The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  The real question for us, of course, is whether these murders could have been committed by the main subject of the book. I believe that in fact these murders most probably were committed by The Man from the Train—not that there is overwhelming evidence for that proposition, but that it seems to me the most reasonable explanation.

  A serial murderer often has an isolated event that occurs several years before he begins regularly killing people. That first event is rushed, amateurish, unplanned, or badly planned. The Allen massacre was not that first, isolated event—and neither is it the first of the planned, deliberate, and systematic murders that he would commit over the next eleven or twelve years. This is a transition event, a murder that resulted from a sudden burst of uncontrolled anger.

  The basic fact of the case is that a family was murdered, with an axe, without any robbery and with no reason to believe that anyone held a grudge against the family.

  In addition, there are four factors here that strongly suggest The Man from the Train: (1) proximity to the railroad tracks, (2) the fact that it was a logging area; (3) the presence of a large number of railroad tramps; and (4) the presence of Carrie Allen among the victims.

  The murders occurred two miles from the railroad track, through relatively dense woods, and the sheriff spoke about that as if nobody could possibly cut through two miles of woods to commit a motiveless murder. But the hobo camp sat just two miles away, and there were trails through those woods, and people cut through them all the time.

  Many, many of The Man from the Train’s murders were committed in logging areas, presumably because he worked as what we would now call a lumberjack. Logging was then and is now the dominant industry of this area.

  Third, the early newspaper coverage of this crime states repeatedly that the area had recently been plagued with tramps.

  Fourth, Carrie Allen was just two or three years older than Lena Stillinger (I think), and the newspaper coverage states specifically on many occasions that she was an attractive young girl. Her age is reported in various places as twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, and I don’t honestly know which is correct, but fourteen seems to be the age given most often.

  I will note also that it was a Sunday night, which was the most common night for The Man from the Train to attack, and that it occurred in warm weather.

  Against the argument that this is our fiend is the fact that not enough is known about the crime to reach that conclusion, and also the fact that this family was apparently murdered about nightfall, whereas The Man from the Train preferred to wait until the middle of the night, when the families were asleep. But if this crime resulted not from a plan and pattern, but from sudden anger, then we would not expect it to conform to the patterns that developed in later years. In 1911 there were two murders (in Marshalltown, Iowa, and in Johnson County, Kansas) in which the murderer hid out in the barn until the man of the house came out to do his evening chores, attacked the man of the house in the barn, and then attacked the rest of the family. This, it appears to me, is what most likely happened here: the murderer was hiding out in the barn when J. Wesley Allen went out to do his evening chores and attacked him from behind with an axe before he had a chance to defend himself.

  The Web site Victims of the State, an anti–death penalty information source, makes this the last paragraph of their summary of the Lambert/Allen case:

  In 1923, after serving more than 20 years in prison, Lambert was granted a pardon based on innocence. It was felt that Lambert was convicted on insufficient evidence and that other evidence showed Allen had had a dispute with a tramp who may have committed the alleged murders.

  I think that this is roughly right. Some speculation here, OK? Speculating. The Man from the Train acted—committed murders—out of a combination of hatred and a horribly perverted lust; I don’t want to call it “lust” because that makes it sound normal, so I will refer to it as “perversion.” In the end, these two fused so that he simply enjoyed killing people; he enjoyed committing murder in the same way people enjoy roller coasters or mountain climbing—in the end. But in the beginning, it was hatred and perversion. My best guess is that, having done some logging work somewhere in the area in the previous weeks, he was spending the weekend tramping around the area, drinking and fantasizing about killing people, when he happened somehow to see Carrie Allen, perhaps just walking across her backyard. He walked down the road a ways, circled back, picked up an axe in the barn, and hid out in the barn until Wesley Allen began his evening chores.

