The people who lived in small towns a hundred years ago lived lives every bit as rich and varied as your life or my life. Everything meaningful that has ever happened in your life happened just as often to people in small towns a hundred years ago as it does to people in New York or LA in the twenty-first century. People who lived in small towns a hundred years ago fell in love, fell out of love, got married, got divorced, and had affairs inside and outside of marriage. They got jobs, got promoted, and got fired. They started their own businesses, sometimes got rich, more often went bankrupt or just gave it up and closed the doors.
They formed lifetime friendships; they fell into bitter rivalries with people they could not avoid. They joined groups of people who had interests like their own. They played sports; they got fat, got determined to get back into shape, sometimes succeeded and more often failed. They had children and raised their children. They suffered through their children’s failings, and sometimes those were terrible failings. They took vacations; they traveled far from home and brought back souvenirs. They bought a new house or, down on their luck, moved into a dumpy house and hoped to get into someplace better. They rooted for faraway sports teams. They buried their parents and buried their brothers and sisters and sometimes buried their children. They got cancer and had heart attacks and contracted diseases that they had never heard of. Most of them were honest people, but there were thieves among them and thugs and con men. They bought new things, new toys, new inventions, and they were as excited by these new things as you are by yours. They suffered through fires, floods, and other natural disasters. They drank, and some of them became alcoholics, and some of them became drug addicts.
Amusements? I lived in a town of three hundred people in the 1950s. If we had wanted to, we could have gone to some type of organized event 365 days a year—football games, or basketball, or baseball, church, church picnics, church pageants, school plays, school programs, political rallies, parades, band concerts, VFW meetings, Knights of Columbus events, holiday celebrations, fund-raisers, community meetings, store openings, private parties, public parties. On average, these events were exactly as interesting as the events that you go to now.
If you read about a crime in a small town, you will encounter frequently the comment that these people lived in the kind of quiet place where nothing very interesting ever happened. This is a despicable thing to say. It is a form of bigotry directed at the past, and bigotry directed at people who live in small towns—and worse yet, it’s ignorant. Pardon my French, but it’s an ignorant asshole comment, and if you ever say anything like that, you are revealing yourself to be an ignorant asshole.
This book is almost entirely about people who lived in small towns a hundred years ago—as much about how they died as about how they lived, but the flash of death illuminates the lives that the victims had lived. The Man from the Train murdered these people, placing no value on their lives. But when you say that they lived lives in which nothing very interesting ever happened, you are also devaluing their lives.
Small-town people are different from city people in some ways, and people a hundred years ago were different from twenty-first-century urban people in some ways; I’m not saying that those people were exactly like us. In many ways our lives are better than theirs were; in many ways their lives were better than ours are. I’m not saying that everything was the same; I am saying that it is ignorant to suggest that they lived boring lives in which nothing ever happened.
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At this point there are three questions that we need to address before we go our separate ways. Those three are:
1. What could have been done to stop him?
2. How many people did he kill? and
3. What happened to him?
We don’t absolutely know the answers to any of those questions, but we have thought about them a lot more than you have or will, so we’ll share our thoughts with you; take them for whatever you think they’re worth.
Four things needed to be done, to give authorities some chance to catch the roving axe murderer of 1911 and 1912, Paul Mueller. It is no help to say that they should have called state police forces or the federal government; the state police forces did not exist at the time in most of these states, and the federal government regarded crime as a local problem. That’s saying that they should have invented the future.
The first thing that needed to be done was: stop denying that this was happening. Take off the blinders. Let go of the irrational skepticism.
In Houston Heights, Texas, in 1910, the county sheriff told the newspapers a few days after the murders of the Schultz family that the crime had probably been committed by a madman from the railroad that ran right by the house, and that he had probably just got back on the train and left town. Having said that, he then spent three years trying to prosecute an obviously innocent young man who was involved with the woman who had been killed.
