The Press Box - Bill James on His New Book 'The Man From the Train' (Ep. 358)

Episode Date: October 2, 2017

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh talks to author, historian, and statistician Bill James about his new true-crime book, 'The Man From the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery,' in which James attempts to identify the man who may have been the deadliest serial killer in American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Wanted to make sure you were listening to all of our sports podcasts on the Ringer podcast network, like The Ringer MLB show, hosted by Ben Lindberg and Michael Bauman, who know more about baseball than anyone. I know. What about the Ringer NFL show? Kevin Clark, Robert Mays, Tate Frazier, Mike Lombardi. Multiple podcasts coming up as the season approaches. The Ringer NBA show.

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All of them you can find in the Ringer Podcast Network. Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of Channel 33, part of the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Ben Lindberg, a writer for the Ringer.com. The scariest serial killer in American history is not someone you need. No, unless you've read the latest book by Bill James. I want to read you a short passage from the beginning of that book. It is a warm night, most often on a weekend. There is a very small town with a railroad track that runs through the town, or sometimes along the edge of it. You can't get more than a few hundred feet away from the railroad track and still be in the town. He is looking

for a house with no dog. He would prefer a house on the edge of town, just isolated enough to provide a little bit of cover. A big two-story house would be best with a family of five, a barn where he can hide out from sundown until the middle of the night. But in that era, before the automobiles came, almost every house had a barn. Even the houses in Chicago and Philadelphia had barns. He is looking for a house with a woodpile in the front yard and an axe sticking up out of the woodpile. Before this book, we knew that the never caught or convicted murderer James is describing here had killed multiple Midwestern families with their own axes in 1911 and 1912, most notably in Valisca, Iowa. What we didn't know until James pieced it together is that the same

killer was probably responsible for a much longer string of killings under similar circumstances that took place across the country and stretched back to the 1890s. In his new book, Bill and his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James, do a lot of digging to trace that trajectory, make an, I think, convincing case that those deaths were the work of one person, and even identify who that person probably was. If you know Bill James, it's probably because of his baseball research. He's the father of Sabermetrics and a pioneer and popularizer of the statistical analysis of sports. But this book blew my mind as much as any of his baseball work. And when I finished it, I had, oh, a hundred questions. Fortunately, Bill was willing to answer some. So I am joined now by Bill James, man who is probably

indirectly responsible for my having a job, a very prolific author of many books. Most recently, The Man from the Train, The Solving of a Century Old Serial Killer Mystery, which is out now and to which I was riveted for the past few days. Bill, thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for having me on. So if popular culture has taught me anything, it's that when you're tracking a killer, wherever you're working has to be an absolute mess. So was there a portion of your house

with newspaper clippings pasted all over the walls and pushpins on maps with strings wrapped around them that would have made someone who walked in on it think you were crazy? I had had invitations from hoarders to be a victim of their fine show. So you describe in the book that you go from this subsisting, section of known murders that were connected at the time that they were done and have been connected since, but were not known to be a subsection until you started looking into this and you saw the whole picture. So how did you make that leap going from this very limited section

of crimes to this larger string that stretched back more than a decade? Well, the crimes that people had realized were linked at the time. And let me explain. When the Mansion of tank committed to murder in Ellsworth, Kansas in October 1910, it was reported in the morning newspaper that the scene from Colorado Springs has now come to our tent. When the murders were committed in Belisca, Iowa, which are the most famous of the series, the first paragraph written about that reported that there was no smell of chloroform in the room, not that anyone had smelled chloroform, but that no one had spelled chloroform, which meant that They had connected the crime to the previous series in which there were reports of chloroforms melanoma,

which is a bogus, by the way. The 19-trane, quite certainly did not use chloroform, but people thought he did. Anyway, so the series was connected as far back as Colorado Springs. But when you look at what happened in Colorado Springs, it's obvious that this could not have been the first time that he did this. Because in that horrific event, he killed two families in one night. He murdered a family and then broke into the house 15 feet away from them and murdered that family as well. It's apparent to anyone who is a little knowledgeable about serial murders that this is not a first time explore for him. It's clear that he knew what he was doing.

