The Man from the Train

First question from Dean.

What are your thoughts on Bill James's second true crime book, The Man from the Train? It likely shares some of the timeline issues you mentioned with his first book.

So, yes.

So that The Man from the Train, which he wrote with his daughter, I believe, it builds on an existing theory that's actually, you know, honestly been a theory for decades.

over 100 years, that a series of axe murders that took place in the late, well, really the early 20th century, beginning in, like, 1911 and stretching from Colorado into Kansas and the Midwest, were the work of one person.

So this is, that was a theory at the time.

Well, in May of 2010, Lorenz Schlittenbauer's daughter, Regina Wichselbommer, who was not born until the year after the murders took place and was 86 years old by this point, gave a rare public statement about the case to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in Munich and claimed that she and her siblings were ostracized throughout their lives because of the cloud of suspicion surrounding their father.

The case would return to the spotlight in 2017 when author Bill James and his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James, co-published a true crime book titled The Man from the Train, which explored the possibility that a German-born farmhand named Paul Mueller spent the late 19th century and early 20th century functioning as one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, as he supposedly spent over a decade traveling throughout North America via the railroad in order to commit a series of axe murders.

In total, the authors suspected that Mueller was responsible for annihilating at least 14 families and having between 59 to 100 victims.

The most infamous of these crimes is probably the Villisca axe murders, which took place in Villisca, Iowa in June of 1912 and involved six members of the same family and two of their houseguests being fatally bludgeoned with an axe inside the residence.

The theory shared in The Man from the Train is that following the Villisca axe murders, Paul Mueller decided to avoid the authorities by returning to his native Germany and then proceeded to commit the Hinterkaifeck murders a decade later.

But I'll be exploring this theory in more detail next week.

For now, after more than a century, the truth about who was responsible for the Hinterkaifeck murders remains unsolved.

We've spoken of Troy Taylor several times.

Um, and The Man on the Train by Bill James.

I've not read them, but I've heard good reviews online-

Hmm