  But it may not have been Carrie; it may also be that he knocked on the door and asked for a drink of water, and Wesley Allen came out at him in a bad temper, and told him to get on down the road and be quick about it. The Man from the Train, although very strong, was a small man who felt that he had been mistreated by the world, that he was smarter than other people, and that he was better than other people, but that he had been denied his rightful place in the world.

  There is a scene in the TV series Dexter in which the friendly suburban serial murderer has a confrontation with a neighbor who is committing some petty vandalism, and the neighbor threatens him, and Dexter says to himself, in his internal-monologue voice, “Believe me, you are definitely messing with the wrong man here.” Wesley Allen, a large, powerful man, angrily drove tramps away from his door, but he was messing with the wrong man here. Most likely The Man from the Train, given his small stature and his hatred of humanity in general, particularly hated large men who tried to push him around. So he walked down the road a ways, but as he walked he worked himself into a blind rage about the way that he had been treated.

  In the process of this attack, however, The Man from the Train may have suffered a significant injury, causing him to shed blood at the scene. I believe that the two patches of blood in the yard are difficult to explain unless the murderer also suffered injuries. Because he was injured the murderer perhaps spent that night and possibly the next night hiding out in the Huff cabin, retreating into the woods in the daytime. It may be that the injuries suffered by the assailant in this case helped persuade the murderer, in future attacks, to wait until the families were asleep before he began his assault.

  CHAPTER XXII

  An Uncertain Set of Names

  The population of Florida now is twenty million, but in 1903 it was about 500,000 people, most of whom lived near the northern border of the state, as did the Kelly family—Kelly, or Caffey; we can’t be certain of the name. The village of Cottondale, eight to nine miles west of Marianna, was at that time unincorporated, just a few dozen people living around a rural railroad stop, where two lines met; it would be incorporated as a town two years later. The primary industries of the area were cotton farming, logging, and mining.

  Henry Kelly, a black man, was most likely a sharecropper. Of the nineteen newspaper accounts of this incident that we could locate, eleven say that the murdered family was named “Kelly,” four say “Caffey,” two say “Smith,” and two do not give any name. We will use the name “Kelly”; however, the best account of the murders uses the name “Caffey,” so that could be the actual name.

  In any case, the family lived in an isolated cabin near Cottondale; Henry, his wife, and three small children. The Kellys were last seen about October 31, 1903. On November 9 Kelly’s mother-in-law, who lived in Marianna, made her way to Cottondale to check up on the family, having not heard from them. The front door was secured from the outside with a padlock and a chain, and she could see blood on the outside of the house. She got a neighbor, and, with difficulty, they were able to break in.

  The Kelly family had been dead for several days, and their bodies were already somewhat decomposed. Mr. and Mrs. Kelly were found in bed, their heads crushed by “some blunt instrument.” Their baby was in bed with them, his throat slit, and the young children had been decapitated, their bodies on the floor and their heads on a mattress. An unwashed axe had been left in the room.

  Two men, perhaps only boys, also black,
were “arrested on suspicion.” Their names were Albert (or Allen) Roulhaes and Joe Gordon (also called George Jordan and George Jerdan. The name “Roulhaes” is probably misreported, as well, since no other person in the United States is known to have that surname). Since there are no reports of a trial, we have to assume that these young men were released.

  This is all that is known about the case. The area where the crime occurred was thinly populated with low levels of literacy and essentially no newspaper coverage. There is no indication that anyone from any newspaper ever visited the scene of the crime, and it is unlikely that there was ever any meaningful police investigation of the crime.

  We believe that the mother-in-law, who found the bodies, was named “Smith.” The confusion over the other names almost certainly results from the poor quality of long-distance telephone service at this time; the phones were so scratchy and faint that in many cases it was all you could do to make out what was being said by a person on the other end of the line.

  Obviously this is a low-information event; we don’t know enough about it to draw any solid conclusions. There is a substantial possibility that the crime was committed by The Man from the Train, based on the following facts:

  1. It was close to the railroad tracks, and to the intersection of two railroad lines.

  2. It was a logging/lumber area.

  3. The Man from the Train liked this area, and would murder several other families very close to here over the next few years.

