Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery
    The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery
    The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery
    Audiobook17 hours

    The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery

    Written by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James

    Narrated by John Bedford Lloyd

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    An Edgar Award finalist for Best Fact Crime, this “impressive…open-eyed investigative inquiry wrapped within a cultural history of rural America” (The Wall Street Journal) shows legendary statistician and baseball writer Bill James applying his analytical acumen to crack an unsolved century-old mystery surrounding one of the deadliest serial killers in American history.

    Between 1898 and 1912, families across the country were bludgeoned in their sleep with the blunt side of an axe. Jewelry and valuables were left in plain sight, bodies were piled together, faces covered with cloth. Some of these cases, like the infamous Villasca, Iowa, murders, received national attention. But few people believed the crimes were related. And fewer still would realize that all of these families lived within walking distance to a train station.

    When celebrated baseball statistician and true crime expert Bill James first learned about these horrors, he began to investigate others that might fit the same pattern. Applying the same know-how he brings to his legendary baseball analysis, he empirically determined which crimes were committed by the same person. Then after sifting through thousands of local newspapers, court transcripts, and public records, he and his daughter Rachel made an astonishing discovery: they learned the true identity of this monstrous criminal. In turn, they uncovered one of the deadliest serial killers in America.

    Riveting and immersive, with writing as sharp as the cold side of an axe, The Man from the Train paints a vivid, psychologically perceptive portrait of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, when crime was regarded as a local problem, and opportunistic private detectives exploited a dysfunctional judicial system. James shows how these cultural factors enabled such an unspeakable series of crimes to occur, and his groundbreaking approach to true crime will convince skeptics, amaze aficionados, and change the way we view criminal history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 19, 2017
    ISBN9781508241492
    Author

    Bill James

    Bill James made his mark in the 1970s and 1980s with his Baseball Abstracts. He has been tearing down preconceived notions about America’s national pastime ever since. He is currently the Senior Advisor on Baseball Operations for the Boston Red Sox, as well as the author of The Man from the Train. James lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife, Susan McCarthy, and three children.

    Related to The Man from the Train

    Related audiobooks

    United States History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      ‘Go Ahead, Kill Her’

      Aug 6, 2020

      ‘Go Ahead, Kill Her’
      4 min read

    • Article

      'Most Prolific Serial Killer' In America Confesses To Murdering 5 More Women In Ohio

      Jun 7, 2019

      The new charges filed by prosecutors in Ohio are the latest decades-ago murders carried out by Samuel Little, who authorities say killed women in 19 states over nearly half a century.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Ten Thrillers Based on Real-Life Events

      Mar 17, 2021

      These books works of entertainment, yes, but honorable, thought-provoking, and deeply compelling. The post Ten Thrillers Based on Real-Life Events appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Disappeared

      May 1, 2020

      The Disappeared
      15 min read

    • Article

      The Living Victims

      May 8, 2020

      The Living Victims
      7 min read

    • Article

      America’s Deadliest Serial Killer Preyed On The ‘Less Dead’ For Decades – A New Documentary Seeks Answers

      Apr 20, 2021

      In 2018, while serving a life sentence for three killings dating back to the 1980s, Samuel Little, then 77 and in poor health, began talking. Over hundreds of hours, he confessed to a total of 93 murders. At least 50 of these confessions have been ve

      5 min read

    • Article

      Now We Know Their Names

      Feb 2, 2022

      Now We Know Their Names
      15 min read

    • Article

      An Aneurism of Axe Murders: On ‘The Man from the Train’

      Oct 9, 2017

      You can’t help but read these murders as a parable of alienation. The lone drifter stalking the country by train, itself a mode of transport from a bygone era, to literally smash apart families with an instrument that evoked America’s timbered fronti

      6 min read

    • Article

      Murder in Hope Falls

      Mar 31, 2022

      Murder in Hope Falls
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Legacy Of A Lynching

      May 3, 2018

      Nearly a century after three men were lynched in northern Minnesota, a delegation embarks on a pilgrimage to a new memorial in Alabama.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Secret Society

      Mar 30, 2023

      Secret Society
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Girls Next Door

      Aug 12, 2021

      The Girls Next Door
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Warning From History.

