The Man From the Train

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This book was recommended to me by my friend, Candi, who I met while I was working with her son filming Episode 7 (Season 9) of the Investigation Discovery show, Disappeared! We have kept in touch for years about books, true crime, and the case of Holly Cantrell, who I portrayed on the show. I'll do a post about that episode later.

The Man From the Train is a very long and thorough book. It recounts numerous ax murders (the book spells it axe - maybe that's an old fashioned spelling?) across the US in a relatively small window of time. It took me a while to read the book because it was a little confusing and so long. It talks about SO MANY ax murders that I started to get confused on which one they were referring to when they compared murders and evidence. It's really surprising the number of ax murders that took place during this time. I tried to logically reason why, and I thought maybe it was because guns were not readily available to the population back then, but EVERYONE had an ax for chopping wood for their fireplace/stove/cooking.

Most of the murders follow what appears to be the same MO, however, there were maybe 4 or 5 that did not fit, in my opinion. So, I don't think the same person committed all the ax murders in the book, but I do believe he/she/they committed a majority of them due to their similarities. One similarity was the close proximity of many of the murders within 2 miles of a train track. The author tries to convince us that "The Man From the Train" was someone who constantly used the rails as a mode of transportation, so the murders were mostly out of convenience whenever the "man" would pass through a populated area.

The book does not mention the case of Lizzie Borden, which I thought was odd - because I would love to see the similarities between the Borden ax murders and these "Man From the Train" murders. How do we know that the man didn't pass near Lizzie's house and commit those murders for which she was accused? I would really like to see more research and comparisons between the Lizzie Borden murders and The Man From the Train. If you have any insight, please share!!

The book was hard to follow due to the timeline of events, locations of events, and the sheer number of murders that it covered. I still think it is a good read, though, if you are into gory details and would like to be your own Sherlock Holmes and solve the case yourself.

I think there are probably many ax murders that happened during this time that are not mentioned in this book or that were not thought to be connected, so a local person was usually to blame.

Do you think the author knows who The Man From the Train was? Do you think all the murders discussed had the same MO?