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>> this week on "q&a" author and senior advisor for baseball operations for the boston soiks is bill james. mr. james talks about his book "the man from the train: the solving of the century-old erial killer mystery." host: bill james, "the man from the train" your first sentence i have long been fascinated that knowledge can be created about the past. tell us more about that. bill: the easiest example is dinosaurs. for thousands of years people didn't know these great beasts had ever existed. now we have not only created an information about them but it's so widely that every 4-year-old child has a collection of little plastic dinosaurs. much of what academics do is create -- is sort out the

conflicts of what was said at the time to create a detail and more accurate picture of the past so we know things about the romans that the romans didn't know. we know things about baseball in the 1960's that the baseball players of the 1960's didn't know. host: when did you know you wanted to write this particular ook? bill: i stumbled into it without making a decision to do it. i was supposed to be working on a book with my wife with the history of -- about the history kansas and i saw a pbs show about the murders in iowa and i thought i would put a couple of hours into tracking down what facts i could about it. a couple hours became a couple weeks. couple weeks became a couple months and it eventually became seven years. brian: when was the pbs

documentary shown? bill: i would guess 2008 or 2009 but i'm not sure. brian: i want to ask you to read your opening page. just to set the scene on what we're 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 where sometimes along the edge of it. you can't get more than a few hundred feet away from the railroad track and still be in the town. he is looking for house with no dog. he would prefer a house on the edge of stountown just isolated enough to provide cover. a big two-story house would be best with a family of five. a barn where he can hide out from sundown until the middle of the night but in that era before the automobiles came almost every house had a barn. even the houses in chicago and hiladelphia had barns.

he is looking for a house with an ax sticking up. brian: who is he? bill: he is a serial murderer who is as terrible a human being as ever walked the face f the earth. brian: do you know his name? bill: it is revealed toward the end of the book. brian: i won't insist. you have to get to chapter 40 before you find out. bill: right. brian: but give us a profile who this guy is and what about valisca, iowa, where is that? bill: it's in the southwestern corner of iowa. s a town of around 2 -- it's a town of around 2,000 people. on a night of june almost 100 years ago almost all the lights

were out. the city was in a dispute with the electric company over the price of electricity and they shut off the streetlights. on a monday morning in june, a man did not report to work named joe moore. on investigation, it was found there was a locked house with all the windows covered and eight people inside murdered ith an ax. this was immediately linked within an hour to now what we call a serial murder, although the term wasn't used then. serial murderer traveling the nation murdering families. 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 half mile outside of town and the k.c. 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 especially back in those days for the murder? did anybody know who it was? bill: at the time, there were wo or three, depending how you count them, what i would consider bogus prosecutions. a man was arrested and intimidated and beaten and put on trial, not put on trial but

indicted for the murders, but the indictment was dropped because there was really no vidence. 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 didn't 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 don't mean to make judgments for other people. some of them seem to be unquestionably linked to the villisca murders. brian: where do you reside? i live in northeast kansas. it's onlyly about 180 miles from villisca. brian: how long have you lived there? bill: lawrence. move home of the jayhawks. 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 can't use violence to prevent that from saying that.

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: are you still working for the boston red sox? bill: i'm still very proud to do so. brian: and what do you do there? bill: i try to create organized ays of taking about problems and encourage people 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 dad's writing shone the most honestly when he was talking about these small-towns 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." hy is she saying that? bill: by the way, in working on this book, i reached the point of overconfidence that i knew. i honestly believe that if the man from the train had ever come to mayetta, kansas, i know what house he could have hit. i could have narrowed it down in a couple towns. he had such clear patterns that i knew exactly where he would have gone. i grew up in a small town in the 1950's and very much like the places where the men from the train committed his murders. there was no police force and -- no police force on site. there was a county sheriff 10 iles away.

