The Man On The Train

And this is the  book that I read recently about the serial killer who road the train and murdered victims--chopping them with an ax.  Was the killer riding the train near Crooked Creek and spotted the pretty Ella riding her horse to the neighbors' house.  He could have jumped from the train and waited for her to return trip ambushing her raping and chopping her to pieces.  The book tells about a man in bloody clothes being seen in Fort Smith, Arkansas within days of Ella's killing.

Too bad there was no DNA testing in 1912.  Ella's murder might have been solved or at least Odus could have been cleared.

From a book reviewer—

This book centers around The Villisca Axe Murders of 1912, a case often described as the greatest unsolved crime in American history. 

James’ book goes way beyond that one horrific act – the gruesome murder of an entire family of six plus two young neighbor girls in the small town of Villisca, Iowa – to connect that crime to a series of axe murders (perhaps as many as 110 victims in all) that took place across the United States between (as best the Jameses could determine) 1898 and 1912. One of those murders (of the Lyerly family) took place near Salisbury in 1906, and resulted in the mob lynching of three African-American men believed to be innocent of the crime.

James uses the research and statistical skills he honed as the author of “Baseball Abstracts” in the 1970s and ’80s to make his case: that the Villisca murders and many others like them were committed not by persons known to the victims, nor by robbers, but by a psychopathic madman who rode the rails from Florida to Washington state, carefully picked his targets, and then carried out his mayhem in a pretty predictable way.

The Jameses discovered that a large number of the axe murders they found by scouring newspaper reports from the period had the same characteristics: the murders took place near a train track; entire families were murdered; the weapon was picked up outside the home – perhaps in a woodpile – and dropped at the scene; the murders took place on the same day of the week and same time of day; the blunt side of the axe was used instead of the sharp side; the victims were murdered in bed while sleeping; there was the presence of young children – usually young girls – in the home; there was often an oil lamp at the scene with the glass globe removed; there was never any sign of robbery at the murder scene; etc.

James recounts each of the murders they discovered, making a case for each one to either be counted or discounted as a Man From the Train murder. If it doesn’t fit the criteria, he doesn’t try to force it. He lays out the facts in a straightforward but not gratuitously gory manner, calculates the likelihood that it could be attributed to anyone other than The Man From the Train given the variables present in the case, and decides yay or nay.