We have circled back now to the point at which we began. The next murders in the series are the murders in Hurley, Virginia, which were the first story in the book. I have more to say about that crime and those that followed it, but that begins in the next chapter.
Let’s assume that some of you are resisting the notion that this was in fact a series of related crimes, rather than a series of unrelated crimes. I would suppose that many of you were skeptical about this thesis when you began the book, and I would hope that most of you are not as skeptical now that you have heard most of the facts. Still, the time has come to address the nagging concerns of the unconverted. Let me make the argument that I think a skeptical reader might make, were she here to speak for herself.
What real evidence is there, that reader might argue, that these murders were all committed by the same man?
In a country the size of the United States there must be a good many families murdered each year. Many, many people lived close to the railroad track. Many of those who are murdered were no doubt murdered with axes. I am not questioning your sincerity, Bill and Rachel (the reader says politely), but how do I know, from my position, that you have not merely chosen certain crimes that accidentally happen to have these few critical characteristics in common, and then built upon that by pointing out whatever other coincidental similarities might appear?
In response to that, let me point out, first, that it was widely recognized at the time, beginning in October 1911, that this axe murderer was at work; that is, it was recognized that a limited number of these crimes were connected. The newspaper attention that came immediately to Villisca was drawn there in large part because the moment that the crime was discovered, it was suspected that this was the latest crime committed by the unknown man who had murdered several other families.
And second, let me point out that there are no fantastic or highly improbable elements of the story that we have told you or will tell you, stretching from 1898 to 1912. What element of this story would you find fantastic? Do you not believe that a man could be so evil as to do this? Do you not believe that that man could be clever enough to develop this simple scenario, by which he could escape detection (towns too small to have a police force, access to multiple railroad lines, strike late at night, be gone before dawn)? What, really, is improbable about it?
What seems improbable is that the series of crimes could have gone on for so long without anyone realizing what was happening. But turn that around and look at it from the other end. If you look at the first “recognized” crimes of the 1911 to 1912 era, which were the Colorado Springs murders, is it easy to believe that this is where the series of crimes begins?
To a modern reader it should be obvious that this is not where the series begins. A sophisticated serial murderer gets to that stage one step at a time—the same way that an athlete becomes an athlete, the same way that a writer becomes a writer, the same way that a musician becomes a musician. A serial murderer normally commits lesser crimes such as arson or molestation, graduates to murder in an isolated event, and then, more often than not, hunkers down for a time to blend into the walls. Eventually he resumes acting out his fantasies and, with the passage of the time, becomes bolder and more active.
The Man from the Train murdered two families in Colorado on one night in 1911, murdered another family two weeks later, and murdered another family two weeks after that. That is not a young, inexperienced offender. That is a serial murderer who has reached a mature phase.
Newspaper writers and ordinary citizens, at that time, did attempt to make connections between the Colorado Springs murders and earlier crimes in the Portland/Washington area. They lacked sufficient information to go very far with it. There simply was no way, in 1911, to connect the dots among events stretching over a period of years and occurring in different places. There was no place where information could be gathered, sifted, and systematically reviewed to look for patterns. There was no technology to compile the information or to sort through it.
Contemporary newspapers and others realized that a Subsection of the crimes were related, the Subsection beginning in Colorado Springs. But if you go back just weeks before Colorado Springs, to Ardenwald, Oregon, there is another little girl laid out in the middle of the room, covered with bloody fingerprints, her family murdered with an axe, with the blunt side of an axe, the axe taken from a neighbor’s yard and left in the room, her family murdered in the middle of the night. And if you go back a couple months before that, to San Antonio and the Casaways, there is another one. Why would we not believe that these crimes are part of the same series?
Actually, the main reason that the crimes have not been connected by other writers is irrational skepticism. I’ll get back to that point, irrational skepticism, but let me proceed toward it in an orderly way. I had points one and two in response to the rational skeptic above. The third point is that, of course, we don’t know in many cases which crimes he committed. There are perhaps fourteen crimes about which we have enough information to be certain they were committed by the same man, and then there are also many other similar crimes, and we believe that The Man from the Train was responsible for some of them or many of them, but not all of them. I have about six more arguments that I need to make here, and let me try to organize them.
* * *
(1) Visualize a target, with bullet holes spread around the surface of the target.
If the bullet holes are randomly distributed across the target, then there is no reason to believe that anyone was aiming at the target; it is more likely merely that the target was there, and there were a bunch of bullets flying around, and some of the bullets hit the target.