So I started thinking, well, let's see if by using modern resources, we can connect the dots to other crimes. And at first, I found other crimes that didn't have any way of knowing whether they were connected or not, because it was kind of, I didn't know enough about the criminal that we were dealing with to recognize kind of reliably his crimes from others. So I wasted a lot of time learning about crimes that turned out weren't connected. But eventually, we were able to get a good understanding of what we were dealing with, and then we could connect the thought. Was there a eureka moment for you or for your daughter who was helping? you with research at the time when the full import of what you had found hit you when you knew that this was not just one additional crime or two additional crimes, but that this could stretch back years, decades, dozens of murders.

There was about a week in there that I came to terms with I was dealing with. My daughter, Rachel, my co-author, she wound up co-author. I hired her initially as a researcher and she wound up his co-author because there was actually she who found the first case. she found the murder. She had a whole stack of cases. And I thought, well, you know, she's just imagining things and I'll look into the stack of cases and they'll turn out not to be related. But initially, you know, you couldn't show that they're not related.

And then you go through them and you begin to see the pattern. They begin to see, oh, yeah, it's the same thing. And I said, we did see a lot of cases and we did waste a lot of time falling out that cases turned out to be unrelated. But there was a period of a week or two in there in which I went from deep skepticism about the man having committed as many crimes as we now know that he did to the realization that there's just no other rational explanation for. Yeah. So describe the research process. You were using digitized archives primarily of newspapers. At what point did those resources become available and how would you comb through decades of news and crimes? to isolate the ones that you wanted to focus on? Well, the most useful was a site called newspaperarchives.com, which has what we thought at the time was phenomenally bad architecture,

but it does have millions and millions of old newspapers on a site that you can search through key words, like families, murder, acts, midnight, and you'll turn up with five crimes, the five stories that have all of those words in them. And then you search three of them and four of them aren't relevant. And one of them is, wait a minute, what's this? Just then you have a name, a set of victims, and then you can search based on that name.

And the old newspapers will lead you to connections from other sites. Once you have a name and a date, then many times there was a lawsuit filed in connection. There may have been a trial. Sometimes there's a book about the case. So you can follow through and build, once you get a lawsuit, a starting point for a case, you can build up, build outward from that. And as you document in the book, it's really only fairly recently in the grand scheme of things that we've developed the ability to make these kinds of connections and that in the

past, a crime that happened not so far away from another one, just never would have been connected because there was no way for contemporary people to do that. So do you think that you have started something of a new field of inquiry? here, were you looking at any previous investigations that were able to turn up knowledge that was not known at the time? Do you think that there will be other people diving into unsolved crimes and trying to make similar connections for other killers? Yes, there will be, but whether they'll have any luck or not, I don't know. It is necessary to note that we were lucky. I mean, I had a theory of how we might be able to identify who was behind this series

of crimes we were dealing with. And that theory was that if you keep working back, backward on his crime, he'll come to the first crime, and when he commits the first crime, he'll make mistakes that will reveal who he is. That was my working theory, and it turned out to be true, but that was luck. I mean, it's like you throw up a three-pointer and it bounces off the glass and goes in. It doesn't mean you could do it again. It doesn't mean that somebody else could do it again. It doesn't mean that it's a good theory. It just happened to work. I was kind of astonished at work. I mean, to be honest, I'm afraid that people will think that this is one of those Jack the Ripper type books or Zodiac killer type books in which people say, yeah, yeah, I figured out who the Zodiac murderer was.

Well, I wasn't exactly trying to do that. I was writing a book about the series of crimes, and some of the gun, we stumbled across the original crime and learned who he was, but I'd never expected to do that, and it wasn't really what's about. And in the book you describe in detail why you came to the conclusions you did and why you believe it's more of a stretch to say that these crimes were unconnected than to say that they were, even though they're so numerous. But was there ever a point that you thought during this research, I'm in too deep, I'm seeing things that I want to see? How did you guard against both the desire to see something that wasn't there? And also the instinct you discuss in the book to dismiss what you found, because even though it might be reasonable at first. It seems so incredible that this number of crimes could be connected. It's flabbergasting. Right. The number of crimes you committed is, it's flabbergasting. You can't believe this is happening. Yeah. Yeah, I went through a long period. It took me seven years to write this book. And I went through a long period of being confused about what was happening and not, you know, spent a lot of time researching crimes that weren't connected. And eventually, you reach a point of clarity in which you begin to see what are clear and obvious patterns. And once you, you read

