Rachel James is the co-author of the bestselling book, The Man from the Train, which has garnered plenty of attention by claiming to solve the Villisca ax murders, one of Iowa’s most notorious crimes. Rachel, together with author Bill James, her father, say they now have the identity of the person who the murdered eight people in the quaint home on 2nd street. They say his name is Paul Mueller. We talk to Rachel about what she’s learned. The book also links Mueller to a murder home in Germany that we will be covering in Season 2.
Murder Holmes is a production of iHeartRadio. Rachel James is co author of the best selling book The Man from the Train, which has garnered plenty of attention by claiming to solve the Veliska axe murders, one of Iowa's most notorious crimes. Rachel, together with author Bill James, her father, said they now have the identity of the person who murdered eight people in the Queen Home at five oh eight East Second Street. They say his name is Paul Mueller. In this bonus content for True Crime Plus subscribers, I talked to Rachel about her book and what she discovered through her research. We also touched on the potential link between Velliska and another famous murder home in Germany, hinter Kaifek, which will be covering in season two of Murder Homes. Sir Rachel, can you tell me a little bit about how The Man on the Train all got started?
Sere? Yeah. Absolutely. My dad is a baseball writer at the time was working for the Red Sox, so he had a lot of other demands on his time, and The Man from the Train was kind of like a side hobby that he got into. He saw documentary about it on the treadmill one night and became interested in it. Found another crime he thought it was related to it, but he didn't really have the time to go and dig through newspaper after newspaper after newspaper, so he hired me to start looking into it. I'm also very much a researcher, and it was kind of presented as a lark. Neither of us really expected that I would find that much. It was more like doing our due diligence so he could say, Okay, this crime is connected. We haven't found any other crimes, so we don't know if this is a huge case or not. But pretty much as soon as I started understanding the case looking into it, as soon as I started understanding Veleska and the first crime that we talk about in the book in Hurley, Virginia, which Dad found before I came on the case, as soon as I came to understand those and kind of the commonalities we were looking for, I started to immediately find a lot of cases. I had just moved back from Virginia, where I was living, to Kansas, which is where I grew up, where my dad lives. As soon as I got there, I started finding case after case after case after case, so we knew we were on to something big.
Thanks Rachel. So the book starts with a man named Howard Little. Can can you talk about that tinyment before we get into the poem Muller moment.
So the book begins with a man chase for a man who we ultimately believe was not responsible, Howard Little. And there's really a lot of this in this book. It is about looking at people who were wrongly accused lynched in some cases because this man slipped in, committed these horrible crimes and then slipped out without basically anybody noticing he had ever been there except for his crimes. And so when that happens, they didn't really have a framework for a random series killer that would come and strike and leave in the middle of the night. Now, you know, if something weird happens, that's something that somebody will immediately suggest. So this is one of those cases where Howard Little was accused because he was big and kind of weird and he was in the vicinity at the time. But only a few weeks after that, there was another crime that I found in Beckley, West Virginia, on the night of Halloween nineteen oh nine. This is about six weeks after the first crime, and I was a family that was living in a black neighborhood who were hacked to death and then their house was set on fire, which was part of his pattern. At this point, if.
It's okay just to circle back to your finding Mueller, because I think you were in a Worcester paper, right if you take me two steps back before finding Mueller's name, like how you found his name?
Okay, So I found him on the night of January seventeenth, twenty thirteen. The day before that, I'd asked Dad an email, I know you told me this in person, but what exactly should I be looking for in terms of his first murder? And he said, well, I don't exactly know. We have to work it back until we have a timeframe where there doesn't appear to be a crime that is a part of the series, a period of two years or more. Then at the end of that there's a crime that just isn't exactly right. It's what the man from the train wanted to do, but he didn't pull it off somehow. And so what I was mainly looking for was any really horrible, unsolved crime having to do with a train particularly brutal, and I guess I was looking for an accent. Here's my email. I'll just go ahead and read you the email that I sent to my dad. Dad. There is a chance, a minuscule chance, that I found not only the beginning of the sequence, but the name of the man from the train. I freaked out when I read the following. In any case, the Wooster police worked for over a year in connection with the state to cause the arrest of Paul Mueller for the murder of the Newton family in west Brookfield. Mueller murdered Francis D. Newton, wife and daughter Elsie with an axe on the night of January ninth, eighteen ninety seven. Was seen walking in the direction of the Boston and Albany Railroad, where he took a train leaving at one o'clock in the morning. Not a trace of him has been found since. And so I find this and I'm like, oh, my god, did I actually figure this out? What happened to you? Is this for real? Because I'm not a huge true crime had I'm not someone who always dreamed of solving a murder like some people, and yet here I was in this situation and I kept trying and trying to call my dad, except that he was in Boston doing baseball stuff, so I could not get him on the phone. So I just sent him like a huge series of emails and he didn't