The Man From The Train

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Part 1.

The Lisca

In June of 1912, an entire household was brutally slain in the small town of Aliska, Iowa.

No one was ever brought to justice for the crime, and evidence now suggests that it was in fact just one of a large number of families murdered by the same killer.

Who was the man from the train?

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The church service had ended at about 9.30pm, and as the small group slowly made its way back through the centre of town towards their home, they had attracted no small amount of attention from the people they encountered.

It was a warm and pleasant evening, and whilst the adults maintained a slow and leisurely pace, The older children giggled and laughed aloud as they chased after their younger siblings.

In addition to his own four children, Josiah Moore's wife, Sarah, had arranged for two of the younger daughters from the neighbouring Stillinger household to spend the night at their address.

It was a three-block walk from the Presbyterian church back to their house, and neither Josiah nor Sarah were in any rush.

After all, Allowing the children to tire themselves out might make their bedtime a less laboured affair.

As the party had passed passed by the town marshal, Hank Horton, they stopped momentarily to exchange pleasantries.

Some of Villisker's other residents had demonstrated a tendency to mock the man for taking his duties a little too seriously, but Josiah had always been reassured by the diligent and confident manner with which Horton went about his business.

When they eventually reached the Moor residence, Sarah gently ushered the children into the kitchen for a serving of milk and cookies, before settling them down for the evening, whilst her husband made his way over to the woodpile to fetch fuel for the fire.

After loading up with an armful of logs, Josiah paused briefly, using his foot to nudge the axe that was lying on the floor there a little further under the pile, in order to conceal it from anybody who might subsequently be walking by.

It was the smallest and most insignificant of acts, one that he had repeated almost every evening since he and his family had lived at the address.

However, Josiah could not have known that he was being keenly observed from only a short distance away.

His task complete, he walked back over to the house and shut the door behind him.

The woodpile sat a few feet away from the barn, which stood silent and foreboding, in stark contrast to the candlelight and sounds of merriment emanating from the main residence.

Hidden away inside the outbuilding's darkened interior, a man lay propped up on his side, staring intently across the yard through a small knothole in the wooden wall.

He had watched with interest as the happy group had returned to the location, his gaze resting for a time on 12-year-old Lena, the older of the two Stillinger girls.

One by one the lamps in the Moore household were slowly extinguished as the family settled into their beds.

He felt a warm and pleasant feeling finally rising within him.

It would not be long before he could finally satisfy the painful urges that had grown to consume him.

Not long at all.

The following day, the family's elderly neighbour, Mary Peckham, noticed that nobody had emerged from the Moore household that morning to tend to their animals.

She took the liberty of letting the family's chickens out out for them and then proceeded to knock on the front door.

After several attempts, she was still unable to raise anyone's attention from inside and found that all the building's windows had been covered over with either curtains or bedsheets.

With growing concern, she returned home and called Josiah's brother, Ross Moore, who worked at the nearby drugstore.

Ross arrived at his brother's home a short time after, but also failed to elicit any response from inside.

Eventually, he used the spare key that Josiah had given him to gain entry, but still had to use a degree of force to open the front door, as it had been wedged shut from the inside with clothing.

Ross cautiously stepped into the house through the empty parlour, immediately apprehensive.

There was a deafening silence.

accompanied by a slightly odd smell, which hung in the air.

The first room he arrived at was the guest bedroom, which was where he found the dead bodies of the two young Stillinger girls.

The bedsheets covering them were saturated with crimson blood.

Stumbling back out of the darkened house and onto the sun-drenched porch, he yelled at the neighbour, Mrs.

Peckham, who had been waiting outside, that something terrible had happened.

and told her to call for Hank Horton.

He was still sitting there, head buried in his hands, when the town's peace officer arrived half an hour later.

With Ross too frightened and upset to venture back inside, it fell to the marshal alone to search the rest of the building.

Horton emerged a few minutes later, ashen-faced, with the full realisation that he was completely out of his depth.

A hard-working and well-meaning local official, his primary duties involved dealing with petty fets and the aftermath of barroom brawls.

He was not prepared for something of this magnitude.

Recovering his composure, he immediately started to issue orders.

Phone calls were made, summoning the sheriff from nearby Red Oak, along with men from the National Guard, to secure the crime scene.

Bloodhounds were also requested to assist in the search for the offender.

Horton then headed into town, enlisting the help of a doctor and the photographer from the local drugstore to help him document what he had found.

