The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  Several months before the murders at Hinterkaifeck, the maid quit her job. The farm’s descent into true strangeness started when the maid suddenly quit her job and wished to leave immediately. When asked why she had so suddenly decided to abruptly leave, Maria explained that she had been hearing strange voices and other noises in and around the house, as well as the sound of disembodied footsteps emanating from the attic. The terror stricken maid had become convinced that the house was haunted and wished to stay there not a moment longer. She was reportedly white faced and emaciated when she said her final goodbyes. After her departure, the Gruebers chalked it up to the poor woman being simply mentally disturbed.

  OK, cut the crap. All that happened was that the maid quit, and then later, after the murders, she told reporters, “Oooh, I knewewew there was something spookeee going on out there.” They had a critter living in the attic; so what? It doesn’t have a damned thing to do with the murders.

  The murders at Hinterkaifeck are often described as the most notorious unsolved crime in the history of Germany. All famous crime stories come to be encrusted with mythology, but I’ve never run into a crime more encrusted with mythology than this one. There is no way to tell the story without Vili or Thor bursting in a side door to interrupt you.

  Andreas Grueber was a nasty old bastard who lived on a prosperous farm with his wife, Cazilia, who was nine years older than he was, his daughter Viktoria, and his grandchildren, Cazilia and Josef. Josef was two years old. Viktoria, thirty-five, had been widowed by the Great War, and had been living with her father for several years before Josef was born. It was believed by the neighbors that Andreas was not only Josef’s grandfather, but also his father.

  Again, this is part of the mythology of the crime, but (a) nobody knows whether this is true, and (b) even if it is true, it almost certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the murders. Grueber was a wife beater, and it is written everywhere that he had forbidden Viktoria from pursuing any other relationships after her husband had died.

  In mid-March of 1922, Grueber found footprints in the snow, leading out of the woods behind his house and up to his door—but there were no footprints leading away from the house. Alarmed by this, Grueber searched the house, the grounds, and the outbuildings, but found nothing.

  Now here, are we dealing with fact or mythology, and, if it is fact, is it relevant fact or irrelevant? We don’t know. This is the essence of the problem: every family has twenty-five neighbors, more or less, and when there is an event that commands the attention of the nation there will be two or five immature, irresponsible, attention-seeking neighbors who will tell stories that will become a part of the narrative of the crime. Obviously it wasn’t Grueber who told reporters about these mysterious footprints in the snow, so who was it? The footprints in the snow may have been real, but that may have happened two months earlier rather than two weeks, and may have been moved into the narrative by a neighbor who wanted to be part of the action.

  In the days before the murders, Grueber told another neighbor—or did he?—about a series of mysterious events around the farm. The family heard noises in the attic but searched the attic and could find no explanation. The next morning they found a newspaper on their porch that no member of the family could explain. On March 30, 1922, “a set of keys to the house mysteriously disappeared and could not be found anywhere. In his search for the keys Andreas came upon the disturbing discovery of scratches on the lock to the toolshed, as if someone had tried to pick it.”

  OK, we’ve got a squirrel in the attic, we lost our house keys, and some drifter tried to break into the toolshed; it sounds like a normal week at my house. Whether there was anything out of the ordinary going on at the Gruebers’ in the last week of their lives is debatable, but most probably not.

  On Saturday, March 31, a new maid arrived at Hinterkaifeck. Maria Baumgartner, forty-four. On Sunday, April 1, Viktoria Grueber did not show up at church, which was unusual for her; she had a beautiful singing voice and was always in the choir. On Monday, nine-year-old Cazilia Grueber did not show up for school—nor on Tuesday, nor Wednesday. At some point neighbors . . .

  The bodies, except for one, were all in the barn. They had been killed with a mattock, which is a type of pickaxe. They had all been hit in the heads, most of them decapitated or nearly decapitated. The body of Maria Baumgartner was found in the house, murdered in her sleep in the room she had just moved into.

  The bodies had been stacked on top of one another in two or three stacks, and each stack had been covered with hay—but for the body of little Cazilia, who had apparently survived the first blow, and had pulled out some of her hair in her agony.

  The murderer had apparently remained at the farm for some time after the crime, and here again we hit the mythology of the crime. Food had been taken from the kitchen and eaten, although how anybody knows that this was done by the criminal, rather than by the family, is beyond me. Smoke had been seen rising from the chimney days after the murders are believed to have been committed, and, most chillingly, the livestock had been cared for, and the dog had been let off his chain. Again, there are normal explanations for these events. One of the neighbors may have tended to the livestock as soon as the crimes were discovered, without the others being aware that he had done so, or the crime may have occurred a day later than people believe that it did, and Viktoria may have had some entirely unrelated reason for skipping church on Sunday morning.

  The murders at Hinterkaifeck were never solved, although hundreds of people were questioned in connection with them, the last of those in 1986. The house and outbuildings on the farm were burned down in 1923, no one knows by whom. The crime was the subject of a German-language horror movie released in 2009.

  Let’s just look at the facts here: Paul Mueller was German—maybe Austrian—and it is entirely reasonable to suppose that he might have returned to Germany when the clock ran out on him in the United States. The use of the axe, hitting people in the heads, the stacking of bodies, covering the bodies with hay, and the special attention to the body of the nine-year-old girl are all elements familiar to us from The Man from the Train. To the best of my knowledge, the crime did occur within one mile of the railroad, although I am unable to locate the farm precisely.