      May 24, 2021

      A Warning From History.
      7 min read

    • Article

      Lynchings Past And Present

      Apr 12, 2018

      When history is looked at in its complexity, it plays havoc with the present moment. "This wasn't done by the Klan, or people who had to wear a mask. This was done by teachers and clergy and law enforcement officers." This is Bryan Stevenson of the E

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Classical Outlaw

      Aug 9, 2022

      A Classical Outlaw
      3 min read

    • Article

      Twentieth Century Tales

      Apr 21, 2022

      Twentieth Century Tales
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Man from the Train

    4/5

    245 ratings30 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      So interesting, too real, I must find more from this author!!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Bill James is a hilarious author, and his humor and sarcasm kept me interested in the book (even though most of it is the same sad story over and over again). The John Bedford Lloyd was the perfect narrator for this book. I recommend it to any true crime enthusiast.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Well researched and keeps you interested even if you don't totally agree with the author. Great audiobook

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A fascinating book, which I would recommend to everyone interested in true crime.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      As someone that reads a lot of true crime about serial killers, I loved this book. I didn't always agree with Bill James, but it was obviously well researched and I was able to research several of the cases myself after finishing. As I said, I didn't always agree with the conclusions of Bill & Rachael James, but it was based on their research so it wasn't complete hogwash which I appreciated even more. Especially, since I have read plenty of books where the conclusions of the authors have been way out there in left field.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Thorough, intensive research, well read, well presented and informative. A very good listen. Lot to take in, I can see me listening to the book again in a few months.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Absolutely fascinating. Brings new understandings of serial murder to old murders with complete believability.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Grade A+ true crime book. Cannot recommend this highly enough. I neglected all of my life duties for 4 days just so I could finish this. So well researched and written.
    • 4/5
      Good book. He can be right about it, I don’t know haha but definitely good research.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic. Love everything about it. Humorous, introspective...racism, crooked cops, angry wives. And trains, and axe murder.

