Late on the hot and sticky night of Saturday, Aug. 3, 1963, 52-year-old Virgil Terry punched in for work as a switchman for the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad in the sprawling Hammond, Ind., yards.
Here, amid the eerie glow of blast furnaces and oil refineries, massive freight trains would be assembled for transport west toward Chicago or east across Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan along the Belt, New York Central and what are now known as Conrail lines.
As lightning flashed across the midnight sky two nights shy of the full moon, the veteran railroader walked toward the droning diesel locomotive hard by the switchman`s shanty, where engineer Roy Bottorff, 60, and fireman Paul Overstreet, 45, were waiting in the dimly-lit cab.
He swung up on the engine; and by the time they had coupled up to their 55-car freight train and pulled it to the far end of the yards, it was 1:05 a.m.
”I got off the engine and walked to the west end switchman`s shanty to call Hammond tower and get a clearance to get to the Calumet City yards,”
Terry would later tell police. ”The tower man told me that we would have to wait for the Blue Island train to clear.”
Minutes later, after the Blue Island had rumbled past the Columbia Avenue crossing, Terry threw the switch to the main line and waved his lantern to signal the engineer to come ahead.
”I did not get a return signal,” he said. ”As I walked toward my engine I gave the come ahead signal three or four times, and the engine did not move. I walked up to the side of the engine and I noticed Bottorff had his head laying part way out the side window.
”I climbed up on the engine and touched Roy on the arm, and then I noticed blood on his face and neck. I turned around and saw that Overstreet had blood on his face . . .”
The two trainmen were dead at the controls. Each had been shot twice in the back of the head. Three 22-caliber shell casings would be found on the floor of the cab, and one more on the ground next to the engine.
That humid August night marked the beginning of a frightening succession of railroad murders that, over the next 15 years, would leave seven trainmen dead along 200 miles of track dipping around Lake Michigan between the Hammond yards and Jackson, Mich.
— At 4:38 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1968, engineer John W. Marshall, 51, of Niles, Mich., was cut down by shotgun blasts as he stood next to his diesel locomotive in the rail yards at Elkhart, Ind. He was struck once in the midsection, once in the side, and twice in the head by a 12-gauge weapon fired at close range.
— At 1:08 a.m. on April 5, 1976, in the same Elkhart yards, engineer James ”Tiny” McCrory, 51, also of Niles, was shot in the head with a deer slug from a 20-gauge shotgun as he sat in the cab of his locomotive parked near the diesel house.
— At 6:44 p.m. on Dec. 31, 1978, conductor William Gulak, 50, of Lincoln Park, Mich., and flagman Robert Lee Blake, 42, of Southgate, were killed by deer slugs from a 12-gauge shotgun as they sat in the trainmen`s locker room of the Jackson, Mich., depot. Fireman Charles Lee Burton, 32, of Jackson, was cut down by a fatal blast on the loading platform outside the door.
It was after the fourth slaying–the McCrory shooting in 1976–that police compared notes and came up with the haunting possibility of a phantom of the railyards–a shadowy figure who stalked unsuspecting trainmen in the dark of night and shot them in the back.
Looking for a possible pattern in the two Elkhart slayings, police Sgt. David Keck of Elkhart had sent queries to other towns along the rail line.
”When we checked with Hammond, they said, `Yes, we had two killed in 1963,”` he recalled.
The circumstances were identical to the Elkhart murders: All the victims were trainmen, mysteriously gunned down during the pre-dawn hours while working in the switchyards.
Then Keck pulled an old file on an isolated railyard shooting that had attracted scant attention in 1971 because it seemed, at the time, an open-and- shut case. Suddenly it looked very, very big.
It was at 3:55 a.m. on March 30 when a bearish figure stepped from behind a darkened oil storage tank in the Elkhart yard and began blasting away at engineer Louis John Sayne of New Buffalo, Mich., with a .357 magnum. The engineer was struck twice in the back, but managed to wrest the handgun from his assailant and shoot him in the stomach.