If, on the other hand, you have a cluster of bullet holes around the center of the target, and many fewer bullet holes on the outer edges of the target, then you have to conclude that someone was actually aiming at the target.
We have a large group of tight clusters here. If we had as many murders ten miles from a railroad track as we do a five-minute walk from a railroad track, that would be a random pattern. But when we have many, many murders within a five-minute walk of a railroad track and two or three crimes that are a few miles from a track, that’s a cluster.
If we had as many murders committed at 4:00 a.m. as at midnight, some at 6:00 a.m., some in the afternoon, some at dusk, we could conclude that this was a random pattern. But all of the murders which are central to this story—all of the murders that you have to believe are related or you’re off the reservation—all of them were committed within ninety minutes of midnight. That’s a cluster.
If we had murders committed in big cities and small towns and all sizes of towns in between, we could view those as random events. But, in fact, we have no crimes at all (relevant to this series) that were committed in a large city, one crime committed in what was then a small city (San Antonio), and the vast majority of our crimes committed in towns and settlements that were too small to have a police force. That’s a cluster. That’s a pattern.
If we had murders committed with an axe, and some with a knife, and some with a gun, and some with a baseball bat, then of course we could view those as random events. If we have a series of murders committed with an axe or similar instrument, that’s a cluster.
Except that, in approaching this problem in this way, I have tremendously understated the implausibility of these being random, unrelated events. They were not merely near railroad tracks, they were extremely near to railroad tracks, and they were predominantly near the intersections of multiple railroad tracks, and they were almost all at places where railroad trains would have to stop, and the bloodhounds in several cases tracked the scent directly to the railroad line, at which point it was lost.
And these crimes were not merely committed with an axe, they were committed with the blunt side of the axe, and they were not merely committed with an axe, they were committed with an axe that was taken from the family’s yard or from a neighbor’s yard or, in two cases, the coal shed. And the axe was (generally) left in the room. And after fingerprints were developed, the handle of the axe was washed off in a bucket of water. You think it just happened that way?
And I haven’t even mentioned the idiosyncratic behavior of the criminal. I haven’t even mentioned the moving of lamps, or the removal of the chimneys from the lamps, or the placing of cloth over the windows, or the covers over the heads of the victims, or the practice of locking up the house tight as he left, or the special attention to the young female victims.
There are thirty-three elements that help identify a crime which may be connected to this series, not thirty-three distinctly different elements, but thirty-three elements with some overlap and some redundancy. I will list the thirty-three elements at the end of this chapter. But it is preposterous to suggest that there is not a cluster of events that surrounds a small target—and it is clear that this cluster of events describes events other than just The Subsection which has previously been connected by other writers. There is a target there, and there is somebody aiming at the target.
* * *
(2) There are nowhere near enough murders of families in the relevant years for these to be random clusters of events.
The murder of an entire family is a relatively rare event. It was relatively rare in 1911, and it is relatively rare now. How rare?
We tried to document every family murder in the United States in the years 1890 to 1920. I can’t tell you absolutely that we have found every single event, but we made a serious and determined effort to find every single event, and we certainly found most of them. This is the count, by years:
1890 |
7 |
1891 |
6 |
1892 |
8 |
1893 |
9 |
1894 |
6 |
1895 |
7 |
1896 |
11 |
1897 |
10 |
1898 |
2 |
1899 |
7 |
1900 |
4 |
1901 |
8 |
1902 |
14 |
1903 |
10 |
1904 |
10 |
1905 |
9 |
1906 |
9 |
1907 |
4 |
1908 |
11 |
1909 |
9 |
1910 |
10 |
1911 |
19 |
1912 |
14 |
1913 |
9 |
1914 |
6 |
1915 |
5 |
1916 |
6 |
1917 |
5 |
1918 |
1 |
1919 |
7 |
1920 |
5 |
That averages exactly eight families murdered per year, 248 in thirty-one years. In the years when The Man from the Train was most active, there would be about ten families murdered per year in the United States. (The number jumped in 1911 because there were at least two other persons murdering families that year, in addition to The Man from the Train—the New Orleans Axeman, and Clementine Barnabet. Story to come.)
After The Man from the Train was no longer active, the number of families murdered per year dropped sharply. It could be that the number dropped sharply simply because our man was no longer active; that could be true and probably is true, but we are not making that argument.
