Tells more about that tell us more about that. Bill the easiest example is dinosaurs. For thousands of years people had no idea that these great beasts had ever existed. Now we have not only created information about them, but disseminated it so widely that every four euro child every for your old child has a collection of little plastic dinosaurs. Ist of what academics do sort out the conflicts of what was said at the time to create a clearer and more detailed and accurate picture of the past so that we know things about the romans that the romans didnt know. We know things about baseball and the 1960s that the Baseball Players in the 1960s did not know. Brian when did you know you wanted to write this particular book . Bill i stumbled into it without making a decision to do it. I was supposed to be working on a book with my wife, which i am still working on, about the history of kansas. About thes show murders in villisca, iowa and thought i would put a couple of hours into tracking down what facts i could about it. Couple of hours became a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks became a couple of months, and eventually seven years. Brian when was the bbs documentary shown . Guess 2008 or 2009, but i am not sure. Brian want to ask you to read your opening page just to set the scene on what we are about to talk about. Bill all right. 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 cant 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 twostory house would be best, with a family of five. A barn where you can hide out from sundown until the middle of the night. Before the automobiles came come almost every house had a barn, even the houses in chicago and philadelphia had barnes. He is looking for a house had barns. He is looking for a house with a woodpile in the front yard and an ax sticking up out of the woodpile. Brian who is he . Asl he is a serial killer awful a human being as has ever walked the earth. Brian do you know his name . Bill i do know his name. Is revealed toward the end of the book it is revealed toward the end of the book. Brian you have to get to chapter 40 before you find out. Bill right. Brian give us a profile of who this guy is and what about villisca, iowa. Bill villisca, iowa is in the southwestern corner of iowa, a town of around 200,000 people. On a night in june 100 and some years ago, all of the lights were out. The city was in this dispute with the Electric Company over the price of electricity, and they had shut off the street lights. June, aday morning in man did not report to work named joe moore. On investigation it was found that there was a house with all the windows covered and eight people murdered with an ax. Linked withediately an hour to what we now call a serial murder, although the term wasnt used then. It was immediately recognized that this was another of those cases. Brian have you been to that town . Bill i have, yes. Brian what is it like today . Town the interior of the has not done terrifically. A lot of the highway with a halfmile outside of town, and the general store moved to the edge of town, that sort of thing. But it is still a quiet, peaceful little place, or it is once more. Brian that murder, has anybody ever been found or prosecuted for the murder back in those days . Bill at the time there were two what i would consider bogus prosecutions. A man was arrested and intimidated and beaten and put on trial, indicted for the murders, but the indictment was dropped because there was really no evidence. Later a man known as the little minister, reverend lynn kelly, was tried twice for the crimes. It is my view and there are still people who believe that reverend kelly committed the i regard that as a complete impossibility. Brian how many crimes did you investigate for this book . Bill well, there were an awful lot of crimes that at one point we thought might be related, and ultimately decided had no connection to the story and didnt include in the book anywhere. There are probably 40 to 50 crimes discussed in the book. Some of those are relatively low probability of being linked, and some of them are absolutely and unquestionably linked, in my view. I dont mean to make judgments for other people. They seem to be unquestionably linked to the villisca murders. 180 miles fromly villisca. Brian how long have you lived there . We movedd bill back to lawrence in 1991. We spent two years in boston while my wife was getting a masters degree from boston university, but otherwise in lawrence since 1991. Brian most people who know the name bill james have no idea you are dealing with crime. What would they say you do for a living . Bill most people would say i am a baseball statistician. I write about baseball, and i have written about baseball and analyzed baseball almost all of my life, and that is what i am best known for. Brian her used to working for the Boston Red Sox . Bill i am still very proud to are you still working for the Boston Red Sox . Bill i am so proud to do so. Brian and what do you do there . Bill i try to create organized ways of taking about problems and encourage people is in the system to use those organized ways of thinking about problems as much as i can. Brian your daughter helped you read this book. Bill she did. Brian i want to quote from her in a previous interview and get you to expand on it. Shone theads writing most when he was talking about these smalltowns he grew up in. I mean, his parents were born right around these years, and they grew up in the small town mayetta, kansas, the kind of place that the man from the train attacked. I hope readers will take away a greater sense of empathy for these tiny towns that are just as interesting, fascinating and worthwhile as the largest city owner. Largest city on earth. Wise she saying that why is she saying that . Bill i honestly believe that if the man from the train had ever come to mayetta, kansas, i know where he would have gone. I grew up in a small town in the 1950s and very much like the places where the men from the train would have gone. There was no police force on site. There was a county sheriff 10 miles away. Understand not 100 years ago, but 50 or 60 years ago, and i well, i often feel that the