get back to me until like three in the morning. I had found that he was never arrested, and several men were thought to be him. They followed the case. The police followed the case pretty diligently for several years after that. There are reports of him being possibly identified on a number of occasions leading up to nineteen oh four, but after that it was completely forgotten pretty much. So, Yeah, Mueller was a wood shopper and a farm hand who lived in the house, and he tried and came very close but ultimately failed to set it on fire. Now, fire was not a part of the later and more famous series of crimes. Fire was not a part of Velesca of Colorado, Springs of Paola because it attracted too much attention. As he moved on and got more focused and started committing a lot more crimes, he tended to go less for isolated farm communities and a lot more for bustling small towns. Basically like Velesca at the time, so setting a fire would only hurt his cause there, But at first he really liked to set fires, and in the Newton case, he had basically collected a bunch of firewood together and thrown an oil lamp at it after moving the oil lamp, which was a ritualistic thing he did, but the oil failed to light and just went out after a little bit, so they could tell that he had tried to set it on fire and had failed, which was really important to what my dad had said to me just the day before, is that it would look like the later crimes, but something was wrong about it, and he also was not very quiet when he was inquiring about the one am train out of Brookfield. He was seen and recognized by the neighbors on the way to the train, but a lot of other things mash up. He used an axe and left behind, used the back end of the axe and then stabbed the abdomen, rifled through the pockets, but left a bunch of cash still in there, and went to the train right after. So yeah, it was really an interesting, overwhelming moment.
With your suggestion, your belief that you know that it's Muller across many crimes. Is it the m in other words, like the covering of the heads or the removing of the chimney of the lamp. Do you feel certain, for instance, that the same person was involved in Veliska because of these details of how he's perpetrating the crimes.
I do feel certain about eighty percent certainty. But yeah, I do feel that this he was responsible for Veleska. I feel more sure about it the longer it goes on. I do feel in my heart that he is the one who did this and many of the other crimes. I am not as certain about all of the crimes in this book. There are over one hundred murders in this book. Yes, I am not positive that all of them were him, And actually hinter Kayfek is one of the ones that I am a little bit less sure of.
Yeah, And I think your father had a good honest quote about saying it's a toss up, you know, which is a saying a lot with saying a lot with hinter Kaifax. Since it's like, yeah, it's such massive speculation still from many many people about it. You were going to say about Valliska, though you feel more certain about that.
Yeah, I'm about eighty percent sure that I'm right here, which I think it's pretty good considering that we're looking at a time span of one hundred years. You know, I think them really matches up. I think it's a classic case. It's exactly what I would have been looking for if I were looking for cases like this. Reminds me of a lot of the Castaways, which is another crime in Houston Heights, San Antonio, in which a mixed race family was killed in much the same manner, or the Shultzes, which is a similar case. Those are really strong connections, especially that late in it, and I think that the Newton case, there's so many similarities and at such a distance. You know, these are fourteen years apart, and yet there's a lot of things that we see. One of my big tasks after that was trying to go through every family murder that I could find between eighteen ninety and nineteen twenty. And it was really stark the ones that were clearly him. They didn't crop up all the time. There's not like a million cases where someone enters the house kills everybody with an axe, big wood shopping axes. There's weird stuff with lamps and bedclothes and mirrors and locked doors. That's not something that happens a lot. It didn't happen a lot before eighteen ninety when I did a little research into that, or after nineteen twenty. This is not a common profile. It's one profile, and it happens in a kind of predictable geographical pattern and in strong commonalities across all of these He I was.
Going to ask with axes, because your father has a very vociferous reaction to the suspect, Lynn Kelly, the Reverend Lynn Kelly. And it's just funny because you can tell angry it makes him that he's he's brought up as a possible suspect, and he's like, he wouldn't be able to handle the axe. He wouldn't be able to have handled the murders. You know.
Part of the thing with Paul Vueler's that at this point, by Velesca, he was very well practiced with the acts. At that point, he'd already killed I think I can confidently say about fifty people at least, so he really knew how to use an axe, not just in wood shopping, but in killing someone. He knew how to get it done. Very efficiently so that people would not be roused from their beds and come and see what was going on and potentially ruin the whole thing. Lynn Kelly, I think he could have used a hatchet, but it wasn't a hatchet. It was a wood shopping axe, and he wouldn't have been able to dispatch everyone that quickly. And I think what frustrates that about it with Lyn Kelly is that we talk a lot about people being too obsessed with true crime in these days, and you know, I think there's always a case to be made for not getting too prurient or respecting boundaries with this, But people have always been obsessed with true crime, and there are always cases where someone in some perverse way once the glory of having committed it.
Rachel, I just I wanted to thank you. I could talk about this for about ten hours.
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
This is Murder Holmes. I'm at Murnovich. Stay tuned for more bonus content and upcoming episodes.