by Bill James
Ideas spread from one person to another. It would be nice if only good ideas spread, but unfortunately bad ideas get spread around, too—really, really horrible ideas. There are trends and fashions in crime as much as in any other area. In the 1870s there were gunfights and gunfighters. In the 1880s there were train robbers. In the 1930s there were a bunch of roving criminal gangs like the Dillinger gang, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and her boys, and Pretty Boy Floyd. You didn’t have those gangs in 1923 and you didn’t have them in 1943, but in 1933 they were all over the nation. There was an era when kidnapping was the crime du jour. For many years no one ever heard of a drive-by shooting, and then, all of sudden, there were drive-by shootings every night. The 1960s were the era of the political assassination. In 1975 nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, and then there were school shootings.
The period from 1910 to 1912 was the era of the axe murderer. It is not a silly argument to say that this era came about because of The Man from the Train, that he was the man who spread the idea across the country. He was the Typhoid Mary of the Axe Murder Epidemic.
Violence follows violence. One murder leads to another, even when there is no apparent connection. In this book we have seen small town after small town in which, after The Man from the Train was there, there was another murder the next month—and we didn’t always tell you when that happened. These were in small towns where there should have been one murder every fifty years or something. Murder leaves the idea of murder hanging in the air.
So what happened in this era, and who killed all of those families in Texas in 1912? We don’t know. We’re not sociologists or psychologists or criminologists or detectives. We’re not even real historians. We’re just writers. These are just the facts as best we can tell.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Harry Ryan
Continuing now the “second circuit” of these crimes, the next crimes we discussed were the murders of the Bernhardt family along the Kansas-Missouri border, near Martin City, Missouri, probably on the evening of December 7, 1910. On December 17, 1910, a small man walked into a pool hall in Iola, Kansas, ninety-four miles south of the crime scene, and asked the proprietor if he had any newspaper stories about the Bernhardt murders. The man was a stranger, badly dressed, and his enthusiastic enjoyment of the newspaper articles gave the pool hall manager the creeps. The proprietor engaged the little tramp in conversation and secretly sent someone running for the cops. The stranger tried to leave after a little while but was detained by patrons until the Iola chief of police, Chief Coffield, arrived.
Coffield took the man into custody and questioned him at length. He gave his name as Harry Ryan. He carried no identification, but in 1910 this was not unusual; most people carried no official ID at that time, but his answers as to who he was and where he was from seemed evasive. He offered no information that could be checked out. And, in this context, Harry Ryan said something that, when I read it a hundred years later, would send chills surging up my spine.
He said that he had done some work the previous summer up in Marshalltown, Iowa.
From Iola, Kansas, to Marshalltown, Iowa, is 350 miles. If you draw a circle around Iola with a 350-mile radius, that circle will encompass about 6,500 small towns. When he was questioned about a family murder in Johnson County, Kansas, Harry Ryan had offered the one other little town where there had been an extremely similar family murder as the one other place where he had been. What are the odds?
Not only the place, but the time as well; Ryan told the sheriff that he had “done some work last summer” in Marshalltown, Iowa. The Hardy family had been murdered near Marshalltown on June 5, 1910. Harry Ryan insisted that he knew nothing about the Bernhardt murders, but did acknowledge that he had been in the area of the Bernhardt farm at about the time the family was murdered. He said that he had been in Olathe about ten days earlier, he didn’t know when exactly; the Bernhardt farm was a few miles from Olathe, and the crime had occurred ten days earlier. And, by his own voluntary statement, he had placed himself at or near the scene of a similar crime six months earlier.
Pass the palm of your hand over the top of your head and say, “Whoosh.” It went right past them. “Marshalltown” and “last summer” didn’t mean a thing to Chief Coffield, nor to the newspapermen who reported on the case. To the best of my knowledge, no person ever realized that the Hardy and Bernhardt murders (a) were similar and (b) might be connected, until the authors realized that in early 2012. Marshalltown is mentioned in the Harry Ryan stories only because that was the most notable of the places where Harry Ryan volunteered that he had been.