      Thanks bill and Rachel.
    • 5/5
      Insanely well researched. The story it tells is fascinating, and I really believe that the Jameses solved this set of brutal murders.
    • 4/5
      This author was amazing. I love his tone and how he has no pretenses. It’s like someone is just telling you a story. And to that end, the narrator takes it a step further. Excellent audiobook.
    • 2/5
      Story sad, obviously well researched, but I felt the authors to be condescending to their readers.
    • 1/5
      Atrocious writing on an interesting subject. I finished it but wish I would have spent that time on another book.
    • 2/5
      Fascinating subject, but the authors' writing style and approach is just down-right insulting at times and thus makes it very difficult to get through. And there are NO citations - none. For a historical work, this is unforgivable. This book would have been vastly improved by an editor, even a bad one.
    • 4/5
      The murderer known throughout this book is the man from the train, because he seems to murder families and then leave by train. The murders in the series happened from 1898 to 1912. The first murder in the book is the axe murder in Villasca, Iowa. The author and his daughter did research into the various murders they feel the man from the train committed. They used several factors that seemed to occur in murders of victims over and over. The author reveals who he believes the man from the train was, near the end of the book. Some of the crimes are lost to history and have very little information. Then there are others like Villasca, where there are many newspaper accounts and some evidence is still available through court records, etc. If you are true crime buff or interested in the investigative techniques at the turn of the century this is a good book.
    • 5/5
      Here's the premise. 100 unsolved murders from 1890-1920 in the SE United States and this book is 400 page investigation/closing argument ending with the answer. And pretty much every word of it is factual, calm yet unbelievably thrilling.
    • 3/5
      Great read. Highly recommend.
    • 4/5
      I have been a fan of Bill James ever since I discovered his first annual Baseball Abstract back in the seventies. James has a way of looking at the same data that everyone else has and coming up with very different and unique conclusions. His work eventually led to a revolution of sorts in the way that baseball General Managers think, and the game has never been the same. So, when I saw that James was applying his analytical talents to a series of 100-year-old murders that had never been solved, I jumped all over The Man from the Train. A little over one hundred years ago, there was a series of horrific murders in which whole families in the South, Northeast, and Midwest were murdered in their sleep by an axe-wielding maniac who seems to have taken great delight in crushing their skulls – and performing perversions on the bodies of his female victims, many of them children. Bill James is very familiar with computers and how they can be used to search “tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of small-town newspapers” looking for murders that shared certain characteristics. He had a hunch that an infamous family-slaughter that happened in Villisca, Iowa, in 1912 was not a one-time, random event. James felt that the murder was most likely “part of a series of similar events,” and he and his daughter set out to prove it. That they were actually able to name the killer, was as big a surprise to James as it was to anyone.Murders of entire families are, thankfully, rare even in our own violent times, so James and his daughter feel confident that they identified almost all of the ones that occurred in this country from the late 1890s through about 1920. That was their universe. Now all they had to do was research each crime to see what, if anything, they had in common. Serial murderers tend to identify their crimes by the clues they cannot keep themselves from leaving at the crime scene. And very quickly, James and his daughter identified four “markers” shared by many of the crime sites: 1.“The heads of the victims being covered with cloth or other items, both before and after the crime.2.The house being sealed up tight, with the window shades all drawn, at the conclusion of the crime.3.The presence of a prepubescent female, essentially nude, among the victims.4.The bodies being moved around the house postmortem for no obvious reason.”But this was just the beginning. By the conclusion of their research, the pair had identified a total of thirty-four markers shared by these crimes, and it became relatively easy to identify the murders that were almost certainly committed by “the man from the train” as opposed to those that had obviously been committed by a different murderer. Statistical analysis made it almost easy for them – the hard part was first locating the information they needed to analyze. Newspapers of the day were not the most reliable reporters of facts (and I’m not sure they are much better today), so James and his daughters had to read their stories about the crimes with skepticism. Sadly, things were very different 100 years ago when it comes to catching killers. There were no state police agencies in the country and the local police were unlikely to share information with other local police departments. Investigators were unable to tell one blood type from another, and DNA analysis was still decades away. Even distinguishing human blood from animal blood was a challenge to the investigators of the day. And because the man from the train fled the area immediately after committing one of his mass murders, several innocent people were convicted of his crimes. Some spent decades in jail, some were executed by authorities, and several were lynched (all of them black) by neighbors of the victims. Personally, I was intrigued by the fact that the killer struck a Houston neighborhood at one point, and around 1910 worked his way east to west along a stretch of southwest Louisiana towns and into Beaumont, Texas, all places with which I’m very familiar. Because James spends so much time putting the slaughters into historical context, I come away from reading The Man from the Train with a much better appreciation for what life in this part of the country was like at the turn of the twentieth century. That may, in fact, be what ultimately sticks with me the longest from having read this one.Bottom Line: The Man from the Train is a true crime/history combination that readers interested in criminal history are sure to appreciate. Whether or not you believe that James proves his case against the named killer is not the real point (I, for one, believes that he has). The most satisfying thing about the book is how much about the past can be recreated by someone willing to do the research, and how good Bill James still is at it.
