The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  “The Gift of the Magi,” however, was originally published on April 10, 1906—three months before the murders of the Lyerly family. This means that either:

  • O. Henry knew Della Dillingham was somehow unconnected to this famous crime (which is certainly possible, since they were from the same area), or

  • The use of her name or the elements of her name is just a weird coincidence.

  In this section of the book, Section III, there have been twelve crimes, resulting in the murders of forty-nine people. This brings the total for all three sections to twenty-seven crimes involving 110 victims. The total of 110 victims does not include the 7 people (so far) who were murdered by lynch mobs as a result of these crimes, nor does it include the 3 or 4 people who were lawfully executed for crimes that seem similar to those committed by The Man from the Train.

  SECTION III

  Where

  Who

  No.

  Date

  Year

  Trenton Corners, New Jersey

  Van Lieu family

  2

  November 17

  1900

  Shirley, Maine

  Allen family

  3

  May 12

  1901

  Cottondale, Florida

  Kelly or Caffey

  5

  October 31

  1903

  Statesboro, Georgia

  Hodges family

  5

  July 28

  1904

  Trenton, South Carolina

  Hughes family

  4

  December 8

  1904

  Radford, Virginia

  Linkous family

  2

  December 25

  1904

  Marion, Arkansas

  Boylan family

  3

  February 7

  1905

  Jacksonville, Florida

  Wise family

  5

  September 21

  1905

  Cottonwood, Alabama

  Christmas family

  3

  February 7

  1906

  Dominion, Nova Scotia

  Stetka family

  4

  February 16

  1906

  Allentown, Florida

  Ackerman family

  9

  May 13

  1906

  Barber Junction, NC

  Lyerly family

  4

  July 13

  1906

  SECTION IV

  CHAPTER XXXII

  Hiatus

  Between July 13, 1906, and March 6, 1908, a space of twenty months, there are no reports of crimes that seem related to our criminal. There are essentially three possibilities to explain this hiatus:

  1. The Man from the Train was in jail.

  2. He had left North America, and was killing people somewhere else.

  3. There was something going on in his life that prevented him from being active. He could have been injured, for example, or perhaps the outrages occurred when he was drunk, and perhaps he had stopped drinking. Sometimes a serial murderer is inactive because he is involved in a relationship that limits his outside activities, but we believe it is unlikely that The Man from the Train was capable of forming a relationship, and also that it is unlikely that he committed his crimes under the influence of alcohol.

  While it is difficult to speculate on what someone was doing based merely on the fact that he wasn’t killing people, the most likely explanation is that he was in jail. Let us take advantage of this break in the story to ask ourselves a few questions about the murderer, starting with:

  1. Did he stalk his victims?

  2. Is it fair, accurate, and instructive to say that The Man from the Train was a coward?

  On the “stalking” issue, it is our opinion that, prior to 1906, The Man from the Train generally did do some advance research on the families that he intended to kill, but that after he got out of jail in 1908, and sometimes before, he did little research and was, for the most part, just finding a house and going in. I don’t think he had identified in advance the Lyerly house; I think he just got off the train, saw the house across the road from the railroad track, and thought that looked perfect.

  Let’s say, for the sake of argument:

  1. The seminal event in 1898, which we have not yet told you about, was the first time that he had killed anybody.

  2. The murder of the Van Lieu family in 1900 is an unrelated event that merely happens to give a similar appearance to The Man from the Train’s crimes.

  3. The murder of the Allen family in Maine in 1901 is him, but that this was an unplanned event that resulted from an eruption of anger on the murderer’s part, when Mr. Allen insulted the murderer and drove him forcefully away from his door.

  4. After the murders of the Allen family, The Man from the Train gave himself over to his murderous impulses, and that from that point on—beginning with the murders of the Kelly family on or about Halloween, 1903—he was an organized serial murderer acting out an increasingly sophisticated program.

  We don’t know for certain that any of this is true, but I would guess that each of these statements is true, 51 percent chance or higher.

  Sometime between May 12, 1901, and October 31, 1903, The Man from the Train made the decision to commit himself to a life of recreational murder. However, I think it is unlikely that, when he made that decision, he immediately went out and murdered the Kelly family. I think it is much more likely that he began thinking through the problem of how he could commit these crimes without getting caught.

  One of the things that we can say with confidence about The Man from the Train is that he was not a hobo, not a person who just rode the rails for long periods of time without direction. He settled in to an area, got a job, usually as a lumberjack or working in a sawmill, and lived in that area for several months, as a rule. We know this because (1) the predominance of these crimes in areas economically centered on the lumber industry is beyond chance, and (2) if he had not settled in an area for several months at a time, the crimes would be much, much more spread out than they are. If The Man from the Train was truly a hobo, the crimes would have no obvious geographic pattern; a crime in Virginia would be followed by one in Utah. But, with just a couple of exceptions, the crimes have obvious geographic patterns—as if he had remained in essentially the same area for months at a time. He lived in an area for three to six months, almost certainly was employed, and then he moved on, but not a thousand miles on; normally he just moved one hundred to four hundred miles to get outside the sphere of his last murders.

