I am a man condemned to die. I am going to meet my God an innocent man. May God bless you people who have sent an innocent man to the gallows. You can believe me or let it alone. Oh that a poor innocent man should be murdered. I pray God to hold me up. How much better off am I than those of you who are standing about hearing my voice. I hope that no other poor man will meet my fate. I am now passing through life to death, and will soon meet my God. All of you meet me in heaven. There you can learn all about it. There I will see one I know.
He had also left a statement to be opened after his death:
I honestly did not kill either my wife or child. I speak this in the fear of God. I know nothing of how the fire occurred or the cause of it.
To this he had signed his name.
For what little it may be worth, I believe that James Linkous was probably an innocent man—not because he said that he was, but because the evidence against him is so poor. What convicted him was excitable gossip. In a moment of horror and shock, Linkous was expected to act in a certain way, and did not act in that way. His perception of the scene was different from those who came to help. His thinking at first was that his family was safe; later, that it was too late to save them. He was confused and disoriented. He had inhaled smoke. He focused on points at random—the firewood, the livestock, the fire bell—and did what seemed to him appropriate, in his confusion and distress.
The least that one may say is that in the modern world no one would be charged, much less convicted, on such evidence; of course, in the modern world, if he was guilty, we might be able to find much better evidence. Some witnesses didn’t seem to understand that fires can grow larger and smaller and then larger again. This obviously seems to have happened here, since the Butterworth/Shelor family reports being trapped in a smoke-filled, burning house, the doorknobs too hot to touch, some time before the policeman arrived on the scene, but the policeman reports a fire no bigger than a torch. Either the witnesses are confused, or the fire took an uneven course.
But our underlying question is not whether Linkous was guilty but whether the crime was connected to our series of crimes. These facts tie the case to our criminal:
1. The crime was committed very near to a railroad stop—and, in fact, near the intersection of two railroad lines. A two-minute walk or less.
2. The crime was committed in the type of small town often favored by our criminal, beginning in 1904.
3. The crime was committed in the middle of the night.
4. Multiple people were murdered.
5. There is no apparent reason for the attacks.
6. The scene of the crime lines up geographically (and perfectly) with the three previous attacks. (If you look at the three previous crimes and ask, “Where is this criminal likely to strike next?” Radford, Virginia, is about as good an answer as you can get. Radford is three hundred miles almost straight north of Trenton, South Carolina. He had murdered families in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina before Virginia; he had just skipped over North Carolina.)
7. The door to the rooms where the victims died were apparently jammed shut.
8. There is no evidence of theft or the intent to commit theft.
9. The house was set on fire, as was our perpetrator’s usual practice in this era.
Also, I will note that the crime did occur on a Sunday and on Christmas Day, while most of the connected crimes also occurred on weekends, and many of them on Sundays, although this may be too weak a connection to be considered a link to the other cases. The temperature in Radford, Virginia, on December 24 and December 25, 1904, was in the mid-fifties. If the temperature had been in the twenties or even the thirties, that would be an indication that it is not The Man from the Train, because he rarely went out killing in cold weather.
The following facts, however, are different in this case from the others:
1. In no other case did he attack persons living in part of a domicile also occupied by another family.
2. When The Man from the Train broke into a house, he killed everybody in the house.
3. The Man from the Train normally killed the adult male or adult males in the house first, before he attacked the women and children. In this case the adult male was not attacked.
4. There is no specific mention of an axe here, just “some dull instrument.” (There was, however, a woodpile next to the house.)
5. There is no evidence in the information we have seen of the ritualistic behavior that identifies our criminal—carrying lighted lamps around the scene of the crime, covering bodies and windows with cloth, etc. There may be evidence of such behaviors in material that we have not uncovered.
6. There is no juvenile female among the victims.
The evidence is not sufficient to firmly link this crime to the others, but I will note this as well. In Paola, Kansas, a few days before the murders in Villisca, The Man from the Train murdered a couple in a house that sits above the railroad track, almost as if on a perch. If you look at it on a map, it looks like the house in Paola is some distance from the track, but if you stand at the door of that house and a train goes by, you feel like you can reach out and touch it.
The murder scene in Radford sat above the railroad track in exactly the same way, and from the same distance. Although of course the building is no longer there—it burned down in 1904—it sat above the railroad line on a sharply ascending hill, so that the house would have seemed much closer to the railroad track than it actually was. And the actual distance was only two hundred to three hundred yards.
* * *
The September 7, 2009, edition of The New Yorker contains an excellent article by David Grann about a fire in Corsicana, Texas, on December 23, 1991. In that case a father, Todd Willingham, was executed by the state of Texas for setting a fire that killed his three children. Willingham, like Linkous, went to his death proclaiming his innocence; Willingham turned down an offer of life in prison for a plea of guilty. The cases are eerily similar, and you can gain a lot of understanding of this case by reading Grann’s article about that one. Willingham was criticized for moving a car away from the house, in the exact way that Linkous was second-guessed for moving the firewood, but gave the same explanation: he didn’t want the gas in the car to explode and feed the fire. Willingham, like Linkous, asked to be buried next to the victims of the fire but was denied that privilege. Even the day of the year is almost the same. Willingham is now believed by many people to have been innocent—but I would point out that the case against Linkous was far weaker even than the case against Willingham.