that point of clarity and this isn't in any way connected to cyber metrics or that light of analysis but you can you can do probability studies and show that it's not reasonable to believe that these are all connected because there just aren't enough crimes of a general nature like this for this to be a random series of event we tried to document every family that was murdered in the United States between 1890 and 1920 while While we may not have found every one, we found the great majority of them, almost everyone. And there are 248 cases of a family being murdered between 1890 and 1920. That works out to exactly eight per year.

If there were 100 families murdered per year, it's not likely that there would be even one, which just by coincidence happened to match all the characteristics that we are looking for in a crime. So it's not at all reasonable to think that with eight families murdered a year, that you would have this cluster of crimes, many of which happen to have a series of characteristics in common, to wit all of these murders committed with an axe. We have no evidence of any of his murdering anyone other than with an axe. It's always with the blunt side of the axe rather than with the sharp side of the act. It's always around midnight. Never merge anyone while the sun is shining. and he has numerous other characteristics, frankly, many of them discussing, which identify his crime as opposed to somebody else's.

For example, he liked to move bodies. There are crimes when, in many crimes when there's a huge blood stain in a room, but no body there. After he killed the victim, he dragged the body into another room or carried it into another room and often stacked bodies on top of someone. There are just things that he did that are like that, it's just not reasonable to think that these were a random cluster of characteristic. It has to be a person doing it. And even though he took every precaution to minimize risk, and as you note, he was extremely risk-averse in his behavior in certain ways, the degree of difficulty of the types of kills that he would accomplish is incredible. incredible, right? Because he was attacking entire families with a handheld weapon. And this is not so many serial murderers will target one isolated victim at a time. This killer was going after families with multiple adults. And I don't want to say his success rate because that makes it sound almost as if you're celebrating his accomplishments. They were grisly and horrible. But the extent to which he was able to pull this off. so many other serial murderer stories, there will be close calls, there will be survivors,

there will be, I managed to get out and I got a glimpse of him. There's almost nothing like that in this case. Once he decided that he was going to kill an entire family, he almost always did. It's incredible to imagine that anyone could, I don't know how to describe it, be so skilled at awful deeds to pull this crime spree off. Right. When we get back to his first crime, we learn that He is a very competent person. But we knew that anyway, because, as you say, it is astonishing that the level of competence that he had. And, I mean, this is difficult to do it. Yeah.

One thing that, I mean, he had a pistol stuck in his waistband, and he would use it if he had to. I'm guessing it was stuck in his waistband. Maybe it was in his pocket. Who knows? But anyway, he was carrying a weapon, and he would use it if he had to. But he really knew what he was doing. He was enormously skilled at entering a house quietly, moving around the house quietly, and finding the adult male. And they would kill the man of the house first.

He would kill the adults first and then attack the children. Yeah, you'd just think that, you know, and every now and then something didn't go as he had planned and he would maybe have a closer scrape than usual. But you would think that just with the sheer number of attacks, at some point, there was. be a mistake, a slip-up, that someone would be there who wasn't supposed to be there, someone would be armed who wasn't supposed to be armed. It seems to defy belief almost that someone could have a run this long without being not caught because I think you document in the book how unlikely it was that he would be caught, but just that he would himself screw up or run into some circumstance that was not something you can anticipate. And it just didn't.

happen, which either was because he got lucky, in a sense, unlucky for everyone he encountered, or just because he was so practiced and, as you note, so competent. Right. And we don't know absolutely that that didn't happen. But, for example, we couldn't find any crime in 1908. That looks like him. And there's no crime in 1907, we're sure as him, although there's something I guess that might be in.

But he was out of circulation for a while then. It is possible that what happened to him is that he was caught breaking into somebody's house. Somebody pointed a gun at it and took him into custody, and he spent a year or a year and a half in jail as a consequence of that. It's possible that happened, but we weren't able to find where it happened. You have to understand, in 1910, people's names were not what they are now. People didn't carry identification. Right. And if you said your name was Henry Morganstern, well, your name was Henry Morganstern.