i understand not 100 years ago, ut 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 -- 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: no. no. then you can expand on this. if you read about crime in a small town you will encounter frequently the comment that the -- these people lived in a quiet place where nothing very interesting ever happened. this is a despicable thing to say. this is you writing. it is a form of bigotry directed at the past, and

bigotry directed at people who live in small towns and worse yet it's ignoreant. pardon my french, you say, but it is an ignorant asshole comment 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 said pardon my french because i don't use that language a lot in the book. i do feel it's 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 fall in love, get married, get divorced, have children, the children have problems, we start a career, we succeed in our career or fail, we go to social events,

we go to entertainments. 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. i live in what people in washington or new york would consider a small town. lawrence, kansas is 80,000 to 100,000, so it is not that small. it is not a feeling. t is an understanding. if you think that nothing happens in a small town it is because you drive through a small town and don't 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 alking 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 else's is that it usually happens at the intersection of two railroad tracks and it's at the intersection of two railroad tracks presumably because he knew he had to get out. after he committed his crime he had to get out before dawn and he didn't 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 do you want people o take from this book?

bill: first of all, crimes are serious events. serious people avoid talking about popular crime or celebrated criminal events ecause they regard them as trashy and popular cultural events, but crimes are very erious events. they have 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 thers. 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 nderstanding of numbers?

bill: well, playing around with baseball statistics. i am not anything a mathematician would consider a mathematician. i am very good at adding and subtracting and multiplying in my head but that's 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, 967 to 1971, i studied economics, and essentially what i have done for my career is take economic methods and apply hem 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, economic 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 -- it's fairly obviously -- and how did you go about it? bill: my daughter was in charge of the research. she became a co-author 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 hem and you find more, and you have a better, clearer picture of what it is that is under the dirt. i don't know if i answered your uestion there.

our research, rachel's research, was -- not that i did zero research. i did a lot of research myself. our reerch was essentially based on old newspapers. we found day of the crime news tories about all of the crimes in the book, and those are -- 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 he facts get lost. but also the description of events which you start with provides direction to other sources. brian: we've got some video

that was recorded last year by "the kansas city star" with your daughter talking about looking for this man, the man from the train, so we can see the two of ou together working. [video clip] rachel: i think that he was acting out some horrible trauma that happened to him in childhood. i think he 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 her ackground? bill: she was born in 1986, grew up in that house where the video was shot, the house where study at d went to

holland university in roanoke, virginia. not too far from here. majored in creative writing, was married in maybe 2011, which would have been three 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 worst one ever?" i think what is there, eight or -- let's say, nine people killed at one time and where was it? do you remember? bill: it's called the "worst one ever" because it's 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 in one event. whereas the crimes in villisca are quite well-known today, and millions of people know about them and can tell you something about them, the murder of the ackerman family is so obscure that i actually joined the historical society of the county where the crimes occurred. brian: which state? bill: florida. is that right? rian: near allentown, florida? bill: joined remotely, obviously. and could not find anyone in the historical society of the county where the crime occurred where they had ever heard of them. they are totally and absolutely forgotten except for the old ewspaper accounts.

the murders of the ackerman family were difficult to write about because, not speaking ill but utherners in any way the south at the time had low levels of literacy, and because there were low levels 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 interviewed a neighbor or police officer firsthand. just secondhand reports is all you have to go on, and you know, 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. and then you can pick up what you remember happened. "the ackermans had probably left a kerosene lamp burning and the back bedroom and likely the first thing he did was to lamp and hade off the put it quietly on the floor, then start to examine the layout of the house. mrs. ackerman however was awake nursing her baby inside one of the other rooms. you say i'm speculating that she was awake. if you have ever had a 2-day-old baby, you will know why, and her body was found outside the front door." what did this guy do then in the ackerman house? he never was caught and this was in the 1900's. bill: we assume he broke in through a rear window. you can assume he did that because he always did.

in fact, he loved windows, so much so that if there was a door there and a window there and they both could be easily opened he would go through the window. he just preferred to do that. he was a small man, very athletic, and it was easy for him to scramble through windows. and he did. so he entered -- we can assume he entered the house near midnight because he always entered the house near midnight. and there are two reasons to think he entered at 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 2-day-old baby, were found outside the front door as if they had been chased in that direction, they were chased 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 didn't any of these folks get away from this guy? in all the incidents they seem to all die.