* * *
From 1900 to 1915 houses in America were usually heated in one of three ways: by coal, by kerosene, or by wood. No houses at all were heated by electricity in this era, and no houses were heated by natural gas or propane.
Large, well-built houses and public buildings such as churches and schools were usually heated by burning coal. The coal would be burned in a furnace in the basement, and the furnace would create either steam or hot water that would circulate around the house. Smaller houses with relatively prosperous residents often burned kerosene, which was often called “coal oil” (kerosene is derived from coal). Many smaller houses also burned coal in small stoves, although that’s dangerous; if a coal stove isn’t properly vented the fumes can kill you.
Burning wood was the downscale, entry-level heating system, also used by older houses that had not been converted. No data is available as to what the percentage distribution was of houses that burned coal, kerosene, and wood in 1910, but in 1940 55 percent of houses were heated with coal, 23 percent with wood, and most of the rest with kerosene. In 1910 the percentage heated with wood would have been higher than 23 percent. But when The Man from the Train was wandering around a small town, scouting for the “right” house, the first thing he looked for was a woodpile with an axe.
When you read accounts of these crimes, there is often incidental mention of a woodpile, which no one recognizes the significance of at the time. In one
case, there is a woodpile which is mentioned only because it didn’t burn; the house burned, and the barn burned, but the woodpile, which was between the house and the barn, did not burn. In this case, the woodpile is mentioned only because Linkous was moving the wood away from the house at a critical point in the story. It is very spooky to be reading these old newspaper reports and find an offhand reference to a woodpile, and then you think, “Uh-oh. The guy who wrote this story doesn’t have any idea what the significance of that woodpile really is.”
Later on, after he stopped setting fire to the houses, the axe would be found next to the last victim, and then people understood what that meant. But in this era, when he was burning the houses down, they didn’t get it; the handle of the axe would burn, and the head of the axe was just a small piece of junk in a large pile of burned-out junk. No one would notice that the axe was missing from the woodpile. I’m not sure that any crime in this series was not committed in a house that burned wood for heat, although there may well have been.
The news reports of the Linkous crime don’t say where the woodpile was; it was against the house, but we don’t know on which side. But since the house sat up on a hill above the railroad line, if the woodpile was on the west side of the house or the north side, a man standing at the train depot a block below would have seen the woodpile as soon as he got off the train. The moon was almost full—the full moon was December 22—and the sky was clear.
CHAPTER XXVI
West Memphis
Memphis, Feb. 9—Boylan and his wife were both well known in Memphis. He was regarded as one of the best negroes in Crittenden County.
—Bryan (Texas) Morning Eagle, February 10, 1905
The Mississippi River is deep and wide. Here in the Midwest we will build bridges every couple of miles across a less imposing river, but you don’t do that to the Mississippi; it is a monster. Only a few railroad bridges cross the Mississippi, so the railroad lines all converge at those bridges and fan out from them on the other side. There are not one or two railroad lines there, but a large number, joining forces as they near the river.
Memphis, of course, is in Tennessee but on the edge of the state; when you cross the river you are in Arkansas. West Memphis is in Arkansas. On May 5, 1993, three eight-year-old boys were murdered in West Memphis. Three teenagers were convicted of those murders and spent twenty years in prison before they were freed; they are known as the West Memphis Three.
In 1900 there were more than five hundred sawmills within a hundred miles of Memphis. The Boylan family lived west of Marion, Arkansas, inside this thinly populated latticework of railroads and lumber mills. On Tuesday, February 7, 1905, the Boylan family was murdered with an axe in the middle of the night—father Albert, mother Ann, and a son named Rush. The son was found outside the house, the mother at the front door, and the father inside the house. The axe was left inside the house.
This is a low-information event; this will be a short chapter because we don’t know very much about the crime. A week before the murders the Boylans had sold their house and land—apparently the house in which they were murdered—for $1,500 cash. They had put $1,000 in the bank; the other $500 was unaccounted for, and some presumed the money was stolen at the time of the crime.
The Boylans had two adult sons who lived on the property, some distance from the house; they may have lived in a tent or some similar temporary structure. The adult sons claimed to know nothing about the crime. The sons were arrested; however, there is no report of their being prosecuted, and other reports said that a posse of more than forty men, almost all of them black, was searching the area for clues.
There are several reasons to suspect that this crime was connected to the series—the proximity to the railroads, the fact that it was a lumbering region, the unexplained murder of a family with an axe in the middle of the night, and the axe being left in the house. There are a similar number of reasons to think it was not connected: a speculative theft of $500, reports saying the heads of the victims were “severed” as opposed to crushed, as would be the case if it were The Man from the Train. We just do not know.
