How a baseball statistician unmasked a serial axe murderer.
Imention the author and Boston Red Sox consultant Bill James in passing quite often, owing to my conviction that he is probably the greatest living American. But I am never quite sure how to introduce him briefly to the reader. For a long time James was ordinarily referred to in print as a baseball “statistician.” But this description annoys him, and he is actually something of a Luddite when it comes to statistical methods.
It would be more accurate to say he was the first person to apply scientific method to baseball. His rags-to-relative-riches story is now wellknown: he founded a mimeographed analytics newsletter that turned into a series of best- selling annuals, joined the Red Sox front office (three world championships ago), and eventually became the pre- eminent strategic influence on the contemporary game. He has, at second hand, influenced every serious sport that keeps statistical records. But to refer to all this is to say nothing of his idiosyncratic, conversational literary style: he is an artist first, one might say a philosopher. And now he has written a true crime book called The Man From The Train.
The book is co- authored with his daughter Rachel McCarthy James, who signed on as a researcher when the whole thing was still just a half- baked idea. Neither could have guessed where they would end up. They have accomplished a feat of historical detection that borders on magical.
The Man From The Train emerged from Bill James’s longtime interest in true crime stories, combined with the kind of approach to information that made him a success in baseball. It seems he was reading idly about the Villisca, Iowa, axe murders of 1912, a canonical, unsolved true crime in which a family of six and their two houseguests in a small town were slaughtered with an axe. A day’s reading gradually became a couple of weeks, and James began to wonder if there had been similar crimes, and whether one could work out data patterns that might connect otherwise “unrelated” random killings.
He initially thought of this in terms of statistical coding, almost like one would see in a baseball scorebook. You’d put down an F for a firearms incident, an X for a crime with a sex element, an A for a murder covered up by arson ... “scorebook” codes for all the ugly details. You have probably read about a new wave of criminologists who are using a similar approach, albeit with greater technological sophistication, to pluck unsuspected serial killings out of the recent record.
They will have some catching up to do to beat the Jameses. The father- daughter team discovered that the Villisca murders were unquestionably part of a longer series of axe murders committed between 1898 and 1912, covering almost the whole of the United States ( and possibly beginning in Nova Scotia), but confined mostly to its warmer parts. The Jameses leave, I think, no possibility of serious doubt that the “Man From The Train” existed. He killed at least 40 people, and probably more like a hundred.
They found a pattern of dozens of different factual signatures that define his handiwork; these clues hint at an evolving ritual of death, with sexual elements. The Man would break into topographically isolated private homes at night, always near a railroad junction, and would use the household’s axe to commit the killings, using the blunt side of the head almost exclusively.
When you picture an “axe murderer” you imagine him using the blade of the axe. The Man From The Train didn’t. And we know he was an expert in killing, because almost nobody, in a very long career of violence, survived his attention.
At the end of the book, the Jameses propose a named suspect. This is a bravura way to conclude, but a little unsatisfying from a narrative standpoint. Almost all they do have is a name, along with a handful of biographical details, so you don’t get some cheap surprise from finding out that the Man From The Train was actually Herbert Hoover or Fatty Arbuckle.
It is all still amazing, and thoroughly convincing. And for Canadian readers there is one unnerving additional aspect. As Bill James would often point out before he discovered and identified the Man From The Train, police took a long time to become convinced that “serial killers” who kill randomly for pleasure were a meaningful phenomenon. ( The Netflix series Mindhunter, set in the 1970s, is a new TV drama about the dawn of the study of serial killers.) A police detective’s professional instinct is always to start checking on relatives, paramours, or possible enemies of a murder victim.
Human nature being what it is, cops can grow too attached to a bad theory or a poor line of inquiry, especially when it makes their lives easier. In the case of The Man From The Train, several innocent persons were tried, lynched, or executed for his murders. We are all sometimes blind to what is in front of our noses.
And although I am talking about crimes from a century ago, you are perhaps already thinking about the continuing daily reports of the investigation into Bruce McArthur — an alleged serial killer in Toronto’s Gay Village whose existence the police were denying, somewhat indignantly, until a few short weeks ago. For us, the Man From The Train sheds a little inadvertent light upon how such a thing might have happened.
SEVERAL INNOCENT PERSONS WERE TRIED, LYNCHED, OR EXECUTED. — COSH