  It is ten years between Villisca and Hinterkaifeck; to include this crime in the series changes a fourteen-year odyssey into a twenty-four-year odyssey, and I know how I react, as a reader, when someone attempts to connect two famous crimes. Paul Mueller would have been close to sixty years old by 1922, and I will let you decide how improbable you think it is that he could have crossed the ocean and continued to murder people. Only don’t indulge yourself in irrational skepticism. There’s no real reason to believe that it’s not him.

  Rachel’s Acknowledgments

  We could not have written this book without the research of Beth Klingensmith, who wrote a long and insightful academic paper on the topic at Emporia State University in 2006. Librarians are great, and several of them assisted in collecting and locating important information, including Dagmar Weschke at the Radford Public Library; Pati Threatt at the Frazar Memorial Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana; and Nolan Eller at the Northwestern State University of Louisiana. I also spoke to a couple of ladies at the Beckley public library who helped me figure out where to find the site of a crime. NewspaperArchive.com is super frustrating to work with, but it offered a very broad range of historical newspapers without which we would not have been able to complete this book. My father-in-law, Barry Graham, helpfully shared his perspective of Hurley geography, gleaned through years of work as an electrician with AEP. Many of my good friends offered advice and support and enthusiasm, including Carmen Sambuco, Allison McCarthy, Casey Bridgers, Emily Compton, Rachel Emery, Melissa Eastlake, and Miranda Dennis. I also want to give a shout-out to Hollins University, where I learned how to research. The team at Scribner, including Taylor Noel, Brant Rumble, John Glynn, Emily Greenwald, and Rick Horgan, were patient and
helpful throughout the process. My husband, Jason, is terrific and took care of a lot of dog walks while I was wrapped up in research. Lastly, my parents, Bill and Susan, have never failed to give me as much support as possible. This was especially true in the writing of this book.

  Bill’s Acknowledgments

  My first acknowledgment, as always, is to the patience of my wife, Susan McCarthy, which, I should tell you, was worked especially thin by the fact that I wrote this book while I was supposed to be working on a different book, cowritten with her. I would also like to thank my first editor at Scribner, Brant Rumble, and my second editor, John Glynn, and my third editor, Rick Horgan; apparently I am hell on editors. Others at Simon and Schuster who were vital include Mia Crowley-Hald, who served as the production editor, and Taylor Noel, our publicist; thank you, Taylor. Nan Graham was supportive from above; thank you, Ms. Graham.

  I would like to thank my daughter and coauthor, Rachel, whom I hired to do research on the book when I thought I might be missing a corner of the story, but who discovered that I was missing most of the story. Chuck Verrill and Liz Darhansoff have represented my interests in the publishing business for uninterrupted decades. Thirty-six years, I guess. I try in each book to acknowledge my debt to Dan Okrent, whose interest in my work helped my writing career get off the ground some forty years ago.

  My personal friends Cal Karlin and Joe Posnanski read the book before it was published; thank you, Joe and Cal, and also Matthew Namee. I would like to thank some very nice lady at the Kansas State Historical Society, who may have been Susan Forbes, Sara Keckleson or Sarah Garten. I am sorry, I have lost the slip of paper that had your name on it.

  The primary indebtedness of this book is to those who have written about these crimes before, or who have written before about the places and times which are critical to the book. It is my belief that it is inadequate to acknowledge in a footnote those whose work you use, and that sources should be directly acknowledged in the text. I have tried to do this throughout this book. Literally thousands of people have written about one of these crimes or another, although (a) none of those people had a full view of the series of crimes, and (b) most of those people are now dead and would get little pleasure from being acknowledged by me. But a short summary of the living and more recently deceased: Frederick Brogdon, JD Chandler, Susan Cronk, Dr. Edgar Epperly, Donna Fricker, Alan G. Gauthreaux, Beth Klingensmith, Gary Krist, Beth Lane, John Nova Lomax, Roy Marshall, Dr. Charlton Moseley, Keven McQueen, Kelly and Tammy Rundle, Troy Taylor, Mike Vance and Susan Barringer Wells. Out of that list, I would especially like to thank Dr. Moseley for allowing me to quote from his work.

  Thank you all, and my apologies to whomever I have forgotten to thank, and also to anyone whose name I have misspelled or whose well-earned title I have omitted.

  About the Authors

  © CRYSTAL IMAGE PHOTOGRAPHY

  BILL JAMES made his mark in the 1970s and 1980s with his Baseball Abstracts. He has been tearing down preconceived notions about America’s national pastime ever since. He is currently the Senior Advisor on Baseball Operations for the Boston Red Sox. James lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife, Susan McCarthy

  RACHEL McCARTHY JAMES lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with her husband, Jason. She studied creative writing and political science at Hollins University, and her work has been featured in publications including Bitch, Broadly, and The New Inquiry. The Man from the Train is her first book.

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  ALSO BY BILL JAMES

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  The Bill James Baseball Book

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  The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers

  The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

  Win Shares

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  The Bill James Gold Mine

  Popular Crime

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  ISBN 978-1-4767-9625-3

  ISBN 978-1-4767-9627-7 (ebook)