Modus Operandi

While doing some biographical research of a possible suspect in the case of my friend Patty Tigard’s 1976 murder, I stumbled on a June 1911 article about the ax murders of the William Hill family in Ardenwald, Oregon. The killer’s method sounded vaguely familiar, thus piquing my interest.

Call it a side-trail, a rabbit hole or a complete distraction from the task at hand, I began reading newspaper article after newspaper article until I found something useful: Paul Mueller, an immigrant from Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. Trailing Mueller backwards, using these same news articles, lead me to the May 1901 murder of the J. Wesley Allen family of Shirley, Maine; killed in the same manner as the Hill family in Oregon.

Following article after article on the Allen family murders, I read a name that I’d seen before: Paul Mueller. Evidently, he’d been in the area of the Allen farm and had been chased off by Allen, who is described as being less than friendly to everyone.

In both the Hill and Allen family murders the homes and out buildings were also set ablaze. Investigators at the time believed this was done to cover possible clues in the crime.

These two crimes got me to thinking about another crime, one that has been researched and investigated by criminologists, journalist and even paranormal groups. It is the use of a found ax belonging to the victim that triggered my recollection of the Villisca, Iowa murders.

Sometime between the evening of June 10, 1912, and the early morning of June 11, 1912, the Josiah Moore family and two visiting neighbor girls were found murdered in a similar fashion as the Hills and Allen families. While there is a list of suspects in this particular murder, none were ever convicted of the crime.

As I felt I’d run the course of my little side investigation and was prepared to return to my research on Patty’s murder case, a memory popped in my mind. That thought was about the unsolved March 1922 ax murders of the Andreas Gruber family in modern-day Waidhofen, Bavaria, Germany, better known as the Hinterkaifeck Murders. Further, Mueller’s hometown of Ingolstadt shows that he lives less than 20 miles from Gruber family murders.

“Bingo!” I thought as I got up from my writing desk to do a ‘happy dance, go pee and get some more coffee.’

As I was congratulating myself on a ‘job well done,’ it was then that I saw a footnote to an article that listed the 2017 book, ‘The Man from the Train,’ by Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James. Their work shows the various connections between Mueller and 39 family murders, totaling 153 victims, going back as far as 1898, near Boston, Massachusetts.

So allow me to lick my wounds, ending with a quote from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass,’ that leaves me feeling a little bit better about my exercise in futility, “Go on till you come to the end; then stop.”