The argument we are making is this: that there are nowhere near enough crimes here to form random clusters of identifying characteristics. The crimes that we have described for you in this book represent a very significant portion of all the family murders that occurred in the United States in those years.
Another thing that unites these murders is simply that they are so horrible. Almost every crime in this book was described in the newspapers as “the most horrible crime ever committed in this region” or “one of the most terrible crimes ever in this state” or by some similar phrase. We have quoted those phrases periodically throughout the book, and we did that to make a point: that these are not common events. There simply are not many crimes like this.
Further, family murders in general—what could be called unremarkable family murders—almost always have certain characteristics in common. Unremarkable family murders usually occur in daylight or in the early-evening hours (because they usually occur in the context of a heated family dispute). Unremarkable family murders almost always are committed by a family member or by a person close to the family such as a rejected suitor, a servant, or an overfriendly neighbor, often followed by the culprit’s suicide. It is usually immediately obvious who has committed the crime. Often that person has a history of mental illness, alcoholism, or drug abuse, although in some cases the crime is committed due to greed. Unremarkable family murders are normally committed with a gun, a knife, or a sharp instrument such as a scythe.
In the years other than the years that The Man from the Train was active, unremarkable family murders will account for almost all of the total. There is the other serial murderer in 1911, and there were a few Italian immigrant families murdered by The Black Hand in the very early part of the century. The 1914 murders at the Wisconsin home of Frank Lloyd Wright, although they cannot be labeled unremarkable, actually meet all of the “normal” conditions that I outlined above. But here’s my point: we are not talking about a large number of crimes that could be sifted and sorted to “find” the murders that fit the pattern; it’s just not that way, at all. We’re actually drawing from a very small pool of family murders. If you remove the unremarkable events, then the cluster of characteristics identifying The Man from the Train dominates the remaining events.
* * *
(3) Let us approach this as a mathematical query, understanding that some of you are not comfortable with story problems and will want to skip ahead a couple of paragraphs. We can begin by distinguishing between the fundamental conditions of the crime, the idiosyncratic behavior of the criminal, and the fetish behavior. The fundamental conditions of the crime are:
• A family is murdered in their beds.
• The family lives within walking distance of the railroad track.
• The crime occurs near the hour of midnight.
• The crime is committed with the blunt side of an axe.
• The crime occurs in or near a small town, usually unincorporated, with little or no regular police presence.
• The crime occurs without any warning, without a robbery, and without any apparent motive.
• It is in no way clear or obvious who has committed the crime.
The second-level stuff . . . breaking into the house through a back window, removing a screen and leaving it propped up against the house, removing the chimney from a lamp and carrying the lamp around the house, picking up the axe from the family’s yard or a neighbor’s yard, leaving the axe at the scene of the crime, washing the axe handle in a bucket of water, committing the crimes on weekends . . . these are idiosyncratic behaviors, as opposed to fundamental conditions of the crime. And the third-level stuff, such as covering mirrors with cloth and paying special attention to the prepubescent female, that’s fetish behavior.
We’re just dealing now with the fundamental conditions of the crime, ignoring the idiosyncratic behavior and the fetishes.
Mathematical query: Given that there are about ten family murders per year in the United States in this era, given that most family murders will occur in daytime, given that most family murders will obviously have been committed by family members or persons close to the family, given that most of those will be committed with a gun or a sharp instrument other than an axe, how many murders would you expect there to be in the United States, per year, in which:
• A family is murdered,
• Without any warning,
• With the blunt side of an axe,
• With no robbery,
• At or near midnight,
• In or near a small town with no police force or very little police protection,
• Within a few hundred feet of a railroad track,
• Without any real evidence as to who has committed the crime?
The mathematical answer is: zero. As a random set of facts, you wouldn’t expect any murders to meet all of those conditions, in a typical year or in a typical five-year period.
You wouldn’t expect to find any murders that meet all of these conditions, at random, if there were a hundred families murdered a year. If there were a hundred families murdered a year in this period, it might happen (at random) that thirty of those would be murdered with an axe, and (let us say, very generously) twenty of them with the blunt side of an axe. Ten of those twenty crimes might occur in small towns with no police presence; three or four of those ten might occur within an hour or two of midnight. One or two of those might occur within a half-mile of a railroad; one might occur near the intersection of multiple railroad lines. That one crime might occur without any warning and without any real indication as to who was responsible, but most likely not. Given that one crime, there might or might not be valuables left in plain sight.