Sayne, now 62, a 40-year railroad veteran with the New York Central and now Conrail and Amtrak, remembers vividly:
”I was in a happy mood because there were two train jobs that night and I got the good one, going to Chicago.”
Sayne had just finished a cup of coffee in an all-night restaurant and was walking toward the roundhouse to climb aboard a freight engine when . . . crack! crack! . . . two bullets slammed into his back and hip.
”I thought to run. But hell, I couldn`t outrun bullets, so I turned around and faced him,” Sayne said. ”We wrestled. He tripped on my overnight bag and fell down. I fell on top of him, grabbed the gun and shot him.”
As surgeons worked over the two men in the emergency room of the Elkhart hospital, Sayne recognized his assailant as a burly, sullen locomotive fireman who had crewed with him in the past.
”Why did you shoot me, Rudy?” Sayne asked.
Dour faced Rudy Bladel, then 38, like Sayne a career railroader, mumbled, ”I did all I could to get the Niles men out of Elkhart.”
Bladel was charged with attempted murder, but in a plea agreement with prosecutors he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of aggravated battery.
On Dec. 31, 1971, he was sentenced to one to five years in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City. He served 18 months.
Sgt. Keck studied the old file. Except for the fact that Sayne survived the attack, the pattern was identical to the two Elkhart rail yard murders and the double homicide in Hammond.
The original Hammond investigators had retired, but the case was reopened with Keck`s help by Detectives John Baron and Walter Murray.
”In Hammond there was a witness who had spotted this man (lurking in the switchyards) and said he walked `like a gorilla` or had a `farmer-type walk, like behind a plow, looking down at the ground.`
”That`s Rudy,” said Keck, recalling Bladel`s unusual gait.
”Then we went to the Marshall case, in which there were eyewitnesses. They couldn`t put a face on the man but they put a walk on him and his build
–Rudy Bladel.
”So we had our pattern. We made it a point to find out everything we could about Rudy Bladel.”
Those who worked with Bladel agree that nobody really knew the quiet but powerfully-built, bespectacled man. He had no friends, nor did he seem to want any. While other crewmen talked or played cards as they waited for assignments, Bladel would disappear until train time.
”I took a long walk,” he would mumble when asked where he had been.
During Bladel`s long walks, according to fellow railroaders, he was frequently seen talking to himself.
Sayne remembers Bladel as a morose, brooding fireman who, when they crewed together, sat looking straight ahead, rhythmically slapping his knees with his hands to the clickety-click of the rails.
”No words were ever exchanged between us. He would sit there on the left side of the cab talking to himself and playing pat-a-cakes with his knees.”
Not long after his release from prison in 1973, Bladel, who had been fired after the Sayne shooting, appeared at a union hearing in an unsuccessful appeal to win back his fireman`s job.
”I only wanted to dust his pants off,” he said.
”He came up to me and shook my hand,” the baffled Sayne said. ”He said his reason for shooting me had nothing to do with me personally, `just the Michigan men.` Imagine that!”
”The Michigan men,” investigators would later determine, were the seat of one man`s fanatical grudge against the railroad industry.
In the late 1950s, the New York Central shifted most of its operations from Niles, Mich., to a new rail yard in Elkhart. The move caused the layoff of more than 75 trainmen in Niles, and the number of train crews on the Niles seniority list was cut from 22 to 5.
The railroad let the unions solve the job dilemma, and it was eventually decided that 52 per cent of the personnel needs at the expanded Elkhart yard would be filled by Elkhart men. The other 48 per cent, or ”Michigan percentage,” would be men from Niles. A number of ”Elkhart men” lost their seniority to the ”Niles men” and were either ”bumped” to lesser positions or laid off.
Among them was Bladel, a man whose entire life was geared to trains. Rudy Bladel had no wife, no girlfriends, no hobbies and no other known interests.