In this book we have seen this several times—that the police or prosecutors would say that they thought the crime was committed by a person just passing through town, but wouldn’t follow through on that. All of the real detectives who investigated the murders in Villisca said at one time or another that the crime had to be committed by persons just passing through town. But if the crime was committed by a local person, they could arrest him and prosecute him. If it was committed by a person just passing through town, they were helpless; they couldn’t do anything. Because they desperately wanted to solve the crime, they bought into the theory that it had to be a local person.
In Georgia and South Carolina in 1904, authorities could have realized that the Hodges and Hughes family murders had to be related. Had they not committed themselves prematurely to the silly notion that the crimes were committed by a gang of black assassins known as the “Before Day Club,” they would have been the first people to realize what was happening. They probably wouldn’t have found Paul Mueller, but perhaps they could have prevented the lynching of innocent men.
When one family was murdered just west of Bluefield, West Virginia, in 1909, and another family just north of Bluefield six weeks later, officials could have seen that the Meadows and Hood family murders had to be connected. Unfortunately, private detectives had “solved” the Meadows murders by hanging the crime around the neck of Howard Little. In their minds, this severed the two crime scenes; they couldn’t be connected, because Howard Little was in jail when the Hood family was killed.
The first thing that needed to be done was: open your eyes and see what is happening. Don’t make up reasons why this can’t be happening; it is happening.
The second thing that needed to be done was to coordinate the bits and pieces of information from many different crime scenes, rather than investigating each crime as if it had occurred in isolation. In researching this book, we found an astonishing number of times when suspicious persons were spotted near the crime scene before the crime occurred—but no description of that person, however vague, was ever published.
Detectives in Ardenwald, Oregon, and Rainier, Washington, had shoe prints and possibly fingerprints in blood; detectives in Colorado Springs had fingerprints or partial prints in ink from a spilled ink jar. A little girl in Paola, Kansas, woke up and found a man in her room, and lived to tell about it.
As much as we can tell, no effort was ever made to bring these bits and pieces of information together. I am not saying that this would have solved the crimes and ended the murders; probably it wouldn’t have. Probably the mysterious man seen in Villisca and the stranger seen near the Bernhardt farm in Kansas would have turned out to be two different people, neither of whom had anything to do with either crime, probably. I am not saying that this would have solved the crime by itself; I am saying that it should have been done as a logical step toward a solution, and that it probably would have been done if authorities had not irrationally insisted until late in the series that the crimes were not linked.
The third thing that should have been done is: use the railroad detectives. The irony of this case is that at the time that The Man from the Train was traveling around murdering people, the railroads had the best police forces in the country, other than perhaps the large private detective agencies with which they worked hand in glove. In 1910 every major railroad had its own police force. In 1910 a lot of policing was private. There were bank dicks (bank detectives), and hotel dicks, and detectives routinely hired in other lines of work—factories hired “company dicks” to keep the employees from stealing from the factory—but the best of these were the railroad dicks.
If you look at the list of people who were incarcerated in your state in 1910, what you will probably find is that many of them were not arrested by the sheriff of one county or another or by city police; they were arrested by the railroads. In my state, most of the people who were in the state prison in 1910 had actually been arrested by the railroad detectives, for crimes committed on the railroads.
This relationship had started with private detectives hired to fight union efforts back in the 1860s. Mine owners and railroads, in the 1860s, hired private detectives to infiltrate and destroy the unions—with some justification, in that a substantial number of people were being killed in union-related violence. I’m not on the railroads’ side here, but I’m just saying. The railroads became the biggest customers of the Pinkertons, the Burns Agency, and the other private detective agencies. When those agencies expanded their businesses to offer other security services, they went to their biggest customers.
By 1910 the battles against the unions were far from over, but the railroads had large and sophisticated police operations, supported by the private detective agencies. The two main tasks of the railroad detectives were (1) to stop tramps and other people from jumping onto trains for free rides, and (2) to suppress criminal activity on the railroads.
In this era there were lunch counters in many thousands of little towns set up to feed people from the trains. The train would stop for twenty minutes in a small town; a person making a long train journey would hop off the train and grab a bite to eat, then get back on the train. It became a common crime for someone to steal the passengers’ hand luggage when the passenger hopped off to get something to eat. There were criminals who made a living doing that—lots of them, at one point. The railroad dicks’ job was to catch them and put them out of business.