Realistically, there would probably not be a “random match” for this basic set of facts, even if there were a hundred family murders a year in the United States. And, in fact, if you choose a five-year period outside this period we are discussing, let’s say 1922 to 1926, or 1931 to 1935, whatever . . . in that five-year period there probably will not be a single family murder in the United States that matches these fundamental conditions. There might be one or two. The odds against there being a random cluster of such events, with no one criminal causing the cluster, would be astronomical.
But that’s just based on the fundamental facts of the case—not the idiosyncratic or fetishistic behavior. If you factor in the long list of idiosyncratic behaviors, it’s not thousands to one against there being a random cluster of such events; it’s billions to one. That is my argument, in a nutshell: it is simply not reasonable or logical to suppose that these could be random, unconnected events.
In February 1902, six members of the Earl family were murdered with an axe near Welsh, Louisiana; a man named Albert Batson was convicted of the crime and executed for it. The house was right next to the railroad track. But in that case it is obvious that the crime was not committed by The Man from the Train:
1. The crime was committed in daylight.
2. The crime was committed with the sharp side of the axe.
3. A note was left on the door to divert attention from the crime.
4. A team of mules was stolen from the property.
5. An effort was made to sell the mules.
Very obviously not The Man from the Train, and there are other crimes like that. My point is that when it is not him, it tends (most often) to be obvious that it is not him, because a set of facts at random will not match up with the set of facts that identifies our particular nutcase. It might match up at random on a couple of points, such as the railroad track and the axe, but it won’t match up on the longer list of identifying points.
* * *
(4) The crimes are also united by obvious geographic and chronological patterns that could not reasonably be explained as random outcomes.
June 5, 1910; Marshalltown, Iowa
November 20, 1910; Guilford, Missouri
December 7, 1910; Johnson County, Kansas (near Martin City, Missouri)
March 21, 1911; San Antonio, Texas
Take a map, put pushpins in the map 1-2-3-4, and you will see that these four crimes form an obvious geographic unit, with a clear and consistent pattern of movement. The geographic sequence lines up perfectly with the chronological sequence; not only that, but the time gaps are almost perfectly proportional to the spatial gaps.
Almost all of The Man from the Train’s career is geographically and chronologically coherent in this way. Occasionally, such as after the murders in San Antonio, he will take a longer than normal train ride and surface in an entirely different part of the country two or three months later. But then there will be a cluster in the next place, and then a little gap, and then a cluster in the next place. He kills a family in Georgia, then one in Florida, then another one in Florida, then one in South Carolina. The only time in the entire series when the geography doesn’t make sense is the crime in Nova Scotia.
If the crimes were not connected, why would that be true?
* * *
(5) The crimes are united by many different things, other than the broad outlines of the facts and the idiosyncratic/fetishistic behavior of the criminal. To name one of those things: the lumber business.
The majority of The Man from the Train’s crimes were committed in places where the primary industry or one of the two primary industries was logging. Sometimes it’s not logging; sometimes it’s mining. Think about it. What do you use in the logging business? An axe. What do you use in the mining business? A pickaxe.
Hurley, Virginia, where we started the book. Logging town.
Ardenwald, Oregon. Logging town.
Rainier, Washington. Logging town.
Colorado Springs, Colorado. Logging town.
Ellsworth, Kansas. Mining town.
Occasionally it isn’t a mining or logging town; Villisca wasn’t, and San Antonio wasn’t. Sometimes he is just passing through town.
Anyway, let’s take these three facts:
1. That most of the murders occurred in logging towns,
2. That most of the crimes occurred on the weekend, and
3. That the murderer left money and valuables in plain sight in almost every case, or else the crime was committed against persons who had nothing worth stealing.
When you put facts together and they make a sensible, coherent package, that is an indication that those facts may belong together. If you put those three above facts together, they make a sensible, coherent pattern: The Man from the Train worked for a living. He went to logging and mining towns, because logging and mining camps were always hiring workers. He committed his crimes on the weekend, because he worked during the week. And he didn’t steal things from the murder scenes, because (1) he knew very well that stealing things from the scene of a murder would get you hanged, and (2) he wasn’t desperate for money. Because he worked.
* * *
(6) Another thing that ties these cases together is the sheer, astonishing competence of the murderer. He is so good at what he does that you almost don’t see it; you almost take for granted that this is the way it goes.