Sheriff Coffield took a photograph of Harry Ryan and sent it by courier service to the sheriff of Marshall County, Iowa, Sheriff A. A. Nicholson. Nicholson carried the photograph around town and reported back that he could find no one in his town who had ever seen Harry Ryan or heard of him. No bells went off. There is no evidence in the record that either the Allen County or the Marshall County authorities made any connection to the Hardy family murders. Nicholson, in any case, was convinced that Raymond Hardy had murdered the Hardy family; in his mind that was a closed case, although the grand jury had refused to indict.
After the Hardy murders, it was reported briefly that a man was being held in connection with the case in Sioux City, Iowa, which is about two hundred miles west of Marshalltown. Asked if he had ever been arrested before, Harry Ryan said that yes, he had been arrested once before. Where were you arrested? Sioux City, Iowa.
Before Marshalltown was mentioned, Police Chief Coffield called the Johnson County sheriff, Sheriff Stead, and told him that he was holding someone who should be questioned about the Bernhardt family murders. Sheriff Stead took the train down to Iola, talked to Harry Ryan for a little less than an hour, decided that he had no connection to the Bernhardt murders, and took the next train back to Olathe.
In 1910 (and until 1972) police could hold a person who had no address and no employment on a charge of “vagrancy.” While he was in custody, Harry Ryan was interviewed several times by several different small-town reporters, and long or at least substantial interviews with him were printed in several different small-town Kansas newspapers. Ryan seems to have been quite intelligent and generally polite, and enjoyed being interviewed, although he never did tell anyone who he was or where he was from. But obviously, it is quite unusual for several different small-town newspapers to take that much interest in a tramp who is being held on a charge of vagrancy. How do we explain this?
It is our opinion that Chief Coffield believed, deep in his gut, that Harry Ryan had something to do with the Bernhardt family murders. Coffield called Sheriff Stead and said something like, “I’ve got this guy in custody who had something to do with the Bernhardt family; you’d better get down here and question him.” Sheriff Stead went down, but Sheriff Stead had it in his head that if Harry Ryan didn’t know the Bernhardts, didn’t have any connection to them and had never worked as a farmhand for them, then he couldn’t have had anything to do with their murders. That was conventional thinking at the time. Sheriff Stead thought that Chief Coffield was just wasting his time.
What is Coffield to do? The Bernhardt murder isn’t his case. He has no jurisdiction; he has no authority. If Sheriff Stead says that Harry Ryan isn’t involved, that’s the end of that rope. Also, at some risk of getting lost in the weeds, Sheriff Stead’s successor had been elected several weeks before the Bernhardts were murdered. Stead was leaving office on January 1, within two weeks, and was barely on speaking terms with his successor, a man named Cave; Cave suggested to reporters that he had been locked out of the investigation, and would have to start fresh when he took office in January.
Coffield still thinks that Harry Ryan is involved, and he is not going to let Ryan go without a fight, so what is he going to do? He starts talking to the newspaper guys. He tells the reporters to come over and talk to this guy. He is trying to keep the investigation alive.
But there is something going on her
e, with these 1910 family murders, that we do not understand. Both the Hardy and Bernhardt family murders start in the barn and about nightfall, which is different from our most dominant pattern. In neither case is there a prepubescent female among the victims, and in neither case is there clear evidence of signature behaviors such as moving lamps or covering the victims’ heads with cloth (although victims in both cases were covered with hay, which could serve the same function). Also, in both of these cases there is a handprint in blood on the wall next to one of the victims, pointing downward, as if the murderer had braced himself against the wall while raining blows on the victim. We are not aware of any other case in this series in which this feature was found. In addition, the Hardy family murders (a) show evidence of taunting behavior, and (b) are not near the railroad track. So in some ways these two crimes (and the Hubbell family murders, which are between them both in place and time) do look like related crimes, and in some ways they do not. Something is happening here, and we don’t know what it is.
Was Harry Ryan taunting the police when he said that he had “done some work last summer” in Marshalltown, Iowa, gambling that the police would not connect the dots, or else gambling that if they did connect the dots they could not use his words against him?