The police would arrest you under that name. press charges under that name and walk you up under that name. So it's not like it is now where we go to a lot of trouble to figure out who this person really is. Right. And would you speculate that this is the sort of person who, if you had met him, you would have sensed something is off about this guy? Because I know that you've written, I think, in the past, that it is often a misconception that you can look into a killer's eyes and see the inherent evil lurking there and that people like this can often pass unobserved. for years for their whole lives. Do you think that he would have fallen into that category, or would you have spent some time around him and said, I've got to get away from this guy? You'd have known that there was something wrong with him.

There's something different about it, but you wouldn't have thought he was a murderer. He was bright. He could be friendly. It worked hard, and you wouldn't have thought that he was a murderer. He wasn't charismatic. He was an ugly, not clean little man.

And that was the rejection of him by, society is one of the things that drove him to the place that he went. And you've studied crime and you've studied killers. And if your estimate of his body count, which includes people who were sort of swept up in his rampage and blamed for crimes he committed, you're into the low triple digits. And as you say, you attempted to be conservative in coming up with that estimate, I assume that would make him the most prolific, most deadly killer in this country's history, as far as we know, were there commonalities between other killers and the man from the train that you observed and

ways in which he stood out? You speculate about his motivations. You develop a sort of profile of him, and maybe there are certain commonalities in the upbringing of serial murderers that you would also apply to him, but in terms of his methods and the just mass killings, is that unique? Are there comparable killers that you've come across? Well, we used what we know about serial murderers, which was not known in 1910, but we use the things we now know about serial murderies as a guide to what we should look for. In other words, we worked back from Colorado Springs, and that wasn't the only time that happened. There was a crime in 1909, and before that 1919.

mind crime, as I mentioned, he was inactive in 1908, and I couldn't find any similar problems, but I just couldn't get over the notion that this is not the first time he's done this because it doesn't look like the first time he's done that. That's generalizing from serial murders in general, to the man we're dealing with. And there are other things like that you could generalize. One of the oldest definitions of murder, one of the oldest legal definitions of murder, is a killing done in secret. Murder is by its nature done in secret, so one doesn't really know how many people Ted Bundy killed or how many people the knife stalker killed. We really never know.

And also, you know, when they are caught, all of these guys are fantastic liars. And, you know, they'll tell you they committed crimes that they didn't actually commit and tell you they didn't commit crimes they did actually commit. You can never actually figure out when they're telling you the truth. But the body county is horrible. I don't mean to warn people away from reading my book, but I just get kind of get people to understand that you've never, even if you read crime books, you've never read a book about a criminal was horrible. Yeah. He's a monster. Right. Yeah, you, you sometimes, you know, I don't know whether

it's something that is mostly in fiction or whether this is the case. I'm sure it is the case in actual investigations where someone who is pursuing a killer will be warped in some way, will be scarred by the experience of trying to put himself in the place of this killer to think like that killer just to experience his crimes in this way. And of course, you're looking at this from a century or more's removed. You're looking at it in newspaper accounts. But in the seven years that this murderer was on your mind, did that have some larger effect on you? Oh, I was warped before I got into this. I wouldn't say it did. I mean, but I've been crime stories are fascinating because they are about those parts of ourselves that we don't talk about. Crime stories about lust and greed and anger and resentment. Those things are parts of all of us, but we don't like to talk about them. Crime stories are the places where those things bubble to the surface. I've been a voracious reader of crime stories since I was 10 years old,

and they never give me nightmares. I shouldn't say never. A couple of them have given me nightmares. This guy was pretty, he was hard to live. with and you get tired of him. But on the other hand, you're aware that you're onto something really unusual here. So you're working through. All right.

Let's take a quick break here for a word from our sponsor. And we will be back with Bill James in a minute. Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I want to tell you about the ringers gambling podcast. It is called Against All Odds with Cousin Sal. And you're not going to believe this, but it is hosted by Cousin Sal. The biggest degenerate gambler that I know. He's such a degenerate.