people who live in those towns are not taken seriously, that they are not respected, that their view of life not their political philosophy is not respected. Brian can i read from your book what you said . It is one of the more interesting paragraphs of your book. Bill feel free. Read the whole book. [laughter] brian you can expand on this. If you read about crime in a small town you will encounter vaguely the comment that the lived in the kind of quiet place where nothing very interesting ever happened. This is a despicable thing to say. It is a form of bigotry directed at the past, and bigotry directed at people who lived in small towns, and worse yet it is ignorant. Part of my french, but it is an comments, andle if you ever say anything like that you are revealing yourself to be an ignorant asshole. Bill that is how i feel about it. I do feel that it is offensive to talk about small towns as places where nothing ever happens. Everything meaningful that happens in your life or my life happens just as often to people who live in small towns and to people who lived in small towns 100 years ago as it does to you and me. The meaningful things that happened to us in our lives are that we follow love, get married, get divorced, have children, the children have problems, we start a career, succeed or fail, go to social events, go to entertainment. All of those things happen just as often and just as profoundly in small towns 100 years ago or in small towns today as they do to People Living in new york city or washington or los angeles today. Brian where did you get this strong feeling about small towns . Bill i grew up in a small town. Inive and what people washington or new york would consider a small town. Is 80,000 tosas 100,000, so it is not that small. It is not a feeling. It is an understanding. If you think that nothing happens in a small town it is because you drive through a small town and dont see anything happen, but if you live there you understand that people are living their lives there and it is just not true that nothing happens there. Brian the title the man from the train, what does that come from . Bill one of the things that identifies the murderer we are talking about is that many of the crimes happen within 100 yards of a Railroad Track, and one of the things that helps us identify his crime as opposed to somebody elses is that it usually happens at the intersection of two railroad because hesumably knew he had to get out. After he committed his crime he had to get out before dawn and didnt want to be stranded there waiting for a train to go through that he could hop on, so being at the intersection of multiple Railroad Tracks gave him more opportunities to get out of town before the crime was discovered. Brian what you want people to take from this book what do you want people to take from this book . Bill first of all, crimes are serious events. Serious people avoid talking crime orular celebrated criminal events because they regard them as and popular cultural events, but crimes are very serious events. They had a huge impact on shaping how people live, even if you are not the victim of the crime. The phenomenon of famous crimes is a serious phenomenon that needs people to stop blowing it off. That would be number one. Number two is a better understanding of the time. What i was trying to do was create as much as i could the time and the place where these crimes occurred. Tried to get people to understand that the world was changing very rapidly at that moment, as it normally is, but sometimes more rapidly than others. It is not a static world. It is a rapidly changing world which has a lot of things in common with the way we live now, and many things different. Brian when did you first begin to be interested in numbers . Bill in the spring of 1961 i was captured by a stack of baseball cards and never really escaped. That is where it comes from. Brian how did you develop an understanding of numbers . Bill well, playing around with baseball statistics. Anything a mathematician would consider a mathematician. I am very good at doing it in my head, but that is just from thousands of hours of doing it with baseball statistics. In terms of getting an understanding of what could be done with those, when i went to college at kansas university, 1967 to 1971, i studied economics, and essentially what i have done for my career is take economic methods and apply them to baseball. That essentially is all that i have ever done other than the crime stuff. That is what i have done almost all of my career, take economic models and theories, economist ways of thinking about things, and apply them to baseball related questions. Brian how important obviously you do research but how important was research to this book, and how you go about it . Bill my daughter was in charge of the research. She became a coauthor because in doing the research, she discovered things that were too large to be ascribed to a researcher. At this point you become an author. Essentially what we were doing was scraping the dirt away like archaeology, brushing the dirt away from things that were a little bit exposed but mostly hidden. You brush the dirt away from , and youyou find more have a better, clearer picture of what it is that is under the dirt. I dont know if i answered your question there. Research, rituals our research, wasels not that i did not do a lot of research but our research was basically based on Old Newspapers. We found day of the crime news stories about all of the crimes those are and first of all, many times the day of the crime description is the most reliable description because more often it gets repeated, the more it becomes like a game of telephone and effect get lost. Description of events which you start with to otherdirection sources. Brian weve got some video that was recorded last year by the Kansas City Star of your daughter talking about looking for this man, the man from the train, so we can see the two of you together working. Rachel i think that he was acting up some horrible trauma that happened to him in childhood. I think you was probably viciously abused, was never loved and cared about, and he was acting out that horror throughout, and i