t; it was a term used in New Jersey law that meant “aggravated assault,” which means assault leading to injury. Atrocious assault meant that the skin was broken. He had also been arrested in regard to the murder of a white woman, Ellen Quinn, in 1888. Not blowing that off, but he was a black man suspected in the death of a white woman; if they had had any evidence against him at all, they’d have hung him for that.

  Hensen had no permanent address. He slept under bridges and left clothes with friendly families. He was arrested the next day, ten miles away, at the home of another friend—also named Williamson, the fourth Williamson we have encountered. The papers note that the arrest occurred in the same house next to which another man had frozen to death the previous winter.

  Van Lieu told the police that when he met Hensen at Trenton Junction, he assumed that Hensen was headed to his house (the Van Lieu house) to pick up the clothes that he had left there. Police surmised that this must have led to a renewal of the earlier dispute, and that Hensen must have erupted in anger and murdered the family. Hensen insisted that he never went to the Van Lieu house on that day; he was never there. There is no independent evidence that he was there; no one saw him at the house on the day in question or saw him leaving the house. His presence there, and the resulting dispute, is conjecture, and the prosecution timeline has a six-hour gap. If Hensen had gone directly from meeting Van Lieu to Van Lieu’s house he would have been at the Van Lieu house about 4:00 p.m.; the house was found in flames more than six hours later.

  Hensen also left clothes at the house of Ann Smith, who lived in Trenton Junction. At some time that evening Hensen went to Ann Smith’s house. He knocked on the door and was admitted by a man named John Skillman. Hensen thought this had happened about nine o’clock; Skillman thought it was about midnight. Since Hensen had testified to hearing the barking dogs and the violin playing—things that are known to have happened around 10:30—he must have arrived at Ann Smith’s more likely around 11:00. Asked if he was friends with Skillman, Hensen replied, “He is not with me.” Hensen told Ann Smith that he was hungry, washed his hands, and was served a meal.

  The Mercer County sheriff took pride in treating his prisoners with dignity. The grand jurors saw Hensen sitting in a clean, newly whitewashed jail cell with some furniture, apparently well fed, and remarked that “Well, I must say that the prisoners are made very comfortable.” Hensen jumped out of his chair, swore violently for several seconds, and attempted to assault the man who had made the remark. It was a futile gesture, as he was separated from the juryman by iron bars, but Hensen, exhausting his supply of profanities, suggested loudly that if the jury member thought this looked comfortable he should come stay with them for a few days. Retreating across the cell, the “burly negro” turned and hurled a book at the bars. The outburst probably didn’t help his cause.

  The other facts against him were shoe tracks and bloody clothes. There were three hundred yards of foot tracks across a field, leaving the scene of the crime. These were not bloody tracks; the implication was that because whoever left those tracks was cutting through the field, rather than using the road, he must have been fleeing the scene of the crime. We were spared the bloodhounds this time; we were spared them, actually, because the sheriff had already decided it was Hensen, so . . . why bother with the hounds? The sheriff said that the footprints exactly fit Hensen’s shoes. His lawyer said that there was nothing unique about the shoes, they were common shoes of a common size, with no broken sole or anything of that nature to identify them.

  There was blood on Hensen’s clothes; not a whole lot of blood, but some blood. Hensen said that it might be muskrat blood; he had trapped and skinned a muskrat earlier in the month. He also trapped and skinned rabbits and squirrels; it might be rabbit blood or squirrel blood, and also he had smashed his hand earlier in the week helping somebody move a piano, and his hand had bled. And he had constant nosebleeds. I know, that’s too many explanations; when somebody gives you four reasons for having blood on his clothes, it looks hinky. Two Princeton scientists testified that the blood was from a mammal, but muskrats and squirrels are mammals; rodents are mammals. At that time it was difficult to distinguish human blood from the blood of other mammals, although ten years later that was no longer true. The pump handle was sawed off and introduced into evidence; it was covered with bloody prints, which would have been highly significant six years later, when people understood fingerprints, but in 1900 fingerprints hadn’t yet arrived.

  Hensen had a five-day trial with very good defense lawyers. He chewed tobacco constantly, even on the witness stand, and chewed nervously on the ends of his little mustache. He was convicted in early March and filed an appeal, asking for a new trial. The appeal being rejected, he was executed on December 27, 1901, a little more than a year after the trial.

  The case against Hensen is poor, and it rather sets my teeth on edge when people decide who committed a crime in the first twenty minutes of the investigation. At the same time, there is nowhere near enough evidence for us to conclude that The Man from the Train had anything to do with these murders. The indications that it could be The Man from the Train are:

  1. The crime did occur within walking distance of the intersection of two train lines.

  2. The small, isolated village near the murders is exactly the type of place favored by our criminal.

  3. There was no robbery, and no apparent motive, other than the supposition that a dispute from eleven days earlier might have reignited.

  4. The Man from the Train’s previous (known) murders were in the Northeast, in 1898, and his next suspected or possible murder is in the Northeast, in 1901.

  5. Of the few known elements of the crime, some do appear to resemble his patterns that would be established by future crimes such as taking an axe from the scene of the crime: leaving the axe at the scene of the crime, and washing his hands at the scene of the murders.

  He may have been in the Northeast at this time; he may have committed the murders. We don’t know
. The absence of a young female at the scene is against the theory, and there is no convincing evidence that he was criminally active between 1898 and 1903.

  Hensen’s alleged motive is pretty slight. The Van Lieus were his friends, and he visited them regularly. His story is that he was asleep at the time, a half-mile away. Given his drinking and his normal habits it is not unreasonable to suggest that he might have lain down to sleep it off, and the rest of his story, about the dogs barking and the violin playing, is consistent with the accounts of others. The day-of-the-crime quarrel is pure speculation. But there’s a lot here we don’t know.

  What remains of Trenton Junction is now called West Trenton. What is now the Trenton-Mercer County Airport opened in 1929 as the Skillman Airport; the lonely road along which the Van Lieus lived was regraded to serve as the first landing strip. During World War II General Motors built bombers near the airport, which became such a hive of activity during the war that everything recognizable in the area was obliterated. The Trenton-Mercer County Airport has two landing strips, which intersect almost at right angles. As nearly as I can reconstruct, the house where the Van Lieus were murdered stood exactly at the point where the two landing strips intersect.

  Notes about the case:

  1. Discovered on an old map but never mentioned in the newspaper coverage of the crime: the scene of the murders was within easy walking distance of the New Jersey state insane asylum.

  2. Many of you probably know that there is a file that catalogs data on all known executions in the United States; it is called the Espy File. The Espy File lists Hensen’s name as “Henson”; however, all or almost all newspaper articles that we found spell the name as “Hensen.”