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 fouryearold child has a collection of little plastic dinosaurs. Most of what academics do is 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 wanted to write this particular history of kansas. I saw a pbs show about the 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 . Bill i would 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. In that era before the automobiles came come 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 ax sticking up out of the woodpile. Brian who is he . Bill he is a serial killer as awful a human being as has ever walked the earth. Brian do you know his name . Bill i do know his name. Awful a human being as has ever you absoluely insist, i will give it to you. 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. On a monday morning in june, a man did not report to work named joe moore. On investigation it was found that there was a locked house with all the windows covered and eight people murdered with an ax. This was immediately linked within 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 . Bill the interior of the town has not done terrifically. A lot of the highway went 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 quiet and peaceful little place. Brian that murder, has anybody ever been found or prosecuted for the murder back in those days . Bill at the time there were two were three 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 crime 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. I live in northeast kansas, i live about only 180 miles from villisca. Brian how long have you lived there . Bill we moved 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. You cant use violence to prevent them from saying that, it. Ou have to put up with 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 you used to work for the Boston Red Sox . Bill i am still 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 write this book. Bill she did. Brian i want to quote from her in a previous interview and get you to expand on it. I think dads writing shone the 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 on earth. 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. I understand not 100 years ago, but 50 or 60 years ago, and i have a lot of 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 but their view of life 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 frequently 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 brian you say there were 33 things that you could tag to 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. For example, he very often takes 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 that there would be a lamp that 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. That ghastly thin light was part 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. O 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 ide of the ax. That is the signature element. We have no reason to believe that he ever killed anyone in daylight, although, you know, this is a vicious human being. He probably would have, but we have no reason to believe he killed anyone in daylight. Always near midnight. Its not 4 00 a. M. Its not 3 00 a. M. Within an hour of idnight. Brian he paid special attention to the body of the prepubescent female, staging or posing of the prepubescent female, while others are simply left as they were when they were killed. And often, i think i read in these accounts that these young ladies would be around nine years old. Bill a nine to 12yearold girl is his target victim. He enjoys killing people, but his target victim is a nine to 2yearold girl. Another signature element is 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 on him. So if you see people if the report of a crime shows the victims heads being covered with cloth before they are murdered, that is a sign it is him. If there is a young girl and her clothing has been removed and she is lying with her limbs askew, that definitely is him. There are grosser aspects to that which we maybe dont need to talk about. Another thing that we know is im is he uses cloth to block all the windows. He would take blankets or robes or whatever and cover ll of the windows. That is presumably done after he crimes are committed so that he can move around the house in the darkness without being spotted by people walking on the sidewalk. Brian you say he never stole anything. Bill the first crime he stole some, but no, he never stole nything. And many of the crimes it is reported that there was money and jewelry left in plain view at the crime was committed. Brian how often did he set fire to the house . Bill up until 1908, he almost always set fire to the house. After 1908 he is murdering families in houses near small towns, but not actually in small towns. Beginning in 1908 to 1910 he begins to move into small towns. At that point he cant set fire to the house because i forgot the morning people will come running and be aware that something is terribly wrong before you have a chance to escape. Brian so he committed the crimes almost always in warm weather . Bill always in warm weather. There is one crime that could be related that is committed in terrible cold weather. The first crime he committed in 1898 was in cold weather. I suspect that that is relevant because after that he had to walk six or seven miles n the middle of the night in avoid detection, in order to get out of the way. I suspect that after this is generally true with serial murderers that their first crime is an explosion and is poorly planned or not planned t all. It is an explosion of anger or a combination thereof. After that there is normally a cooling off period, and during the cooling off period the person contemplates what they need to do to get by with this in the future. I feel relatively certain that in that period of study and contemplation study and contemplation are good words for that, there is nothing good about this he decided he didnt want to do this in cold weather anymore because, other than that one crime in nova scotia in february, about the coldest you can get, there were no crimes in cold weather. Brian what was his rofession . Bill going back to the first crime, at the time of the first crime people would say that he was trained in that veterinary medicine. That doesnt mean what it means now. But he had some skills working ith animals. He had been a sailor, but his main profession throughout the period of time he is committing the crimes is what we would call a umberjack. Although the word lumberjack isnt the same word we use now. We know that that is true because almost all of the crimes up till 1910 occur, and some after 1910, in