The debilitating horror and disgust which had consumed Hank Horton as he slowly passed from room to room also deeply affected the deputies and soldiers that subsequently arrived to guard the scene.

Every occupant inside the house was dead, savagely dispatched with the use of Josiah's axe, which had been left propped carefully against the wall in the guest bedroom.

next to the lifeless bodies of the Stillinger children.

Investigators would later find find two fresh cigarette ends up in the attic, indicating that the murderer might have concealed himself there after entering the property and had waited until he was fully certain that everyone was fast asleep.

The first to die were Josiah and Sarah, both battered to death in the master bedroom.

Sarah's skull had been caved in with the blunt end of the axe, but the murderer had then rotated the weapon, using the bladed end for her sleeping husband's head.

From there, he had moved on through the other family bedrooms, bludgeoning Herman, Mary, Arthur, and five-year-old Paul to death, again with the axe's blunt end.

It appeared that after this, he had for some unknown reason returned to the parents' bedroom and again attacked Josiah's face with the weapon, hitting it so hard that Moore's eyes had liquefied under the relentless pressure of the heavy blows.

The last to perish were the Stillinger girls.

The positioning of Lena's corpse suggested that she had been the only victim to have woken up during the massacre.

She lay slightly further down the bed than her younger sister, as if she had tried to wriggle free from her attacker's grasp, with a wound to her upper arm that indicated she had held it outstretched in a feeble effort to shield herself from the murderer's blows.

Lena's nightclothes were pulled up, and her underwear had been removed, before being used by the killer to wipe the blood from the handle of the discarded axe.

This was not the only grisly and unnerving detail to be found.

One of Sarah's shoes, which had been placed underneath her bed, had filled up with her blood, before being knocked over by the attacker when he had re-entered to inflict further damage to her husband's remains.

The killer had been deliberate and methodical.

taking his time as he went about his deadly business.

Cupboards and drawers had been emptied of bedding and clothes, which had been used to hide the faces of all the victims, to cover up the windows and mirrors in the house, and to wedge the external doors closed.

He had also inexplicably moved a £4 slab of bacon from the icebox to the guest bedroom, poured a bowl of water to wash his hands, and then left it on the table along with the remnants of a small meal, which he had apparently prepared.

Dr.

Cooper would note in his report that each victim had been killed by repeated blows from the axe, between 20 and 30 strikes each in some cases.

There were indentations on the ceilings of each bedroom, demonstrating the killer had swung the axe down from some height, grazing the roof beams as it passed.

Word of the murders quickly spread beyond the town's borders, meaning that when the bodies were recovered, A substantial crowd of people from all over the county had come to watch what was taking place.

As darkness fell and the tracker dogs finally arrived, the residents hastily retreated to their homes and locked their front doors.

The streets of Villisca were no longer a safe place to be at night.

Keen to remain involved in the investigation, Horton had trailed behind as the sheriff and his deputies used the bloodhounds to track the killer's route away from the Moore residents.

There was some commotion as the dogs had paused briefly at the front door of Frank Jones, a prominent local businessman, before suddenly moving off again.

Eventually they lost the trail at the nearby Noddaway River, unable to identify which direction the murderer had taken after crossing the water.

Inquiries at local hotels and guest houses failed to identify any potential suspects, and the stationmaster was unable to recall seeing any suspicious passengers arriving or departing the town via the train station.

By the end of the first 48 hours, the authorities had no further leads to pursue.

With no state police or FBI in existence during that period, a fund was organised in order to pay for a private investigation into the murders.

There were four major investigative agencies operating in the United States at the time of the incident, and it was to the Kansas office of the Burns Detective Agency that the state of Iowa turned.

Agents were dispatched to the town, and through a combination of undercover work and public appeals, a number of suspects were identified and arrested.

Josiah Moore had been a popular and upstanding member of the community, with no known enemies, but he had never had a good relationship with his brother-in-law, Sam Moyer.

When witnesses confirmed that during a family argument, Moyer had once threatened to kill Moore, he was arrested and interviewed.

However, The evidence against Moyer was non-existent, and as soon as he produced an alibi, he was released.

The next to be detained was a local itinerant named Andrew Sawyer.

The day after the murders he had approached a nearby railway crew, his clothes sodden and dirty, asking if any work was available.

His foreman had contacted the sheriff to report that Sawyer kept on making repeated references to having just come from Villisca.

and knowing more about the case than he was prepared to let on.