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Check it out against all odds with Cousin Sal. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. There are a couple interludes in the book where you pause and kind of remind people what life was like at the time and try to correct some misconceptions, I think, that people might have about how life was different. And really, this wasn't that long ago. This is within the living memory of the very oldest people alive today. And yet there have been enormous changes in the world. What are, you think, the greatest misconceptions that people have about history or about the past, whether it's maybe idealizing or romanticizing it or believing that people at earlier times had different motivations than we have today? You seem to go to some lengths to try to correct that record in the book. Well, that's right.

It is impossible for any of us to really understand what life was like in a small town in 1905. I grew up in a small town in the 1950s, so that's easier for me than it would be for somebody who grew up in Los Angeles in the 1990s. But we really can't quite get to all of the changes. You know, you'll read in an old newspaper that somebody drove to the scene at breakneck speed, and your first image is he was driving a car, and you realize, no, that's not what that meant. He was driving a team of horses to this scene and the coach to the scene at breakneck speed. You never really get used to that. Life in 1910 revolved around train to an extent that's difficult to imagine now.

The life of a small town, the people were the same. I mean, they did all the basic things of life that we do. They fell in love. They fell out of love. They got married. They had fights. They invested in small businesses and got rich or went bankrupt. They did all of the things that we do, all of the important thing.

but with a different set of toys. And it's really impossible to fully orient yourself to the way that people live. One of the things the book is about is the enormous changes in American society that occurred between 1898 when he started killing people and 1912 when we are finished with him. But in that period, when you start that period, no one has a telephone. By the end of that period, most everybody has a telephone. At start that period, very, very few houses had electricity. By the end of that period, many houses have electricity.

In the start of that period, most young people were not in school. Public education had not advanced to the point at which most young people were in school. By the end of that period, most people are in school, and literacy has moved a long way in 12 or 14 years. 1912 is just a lot different in 1898, and those enormous changes are one of the main thing I was trying to write about. Yeah, and the book was not necessarily intended to be a survey of the state of law enforcement and the justice system a century ago or a little more than a century ago. But it ends up being that, at least in rural areas, just because the killer's crimes spanned the entire country and more than a decade. And so you end up describing the response to these crimes in so many different areas in so many different years.

And I think even if someone knows intellectually, okay, this was before sophisticated fingerprint analysis, obviously before DNA analysis, blood typing, all of the modern tools we have now, I think even so, it was somewhat shocking to me to read just how few tools law enforcement officials had at their disposal at that time. It really was almost as if, you know, if you didn't make an extremely obvious mistake or you were not the next-door neighbor who had sworn to kill this person a day before or something like that. It was very difficult to connect the dots in a way that would lead to a killer like this being apprehended. Right. Well, I mean, he had figured out a way that they could never catch it. And that method was that he would go into a small town,

which had no police force or had a one-man police force, so too small to have a police force, really. and he would establish no present. It would just be maybe a stranger seen walking down the street at most. He would break into a house late at night and he would be 100 miles away before morning. And they had no chance. But, I mean, I read a lot of crime books.

I really didn't have any standing what a mess the system was. It is beyond belief. Yeah. After the mansion train committed a murder and it's discovered, the local policeman has basically very, very few resources

to do anything about it. The first thing he has to do is somehow come up with the money to fund an investigation. So before the investigation starts, there is a period of two days or three days or four days or two weeks where they're just trying to come up with the money to fund an investigation. When they fund an investigation, what that means is sending for private detectives. There are private detectives all over the country. Some of them are big agencies and good people and experienced people, and some of them are not that far from being dismantled.

Some of them are con men. Some of them are bullies. They're just all over the map. There's no licensing or regulation of them. They just show up. So you say, okay, there's a $2,000 reward for the conviction of whoever committed this crime. The private detective is rolling into town and they focus on somebody and try to pin the crime on him so that they can make the $2,000. It's beyond imagination how fouled up the system was.

And I was born in 1949. I can remember crimes 1959 or 1960. But the system had advanced so enormously in that half century that I had no understanding of how primitive it was in 1910. Right. And so often the person who would be blamed for a crime would be a black person, a minority, who happened to be in the area, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. and the prejudices were just so deeply ingrained that no one thought anything of that. In the papers, people would just openly make comments that almost surpass belief now if you don't have that historical perspective.