    • 4/5
      Okay so I'm about 80-90% convinced that they're right, but honestly I enjoyed this more for the historical info about that era of American history than whether or not all these hideous crimes were related. I highly recommend Bill James if you've never read him, he's got a very engaging style that I've admired for well over thirty years. This isn't my favorite of his, but if you like True Crime better than Baseball, it's a great example of his theories and writing.
    • 5/5
      Beginning with the infamous Villisca, Iowa murders, James began researching other axe murders of the time, and this became a chain of murders that had too much in common to not be connected. What he found was a remarkably large number of families, sometimes the entire family of up to nine people, all killed in the same way, with the same type of entry to the home and at the same time, often on Sundays. He found the same strange "signatures" of a kerosene lamp being lit but the chimney removed, the family's valuables displayed to show that theft wasn't the objective, and sometimes the house set on fire. By combing through newspapers, police files and historical records, James believes he's uncovered a single man who committed over 100 murders between 1898 to 1912, a man whose crimes happened wherever there was a train stop to jump off from Maine to Florida to Washington.Who knew there were so many families being killed with axes over 100 years ago? James has uncovered whole families wiped out and forgotten with just a newspaper paragraph while the Moores of Villisca remain famous. If the author, a long-time author of baseball books, is correct and these murders were the work of a single man, he'd be the most prolific in American history. The research here is meticulous. James goes through each murder discussed and explains why he believes it is or isn't the work of The Man From the Train. Along the way he discusses police or court proceedings of the time, the laws, racism, lumber and saw mills, and both the "New Orleans Axe Man" and Clementine Barabet. And most surprising is that he gives a name to the killer. This is 460 pages and at that length could have benefited from an index, but it's length is mostly due to all those murders.
    • 3/5
      It 'jaws.' It's folksy and sometimes the thread is hopelessly lost before reappearing several chapters down the line. There's a little of this and a little of that until finally, without annoying foreshadowing, it reaches its conclusion. If you enjoy chewing the fat about crimes that can never be solved, this is an enjoyable ramble. Not for forensic ideologists.
    • 5/5
      In The Man From the Train, James (with research assistance from McCarthy James), tackles the unsolved ax murders that shook America in the early to mid 1900s. Using his statistician background, James analyzes the crimes to prove they were part of a series, committed by one man, and then tells you who that one man was.This is an amazing, fascinating, gripping read (I read the last 300 pages in one sitting). James' previous true crime book, Popular Crime, is one of my all-time favorites. He has a really unique take on true crime because of his mathematics background-but don't worry if you aren't a math person (I am not in any way a math person), because James' doesn't throw formulas at you. He uses his skills to analyze data and present a solution that no one has come up with before. James' also has this fantastically wry writer's style, that will have you giggling at times, even in the middle of a true crime book.I would definitely, 100% recommend this book. And I would also 100% recommend that while you're picking this book up, get James' Popular Crime.
    • 4/5
      Book received from NetGalley.Ok, the author of this book believes that he has proven that there was a serial killer riding the rails in the early 1900's. This is the first book he has written on this subject, he admits from the beginning he's a sports writer. However, something about the various ax murders during this era piqued his interest. The main reason I wanted this book was that he mentions the Ax murders of Villisca, Iowa in it. He does have quite a few facts that make you wonder if there had been a serial killer roaming around the U.S. during that era. However, it also seemed like he was trying too hard to link the various murders around the country. The fact that it made me think, and look up some information on a few of the other murders mentioned, is what made me give this book a 4-star rating. I would like to get a copy of this for my shelves I'd like to re-read it after reading up on a few of the murders he mentioned.
    • 4/5
      The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James is a 2017 Scribner publication. A most unorthodox approach to True Crime, but interesting and fascinating. Right from the start, the author explains he mainly writes books about baseball. I know nothing about the sport or the statistics that Bill James writes about. But, whatever it is he writes about the sport, it obviously requires the ability to analyze, theorize, and puzzle out various probable outcomes. For some his name is very recognizable, but this is my introduction to his writing. When Bill stumbled across ‘the first crime’, his natural instincts prompted him to scratch beneath the surface and do a little digging. Before long he had found several other similar crimes, and so he commissioned his daughter, Rachel, to help him with the research. This book is the result of what looks like a great deal of painstaking and time consuming exploration. The sheer volume of crimes is shocking. We are talking about WHOLE FAMILIES that were slaughtered!! But, uncovering similar crimes was only the beginning. The authors attempt to connect the dots and find commonalities between these ghastly killings hoping to