The deputies who arrested Sawyer testified that he had immediately become enraged, threatening to cut their heads off, but it was later proven that he had actually been in police custody in Osceola on the night of the murders.

A convicted killer by the name of Henry Moore, no relation to the victims, was later interviewed by the detectives, as he had murdered his mother and grandmother with an axe, but there was again insufficient evidence to place him before a jury.

Two years after the murders, the Burns agency dispatched another agent to Villisca in an effort to resurrect the now-stalled investigation into the slayings.

The newly assigned detective's motivations for accepting the case though were less about seeking justice and more about seeking wealth.

His name was James Newton Wilkerson and he was a deceitful and greedy soul who had built a moderately successful career by manufacturing and twisting the circumstances of each case he had been assigned to fit his desired outcome.

But with the Villisca investigation, this technique would be taken to a whole new level.

Immediately upon his arrival in the town, Wilkerson seized on the fact that the Bloodhounds had paused momentarily at the front door of Frank Jones and set about pulling together a case against him.

Since the murders, Jones had successfully campaigned to be elected as a senator.

He was the owner of a number of local businesses, including a tool company that Josiah Moore had once managed for him.

When the popular and easy-going Moore had left this position to start up his own business, a significant amount of Jones' existing customers had followed him.

Using this story as the motive for the murders, Wilkerson threw himself into a very public campaign to get Jones indicted for the crime.

He sought out the politicians' rivals and business competitors for funding, and held public meetings, taking the word word of any lunatic or drunk as solid fact, until he had finally constructed a sufficient narrative to put before a grand jury.

Unsurprisingly, not one of the witnesses that Wilkerson brought into the courtroom had any credibility.

Few were from Villisca or had ever been to the town, and many were just seeking notoriety by attaching themselves to the court case.

But Wilkerson was not to be deterred, and when his first attempt to convict Jones failed, he decided to change tactics.

In July of 1914, two years after the deaths of the Moore family, an Illinois resident and Army veteran named William Mansfield was arrested on suspicion of using an axe to kill four members of his own family.

The new indictment that Wilkerson brought before the court maintained that Jones had ordered the murders of the Moore family.

and had paid Mansfield to carry out the act.

Frank Jones fought the allegation tooth and nail, nail, and after six long years, both he and Mansfield were cleared of the charges, but the damage caused to the wider investigation of the Villisca Axe murders was irreparable.

Eventually, Wilkerson's career would end in disgrace.

When it was discovered that he had been using money for the case to fund a political career of his own, he was removed.

Several years later, he was then sacked altogether, after being caught having an affair with the wife of of a client.

The last suspect to be charged with the killings was George Kelly, a church minister who had spoken at the service the Moors had attended on the night of their deaths.

Something of an eccentric, he had attempted to shoehorn his way into the early days of Hank Horton's investigation, but had been warned off due to his obvious mental health issues.

In 1914, Kelly was committed to a mental facility after trying to persuade a 16-year-old girl to sleep with him, and whilst being held there, it was alleged that he had confessed to the Villisca murders.

He was tried at court twice for the crimes, and released on both occasions when it was proven his account bore no resemblance to the actual crimes themselves.

It was not just the savage and brutal nature of the Villisca Axe murders that caused such alarm for the local residents, but also the fact that the crime was committed at the very heart of their community.

With the benefits of modern transport, communication and educational systems, it is easier now to evaluate and understand such an incident.

But to the people of that era, the frenzied and audacious nature of the act could only mean one thing.

The killer must have had an existing link not only to the victims, but also to the town itself.

This closed line of thinking unfortunately meant that the investigation into the incident would never be sufficient to catch the murderer, a serial killer who used the nation's train network to stay one step ahead of his pursuers and had already spent a decade perfecting his grisly technique.

The individual who slaughtered both the Moore family and the Stillinger girls as they slept in their beds would eventually become known as the man from the train.

In part two, we will reveal not only his identity, identity, but also the full extent of his horrific crimes.

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Part 2: Modus Operandi.

Jay Wesley Allen was not a kind man.

He was as physically imposing as he was fearsome and displayed an utter intolerance towards other people.

He lived in rural Maine with his wife and young daughter on a large farm which sat on the Greenville Road leading to the nearby town of Shirley.