think that there was a sexual motivation as well. As horrible as that is to say, i think that became what his life was about. That became his purpose in life. Brian what is your background . Her background . Bill she was born in 1986, grew up in that house where the video was shot, the house where he lived, and went to study at Holland University in roanoke, virginia. Not too far from here. Majored in creative writing, was 2011, threeaybe years after she graduated. Moved back to kansas in maybe 2013 or 2014 and worked with me on the book. Brian one of the chapters is called the worst one ever. It goes into some detail about this guy, what he did. Why do you call it the worst ever . R the worst one bill because it is the highest body count. In villisca he killed eight people in one night, which is a horrific event, but it actually is, we were quite astonished to discover, not the most people he killed and one event. Where is the crimes in villisca are quite wellknown today, and millions of people know about them and can tell you something about them, the murder of this family is so obscure that i actually joined the Historical Society of the county where the. Rimes occurred in florida brian near allentown, florida . Bill near allentown. Could not find anyone in the Historical Society of the town where the crime occurred to had heard about it. They are absolutely forgotten except for the Old Newspaper accounts. Murders were difficult to write about because, not to speak ill of southerners in any way, but the south at that time had low levels of literacy, and re low levels we of literacy and a thin population, there were not many newspapers active in the area. There is no reason to believe that anyone from a newspaper organization ever visited the scene of the crime or ever neighbor or Police Officer firsthand. Just secondhand reports is all you know,o go on, and we have reconstructed what happened as best we could with as much confidence as we could without trying to fool anyone that we actually know what happened because the facts are difficult. Brian page 288, i will just start reading. They had probably the had probably left a kerosene lamp burning and a back bedroom and likely the first thing he did was to take the shade off the land and put it quietly on the floor, then start to examine the layout of the house. Was awakeman however nursing her baby inside one of the other rooms. Im speculating that she was awake. If you have ever had a twoyearold a twodayold baby, you will know why, and her body was found outside the front door. What did this guy do then in the ackerman house . Bill we assume he broke in through a rear window. You can assume he did that because he always did. , soact, he loved windows much so that if there was a door and a window that both could be easily opened, he would go through the window. He just prefer to do that. He was a small man come a very easy a small man, very athletic, and it was easy for him to scramble through windows. There are two reasons to think he entered from the rear of the house. One is that he always did, and the other is that some of the victims, three i believe, including the two day old baby, were found outside the front door as if they had been chased in that direction toward the front of the house and hit with an ax just after they exited the front of the house. Brian i kept asking, why didnt any of these folks get away from the sky this guy . In all the incidents they seem to all die. Bill that is one of the most workable things about the series of crimes is the remarkably low number of people who lived through the event in any way, shape, or form. He was quiteecause exceptionally good at what he did. He was not a dumb person. He was very skilled at what he was trying to accomplish. He attacked at very quickly. Brian you say there were 33 tag tothat you could this man, and i have it marked here. How did you find the 33 . You list every one of them. Bill we started with a list of five and added. Not 33 things totally different, but 33 elements of the crime. Takesample, he very often in that era, many houses did not have electricity. They had electricity in these small towns he were attacking that she was attacking he was attacking. People would leave a lamp burning through the night so a lamp thatould be have a starting place in the morning. He would take the shade off of the lamp and put it very quietly on the floor, and then turn the lamp down very low so it was just a flicker. I think he did that in part does, of course, he needed to see his way around the house, but also it excited him. Light was partin of the thrill for him, i believe. It is just speculation, getting into his head as much as you possibly can without going crazy. I think that was part of the thing for him. So that is one thing that identifies a crime linked to the man from the train, as opposed to a similar crime doesnt turn out to be linked. Another of course is proximity to the railroad, the intersection of multiple railroads. Another is the use of an ax. It is always the blunt side of the ax. Brian always . Bill i shouldnt say always. Very often when he kills five people, one person, most likely to be the woman of the house, is struck with the of the ax also the sharp side of the ax also. However, there is no crime in which most of the murders were not committed with the blunt side of the ax. That is the signature element. We have no reason to believe that he ever killed anyone in , you know,lthough this is a vicious human being. But weably would have, have no reason to believe he killed anyone in daylight. Always near midnight. A. M. Or 00 a. M. , not 3 00 not 4 00 a. M. , not 3 00 a. M. Within an hour of midnight. He paid special attention to the body of the prepubescent or posing of the prepubescent female, while others are simply left as they were when they were killed. Off and i think i read in these e youngs that thes ladies would be around nine years old. Bill a nine to 12yearold girl is his target victim. People, butlling his target victim is a nine to 12yearold girl. Element isnature that he covers the heads of the victim with a blanket before he hits them over the head, and he does that so that the blood doesnt spray back o