find a pattern that would link the crimes, which would hopefully lead to pinpointing whom ‘the man from the train’ might be. True Crime enthusiast might be taken aback by the writing style or approach the author chose to employ. He speaks to the reader as though is expects them to be highly skeptical, imploring them to just hear him out, to try out his theory, to look at what facts are available, to take into consideration the approach to crime solving nearly a century ago, to see if maybe he might be on to something after all. Sometimes, it felt as though he were speaking to me directly, which was effective in that I found myself paying rapt attention to his narrative, almost as though I were a student and he a professor. I think I absorbed more details that way, but I also felt like he was trying too hard sometimes, or trying to sell me snake oil on a few occasions. But, I enjoyed the challenge and the opportunity to exercise my critical thinking skills. However, there were times he mentioned a random event or crime, then told me he had no intention of delving into that situation, or he would get back to it later, or that it had nothing to do with these crimes, which was very distracting, and I wondered why he even brought it up in the first place. But, I did find myself caught up in his enthusiasm, and was determined to keep an open mind. It is obvious that besides the research, that much thought went into how these crimes were connected- or not- in some cases. He explains why those arrested or suspected were probably innocent, and proceeds to lay out a case for the defense or prosecution, as the case may be. As the title of the book suggests, Bill believes the killer traveled by train, chose victims close to a train depot, perhaps to put distance between himself and his crimes once they had been committed. Law enforcement typically looked inward at those living nearby, or connected to the community in some way, and often pinned the crimes on the uneducated, the poor, or minorities. Some suspects were convicted without due process and some were released due to lack of evidence. The murders do have a few striking similarities- an ax was always the murder weapon, no valuables were stolen, and the victims lived close to a railway track or depot, just to name a few.The author laid out each instance of mass murder, the towns in which they lived, the suspects, and if they believed the murders were linked or not. It is an amazing and surreal connection of dots, but sadly, there is not on shred of actual concrete proof, forensics, witnesses, etc. If this case were indeed brought into a court of law and presented before a jury, it would all be circumstantial conjecture. The authors do eventually present their prime suspect, then proceeded to apply a unique mathematical percentage method to measure the probability their guy could have committed each individual set of murders, how he may have selected each family, how he escaped, and how he remained at large, and if or why he may have stopped killing. The one downside, is that the title is just a bit misleading, since it is really up to you, the reader, to decide to convict based on the information presented. You may or may not believe the case is solved. Overall, this was a very fascinating read, with a fresh approach and presentation. It is nearly impossible to know for certain if they have guessed the real identity of the ‘man on the train’, or if these mostly forgotten crimes are indeed the work of one killer, but I think the authors did an amazing job of collecting evidence and researching police procedures of the era in question. I’m on the fence about how much stock I put into the some of the author’s theories , but overall, I believe they make a compelling case. 3.5 stars rounded up
    • 2/5
      Years ago, I read on a website listing top unsolved murders a report of the 1911 murders of six people in two adjacent houses on West Dale Street in Colorado Springs. These murders were of particular interest to me as I once lived on West Dale Street in Colorado Springs. Both families were apparently bludgeoned in their sleep in the middle of the night. Nothing was stolen and the houses were then closed up and the murder weapon, a bloody axe, was found leaning against the wall of one of the houses. Pretty hairy stuff to have happened just down the street from your house, even if it was seventy-odd years earlier. So when Scribner announced recently that a book was soon to be released about a string of serial killings that occurred mostly between the years 1910 and 1912 in which an unknown person used an axe or similar item found at the scene to murder families in their beds in houses near railroad tracks (the 300 block of West Dale is less than three blocks from the D&RGW tracks), I knew this was a book I had to read. Thank god I waited until a library copy was available. While the book contains a lot of fascinating information about a truly horrific series of murders, the writing is wretched beyond words. Author Bill James began his career by self-publishing books on the statistical analytics of baseball, a springboard which secured him a job with the Boston Red Sox and a reputation that was said to influence Nate Silvers Fivethirtyeight.com and The Upshot at the New York Times. In 2011, though, he decided to change course and published Popular Crime, a disjointed mishmash about a wide variety of notorious criminal cases. He does not shy away from unlikely theories, as indicated by his assertion that President Kennedy was killed by the accidental discharge of a Secret Service officer’s weapon. James’ conversational tone may work well in writing about baseball games but when talking about murderers, or more importantly, their victims, folksy banter comes off as disrespectful and just plain weird. “After their marriage they moved to Centerville, Ohio, where they boarded with Mr. and Mrs. George W. Coe. (We might say they coe-habited with them [you might, but you shouldn’t]...Anna's maiden name was—"Axxe"really—but we're going to let that pass without comment.”