There was no young female victim here; there was no fire. We do not know whether the house was locked up as the murderer fled. There are connections missing that would be necessary to reach a conclusion. But I will also note this: that once these cases stopped, they stopped. In late 1912 The Man from the Train fled the country, or died, or was put in prison, or something. Once that happened, you just don’t find cases like this—random farm families killed with an axe in the middle of the night, near a railroad. Before 1898, you don’t find cases like this. And that is certainly a reason to believe that the cases we do have are somehow connected.
CHAPTER XXVII
Jacksonville
When the house of the Wise family was seen on fire in the predawn hours of September 22, 1905, the neighbors assumed that Lula was burning rubbish. We will start there, because this is one of the few instructive facts we have about the crime. If the neighbors mistook a house fire for someone burning rubbish, then we may say with confidence that the house was isolated, that the neighbors were not ten feet away or a hundred feet away, but at some distance measured in portions of a mile.
Lula Wise and her four children had all been murdered in their beds, their skulls crushed by an unknown intruder before the house was set on fire. An axe was found among the charred remains. She had three daughters, Maggie, Ida, and Sister, and a son who is known to us only as “Son.” The children ranged in age from three to thirteen.
Two or three years before the murders, Mrs. Wise had had her husband, Sam Wise, arrested for beating her. Sam had either (a) served a short prison sentence, or (b) escaped from prison, but in either case he had left the area with no forwarding address. It was easy for reporters to speculate that he had returned to the area to murder his family, and a few of them did, but of course there is no evidence for that.
This is all we know about the case; even the location of the house is missing from the record. The newspapers say that it was “near” Jacksonville, Florida, and that is all that they say; whether it was west of Jacksonville or north of it, whether it was a mile from Jacksonville or five . . . we don’t know. It is one of two cases in the book in which we are unable to determine fairly precisely where the house was located; the other will be along shortly. Jacksonville in 1905 was a city of about 25,000 people, but some of those were seasonal residents who came south to escape the cold. The newspapers tell us the race of the victims; they were black.
This is one of two family murders in the series that occurred during the night of September 21 to the morning of September 22; the Meadows family was also murdered on September 21, 1909. The Double Event in Colorado was on September 17, and other crimes occurred on September 27 and September 30, making late September the busiest time period for the murders, as this region is also the busiest place. The Zoos family, which was possibly a part of the series, was murdered on September 20. Sawmills in this era often shut down or cut back in early September. Home building was a seasonal activity, focused in the summer months, so the busiest time of the year for the sawmills was March through May. It is possible that our offender often committed an atrocity at the time that he was laid off from a job, as he was preparing to move on and find work somewhere else. There are several other dates that repeat themselves in the series of murders. The next crime in the series will be on the first anniversary of the last one.
We are all heirs to the racism of the past, and unable to decline the legacy. The harsh reality is that contemporary authorities did not treat the murder of a black family as seriously as they would a white family, nor half as seriously, nor a third as seriously. The newspapers didn’t care much about the crime or the victims; they ran a note, then let it go. In fairness to the police, the investigation of a crime of this nature was immensely difficult, and a serious, intense, well-funded investigation of the crime would likely have failed—just as it did in all of these
other cases.
A serious investigation would not have found the culprit, probably, but it would have documented the facts, which would have been a step toward identifying the culprit. We would like to take the murders of the Wise family as seriously as we have taken, let us say, the murders of the Moore family in Villisca, but since the case was not documented at the time, we can only tell you what we know and move on.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Cottonwood, Alabama
Like so many of the places bloodied by The Man from the Train, Cottonwood, Alabama, in 1906 could barely be described as a town. It was a whistle-stop of two hundred to three hundred people which had been incorporated just three years earlier. On the night of February 7 to February 8, 1906, the Christmas family was murdered on a farm just outside Cottonwood. Cottonwood is in Houston County, and the county seat of Houston County is Dothan, Alabama, birthplace of Willie Mays. The sheriff of Houston County, Sheriff Crawford, was informed of the murders late in the day on February 8 and left for Cottonwood on the first train out on the morning of February 9.
He found the town in an uproar. Jeremy Christmas was sixty-one years old, and a Confederate veteran. Three people were dead—Jeremy, his wife, Martha, aged fifty, and their youngest son, Slocum, aged eleven. The three had been sleeping in a single room, and had all been murdered in that room. Their heads had been bashed in with an axe, which was left in the room; reports are that their throats had been slit after they were dead, which, if accurate, would be atypical behavior for The Man from the Train. Several dollars were left in plain sight in the room where the murders occurred, and a safe, in the hallway outside, was also untouched.
The Christmas family was well liked—and white, besides—so an intense investigation began immediately. Jeremy and Martha had had ten children, six of whom had passed on before the attack, three of whom were left after the attack. Bloodhounds were brought up from Marianna, Florida, but it had rained hard before the hounds reached the scene, and they were unable to find a trail. A reward fund of $2,500 was raised by donations. A private detective named W. C. Franklin rushed down from Chicago to Cottonwood.