In many of the newspaper reports on these crimes, reporters are baffled by how the murderer is able to overcome the entire family so rapidly. In Villisca, for example, tests showed that the staircase creaked loudly, and that it was entirely impossible to climb the stairs to where the first murders were committed without making a loud noise. For a hundred years, people have been puzzled by how the murderer in Villisca was able to get up those stairs without waking the victims—and in San Antonio there is the exact same scenario. The stairs creak, and the police cannot understand how the criminal was able to get up the stairs without waking anybody up.
Well, I understand how he was able to do this. One minute after his first foot hit the staircase, everybody upstairs was dead. Two minutes, tops. They simply did not have time to react.
What The Man from the Train did was not easy. It was enormously difficult. If you believe that the murders were committed in one case by a jealous ex-boyfriend, in another case by a business rival, in another case by a deranged racist, then you will be very puzzled by how exactly he was able to do this without the family waking up. But if you realize that it is one person committing many of these crimes, then it makes perfect sense: he is able to do this because he knows what he is doing. He has done it dozens of times. He’s not tiptoeing timidly up that staircase like a normal person would; he’s charging up the staircase like the breath of Hell.
The astonishing competence of the murderer goes beyond that. He is able to slink into town, commit his murders, spend an hour or two in the house after the crime without being discovered, and get out of the house and out of town before anybody knows he is there—again, and again, and again.
One of the ways that we know that these crimes are a package is that it is not reasonable to believe that a large number of different people possessed the skill and the self-possession necessary to have committed these crimes without getting caught and without letting potential victims get away from them.
* * *
But the main reason that The Man from the Train’s murderous skein went undetected for more than a decade—and a primary reason why the series of crimes went unsolved—is the irrational resistance to believing that the crimes were related, even when there were sufficient facts to allow a clear-thinking person to see that the crimes had to be related. I have to make three arguments at once here, but they tie together. The Man from the Train was shielded from detection by three factors:
1. The fact that the public had no way to connect the dots until the newspaper wire services reached a certain point of maturity.
2. Very unusual things flabbergast us; that is, they stun us into disbelief. This is different from rational skepticism. Certain experiences and certain ideas seem unreal, and we resist believing them because they are so far outside our experience that we cannot process them as being a part of what seems like real life.
3. In many ways, experience is the worst teacher. In many ways experience is the only real teacher, yes, but in certain situations experience will teach us to believe something that is not true. Experience teaches people to believe that the earth is flat. Experience teaches people to believe that their house will not flood because the house has been there for 120 years and has never flooded before.
Experience teaches people to believe, sometimes, that what is usually true must always be true. Experience teaches detectives to believe that people are usually murdered by someone they know, someone in their life.
Unfortunately, the police for a hundred years “knew” this to be true even when it wasn’t true. When police encountered a serial murderer, prior to 1975, they almost always insisted that they were dealing with a series of unrelated crimes. When the Manson family committed one gruesome set of murders one night and another the next, police insisted that the two crime scenes were not related, assigned different investigators to the two crimes, and refused to “join” the two investigations—even though it is difficult to see how the connections between the two crime scenes could have been any more obvious. According to Jeff Guinn in Manson (p. 273):
From the outset, the Tate and LaBianca cases were hampered by the unwillingness of the investigative teams to share information. . . . They often operated out of the same long squad room, but never effectively cooperated. LAPD administration was unconcerned—after all, the cases really had nothing to do with each other.
When the murderer known as BTK committed obviously similar crimes in Wichita, Kansas, in the 1970s, junior police officers were specifically forbidden from speculating that the crimes might be linked—even after BTK wrote to the newspapers to claim credit for the crimes.
That was irrational skepticism, driven by experience. Irrational skepticism of this nature survives and pollutes this discussion to the present day. JD Chandler, in the book Murder & Mayhem in Portland, Oregon (page 87), makes the following quite incredible statement about the links between the murders of the Hill family in Ardenwald and the murders 365 days later of the Moore family in Villisca:
The shocking similarities between the two crimes were probably in the reporter’s imagination because no charges were ever brought against anyone except Nathan Harvey.
That’s it? That’s all it takes to convince you that two crimes are unrelated—no charges are filed?
By that standard, all unsolved crimes are by definition unrelated to one another. The crimes of Jack the Ripper . . . all unrelated. No charges were ever filed, so obviously, there was nothing linking those crimes except the imagination of the reporters. That’s irrational skepticism.
