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 here, 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.