”His first love and his last love has always been railroading,” said Rudy`s half-brother, a Chicago businessman who asked that his name not be used.
Bladel (rhymes with ladle) was born into a railroad family in Chicago on Dec. 8, 1932. His late father, Holgar, worked for the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad Co.
Young Rudy grew up in the neighborhood around 67th Street and Ashland Avenue, and attended Chicago Vocational High School on the South Side, where he took automotive shop courses.
After graduation in June of 1951, he went to work for the Rock Island as a fireman. ”That`s when you tossed coal in one end and you got smoke out the other,” he chuckled in recalling his youth during a talk with a Tribune reporter.
During the Korean War, Bladel put on Army fatigues and served as a military engineer, ”hostling” locomotives in a South Korean roundhouse, sometimes under enemy fire.
After Korea, Bladel returned to the Rock Island, beginning a rise in the seniority ranks that lasted until he was laid off and demoted in the Niles-Elkhart yard merger. By the time he was fired in 1971, in the wake of the Sayne shooting, he had logged 19 years with various lines.
After his release from prison in 1973, the specter of Bladel became known and feared by railroaders, whose brother trainmen had been shot down without apparent reason along the Indiana Harbor Belt, New York Central and Conrail lines from northern Indiana to southern Michigan.
”Bladel knew the reputation he had among the railroad men, and he played on that,” said former Jackson Police Sgt. Richard Wheeler. ”He would go up around the rail yards in Battle Creek, Kalamazoo and other towns just to stir them up. We know that for a fact.”
”He stalks the tracks,” trainmen would complain. ”When you drive your train under a bridge, you look up and there`s Rudy, staring down at you from the overpass.”
The police determined that Bladel was living alone in a trailer in Blue Island when Bottorff and Overstreet were shot to death in the cab of their engine on Aug. 3, 1963. He owned a motorcycle. A witness recalled hearing a motorcycle leaving the murder scene.
Bladel`s awkward gait, in fact, resulted from a motorcycle accident after he returned from Korea.
”We put a surveillance on him, a constant surveillance,” Keck related.
When Bladel bought a .357 magnum in South Bend, the police notified the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. (It is a federal violation for a convicted felon to own a weapon.) He was arrested on Jan. 6, 1978, and was sentenced to 1 to 5 years in the federal penitentiary at Sandstone, Minn.
Bladel was released on Nov. 16, 1978–six weeks before the Jackson depot massacre.
Keck requested that full-time surveillance be resumed, but was told that neither police nor Conrail security had the manpower.
On New Year`s Eve, when word of the triple homicide in Jackson reached Keck at his home in Elkhart, he instructed the officer who called him: ”Find out where Rudy Bladel is!”
Jackson police found him right in their own back yard. Bladel had spent the night in a local hotel and checked out early on New Year`s Day.
He was taken into custody at 7 a.m. as he walked to the Greyhound bus station to return to Elkhart. In his suitcase, police found an early morning newspaper clipping about the slayings.
”I figured I don`t know what`s going on here, but I figured I`d better get the heck out of here,” Bladel told the police. He was questioned about the slayings, but was released after 48 hours for lack of evidence.
Scuba divers scoured the Grand River behind the train depot and helicopters checked rooftops in a futile search for the murder weapon. Detectives even consulted psychics, without success.
Three months later, a shotgun, broken down into two parts, was found under brush in melting snow in Jackson`s Cascade Falls Park. Ejection marks on spent shotgun shells found at the depot matched test slugs fired from the recovered weapon.
The shotgun was traced through its serial number to Bladel. The husky recluse had bought it in his own name at an Elkhart gun shop on New Year`s eve in 1976–two years to the day before the Jackson killings.
That was enough for Jackson County Prosecutor Edward Grant. On March 22, 1979, he filed a complaint charging Bladel with the Jackson murders.
The shaggy-haired Bladel, who had been living at a mission for homeless men in Elkhart, was arrested by Conrail police that same afternoon. He has been in custody ever since.