And I was reading this book during the weekend when the entire sports world was protesting and taking a knee during the National Anthem. And of course, that started as a protest of discrimination in the justice system, the things that, police can get away with at times and the oppression of black people in 2016, 2017, and reading about what things were like in the early 1900s, on the one hand, I think the idea that you could dismiss the fact that there are biases and blind spots in the justice system and law enforcement that persist to this day. It's very hard to dismiss that idea when you read about how deeply ingrained these beliefs were not all that long ago. And yet on the other hand, I suppose it is encouraging to see how far we've come since this period

when, again, the oldest centenarians alive today were alive at that time. Exactly. You nailed it exactly. It is, on a sense, encouraging to realize, I mean, I know we're all tired of talking about race, but the racism that permeates the story is, it is, as you say, just beyond belief that even in the North when he committed a crime, and people would immediately say, well, the blacks must have done it. Yeah. And in the South, when he committed a crime, they would say the blacks must have done it, and they would lynch a few people to, you know, right to scale.

It's horrible. And one said, one said it reminds you of the history that we have, but it also does remind you that the things we complain about now are really nothing compared to the things that we were dealing with 100 years of it. Right, which is not to minimize their seriousness or the fact that, they should be addressed in it and it's worth trying to. But yes, when you read about the state of things at the time that you were describing in this book, it is really, it's striking and shocking. And, you know, you just mentioned that the man from the train's methods were really almost untowardable at the time that he was killing people. And you write in the book that police and people who were trying to pursue him, if they even knew that they were trying to pursue him, which mostly they didn't, you say were pathetically. far behind the curve, it may be fair to say that he was decades ahead of the police. And maybe because I was reading a Bill James book, I was thinking of this in baseball terms. And, you know, when you started

writing about Sabermetrics or what became Sabremetrics, the advantages, the inefficiencies that you were identifying were so large and in retrospect, so obvious, such low-hanging fruit that there were these ways for teams to get enormous advantages on other teams without going to really great lengths just by opening their minds essentially. And today, now that everyone has embraced that movement, I think the available advantages are much smaller and much harder to uncover. And I wonder whether that is also the case in crime, in murder, whether it is possible today for someone like the man from the train to operate. Obviously, not with the exact same method. But is there an equivalent tactic that a killer could take today that would put him as far ahead of.

of today's law enforcement as the man from the train was in his day, or have we narrowed the gap such that a spree like this would be enormously more difficult, perhaps impossible today? Well, I wouldn't be too sanguine about where we are now. I mean, I think, I believe this is true, and somebody can check me out, but I believe that over 50% of the many, many murderous committees in Chicago this year will never be solved. And that is because it's still very difficult if you kill a person to whom you have no obvious and immediate connection, that it's still very hard to connect the dots. I wouldn't want to bet a lot of money that somebody couldn't get as far ahead of the police now as the man from the train did 100 years ago.

Maybe it's not easy to see how, but I wouldn't want to say it's impossible. I mean, the way you see the world, there isn't the way I see it. And the way I see it is that the world is so much more complicated than the human mind that we never actually catch up. We may know twice as much in our generation as we knew in the previous generation, but that doesn't diminish the amount of ignorance that we still have, the amount of misunderstanding that we still have by any measurable fraction, because it's a small island of knowledge against a sea of ignorance. And I believe that there is as much low-hanging fruit in every area now as there was a generation ago. I absolutely believe that.

It's just, you know, we need another generation of people to see it. And you just need to learn to see all of the things that you have been taught that are true that aren't true and need to learn how to expose the falsehoods that we're dealing with. And maybe that is the quality that distinguishes your work, because you have over the years made many leaps like that, that after you make them, I think, seem obvious to a lot of people, but did not before you made them. And I was wondering that having read a lot of your baseball work, having read your crime books, I've tried to detect some commonality, I suppose, in the approach to both of these topics.