We do not believe that Harry Ryan was The Man from the Train, for three reasons or four. First, he seems, based on the newspaper reports, to have been too young. The Man from the Train was very small, and Harry Ryan was very small, but we believe The Man from the Train was near fifty by this time. Harry Ryan was in his late twenties. Second, we do not believe that The Man from the Train would have engaged in any kind of taunting behavior, because he was tremendously risk averse, and taunting involved risk. Third, The Man from the Train would never have been stupid enough to wander into a pool hall a hundred miles from the scene of one of his crimes and start asking complete strangers about the murders. The Man from the Train, after he committed a crime, got on the train and got out of the area immediately, before the crimes were discovered in most cases.
But there is a fourth reason we are fairly sure that Harry Ryan, while he may have been involved in some of the crimes, was not our principal culprit. We actually believe that we know who The Man from the Train was.
And the time has come for us to tell you.
CHAPTER XL
The First Crime
I found the First Crime on a cold January night in 2013. I was not yet an author of this book, just a research assistant. Bill had sent me working backward through the years, trying to figure out where this series of crimes began. He told me that eventually I would find the First Crime, and that when the murderer committed the First Crime he would make mistakes that would reveal who he was. I didn’t really believe it, and Bill told me later that he didn’t really believe it, either, but it was a working premise. Maybe you can find the First Crime; maybe he’ll leave the door open to tell us who he was.
When I began my search for these murders, Bill asked me to focus on the years around the crime in Hurley, in 1909, 1908. When I asked about looking earlier in the decade, he told me that “for our purposes, a crime in 1899 would be pretty far afield . . . even if you found a case, it would be hard to believe he was active that far back.” But my gut told me that he was already well practiced by 1909, so Bill let me follow my hunch. I used 1900 as my beginning point and started combing through newspapers in those years for reports of families murdered in the night. Soon enough I found the Lyerlys, the Hugheses, the Hodgeses, the Kellys (or Caffeys), the Allens. I knew his crimes went back to nearly 1900. But I hadn’t found the blueprint.
I had just moved from Virginia back to Kansas, living in a little house that sits closer to the train than most of the houses in this story; it is not fifteen feet from the house to the railroad track at the closest point. I’m at home there now, but at the time it was a bit creepy. The north wind rattled the windows. My husband had left me alone with our cats and unpacked boxes to go see a Michael Jackson cover band. Chasing a lead from a story in a Boston newspaper about an unrelated crime from 1901, I found a 1904 book entitled History of the Department of Police Service of Worcester, Mass., from 1674 to 1900 on Google Books. That night, I tried to contact Bill six different ways to tell him what I found, because the second I read this, I knew who he was:
The Worcester police worked for over a year in connection with the state police to cause the arrest of Paul Mueller for the murder of the Newton family in West Brookfield. Mueller murdered Francis D. Newton, wife, and daughter Elsie with an axe on the night of Jan. [7, 1898], and was seen walking in the direction of the Boston & Albany railroad, where he took a train leaving at 1 o’clock in the morning. Not a trace of him has been found since.
* * *
The dog wouldn’t stop barking from inside the Newton house. It was Sunday, January 9, 1898, and no one had seen Francis Newton since that Friday around five o’clock when a neighbor, Joseph Upham, visited to collect a single dollar Francis owed to him. Upham recalled Newton’s ten-year-old daughter, Elsie, playing on the floor with her mother, Sarah, as the men took care of business. “All was cheerful,” the Boston Globe said of the homey scene in Rice’s Corner, just south of Brookfield, Massachusetts. During his visit, Francis took Upham to the barn to show off some new equipment. The Newtons’ farmhand, Paul Mueller, was working in the barn. Upham detected no tension or discomfort between Newton and Mueller.
But on Sunday afternoon, Francis’s fifteen cows were lowing loud and desperate, unfed and strained by two days’ worth of milk. Elmer Newcomb, the closest neighbor a quarter-mile away, was confused by the apparent neglect. A prosperous if not wealthy farmer, Newton was “careful of his possessions, but not stingy [and he] had the faculty of applying business principles to a farm.”