  Well, did he commit his atrocities just as he arrived in an area, or while he was settled in an area, or did he commit his crimes when he was leaving an area? Obviously the more likely explanation is that he committed a crime as he was ready to depart the area.

  I think it is likely that, between 1901 and 1903, The Man from the Train lived and worked in or around Marianna, Florida, and thought endlessly about how he could get by with killing people. He realized right away that his chance of getting away with the crime(s) was better when he killed people of low social standing, poor and black people. He picked houses that were isolated so that he wouldn’t be seen coming or going.

  He set the houses on fire when he was done, perhaps to hide evidence or perhaps because he derived pleasure from the fires, as he did from the murders. I believe that the former explanation—that he set the houses on fire to hide evidence—is more likely, but not certain. I prefer that explanation for two reasons. First, as he transitioned gradually to committing his crimes in small towns, rather than near small towns, he stopped setting the houses on fire. That’s rational. If you set fire to a house with neighbors on all sides, the neighbors will come running. It’s too risky to set the house on fire in that situation, so he stopped doing it—which means that it was rational behavior, given the murderous premise.
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  Also, I rather think that, while The Man from the Train was probably perversely proud of his murders, he may have been ashamed of his perversion. I think he was ashamed of what he did with the bodies of young girls, and that he set fires to cover it up. This is speculation.

  A similar question arises with respect to the midnight entries, and here we get to the issue of cowardice. Did The Man from the Train enter houses after the family was asleep as a rational approach to avoid being arrested, or did he do it because he was a coward who was afraid to confront a living victim?

  Any way you look at it, murdering people in their sleep as a form of recreation is a cowardly thing to do, whether it results from fear or from a rational avoidance of negative consequence. It is cowardly behavior.

  It is fair to describe The Man from the Train as a coward, but is it accurate and instructive? I hang up on that issue for this reason: that what The Man from the Train did required something that was not courage, but was very much like courage. It required composure under stress. It required that he act calmly, deliberately, and aggressively under conditions of substantial risk to himself, even though he had minimized that risk.

  Could you break into a stranger’s house with an axe, and beat the entire family to death, and then go on about your life the same as before? No, of course you could not, and I could not. I would be terrified. I would shake in my boots; I would pee in my pants. I couldn’t do it; not that I would want to, but I could not. It required a self-possession, a clarity of purpose, and a suppression of fear that is beyond anything normal. Is it accurate to say that the man who could do this was a coward?

  It is accurate to say that he was a practical coward. He was risk averse at an extremely high level. He wasn’t taking any chances that he didn’t need to take in order to accomplish his purpose—and this is quite unusual for a serial murderer, to be that risk averse. Some serial murderers like risk; sometimes they seem to be inviting the police to come question them. The Man from the Train had a quite extraordinary degree of focus on avoiding the natural negative consequences of his actions. He thought it through. He was not merely ahead of the police and the sheriffs and the private detectives who made efforts to catch him; he was absurdly far ahead of them. The things that were being done to catch him—sending for bloodhounds, raising reward money, luring private detectives into the investigation—were pathetically far behind the curve. It may be fair to say that he was decades ahead of the police.

  What he did evolved over time, and in this hiatus, this period when he was inactive, there was a transition. He was not quite the same murderer when he got out of prison. When he got out of prison he started killing people in small towns, rather than near small towns.

  And, as a part of that, I think that he mostly stopped researching the families that he was going to kill. I think that in 1903, 1904, and 1905 he would live in an area and work in that area for several months, and during those months he would travel around the area on weekends probably, and he would look for the family that he wanted to target. He was looking for certain things. A house with a barn. A woodpile with an axe. Children’s toys on the front lawn or on the porch. A house that was secluded enough that the neighbors would not see someone creeping around the back of the house after dark. A dog; he didn’t want a dog, and he didn’t want to be more than a five-minute walk from the railroad track. An area where there was no regular police patrol. There was one house in hundreds, one house in a thousand that had exactly the combination that he was looking for. When it was time for him to pack up and leave town, he knew where he was headed.

  But by 1909 he was a very experienced murderer. He didn’t need that preparation and research anymore; he was able to fly by the seat of his pants. This led him, on two occasions, to break into the houses of young married couples who had no children (the Cobles, in Rainier, Washington, and the Hudsons, in Paola, Kansas). That happened because he hadn’t done his research; he just got off the train and looked around and found a house that looked right. This led him to commit a crime in San Antonio, a town large enough to have a police force. He did that because he hadn’t done his research. The train came into San Antonio from the northeast, just clipping the edge of the town, and he did not see the city hidden behind the trees and the hills and didn’t know it was there. He thought he was in a small town.