  4. The Man from the Train almost certainly went south when the weather turned cold up north.

  5. The crime was presumably committed in the middle of the night, since the victims were found in bed.

  6. The victims were hit in the head with the blunt side of the axe.

  7. The axe was left in the room.

  8. Nothing of value was stolen (since the victims had nothing of value to steal).

  9. The incident has no characteristics consistent with it being a hate crime.

  10. There is no apparent motive.

  11. The house was locked up tight as the murderer left, as The Man from the Train would often do.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Just When You Thought This Story Couldn’t Possibly Get Any Uglier

  The Statesboro News defended these attacks and advertised “PHOTOS OF THE STATESBORO HORRORS FOR SALE.” Pictures of the Hodges family, the burned home, Cato and Reed dying in flames, and other lurid prints were available at 25¢ each. Understandably, Blacks began a considerable exodus from Bulloch County, and many white farmers with cotton and corn crops in the field began efforts to stem the violence and quiet the fears of the Black population. In time, a degree of orderliness returned to rural Bulloch County, but the community was never the same. Three-quarters of a century later in the prosperous, progressive college community, most of the great-grandchildren of that earlier generation still cite the lynching of Will Cato and Paul Reed as the best remembered event in the history of Bulloch County.

  —Charlton Moseley and Frederick Brogdon, “A Lynching at Statesboro”

  It rained hard in Georgia on the afternoon of July 28, 1904, and Kitty Hodges and Sallie Akins were caught in the thunderstorm as they walked home from school, a half-mile from the rural schoolhouse to the Akins home on what is now called Isaac Akins road. Kitty and Sallie were nine-year-old girls. They changed out of their wet clothes at the Akins home, Kitty putting on some of Sallie’s things. It would have been another mile or more for Kitty to walk on home and it was still raining, so her father, Henry Hodges, hitched up his horse to his buggy and went to fetch his oldest child and only daughter. The wet clothes were wrapped into a bundle and stored under the seat of the buggy. Kitty would be murdered that night, wearing the clothes she had borrowed from Sallie Pearl Akins, and the wet bundle of clothes would be found the next day still tucked under the seat of the buggy, their owner no longer on this earth.

  From Cottondale, Florida, to Statesboro, Georgia, is 275 miles, most of that east. Cottondale is near the northern border of Florida, and Statesboro is in the southern part of Georgia, but Statesboro is well to the east of where the previous murders had occurred. A few miles west of Statesboro was a railroad stop known as the Colfax stop, and a small, unincorporated settlement had grown up around the stop.

  On July 28, 1904, a family of five was murdered with an axe on an isolated farm near Colfax. The house, which was three-quarters of a mile from the railroad track but a mile from the nearest neighbors, was set on fire. The family was (a) white, and (b) yes, this is certainly relevant. Two black men were arrested the next day, were put on trial, were lawfully convicted of the crime, and were themselves murdered by a lynch mob in an appalling manner a little less than three weeks after the crime. (The house is said to be a mile from the nearest “neighbors,” although there were sharecroppers who lived within a mile of the house. In that era it would never have occurred to a white farmer to think of a black sharecropper as a “neighbor.”)

  There are three subjects here: the first set of murders, the lynching, and the chain of evidence that links the persons who were lynched to the murders. About the first set of murders facts are scarce, but what is reported is clear and consistent with the exception of two issues. Henry Hodges was murdered outside his house about nightfall, presumably as he was doing his evening chores. Hodges’s hat was found some distance from the house, along the road near the house, and the marks of a scuffle could be seen in the dirt near where the hat was found. Clotted pools of blood were found near that place, although Hodges’s body was found inside the house, indicating . . . well, we’ll discuss later what that indicates.