Elmer, followed by William Bemis and William Eaton, became concerned and came over to feed and water Newton’s cows. They figured the family had gone away for the weekend without letting them know (but why didn’t he ask someone to look after the cattle?). After they fed and milked the livestock, they left without any snooping.
Once off the deserted property, the farmers engaged in a little of what the New York World called “thinking it over,” which I interpret as the kind of self-consciously serious gossip that grown men don’t like to admit that they enjoy. Newton was prosperous enough to make neighbors jealous, and he was not warm, and those two qualities could have led to some comments that they regretted later, when they found out. After talking, though, they did agree it was odd “that the Newtons should go away without making arrangements for feeding the cattle.” William Eaton in particular was urging a return visit. It takes considerable confidence that something is amiss to overcome the resistance to breaking into your neighbors’ house. William Bemis wasn’t there yet, and he begged off, but Elmer and Eaton assembled three more neighbors, Arthur Rice, George Pike, and Herbert Duane.
The rescue party ventured over to the white two-story farmhouse on Sunday night around 10:00 p.m. The front and back doors were locked, and the curtains tightly drawn. No one answered their knocks and calls and kicks to the door except the dog, still barking. The men shuffled uncomfortably around the wraparound porch but eventually they found their way in through an unlocked window with a broken pane leading into the parlor. The house was chilly and desolate, trashed like a college dorm room after finals—clothes everywhere, bureau drawers pulled out, papers scattered because they don’t matter anymore.
Finding a lamp and lighting it, the men crept farther into the house, to Elsie and Sarah’s room in the “L” of the house on the first floor. They found the mother and daughter in beds soaked in blood, covers piled over their heads.
* * *
Brookfield, Massachusetts, was and is a peaceful town. At the start of 1898, the Boston Globe wrote, “it was 30 years since anything resembling a murder [had] last occurred within the borders of the town,” the most recent being the killing of a man named Deveger near the railroad tracks a little whi
le after the Civil War.
Francis Newton wasn’t originally from Brookfield. Born in New Braintree around 1853, he came to Brookfield as a young man, first keeping up a milk route and later running a bakery in Hartford, Connecticut, fifty miles to the south. At some point he married his wife, Sarah, and around 1888 they adopted a baby from Sweden. They named her Ethel and called her Elsie. They lived in Hartford while Newton ran the West Side bakery.
In 1896 the family had moved into a dilapidated and isolated home on a back road between Brookfield and Sturbridge. It was called the Sturbridge Road by locals, although we should note that this is not the Sturbridge Road that you will know if you live in that area now, the road that runs from Sturbridge down into Connecticut. Though Francis was middle-aged by the time he bought the farm, he worked hard on improving the barn and house until it was “a very fair farm.”
Now the powerfully built Newton lay in his bed, his head bashed beyond recognition. His body remained in his nightclothes with blankets piled to tightly cover his body and face. He was struck four times over the left temple, driving the steel into his brain each time, and once in the cheek. The wall behind him and the lamp on his bedside table were marked with dried blood. There were no signs of struggle, indicating that Newton had been asleep when attacked. His drawers were rifled through, as was his pocketbook, “the lining of which had been pulled out by the nervous fingers of the man who was in such a hurry to possess himself of the contents,” as the Globe noted.
Downstairs his wife and daughter’s heads were in a similar state, hit five times over the right temple; the medical examiner judged from the blood spattered on the head of the bed and the walls that the attack had been more vigorous than that against the man of the house. The Globe said that the murderer surely must be “freely sprinkled” with blood, as if he hadn’t thought to wash his face in the forty-eight hours between the murders and their discovery. Sarah and Elsie’s nightgowns were thrown up and their bodies had been attacked as well as their faces. They were not robbed; their trinkets were untouched, and a gold watch worn by Mrs. Newton remained on her wrist. Nor was there evidence of rape; in the euphemistic parlance of the day, the Globe said they “had not been outraged,” as if being bludgeoned beyond recognition was not an outrage.