towns where the chief industry is logging. Brian i want to talk to you about a lot of the other things you get involved in, basically your philosophy of life. By the way, does anybody ever say to you, like you spend your time with all this stuff . Bill people do look askance at the time that i spend on looking into old murders, and it is regarded as odd and somewhat offputting by many people i know. T is newspapers that were my basic education. I went to grade school, high school, college, but from the time i was five years old until i was until newspapers died, i was an avid reader of newspapers, and newspapers shaped my view of the world. I grew up in a small town uite a ways from industry, from forestry. Our lives were as rich and complicated as the lives of people in big cities, but i remember when i was about 11 years old asking my sister what an antique store was. We didnt have antique stores. There were a lot of things you didnt have in small towns in those times. I used newspapers to figure out the world, more or ess. I think people in my generation did. If you look at newspapers, theres sports and crime stories and comics and dear abby and one page of political commentary, and those things formed my view of the world. I read crime stories and crime books since i was seven years old. Brian i have to admit, following you in baseball is one thing. Seeing that you are interested in crime is another. But this is, i have to say, in doing research on your visit here, the Biggest Surprise i had. This is from the new yorker in 2003, a profile on you. He turns on cspan, which he watches more than any other channel, and finds another politician lying, thus presenting the kind of puzzle he has been trying to solve all his life. you have to try to reconstruct the organization of your thoughts so that it reaches the point of depending of defending the absurd proposition that they are defending, and the organization of your own thought so that you have a place to put the true fact which is consistent with your underlying belief. of us more give us more. Bill first of all, i have no memory of having said that. I dont read anything written about me, although great admiration for the author. It touches on my central philosophy of life, which is this. I can explain this in about 20 seconds. The world is much more complicated than the human mind, and for that reason nd yet we are desperate to understand the world. We are committed from the moment of birth to a struggle to understand the world which e can never win. Ecause that is true, we make up understandings of the world which we call religion or olitical philosophy or xpertise, and we believe these things are true. As consequence of that, we all believe thousands of utterly nonsensical statements to be true. Ben says that politicians are lying, but i dont know that hey are lying quite. Politicians say things that are not objectively true with great frequency, but it is not clear to me that they do not in general believe these things to be true. They are merely operating out of a paradigm of understanding which has wandered away from the facts which can be established. That that make any sense at all does that make any sense at all . Brian i will just let it lie. Let me ask you though, do you still watch this . Hat you see from lawrence, kansas that we dont see from this place . Bill that is the reason that i am a cspan junkie, is your discipline and commitment to getting as close to the facts without your interpretation, your own overlaying of it, as you possibly can do. I take a lot of crap from my liberal friends because i watch fox news, but i also watch cnn and pbs. It is not that i i have always tried to figure out the world, as everybody is, but i am always trying to create organized ways of thinking about the world, and cspan is ore useful for that than sources which think they have the world figured out, if that makes sense. Brian you tweet. Here is one of your tweets in december. How many of us are old enough to her when old enough to member when meet the press and face the nation would spend the whole hour interviewing a newsmaker rather than 10 minutes with a newsmaker and 50 minutes of talking heads . The commands the 10 minutes with a newsmaker and 50 minutes with a talking head is successful. It is commercially successful. Why do you think it is more successful than the old way . Bill it is part of a system hat has developed. We headed in that direction when people, probably in the lbj administration, but when the politicians started showing up for the morning news shows with a list of talking points and pushing the direction. Then it became inevitable that the newspeople would try to get away from the talking points, that they would try to escape the talking points. He talking head format developed as a way levy come at this from a different angle. Might let me come at this from a different angle. My philosophy of life is that everyone has to have a system of understanding everything, and that is unfortunate because all of the systems of understanding everything are bullshit. None of them work. None of them has any real no one understands the world. No one has the capacity to understand the world, and all of the carefully articulated systems to place everything are inherently false, but everyone has one. Lmost everyone is either a conservative or a liberal or a libertarian or a lunatic of some other stripe. So the in a competitive news environment, the thing to do is to find the Underserved Group of partisans and find a way to appeal to them. Brian here is a tiny little bit of your philosophy. This is the 17 seconds. You made a speech in november of 2016. Bill one of the great problems with human rights is that greed has no limit. Is greed had a natural limit if greed had a natural limit we would all work through our problems a lot quicker, but it doesnt. Brian why doesnt agree to have a natural limit why doesnt greed have a natural limit . Bill organized religion and philosophy and politics are efforts to form philosophies which place limits on the catastrophic consequences of greedy behavior. But as to why i believe that greed has no natural limit has to do with 60 years of reading crime books. Criminals are simply people who put more value on their two minutes of pleasure than they do on your life. The man from the train of more value on is o on his hour of satisfaction than he did on the 100 or so people that he illed. Is greed had no limit. Most of us limit our greed. Ost of us limit our greed by philosophy or religion, but it as no inherent and natural limit iffy loss fi and religion are taken away. Brian as a baseball aficionado and observer and dvisor and all of tha