  Hodges’s wife, Claudia, and his daughter, Kitty, had also been hit in the head with the axe. From evidence found at the scene, it was concluded that both had been sexually assaulted, although newspapers of that era were too circumspect to spell out what the evidence was. Two other small children, a baby and a toddler, had perished in the flames. A purse with several dollars in it was found resting near Claudia’s body.

  A kerosene lamp without its chimney had been placed on a gatepost near the scene of the crime, and was still burning about eleven o’clock that morning, when the crime was discovered.

  From what I have told you so far, you might think that this crime was committed by The Man from the Train, and in fact that is what I think; I think it was him, based on:

  1. The isolation of the farmhouse, which is consistent with the other related crimes in this time frame.

  2. The proximity of the crime to the previous event, to the next event, to other crimes in the series, and to the railroad.

  3. The sexual assault on the nine-year-old girl.

  4. The bludgeoning of the family, apparently with an axe.

  5. The absence of any apparent “normal” motive.

  6. Mrs. Hodges’s jewelry (including her wedding ring) was left at the scene of the crime, and a purse with money in it was left at the scene of the crime.

  7. The house was set on fire, as was The Man from the Train’s usual practice when the scene of the crime was isolated enough that he would have time to make a clean getaway before the fire was discovered.

  8. Bodies being moved postmortem for no purpose.

  9. The lamp burning without its chimney, which, as much as any one thing, is the signature of The Man from the Train.

  We have much more information available about the second set of murders, the lynching of Reed and Cato, than about the first—truly horrible information, by the way. Reed and Cato were bound, soaked with ten gallons of kerosene, and set on fire, alive, begging to be shot, and in the presence of hundreds of people including children. There were photographs taken of the scene, and the photos were printed and sold as postcards.

  The murder of the Hodges family became the occasion for a sort of pogrom directed at the black population of Bulloch County. Paul Reed was accused of the crime and taken into custody the next day. His wife, Harriet, gave a confession implicating Reed and his
friend Will Cato. Several days later Reed also confessed to his involvement in the murders; he would confess repeatedly to involvement in the crime, which he said was a robbery gone wrong, but not to actually committing the murders. With every confession, he gave a different story about who else was involved with him and who actually committed the murders. In his first story he implicated John Hall and Hank Tolbert, his coworkers from a turpentine distillery in Statesboro, and said that Will Cato was not involved. A few days later he changed his story to say that the murders were actually committed by Will Rainey and Will Cato. Later, he said the murders were committed by a “club” formed for the purpose of raising money for two black preachers named Gaines and Tolbert. Another statement implicated a man named Dan Young; later statements included Handy Bell and an unidentified black man called “The Kid.” Just before his death he would add to the list the names of Bill Golden, Mose Parish, and Alex Hall.

  The local police arrested these people as they were named, although Sheriff Kendrick expressed doubt about their involvement even as he arrested them. The Moseley/Brogdon article quoted earlier (and later, at greater length) says that fifteen black people were lodged in the local jail, but a newspaper headline in the Atlanta Constitution (August 1, 1904) reported that “scores” of black people had been taken into custody; the number fifteen, which appears numerous times in newspaper accounts from the era, may actually be the number who were still in custody weeks later. The sheriff arrested everybody that he thought might be involved and then gradually released those who could not be connected to the crime.

  Paul Reed, in some of his many stories, talked about a “Before Day Club.” The Before Day Club was said to be an assemblage of rogue black men who plotted crimes against white people, robbing and killing white people. Reports of “Before Day Clubs” now popped up all over the region; there were supposed to be Before Day Clubs in several other Georgia counties, in Salem, Alabama, and as far away as Homerville, Virginia. Three buildings were burned to the ground in Palo, Georgia, a hundred miles from Statesboro, because whites believed they were meeting places for the local Before Day Club. A white farmer (N. W. Epps) was murdered near Tallahassee; the black man who shot him would claim to be a member of the local Before Day Club.