The ax murders of 39 families during the 15-year period between 1897 and 1912 were documented by the authors of “The Man From The Train” in 2015. The killings happened throughout the country but particularly in the Midwest at a time when there were few police officers and homicides were generally thought to be local crimes. That there might be a nationwide serial killer wasn’t even a half-baked idea at the time. The authors Bill James (best known as a baseball writer and developer of baseball metrics and his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James, concluded that one man was responsible for at least 14 of these multiple homicides – including the Villisca, Iowa murder of the Moore family of six and their two houseguests.
The authors researched thousands of newspaper articles, investigative reports and other materials from across the country. They found remarkable similarities: All the families lived near a railroad stop in small towns near the state border. Often, the crime was committed near the second stop inside the state line. The evidence at the crime scenes was the same: All were killed with the blunt edge of the ax, the killings occurred in the early morning hours sometime after midnight when the families were all asleep, the killer covered all the bodies with clothing or bed linens, covered all the windows in the house with cloth and locked the doors when he left. Piecing together these crimes, the authors also outline a motive: The killer may have had an insatiable, sadistic sexual attraction to young girls. In many of the cases, pre-pubescent girls’ corpses were sexually assaulted.
Now, more than 100 years after this string of killings, no one can know for sure but the James book is an exhaustive record of ax murders that claimed 153 victims.