I mentioned the 1962 movie The Music Man, set in Iowa in 1912, which centers on a con man who came to town, and in Villisca there were actual con men who came to town after the murders to try to take advantage of the situation. You may remember the movie The Sting, which is set in about the same era, or the movie Paper Moon, again set in the same era, again about con men.
There are con men in all eras, of course, but in this era there were a particular type of con men, guys who went from small town to small town, trying to take advantage of the gullible local yokels—and of customers on the trains. It was the railroad dicks’ job to put the con men out of business. These were large, aggressive police operations, and they knew what they were doing.
The third thing that should have been done is that state authorities should have gone to the railroads and asked for their assistance in catching this murderer. A point was reached at which everybody knew there was going to be another murder like this in some small town sometime in the next few weeks. That point should have been reached years earlier, but eventually they got there. They should have been prepared, then, to jump on the next crime as soon as it happened.
What should have been done was to shut down the railroad system in a 150-mile circle around the crime and move the railroad dicks in in force to take inventory of what they had. Again, I am not saying that this would have solved the crime, and I know that you can’t shut down the nation’s transportation system for an extended period of time, but you can freeze a portion of it for a few hours while you gather information. You might find bloody clothes; you might find a tramp who has seen somebody hop on or hop off the train at 4:00 a.m. near the scene of the latest murder.
And the fourth thing they needed to do was: work with the hobo communities. There were hobo villages in this era, places where the trains slowed down and tramps jumped on and off the trains and formed little villages usually populated by eight people or less. There are still villages like that today, of course, people living in boxes under bridges or camping out in wooded areas in the middle of cities; we don’t think of it the same way, but it’s the same thing.
The police, when they talked to these people at all, almost always went after them in a hostile manner—rousting the tramps, tearing up their stuff, driving them out of town. What needed to be done was to work with those communities—in the same way that police now, trying to find a serial murderer who is killing prostitutes, recognize the need to work with the prostitutes.
Who do you think might have had information about Paul Mueller while he was active? Nobody, because he didn’t talk to anybody about what he was doing, but if anybody had any information about these crimes, if anybody had seen anything or heard anything suspicious, it would have been the hobos. It would have been the bums. That’s who the police should have been talking to.
* * *
So how many people did Paul Mueller kill? We will never know for sure, of course, but we can divide the crimes into four buckets, a “100 percent bucket,” a “70 percent group,” a “40 percent group,” and a “10 percent group.” The number we are going to give you in a moment is kind of astonishing, but we swear to you that we have tried to be conservative in making this estimate. If we felt that the likelihood of the crime having been committed by Paul Mueller was 40 to 70 percent, we would place that in the “40 percent” bucket. If it was 10 percent to 40 percent, that would go in the 10 percent bucket.
There are fourteen crimes that we feel certain were committed by The Man from the Train. Those are, chronologically, the Newtons, the Lyerlys, the Hugheses, the Meadowses, Hoods, Schultzes, Casaways, Hills, Burnhams, Waynes, Dawsons, Showmans, Hudsons, and Moores (Villisca). About all of those cases there is a good deal of information available, and about all of those cases there is sufficient reason to conclude that these were committed by the same man. There were a total of fifty-nine persons murdered in those fourteen incidents.
In the 70 percent bucket are (generally) crimes about which we have a little bit less information or (sometimes) a little bit of contradictory information. There are seven crimes in this group, which are the Allens, Kellys (or Caffeys), Hodgeses, Linkouses, Ackermans, Cobles, and Pfanschmidts. These crimes we believe were committed by The Man from the Train, although we are less than certain. In these incidents a total of thirty persons were murdered.
In the 40 percent bucket are crimes that are more or less a toss-up; in some ways it looks like him, doesn’t look like him . . . we don’t know. In this group there are eight more crimes: the Van Lieu, Boylan, Christmas, Gerrell, Byers, Hardy, Bernhardt, and Hinterkaifeck murders. A total of twenty-seven persons perished in these crimes.