And you just spent years sifting through news reports to try to pinpoint the actions of one person in seemingly unrelated events. And I wonder if someone were trying to identify the mind of Bill James at work, having come across your text, but let's say not necessarily knowing that you wrote it, what do you think are the qualities that would distinguish a Bill James inquiry, whether it's into baseball or crime, are there commonalities there that link the two? More was popular crime, my life's crime book, and with this book, I always thought that anyone who read my stuff and read popular crime would know immediately who wrote it, because it is kind of the same thing just with a different subject. And it's not like statistical analysis, but what I did for years in writing about baseball was to pick up a player, let's say, Joe Carter. And writing about Joe Carter, I wasn't really writing about Joe Carter. I was writing about something that would interest me about Joe Carter. In popular crime, I was writing about a long series of crimes, but in writing about Sam Shepard,

I wasn't really writing about Sam Shepard. I was writing about something that interested me about the case. And I think anyone would see that it was basically the same thing. This book, not so much. This book has a kind of subject discipline. I mean, that's still who I am, and that's the way I think. But this book has a kind of subject discipline imposed by the mystery. I mean, I can't really do anything in this book other than follow the story that I'm telling you.

I mean, I can broaden that story to try to explain what life was like at that time. I can broaden that story to explain the mistakes that people were making and why it was so hard to catch him. But I can't really get off the subject line very far just because of the nature of the book. Yeah, and as chilling as the actual violence that you document in the book is, I think perhaps even more, disturbing is the echoes of that violence, the after effects of that violence that have nothing to do with the killer in many cases. And maybe the scariest aspect of the crimes really was these fingerprints of the killer that you, not literal, but figurative fingerprints that you detect, whether it's the characteristics of the crime scenes, the moving of a lantern, for instance, that distinguishes a lot of his crimes, or the fact that he never robbed the place, that he never took any of the valuables that it seems were often. sitting out in these crimes seems so much so that you speculate he may have actually planted that, but that I think drove home to me just how little he was motivated by any of the things that motivate the typical person who commits crimes. He was there for the murder and the murder alone.

And even if there was a fortune sitting out on the table and he could grab it and perhaps not ever be caught, he just wouldn't do that. It wasn't within the scope of what he was attempting there. And that was probably the most disturbing aspect of what he actually did firsthand. But Often it is the after effects. After he skips town, after he's hundreds of miles away, there are years, decades of people being scarred by these crimes and tearing apart entire communities and blaming innocent people. And that is, I think, almost as horrible an aspect of what he did as the actual killings themselves. Right. And I wrote about a man in the book that you couldn't say he was as dreadful as a man from the train himself because that's an exceptional standard.

But he was pretty low person. There were, as you say, years of recrimination in some cases. And I think there are cases where that continues to echo even today. But another thing that you didn't really touch on there is that murder leaves the idea of murder hanging in the air. And in many of these cases, after the man from the train was there, there was another murder a week later. And you can't exactly connect it. But you're talking about small towns where you should have been one murder every 100 years or something. But there would be another one, you know, two weeks after the case.

And that happened repeatedly. It's just that violence leads to violence, not not in a direct manner, but in a general manner. Yeah, and you mentioned in the preface that you're fascinated by the notion that knowledge can be created about the past. And you mentioned the example of the dinosaurs. We never saw the dinosaurs. Most humans who've ever lived didn't know there was such a thing as dinosaurs, but now we know a lot about the dinosaurs. Or you mentioned how much more we know about earlier eras of baseball than even the players or observers at the time. did because of the research that we have done. And I'm wondering if you can think of any other areas

where that sort of archaeology and the kind of archaeology that you've done in this book could uncover things. And maybe it's hard to speculate until they actually happen and change your understanding of the past. But are there areas where we are not digging into the historical record enough, where there are nuggets waiting to be found that we should be tracking down? Well, I think there are a lot of scholars in academics doing that, and I think generally you don't see what they could do until somebody happens to see it and somebody follows through them. Right. So I'll give you one easy example. Throughout much of history, the plumbing was done with lead pipes, and it's likely that the use of lead pipe plumbing throughout a society, in many cases, led to the decline and fall of an empire because the people who were, you know,

consuming water going through lead pipes were severely adversely affected by it. That's something those people had no understanding of at all. You wouldn't have had any understanding of it 50 or 60 years ago because we didn't know the effects of lead, although we did give up lead-based plumbing quite a number of years ago, but we didn't really understand how pernicious it was until the last few decades. And the book hasn't been out all that long, but of course there's a cottage industry of research that springs up around any notable crimes or serial killers in general. Have you received any responses to this, whether skepticism from people who have looked into