Raymond Hardy was suspected of murdering his family on a farm in Iowa on June 5, 1910. The county sheriff thought Hardy had committed the crime and blackened his name in the newspapers, but he was never prosecuted because there wasn’t a scintilla of evidence to support the sheriff’s slanders. Hardy wasn’t a bad person or a troubled person, and he had no motive; he was just a nice farm boy, supposed to be married a few days later. After he was exonerated he lived a long, normal life, living almost sixty years after the murders. To my eyes, it is as clear as could be that Raymond Hardy was entirely innocent.
But modern articles about that case—and there are several of them on the Web—almost all insinuate that Hardy was guilty, because, well, you know, otherwise we would have to believe the family was a victim of a roving monster, and we can’t believe that.
After Hardy was cleared, a man stepped forward to claim that he had seen a suspicious person, covered in blood, on a train leaving town on the morning after the murders. All or almost all of the modern accounts of the crime will say:
• Hardy was set free in part because of the story about the stranger on the train.
• The local people were anxious to have some alternative explanation for the crime.
Both parts of that are bass-ackwards. The story about the stranger on the train surfaced only after Hardy had been legally exonerated and released. And the entire history of crime screams that people prefer to believe that they know who committed a crime, rather than accepting that the crime may have been committed by some unknown person for some unknown reason. Skepticism in favor of a presumption of guilt when the facts do not support a finding of guilt is irrational skepticism. And irrational skepticism is the smoke screen behind which these murders have been hidden for a hundred years.
* * *
I promised you earlier my list of thirty-three elements that we used to identify crimes that may have been committed by The Man from the Train; they are not thirty-three unique elements, but thirty-three elements with some overlap and redundancy. Here is the list:
1. Extreme proximity to the railroad tracks (usually within a quarter of a mile).
2. Crimes usually occurring near the intersection of two railroad lines.
3. The use of an axe.
4. The use of the blunt side of the axe, using the axe as a bludgeon rather than as a cutting instrument.
5. The taking of the axe from the family’s woodpile or from a neighbor’s woodpile.
6. Leaving the axe at or near the scene of the last murder.
7. Hitting each victim in the head, rather than on any other part of the body.
8. The murder of an entire family in one incident.
9. The presence among the victims of a prepubescent female.
10. Special attention being paid to the body of the prepubescent female (staging or posing of the prepubescent female, while other victims are simply left as they were when they were killed).
11. Masturbation near the body of the prepubescent female.
12. The crimes occurring in the middle of the night, usually between midnight and 2:00 a.m. or very near to that time frame.
13. Pulling a blanket over the victim’s head(s) moments before the attack, presumably to minimize blood spatter.
14. Covering the victims postmortem with some item of cloth.
15. Covering other items with cloth (such as windows, mirrors, or, in one case, a telephone).
16. Attacks occurring on farms or in isolated places (up to 1908, and occasionally after) and in towns too small to have a regular police force (after 1908).
17. Setting fire to the house after the murders (up to 1906, and sometimes after 1906).
18. The crimes moving north and south along the eastern seaboard states, up until 1909, and moving from east to west across the country after 1909.
19. The crimes tending to occur on the weekend, and particularly on Sundays.
20. The crimes tending to occur in areas in which the primary industries are logging and mining.
21. The moving of a lamp, the lamp left burning, without its glass chimney, at the scene of the crime.
22. The “timing” or spacing of the crimes, normally a few weeks between attacks, and normally at a distance one from another of one hundred to four hundred miles.
23. The clear and obvious geographical patterns formed by each set of murders.
24. The extraordinary competence of the murderer in accomplishing his grisly purpose.
25. Doors often locked or jammed shut after the crime to delay entry into the house.
26. Window shades pulled/windows and doors covered on the morning after the murders.
27. Crimes committed with extreme suddenness and with no warning of any kind.
28. Victims attacked while soundly asleep (killer may flee from the scene if anyone is awake).
29. Money and other valuables left in plain sight at the scene of the crime.
30. All or almost all of the murders in this sequence were committed in houses that burned wood for heat. Somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of homes in this era burned wood as their primary heat source. All or almost all of the crimes occurred in those houses.
31. Enters the house through the rear.
32. Commonly removes a window screen, enters the house through an unlocked window.
33. All or almost all crimes occur in warm weather.
There is a thirty-fourth element which could have been listed here, which is the moving of bodies postmortem or stacking of bodies atop one another. This was done in at least six cases in this series and probably more, although I decided it was better not to list it as an identifying trait.