In the 10 percent bucket are another nine crimes: the Wise, Stetka, Hart, Edmondson, Zoos, Hubbell, Opelousas, Randall, and Warner families. In these nine crimes another thirty-seven lives were taken.
If we assume that The Man from the Train is responsible for 100 percent of the first group, 70 percent of the second group, etc., that produces an estimate of ninety-five murder victims. (There are also five to seven possibly related crimes, some not covered in this book, that we are going to completely ignore in this accounting.) This estimate, however, does not include those persons who were legally executed for crimes actually committed by Paul Mueller, or those who were murdered by lynch mobs. Four persons were legally executed for crimes that either were or might possibly have been committed by Paul Mueller (Bob Hensen, James Linkous, Howard Little, and Hez Rasco). In addition to those, at least seven persons were murdered by lynch mobs because they were believed to have committed crimes that they probably had not committed. Those seven were Paul Reed and Will Cato (Georgia, 1904), Nease Gillespie, John Gillespie, and Jack Dillingham (North Carolina, 1906), and Curry Roberts and John Henry (Georgia, 1908). If we assign proportional responsibility for these deaths in the same way as for the murders themselves, that would increase our best estimate to 101 victims.
In addition to these 101, at least four other persons were convicted of murders probably committed by The Man from the Train and were held in prison for years, but were not executed; those four were Henry Lambert, John Knight, George Wilson, and Ray Pfanschmidt. Robert Clements in Alabama was convicted of a murder that could possibly be part of the series. In addition to these persons, many others were publicly accused of one of the crimes, most of whom were taken into custody and held for some time. It is impossible to know how many of these persons there were, but the number certainly would be over a hundred. About ten of these were brought to trial and were acquitted or had the prosecution dropped in the middle of the trial.
* * *
The third question that I wanted to address in closing is: What happened to Paul Mueller after the Pfanschmidt murders in September 1912?
There are four apparent possibilities:
1. He died soon after that.
2. He was arrested for some other crime and sent to jail. He could have been caught breaking into someone’s house and sent away, for example, without anyone realizing who he was.
3. He lived on but stopped killing people for some reason.
4. He went back to Europe and continued to murder people.
Any of those four is a consistent and logical continuation of his story; however, if you want to know what I think, I think he probably went back to Europe and continued to murder people.
Mueller’s first murders, the Newton family, attracted substantial newspaper coverage, and probably the police came closer to catching Mueller than they ever realized they had. But after the Newtons, his next several crimes—his next ten or fifteen—attracted relatively little newspaper coverage, and there is no reason to believe that the police were ever within a hundred miles of catching him. But gradually, over the years, this had changed. By 1912 the public was very much aware that a crazy axe murderer was on the loose, and they had a pretty good general idea of where he was.
Paul Mueller was a smart man, and he had to see where this was heading. They were a hundred miles behind him, and then they were ten miles behind him, and now they’re right behind him. Pretty soon now, they’re going to be one step ahead of him, and then that’s the end of the road for him. I think that he had to see that coming, so he got out.
If Mueller had been gradually slowing down, as a murderer, then I might believe that he just stopped killing people. But, in fact, he had been murdering families at a frantic pace in 1911 and 1912. Something sudden had to happen to put him out of business in this country.
The Pfanschmidt family was murdered in September, so he would have headed south soon after that, since he always went south in the winter. I think he got to New Orleans, probably, found work on a freighter heading to Europe, and went back to Europe.
If he did go back to Europe at that time, he would soon have found himself enveloped in World War I. Although Mueller had been in the German army twenty years earlier, I do not think that he would have rejoined the army during the war; in fact, I think that, if conscripted into the army, he would probably have gone AWOL at the first opportunity.
1. Mueller was in his fifties by that time, old enough to be excused from military service.
2. He was tremendously averse to personal risk.
3. He was exceptionally good at avoiding capture. If he went AWOL, once he was in the wind, they weren’t going to find him.
And the chaos of wartime would have been perfect for him—as it was, for example, for Marcel Petiot, a French doctor and serial killer during World War II. People fighting the war didn’t have the time to chase down criminals like they normally would have.
And then, there is Hinterkaifeck . . .