  This led him or permitted him, in Colorado Springs, to break into one house and then another, right next to it; that he did this suggests he was not researching his houses in advance. In Ellsworth, Kansas, he started to break into one house, discovered that the occupant of that house was awake, and moved on a half-block away to break into another house. This is evidence that he was just improvising.

  By 1910, 1911, he was a hit-and-run axe murderer, blowing into town, committing a murder, and leaving the town immediately. This, too, was clever. Working inside a town gave him a variety of targets to choose from, which made it easier for him—but staying in towns too small to have a police force reduced the chance that there would be a problem. What he realized, over time, was that he didn’t need to pick isolated houses near a small town so long as he never established any presence in the town before the crime and was never seen in the town after the crime. Before the crime he was just a faceless stranger, giving no one his name, giving no one any reason to remember him. After the crime he was a ghost in the wind. He was safe.

  In Ellsworth there is reason to believe that he dropped a bundle of clean clothing down near the railroad track, clothes to change into after the crime. He may also have done this in Villisca; clothes were found floating in the river near the place where the dogs led the pursuers. Probably he was not doing this in 1903. He realized, at some point, that being seen fleeing a crime scene in bloody clothes could be very bad for him. As he became more organized over time, he took steps to avoid this.

  Once he became an organized murderer he never took anything from a scene of the crime—nothing—because he knew that if he was caught with something in his possession from the scene of a crime, that would be the end of him. In many crime stories from this era, a man is executed because he is found with an item from a murder scene. This man worked; he had money. He may well have stolen money at other times and probably did, but never from a murder scene.

  Early on, he left bloody fingerprints on the axe. Later on he would wash the axe handle before he left. This suggests that he read newspapers, that he knew what was happening in the world. His method evolved.

  It took me some time before I realized that he was committing his murders not merely near to one railroad track, but usually at the intersection of two or more, which would have maximized his opportunities to catch a train quickly. I began to wonder when he started doing that and how he figured it out, but actually, that one goes back to the beginning of the series of crimes. From 1903 on, he was working almost always near the intersection of multiple tracks.

  I suspect—I don’t know—but I suspect that this trick may have been common knowledge in the hobo community. The Man from the Train was not a true hobo, but he lived and traveled among them periodically. Many of them were petty thieves, sometimes more than petty thieves, and they talked among themselves about how to avoid getting caught. I’ll bet they all knew that trick about committing a crime at the intersection of multiple railroad lines, so that you wouldn’t be stranded on a lonely track waiting for a train. It may have been something that was obvious from experience if you lived the way they lived.

  I recognize the rank improbability of what I am about to tell you, but I’m going to mention it. I think it is possible that The Man from the Train actually left money at the scene of his crimes. I don’t mean left the money that was there; I mean took money out of his pocket and put it on the mantel.

  I know you are going to think that is crazy, to leave money at the scene of a crime and then set the house on fire, but then, The Man from the Train was crazy—tremendously rational in terms of risk avoidance, but driven by uncontrollable anger meta
stasized to general hatred. It seems to me that I see the phrase “money left in the room in plain sight” too often, as if it was more often than it should be. He could have dumped money in the murder room as a way of showing contempt for money, and thus, contempt for society in general. I know it is unlikely.

  We don’t know when he started moving lamps around, but my guess would be that he always did that. If it was rational risk-avoidance behavior, then it may have developed over time. If it was impulse-driven, psychologically rooted behavior, then it was probably always a part of his routine. This was something he did because he liked to do it; he liked the ghoulish half-light of a dark, strange house, and knowing what he was about to do. He did that in 1898.

  The covering of windows with cloth, pulling the blinds shut tight, putting cloth over the windows; that was rational risk avoidance, but it was also psychologically comforting to him. Covering the windows enabled him to carry a lamp around the house after the crime, studying what he had done, dragging dead bodies around and enjoying what he had done, without the curious moving light being detected from outside the house.

  I believe that The Man from the Train was driven by a combination of six factors, which changed somewhat as the series of crimes went on.

  First, he was driven by intense anger and hatred. He had been abused as a child, and he had been imprisoned and rejected and not treated well as an adult. He was a small, ugly, miserable little bastard who lived a very unpleasant life, although he was a quite intelligent man who had other positive qualities such as a willingness to work and a capacity to plan.

  Second, he was sexually attracted to young girls, and there were no outlets to him for sexual satisfaction, and I think he was ashamed of this attraction.

  Third, as he committed the crimes, he became an adrenaline junkie. He loved the adrenaline rush, provoked by fear, of committing the crimes. Every nerve was awake for him; every fiber of his being stood on edge as the adrenaline surged through him. Nothing else gave him that feeling; nothing else was anything like it. When he thought about the next crime it excited him; when he was done with a crime he relived it over and over in his mind, relishing it. Some events were probably disappointing to him, like Paola, and others were probably special to his memory. But for this reason, I don’t believe that he committed his crimes under the influence of alcohol, because I think alcohol would have dulled his senses and interfered with that sense that every nerve was on fire. Also, alcohol would have caused him to make mistakes, and he did not make many mistakes.