Jackson police Lt. Ronald Lowe said that when Bladel was confronted with the shotgun and with evidence showing that fiber particles on his clothing and from his suitcase matched those found in the breech of the weapon, he said:
”You`ve got me. What do you want to know?”
According to Lowe:
”Bladel told me and Sgt. Gerald Rand that he left the hotel, went down to the depot carrying his suitcase with the shotgun in it, put the suitcase down on the platform, got his shotgun out, put it together, walked in the door (of the locker room), shot the man sitting beside the door (Blake), shot the man at the table (Gulak) and (then) put another slug into each of them. As he was going out, another man (Burton) started in the door and he shot that man and he fell on the platform”
At his trial that summer, Bladel recanted his confession.
”They (the police) were yelling at me, so I told them what they wanted to hear. They got me all confused and confumbled,” he testified.
He now said he had gone to Jackson to retrieve his disabled motorbike. He admitted that he had been in the Jackson depot on the day of the killings, but only ”to use the trainmen`s washroom.”
As for the shotgun, yes, it was his, but Bladel said he sold it to a stranger in an Elkhart restaurant for $100 several weeks before the killings. Prosecutor Grant questioned Bladel:
Q–Did you have some grievance against the railroad company?
A–In the past, yes. They gave our jobs away. The Niles men took our jobs and laid us off.
Q–And it caused you to lose quite a bit of time?
A–Right, 524 days (between Oct. 16, 1959, and Nov. 14, 1964).
Q–Did you do different things to harass the railroad?
A–Like what, for instance?
Q–Would you go around and stare at railroad employees and just stand by the trains and stare at the trainmen and firemen, to make them feel uncomfortable?
A–I`ve stood at different places, just all kinds of places. I am sitting here and looking at you. Is this harassment?
The jury found Bladel guilty of the Jackson murders, and on Aug. 29, 1979 he was sentenced to three concurrent life terms and packed off to prison.
After a series of appeals, however, the Michigan Supreme Court last April reversed the conviction, ruling that Bladel`s confession should not have been used against him because it was obtained by police after he had asked for a lawyer.
Bladel, now 53, was returned to the Jackson County Jail, where he remains today, awaiting a new trial.
In a telephone interview with The Tribune, Bladel, an articulate man who claims a military IQ score of 145, said, ”This whole thing is because the railroad gave my job away. I can`t tell you everything. The thing (the Jackson case) goes to trial Sept. 8.
”I can say what the reason is, and that is: They took my job. This whole thing is because the railroad gave my job away.”
There have been no killings since Bladel`s arrest.
Although he would neither admit nor deny that he was the instrument of death, officials say they have established that Bladel was at or near the scenes of all seven slayings, beginning in Hammond on Aug. 3, 1963.
Keck said he and other officers have talked to Bladel repeatedly since he was first taken into custody.
”We tried every way in the world to get to him, to try to bring out why he did what he did. When we talked about the families of the victims, his only answer was, `They (victims) should have thought of that.”`
Meanwhile a related civil proceeding just wound up in a Detroit courtroom, where the widows of two of the Jackson victims, Blake and Burton, had sued Conrail and Amtrak for damages, contending that the carriers ignored warnings about Bladel and failed to provide adequate security at the depot.
On July 3 a Circuit Court jury returned a verdict for the widows and awarded them damages totaling $8.9 million. With interest the award could exceed $12 million, according to Richard Goodman, an attorney for the victims` families.
Though Baron and Murray have retired from police work, their findings as detectives became part of the evidence in the Detroit trial.
Baron told of sitting down with Bladel two years ago in the Michigan State Prison, before the Jackson murder conviction was set aside.
”I asked him for his help in clearing up our murder case,” the Hammond detective related. ”I said: `Look, Rudy, you are doing life. What have you got to lose?”`
He said Bladel merely grinned at him, folded his beefy hands on his stomach and replied, ”You`re a cop. Prove I did it.”
