Two railroad lines crossed in Trenton, South Carolina; actually, because of the consolidation of rival lines in 1894, two branches of the same railway system, the Southern Railway. In 1904 something less than 200 people lived there, in what was normally called a railroad stop. When the Hughes family was murdered in Trenton on December 8, 1904, the first reports immediately connected the crime to the murders of the Hodges family:
Another Crime Laid to Blacks
Family Murdered in South Carolina Under Peculiar Circumstances
TRENTON, S. C.—Dec 8. An entire white family, living near here, has been murdered. Meager details received resemble the killing of the Hodges family at Statesboro, Georgia last August. The Hodges family was murdered by an organized band of negroes formed for purposes of wholesale murder.
—Decatur (Illinois) Daily Review, December 8, 1904
Early in the morning of December 8, the residence of Benjamin Hughes, in Trenton, was discovered by neighbors to be on fire. (Almost 100 percent of newspaper reports say that the crime occurred on December 9, 1904, but it was, in fact, December 8.) By the time the neighbors gathered it was too late to get into the house and save anything. Once the fire had died down, however, searchers found the charred, mostly unrecognizable remains of Mr. Hughes, aged forty-two, his wife, Eva, same age, and their daughters, Emma, aged nineteen, and Hattie, aged fourteen. The bodies of all three women were found in their beds and were undisturbed, suggesting that they had been murdered in their sleep. Their heads had been crushed, probably (according to contemporary news reports) with an axe. Eva Hughes’s face had been covered with a pillow.
The confounding fact of the Hughes family murders is that Mr. Hughes was shot, and also that he was clothed, rather than wearing pajamas or some such. Setting aside that one circumstance, it would be perfectly clear that these murders were a part of our series. Trenton, South Carolina, is almost exactly a hundred miles due north of Statesboro, Georgia. The Hughes family was murdered 133 days after the Hodges family, a normal space-and-distance relationship for the series. The Man from the Train was moving, as he almost always did, in a consistent geographical pattern, drifting north from Florida to Georgia, from Georgia to South Carolina, from South Carolina to Virginia, where a family would be murdered (and a house set on fire) two weeks later.
The Hughes family was murdered without warning and without any rational explanation. The house was set on fire. A young girl was among the victims. Money and jewelry were left in plain sight. The murders were apparently committed sometime after midnight.
If we believe that this crime was committed by The Man from the Train—which I do—this crime becomes a “first” in two ways. Early in his run, The Man from the Train murdered farm families living near small towns but never actually committed a murder in a small town. Later, of course, that became his dominant pattern; later on almost all of his murders were committed in towns too small to have a regular police force, like Trenton, but this would be the first.
Also, this would be the first time that two crimes committed by The Man from the Train were connected by the newspapers. Of course, neither of these is any barrier to believing that the crimes were part of the series, since, if he was committing murders early on in rural areas and later on in small towns, some murder has to be the first one in a small town.
But Mr. Hughes was shot. In the case with which we began this book, the murders in Hurley, Virginia, in 1909, a man was shot, apparently outside the house, while his family was murdered in their beds, with an axe. It is difficult to understand how this happened. If the man was shot first, why didn’t the family wake up? And if the family was murdered first, well, where was the father, and why was he found outside the house? This is the same problem exactly: neither scenario seems to make sense.
The scenario that does make sense was summarized nicely by the Eau Claire Weekly (Wisconsin) December 9:
Investigation revealed the fact that unknown parties, believed by the tracks to be three men, entered the house through the rear door, murdered Mrs. Hughes in her room with an axe, then went to the room occupied by her daughters Emma, aged nineteen, and Hattie, aged fourteen, and murdered them in like manner without the girls awakening. Hughes evidently heard the noise and went from his room into the hallway, where he was shot down, a revolver being found by his side.
A special train was sent to Columbia for bloodhounds to track the murderers. Citizens are guarding the ground about the rear door of the house, where the tracks were found, to prevent disturbing the only means of arriving at a clue.
You may be surprised to learn that the bloodhounds didn’t find a damned thing. I don’t believe there were three murderers; I believe there was one, but otherwise I think the Eau Claire report has it right—he entered through the rear of the house (as he always did), murdered the women in the rear bedrooms, and then was confronted by the man of the house, who slept in a different room, but who happened to be awake. And armed. The Man from the Train sometimes carried a gun, and would use it if he had to. We have seen indications of that on other occasions, but this seems more definitive. Also, in many of these cases it is unclear whether the young girls were assaulted while alive or postmortem, but if we accept this scenario we have evidence about that issue. Hattie’s body was not staged or molested because, just after she was killed, the murderer was confronted by an armed man and had to shoot his way out.
Many newspapers would speculate, because Hughes was killed with a gun and a gun was found near his body, that Hughes had killed his family and then set fire to the house before committing suicide. That crime, of course, is much more common than for a family to be murdered by an intruder for no known reason. The human mind searches for the familiar; we always tend to believe that what has happened is what usually happens. In the words of a wire service story about this case: “The theory of suicide rests largely on the absence of motive for murder and the fact that bloodhounds were unable to discover any trail leading from the house.”
But that’s not right, and we know that it’s not right for several reasons. First, the coroner’s inquest ruled that the Hughes family was killed by intruders, not that I would be hesitant to argue with them if I didn’t agree. (Parenthetically, the county solicitor who presided over the inquest was John W. Thurmond, the father of South Carolina’s most successful twentieth-century politician, Senator Strom Thurmond.) Second, it would be extremely unusual for a man to murder his family with an axe and then kill himself with a gun; in fact, I have never heard of that happening. A man will kill his family with an axe (on rare occasions) if he doesn’t have a gun, but if he has a gun . . . well, why would he do that? Third, the fire was set some distance from where Mr. Hughes’s body was found, which, again, would be unusual in a murder/suicide scenario. And fourth, there is no indication that Hughes was a troubled man or an unstable man, no indication that he had a drinking problem or his wife was running around on him or anything like that. He was not in financial trouble; he was well-off, well-to-do. There is no indication that the family was unhappy. A ship will sink in a storm; it doesn’t sink in calm waters. Murder/suicides do not normally happen without context.