Memphis, Feb. 9—Boylan and his wife were both well known in Memphis. He was regarded as one of the best negroes in Crittenden County.
—Bryan (Texas) Morning Eagle, February 10, 1905
The Mississippi River is deep and wide. Here in the Midwest we will build bridges every couple of miles across a less imposing river, but you don’t do that to the Mississippi; it is a monster. Only a few railroad bridges cross the Mississippi, so the railroad lines all converge at those bridges and fan out from them on the other side. There are not one or two railroad lines there, but a large number, joining forces as they near the river.
Memphis, of course, is in Tennessee but on the edge of the state; when you cross the river you are in Arkansas. West Memphis is in Arkansas. On May 5, 1993, three eight-year-old boys were murdered in West Memphis. Three teenagers were convicted of those murders and spent twenty years in prison before they were freed; they are known as the West Memphis Three.
In 1900 there were more than five hundred sawmills within a hundred miles of Memphis. The Boylan family lived west of Marion, Arkansas, inside this thinly populated latticework of railroads and lumber mills. On Tuesday, February 7, 1905, the Boylan family was murdered with an axe in the middle of the night—father Albert, mother Ann, and a son named Rush. The son was found outside the house, the mother at the front door, and the father inside the house. The axe was left inside the house.
This is a low-information event; this will be a short chapter because we don’t know very much about the crime. A week before the murders the Boylans had sold their house and land—apparently the house in which they were murdered—for $1,500 cash. They had put $1,000 in the bank; the other $500 was unaccounted for, and some presumed the money was stolen at the time of the crime.
The Boylans had two adult sons who lived on the property, some distance from the house; they may have lived in a tent or some similar temporary structure. The adult sons claimed to know nothing about the crime. The sons were arrested; however, there is no report of their being prosecuted, and other reports said that a posse of more than forty men, almost all of them black, was searching the area for clues.
There are several reasons to suspect that this crime was connected to the series—the proximity to the railroads, the fact that it was a lumbering region, the unexplained murder of a family with an axe in the middle of the night, and the axe being left in the house. There are a similar number of reasons to think it was not connected: a speculative theft of $500, reports saying the heads of the victims were “severed” as opposed to crushed, as would be the case if it were The Man from the Train. We just do not know.
There was no young female victim here; there was no fire. We do not know whether the house was locked up as the murderer fled. There are connections missing that would be necessary to reach a conclusion. But I will also note this: that once these cases stopped, they stopped. In late 1912 The Man from the Train fled the country, or died, or was put in prison, or something. Once that happened, you just don’t find cases like this—random farm families killed with an axe in the middle of the night, near a railroad. Before 1898, you don’t find cases like this. And that is certainly a reason to believe that the cases we do have are somehow connected.