HE’S BEEN KILLING ON THE RAILROAD
Cops track down an employee with a grudge
For 15 years, a phantom gunman stalked the men who were working on the railroads.
Between 1963 and 1978, a baffling series of shootings took seven lives — engineers, a conductor, a flagman, and two firemen — in a 200-mile area between Michigan and Indiana.
The killer became known as the “Railway Sniper.”
The murder spree started after midnight on Aug. 3, 1963, in a Hammond, Ind. rail yard. A switchman found an engineer, Roy Bottorf, 67, and a fireman, Paul Overstreet, 45, dead in the cab of their 55-car freight train.
Hammond police questioned hundreds of people but found only one woman who said she heard gunfire. Other than that and four .22-caliber bullet casings on the cab floor, there were no leads.
“Still Don’t Know Killer of Two Railroaders,” The Times-Mail of Bedford, Ind. reported on Oct. 30, 1963.
Then, on Aug. 6, 1968, the phantom struck again at a yard in Elkhart, Ind., killing engineer John Marshall, 51, with four shotgun blasts. Witnesses said that they saw a stocky man who moved with a pronounced limp running away at the time of the shooting. But that clue went nowhere.
Almost eight years passed before there was another rail yard murder.
On Apr. 5, 1976, a fireman carrying paperwork to engineer James McCory spotted the shadowy figure of a large man limping away from the train. He found McCrory in the cab of his locomotive, a shotgun slug in his head.
As in the previous cases, there was nothing to go on.
Three more died on New Year’s Eve, 1978, at a station in Jackson, Mich. A passenger and a railroad employee found conductor William Gulak, 50, lying in a pool of blood on the platform. Another body — the remains of fireman Charles Lee Burton, 32, — was sprawled inside the crew restroom. A third victim, brakeman Robert Lee Blake, 42, was slumped in a chair. All had taken slugs to head from a 12-gauge shotgun.
Blake was alive but unable to speak, so a detective used a hand signal — three squeezes for yes — in a desperate attempt to get some clues. They learned from the dying man that the assailant was a white male who was alone.
This time, police had an idea of who the shooter might be — Rudy Bladel, a former train fireman from Indiana. He had gotten onto police radar because of his conviction in a 1971 shooting in which his target, Louis Sayne, 46, survived. Bladel fit the description of the man fleeing in the other cases, a hulking figure who moved with an uneven waddle. The limp was the result of a motorcycle accident.
He also had a motive.
Bladel was one of those people with a lifelong obsession with trains. His father was a fireman for the Rock Island and
Pacific, and young Rudy never wanted to do anything else. A relative said that railroading was “his first and last love.” He had no wife, girlfriends, children, and few people he talked to other than his coworkers.
Sayne was one of his colleagues. The men knew each other well enough to be on a first-name basis.
He was about to climb into a train headed for Chicago when two bullets crashed into his back. Although injured, Sayne wrestled with the shooter and managed to grab the gun. Then he shot his attacker.
Both were taken to the same hospital, where Sayne, seeing a familiar face, asked the obvious question — “Why did you shoot me, Rudy?”
Bladel said it was nothing personal but the only way he saw to get rid of the “Niles men.”
He was referring to the outcome of a 1959 business decision by New York Central Railroad to move operations from Niles, Mich., to Elkhart, Ind. The Niles workers were hired at the Elkhart facility in a union deal, edging out many long-term employees.
Bladel was one of the Elkhart casualties, fired and then rehired at a much lower level and pay scale. It was an insult that sent him careening off the rails.
Sayne’s shooting earned Bladel a fiveyear sentence, of which he served 18 months. At that time, authorities did not make a connection between the most recent assault and the earlier, deadly attacks.
Not long after his release, in January 1978, Bladel was arrested and given a 1-to5 year sentence for buying a gun, which is illegal for a convicted felon. He served 10 months and was released shortly before the New Year’s Eve murders.
He was the first person considered as a suspect in the triple homicide. Police brought him in, but there was scant evidence to connect him directly to the crime, and he was released.
Three months later, detectives found a 12-gauge shotgun with bullets that matched the ones that killed Gulak, Burton, and Blake. It was traced to a gun dealer who had sold the gun to Bladel.
“You’ve got me,” Bladel said when police told him about the firearm. “What do you want to know?”
He confessed to the triple homicide and blamed it on workplace rage. Although he recanted his confession at his trial, insisting that he sold the gun immediately, a jury found him guilty of the murders. He received three consecutive life sentences. In prison, his nickname was Amtrak.
The Railway Sniper reached the end of his line on Nov. 15, 2006, when he died of cancer at 73.
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