[You should have, but didn’t])In other cases James’ tone is almost conspiratorial which make me feel in need of a shower. "Something in the room would later cause the chief detective to describe the perpetrator as a “moral pervert”; what that was was never revealed, but you and I know."Shudder!In one chapter he lists four reasons why a particular set of killings should not be considered as one of this series with the first reason being that there was insufficient information to include it. Then he immediately offers ten reasons why it should be included ending with "The absence of any factor that would make us think that it isn’t him." In short, he has two contradictory lists that each say that there is no data belonging in the other list. Go figure.Bottom line: I’m torn on how to rank this as I’d like to give it five stars for the material but only one star for the writing which is abominable. The only thing that is keeping me reading it is the desire to find out what happens but the author's history of favoring unlikely conspiracy theories makes me wonder if I will be able to trust his conclusions. Additionally, the book is lacking an index, footnotes, pictures, or much in the way of maps that would help readers gain a better understanding of the case. While the material in this book is very interesting, the author makes enjoying the book all but impossible. The writing is disjointed. He regularly refers to cases which have yet to be mentioned in the book. At one point he admitted that newspaper accounts of a certain murder exist but admitted that he hadn’t bothered to read them. I can’t be sure what research he actually did and what material he lifted from the research of others. Sometimes I wonder why I keep reading this, and yet I do. It's like watching a car wreck. I can't turn away.FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or even memorable.*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending. *1 Star – The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.
    • 3/5
      I received a free advance e-copy of this book and have chosen to write an honest and unbiased review. I have no personal affiliation with the author. It is obvious as I read this narrative that the authors have done a great deal of research. This man is an extremely vicious serial killer committing heinous crimes across the country.The book is a little tedious at times because of a great deal of repetition and the length. I also note that this book is missing a bibliography that I consider being an essential part of any book based on facts. This was an interesting piece of true crime.
    • 2/5
      Historical crime is one of my favorite genres but I had a difficult time getting through this book. The authors clearly did an immense amount of research, and I have much respect for the time and effort they put into this project. Unfortunately, I found the book dull, tedious, and disorganized. The writing style is a lot of telling but little showing. I didn't feel any of the emotions this type of story could elicit. The narrative is more like your friend sits you down to tell you a long, meandering bunch of facts he strings together in a haphazard way. The authors use two tactics throughout the book that I found irritating. First, they tell us all about incidents that have no bearing on 'the man from the train' case at all, and they would immediately tell you so. Sometimes the story would be gossip from the specific area, and other times it would be another murder case that has similarities but is definitely unrelated. These stories only served as distractions, further complicating an already complicated timeline. Second, the authors have an unfortunate tendency to give small bits of information about a case or person in one chapter, then tell us we'll get more detail in a later chapter. These scattered tidbits and teasers add to the disorganized feel of the narrative.Putting this book together was certainly a massive undertaking. For me, though, the result reads too much like an impassioned amateur's creation. *I was provided with an ebook copy by the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.*
    • 4/5
      On June 9th, 1912, eight people, a family of six and two children visiting for the night, were murdered with the blunt side of an axe. The murder of eight people, six of them children under 12 years of age, rocked the small farming town of Vilisca, Iowa. But the Moore family were simply the latest victims of this violent perpetrator. Someone with an axe to grind (sorry, I really, truly couldn’t help myself) was traveling across the breadth of the country at the turn of the twentieth century, and leaving piles of corpses in his wake . . .Bill James is a baseball guy. Specifically he is a baseball statistician, and he approaches this topic with a mathematical mindset. After all, the Vilisca murders, considered to be one of the most infamous unsolved mass murders in US history, are tentatively considered to be part of a series of serial killings at the turn of the twentieth century, but James expands on the widely accepted dimensions of the serial killer’s crimes. Rather than the several crimes most ascribe to the killer, James posits that the man from the train began his cross-country murder spree as early as 1898, and may be responsible for over one hundred murders.Such a claim often precedes eye rolling and offers of tin-foil hats, but in this book, James provides the reader with carefully researched and sourced data to back up his assertions. Using newspaper records from across the country, combined with modern profiling techniques, James has unearthed a truly startling number of mass murders like the one in Vilisca. Like any good historian, James is careful to use primary sources where possible, and to document where the data available clash with his hypothesis. While several similar crimes are dismissed out of hand as being tied to our suspect, James makes quite a strong argument for adding several more murders to the ones traditionally ascribed.Fans of history and true crime (lovers of Devil in the White City take note) should enjoy this book. But the casual reader need not despair. James’ writing style is accessible and engaging, and replete with dark humor and some truly monstrous puns.An advance copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      The Jameses make a good case in this book that the famous Villisca Axe Murders of 1912 were the work of a serial killer who traveled the United States for between ten and fifteen years, killing families in their homes. The cases are far too cold now to have any real hope of solving them, so I'm not completely convinced, but they do make a good argument.