Bonus: Did Rachel James solve the Villisca murders?

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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,

(00:21):
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,

(00:43):
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?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
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,

(01:12):
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

(01:33):
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,

(01:53):
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

(02:13):
after case after case, so we knew we were on
to something big.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
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

(02:47):
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

(03:10):
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

(03:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
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?

Speaker 2 (03:54):
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

(04:15):
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

(04:36):
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

(04:59):
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

(05:20):
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

(05:40):
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

(06:04):
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

(06:27):
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

(06:47):
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

(07:08):
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

(07:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
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

(08:32):
them were him, And actually hinter Kayfek is one of
the ones that I am a little bit less sure of.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
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

(09:17):
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,

(09:40):
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

(10:01):
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

(10:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
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.

(11:20):
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

(11:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
Rachel, I just I wanted to thank you. I could
talk about this for about ten hours.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
This is Murder Holmes. I'm at Murnovich. Stay tuned for
more bonus content and upcoming episodes.