From time to time, wearied travellers would stop by the Allen farm as they passed, seeking directions or refreshment, and would later relate to other residents tales of the dismissive rage with which the farmer had sent them on their way.

On the evening of the 12th of May 1902, Alan's nearest neighbours saw a dull red glow up in the sky above where the farm was situated.

So poor was the farmer's relationship with his fellow residents that not one person elected to stop by and see if he was in need of any assistance.

It would be the following morning before a man, taking his children to school, found that the Alan household had been completely razed to the ground.

Alan's body was found lying inside what remained of the barn, having been bludgeoned to death with his own axe.

There was no sign that he had tried to defend himself.

and given his formidable size and stature, it was believed that the killer had taken him by surprise whilst he was finishing up his evening chores.

The bodies of his wife and child were found in what remained of their bedrooms, both apparently beaten to death in their sleep.

The killer had then seemingly returned to Alan's corpse, striking it again and again with the wood axe until the repeated impacts had finally broken the tool into two separate pieces.

the bloodstlick metal blade left carelessly discarded near to where Alan lay.

The wood pile, situated directly between the two damaged buildings, was untouched by the flames.

This suggested to the investigators that after the attacker had killed the family, he had deliberately started two different fires, one in each of the buildings.

A search of the farm's perimeter revealed that a neighbouring shack, which belonged to a local handyman, had been broken into.

A revolver was missing, and an unfamiliar pack of matches was left lying on the table.

The local sheriff's initial hypothesis was that Alan had got into a fight with an unexpected caller who had broken into the shack and then waited there until nightfall before reattending the farm to seek their revenge.

But when no suspect was immediately identified, suspicion subsequently fell on the owner of this shack, Henry Lambert.

The handyman was something of a loner, and accusations emerged that he had been obsessed with 14-year-old Carrie Allen.

Educationally challenged and illiterate, Lambert was easily convicted of the murders, only to be exonerated several years later when the case against him was deemed non-existent.

No further investigation into the crimes would ever take place.

Bill James is a notable American historian and writer, who enlisted the help of his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James, to research the Villisca killer.

It is from their book, The Man from the Train, that the majority of our information has been taken.

Through extensive research of public records and newspapers from the turn of the century, Bill and his daughter have identified 29 mass murders which occurred across the United States between 1898 and 1912.

Cumulatively, These crimes would claim the lives of 101 men, women and children, each bearing the same distinctive hallmarks of the Villisca slayings.

Working together, Bill and Rachel have constructed a detailed and chilling profile of the serial killer who might have perpetrated them.

They paint a picture of an introverted and sexually frustrated character who killed not out of desperation or necessity, but out of a strong feeling of resentment and hostility towards the society that had marginalised him.

According to their theory, this so-called man from the train criss-crossed the country for over a decade, finding employment as a lumberjack and a farmhand.

It is believed that he possessed an almost supernatural skill with the tools of his trade, and when the work dried up, he would simply hop on a train and move on to the neighbouring state.

It was in these brief periods between employments that he was thought to be most dangerous.

when he would jump down from a slow-moving train in an unfamiliar town, catching sight of a nearby family residence, and feeling a primal urge growing inside him.

On the evening of the 28th of July 1904, the small settlement of Colfax in Georgia was stunned by the slaughter of a family of five living just outside the town.

Henry Hughes, a local farmer, was bludgeoned to death with his own axe that evening whilst working in his yard.

The attacker then entered the main residence, murdering his two infant children in their cots, before beating his wife and nine-year-old daughter to death.

The bodies had been dragged into one room before the house had been set on fire.

The revelation that the two female victims had apparently been molested worked the community up into a frenzy, with suspicion falling on a nearby settlement of African-American sharecroppers.

When two of the workers were arrested on suspicion of the crime, the local sheriff was unable to stop an angry mob from lynching them.

This effectively ended any further questions that anybody had to ask about the murders.

Two years later, this tragic set of circumstances would sadly be repeated.

In the early hours of the 13th of July 1906, young Addie Liley awoke in her home in North Carolina to find that the house had been set on fire.

Meters from where she lay, her six-year-old sister Alice lay dying, bleeding from a vicious wound to her head.

Addie woke their older sister and the two girls ran to their parents' room, only to find two battered bodies dumped on the floor, covered over with blood-sodden bedsheets.

Discovering their older brother had similarly been axed to death, all the girls could do was collect their injured sister and drag her to safety.

They exited the burning building via the front door, which had been left wide open when the attacker had fled the scene.