these crimes or this kind of killer before or epiphanies, how did we miss this? Well, I have yet to hear from one person who has read the book and who doesn't think we got it. I haven't heard from one person who says, I don't think it's him. I know that that will happen, but I haven't had it yet. I don't think that very many people have been read this book and say, we don't believe it's him, because it's pretty clear that it is him, that there is, in fact, one person doing this, and he probably is the guy we name at the end of the book.

But this murderer is so singular that there are going to be several more big books written about him. And the other people who write about him will find things that we did not find and will at times criticize us justly and fairly for not finding things that are in retrospect really obvious. And that has already happened to start to happen. I don't know if you know Craig Wright is.

Yes, the historian and sabermatrician. He was a friend of mine who was accurate. But I got an email from Craig, and Craig had found a death certificate of a girl who was murdered in Maine in 1901. And the newspapers reported her age as 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. And I just guessed, okay, let's say she was 14 because we don't know. But Craig had found her death certificate and sent me a photocopy of it, and she was, in fact, 14. I had a couple of other emails like that. People will mail down facts about this guy and get a clearer picture of who he was and all the things he did than we were able to do. Yeah. And do we know how complete the record of digitized papers from this era is? Essentially, I mean, do we know if there are many papers where their writing is lost to history or sitting in a box somewhere? Do we have any idea how close we are to having a complete record so that we can say, yes, we have identified.

all of the crimes or no we have not? Well, David Smith of retro sheet when he began collecting box scores from the years before 1984, you know, at first he had half the games from 1983 and a tenth of the games from 1977 and then he had more information and more information. Eventually, he wound up with complete score sheets

from basically every game back to 1950. And he's, as he said, it's just astonishing. It keeps thinking, okay, we've got everything we're going to get. And just more stuff comes in and more stuff, and more stuff comes in, and you build a more and more and more complete record dating back to, found complete record somewhere of the 1911 and 1912 seasons or something like that. So I think the same is true in newspaper archaeology, that the record is going to continue to get more and more complete for 100 years or more.

And the last question I had, and this is something that I kept thinking about as I was reading and have continued to think about after I finish reading is what would the man from the train think about this book? Because this killer was not Dennis Rader. This was not the BTK killer. This was not one of these serial killers who almost wants to be caught in his taunting police and is sending letters and seems to almost be tempting fate. He was covering his tracks as thoroughly as he could. He had no interest in anyone detainting. this pattern. And yet, as you note, he probably also prided himself on it and had some inferiority complex and liked to think that he was superior to the people he was killing. And so, in that sense, maybe he would be pleased by the fact that a century later, someone has actually uncovered the full scope of his actions here. Did you think about that at all? And from having tried to put yourself in his head as you were writing this, what do you think he would think about your

work about him. Well, you know, I hadn't thought about that angle, but since you mentioned it, I'm glad the son of a bitch is dead because I wouldn't want to bring him any pleasure at all. Right. But, yeah, I mean, I think he would be pleased that someone had finally seen the whole, and I probably haven't seen the whole stuff of what he's good. But he probably would think is, yeah, there's still another 50 crimes there you haven't found. All right. Well, the book is the man from the train, the solving of a century old serial killer mystery. You can find Bill on Twitter at Bill James Online and at Bill Jamesonline.com. And he is your worst enemy if you are a serial killer from a century or so ago. You can watch the Red Sox for whom he is a senior advisor as they begin

their playoff run, which I know my boss, Bill Simmons, hopes will be long and successful. So, Bill, thanks for the tireless research by you and your daughter that must have gone into producing this book. All right. Good questions. Good talking to. Thanks for me on. All right. Thanks, thanks, everyone for listening. I did not unmask the killer in this episode because Bill does that in the book. I don't want to spoil the ending for anyone. I'd encourage you to check it out. It's just one of those books that won't really release you until you get to the end. But I will release you now as we have reached the end of this episode. So you have been listening to Channel 33, part of the Ringer Podcast Network.