As they lay their wounded sibling down on the floor, the deafening horn of a passing train drowned out their desperate cries for help.

The Lily residents stood only 100 yards from the tracks, and it was most likely the sound of the approaching locomotive that had saved their young lives.

The Hughes residence had also been located a similar distance from the nearest train line.

and this would not be the only similarity between the two incidents.

Again it was the black community that shouldered the blame, with an angry mob overpowering the local militia and hanging the two suspects detained on suspicion of the killings.

In reality, the actual killer was by now long gone, and this was one of the reasons he so favoured offending in the southern states.

The social prejudices that existed towards the Mexican and African American communities often meant that he needn't worry about any pursuit from the local authorities.

The man from the train would have operated at a time when literacy rates across the United States were low, with little in the way of local media or communication to alert folk to serious crimes in neighbouring areas.

In the wake of his crimes, if there was no minority group to blame, much like in Villisca, there were always relatives or rivals of the murdered family that would end up accused of committing the crime.

On September 21st, 1909, George Meadows was awoken by by the sound of the dogs barking outside his farmhouse in Hurley, Virginia.

When he went outside to investigate, he was shot twice in the gut and knocked unconscious with his own wood axe.

His wife, mother-in-law and three children were murdered inside.

Their schools had been crushed using the blunt end of the weapon.

When the killer discovered George clinging to life outside, He reversed the axe and used it to sever the dying man's head completely from his shoulders.

Howard Little was a local resident who had once been convicted of murder whilst working as a private detective.

When his wife discovered he had been planning to leave her for another woman, she went to the police claiming her estranged husband had been mysteriously absent on the night of the murders.

The community quickly turned on the hapless Lothario, and he was executed by Electric Chair two years later, maintaining to the last that he had known nothing of the murders.

A year later, George Bernhardt was killed with a pickaxe in his barn in rural Missouri.

When his son and a farm worker went looking for him, they were similarly dispatched, their bodies concealed under bales of hay.

The murderer then entered the household and hunted for Bernhardt's wife, using a metal clockweight to beat her to death after he found her hiding in a closet.

A neighbor whom they had long feuded with was arrested for their deaths, but eventually released due to lack of any evidence against them.

The many brutal and bloody murders thought to have been committed by the man from the train are distinctive and easy to pick out from others committed at the time he was supposedly active.

If there was such a serial killer, he did not steal money or valuables from the scene and would cover the faces of his victims.

During his earlier offences, he would try to burn the property down to hide evidence, whereas later he would lock and secure the house, covering the windows as he left.

All of the locations he targeted were in easy walking distance of a nearby train line, often at points where the train would have to slow down as it passed.

He would kill using tools or weapons belonging to his victims, but usually shied away from using the actual blade of the implement itself.

The attacks would occur late in the evening, often in households containing young daughters, with evidence left at the scene of sexual assault.

The idea that any of the crimes may have been linked did not occur to the authorities until 1911, 13 years after the first murders.

On March the 22nd of that year, a school caretaker and his family were beaten to death in San Antonio, Texas.

Neighbours were forced to break into the premises which had been locked and sealed from the inside using bedclothes.

A bloodied axe was left lying in the middle of the house.

Ten weeks later, William Hill was killed along with his wife and two young children in the town of Ardenwald, Oregon.

The murderer had used their neighbour's axe to bash in their heads whilst they lay sleeping, covering the windows of the house with bedsheets before he locked the doors and made good his escape.

By the time the authorities had linked the two crimes, it was already too late.

An elderly couple had subsequently been murdered with an axe as they lay sleeping in their beds at a small railway stop in Rainier, Washington.

The man from the train did not steal from his victims because he had no need to.

In the summer months he would find regular work as a logger and when the weather turned cold he would head north to seek employment in remote mining communities.

He had money in his pocket, and only pretended to be a vagrant as a means of hiding his true identity.

He did not brag about his crimes or take trophies from the scene.

When he had satisfied his temporary need to kill, he moved on, living an ordinary existence until the next time the urges consumed him.

Bill and Rachel believe that they are finally in a position to identify the killer and have traced his actions back to the scene of an incident that garnered attention far beyond the borders of the rural town in Massachusetts where it took place.

The settlement in question was West Brookfield, and the location itself was a small farmstead, located a short distance from the Boston to Albany railway line.

This was the home of Francis D.

Newton, who resided there with his wife and young daughter.

On January the 7th, 1898, Newton got into an almighty argument with his farmhand.

When he later settled down for the evening, this farmhand seized the axe from the woodpile and and smashed in the heads of all three family members whilst they slept.

He then assaulted the two dead women before covering all of the bodies with blankets.

Having taken some valuable coins from Newton's private collection, he had left the blood-soaked axe propped up next to ten-year-old Elsie's bed.

He then draped blankets over all the doors and windows.

before soaking the building in kerosene and leaving an open lamp nearby, locking the door as he left.

The flame, however, extinguished before it could ignite the accelerant, and the farmhand would be seen by numerous witnesses hurrying to the local train station to make good his escape.

Despite a nationwide search, the suspect was never captured by the authorities.

He made a number of short train journeys, repeatedly changing direction.

in order to prevent his pursuers from guessing where he may be heading.

Eventually the detectives assigned to pursue him gave up, and gradually as time passed by, people forgot who he was.

He became just another vagabond who dropped off the face of the earth.

The people of the time may have allowed this case to fade into obscurity, but police records certainly didn't, buried for over a century amongst thousands of other unresolved cases, before Bill and Rachel James stumbled across it in their research and learned just who had carried out this depraved act.

His name was Paul Mueller, a German migrant who had travelled to the United States in the late 1800s seeking a better life.

And he did not forget the crime he had committed or the motivations behind it.

Francis Newton had been a miserly and overbearing man.

and when the unemployed Mueller had arrived at his door begging for work, he had been quick to employ the German for a a pittance.

Mueller was a loner, short of stature, possessing notoriously poor looks, and with little command of the English language.

His whole life he had been treated with suspicion and disdain by those he encountered, and finally, Newton's antics towards him caused something dark inside him to snap.

Four years later, living an anonymous and transient lifestyle using the skills he had learned in the Kaiser's army, Mueller might have stopped at a farm he was passing in rural Maine to inquire if there was any work available.

When the enraged J.

Wesley Allen had emerged from the property, screaming and shouting at him to move along, the scenario would have played out like a carbon copy of the incident that had first caused him to go on the run.

Mueller might then have broken into the nearby shack in search of shelter, resolving to punish Allen and his family for the way they had treated him.

Empowered by the ease with which he was able to carry out the murders, and thrilled by the urges towards the female victims the act had inspired, Mueller would supposedly spend the next decade repeating and refining his technique.

After the Villiscax murders in 1912, the killer would disappear into the chaos of the early to mid-20th century.

Or would he?

In terms of what happened to this man, Bill James surmises that he may have died or had been incarcerated under a different identity for an unrelated matter.

But he also speculates that with growing public awareness that a serial killer was stalking the nation's rail network, he instead chose to leave the United States and return to mainland Europe.

In mid-March of 1922, A German farmer found a mysterious set of footprints in the snow crossing the boundaries of his property in the small Bavarian hamlet of Kaifek.

That farmer's name was Andreas Gruber.

Mere days after he had shared this revelation with neighbours, Andreas and the rest of his household lay bludgeoned to death, their bodies concealed under bales of hay within their own residence.

Blame for the crime was laid at the door of socialist agitators, love rivals and passing vagrants respectively.

But although a stretch, it is not beyond all possibility that the Hinterkaifek murders could have been carried out by Mueller.

Too old by now to have been conscripted into the army, he could have easily moved around undetected in the chaos of post-war Germany, continuing to satisfy his passing desires without fear of either detection or reprisal.

Whilst the savage and inhuman manner with which the man from the train committed his murders is unsettling, the ease with which he was able to commit them and continually evade detection is ultimately more shocking.

If, of course, Bill and Rachel James' theory is accurate,

it should be noted that other than the murder of Francis D.

Newton and his family, there is not one single shred of evidence to tie Paul Mueller to any of these crimes.

Although the similarity in modus operandi for each of the presented cases is highly suggestive and intriguing.

If there was indeed a man from the train, we will never know either the full scale of his crimes or his ultimate fate.

We can only hope that society, with its major advances in forensic science, has now progressed to a point where his depraved actions can never again be replicated by any other human being.

Our thoughts are with the many families who were slain in cold blood, as well as those wrongly accused of the murders.

Paul Mueller may never have been brought to justice for his terrible crime in which he murdered an entire family, but at least we finally know just who he was and what he did,

and that he might possibly have done much, much worse.

for it.