bill: right. that is one of the most remarkable things about the crime, about the series of crimes is that the remarkably low number of people who lived through the event in any way, shape, or form. and that's because -- it's mostly because he was quite exceptionally good at what he did. i mean, he was not a dumb person. he was very skilled at what he as trying to accomplish. it must be that he attacked very quickly. 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 the sixth, seventh and eighth. 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 where he was attacking. it's limited electricity. not on all the time. 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 lamp -- take the chimney off the lamp or shade off the lamp and put it very quietly on the floor and then he would turn the lamp down very, very low so it was just a flicker. i think he did that in part because, 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 speculation and i don't but to convince people just 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 doesn't 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 shouldn't say always. ery often when he kills five people, one person, most likely to be the woman of the house, is struck with the sharp side of the ax also. however, there is no crime in

the group in which most of the murders were not committed with the blunt side of the ax. it's always the blunt side 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. if he took a notion to kill someone in daylight, he probably would have, but we have no reason to believe he killed anyone in daylight. always near midnight. not 4:00 a.m., not 3:00 a.m. ithin an hour of midnight. go ahead. brian: i'll tell you some of the others. that he paid special attention to the body of the prepubescent female, staging or posing of the prepubescent female, while other victims are simply left as they were when they were killed.

often i think i read in these accounts that these young ladies would be around 9 years old. bill: yeah. 9 to 12-year-old girl is his target victim. he enjoys killing people, but his target victim is a 9 to 12-year-old 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 doesn't spray back on him. so if you see people -- if the report of a crime shows the victim's 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 don't need to talk about. another thing that we know is him is he uses cloth to block all the windows. he would take blankets or robes or whatever and cover all of the windows. that is presumably done after the crimes are committed so hat 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: never stole. well, the first crime he stole some but, no, he never stole anything. many, many of the crimes it's reported there was money and jewelry left in plain view

after 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. up until 1908, he's murdering families in houses near small towns but not actually in small towns. gradual transition but 1908 to 1910 he begins the -- he moves into small towns. at that point he can't set fire to the house because if you set fire to the house at 4:00 in the morning people will come running and they will 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 in the middle of the night in cold weather in order to avoid detection, in order to get out of the way. i suspect that was such a -- after -- this is generally true of serial murders that their first crime is an explosion and poorly planned or not planned at all. it's an explosion of anger or lust 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 about this and there's nothing good about this but in the period that he decided he didn't want to do this in cold weather anymore because other than that one peculiar crime in nova scotia in february, which is about as cold as you can get, other than that there were no crimes in cold weather. brian: what was his profession? bill: going back to the first crime, at the time of the first crime people would say that he was trained in veterinary medicine. that doesn't mean what it means now. but he had some skills working with 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 lumberjack.

although the word lumberjack is not used the same way then as we use now. we know that that is true because almost all of the rimes up until 1910 occur, and some after 1910, occur 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, bill, why do you spend your time with all this gruesome stuff? bill: people that know me know i'm a creep. no. people do look ascans at the time i spend on -- 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. to link it to -- it is newspapers that were my basic education. i mean, ok, i went to grade school, i went to high school, i went to college. years old me i was 5 until -- until -- until newspapers died, i was an avid reader of newspapers, and newspapers shaped my view of the world. grew up in a small town quite 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 ears old asking my sister what

an antique store was. we didn't have antique stores. there were a lot of things you didn't have in small towns in those times. i used newspapers to figure out the world, more or less. i think people in my generation did. if you look at newspapers, there's 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 7 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 ben mcgraph from

"the new yorker" in 2003. he writes a profile on you. "he turns on c-span, which he watches more than any other channel, and finds another politician lying, thus presenting the kind of puzzle e has been trying to solve all his life." quote, this is you, 'you have to try to reconstruct the organization of your thoughts so that it reaches the point of defending the absurd proposition that they are defending and then try to restrict the organization of your own thought so that you have a place to put the true fact which is consistent with your underlying belief.'" give us more. bill: first of all, i have no memory of having said that. i know people don't believe this but i don't read anything written about me, although great admiration for ben mcgraph but i never read that piece. -- ben mcgraff but i never read

that piece. 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 -- and yet we are desperate to nderstand the world. we are committed from the moment of birth to a struggle to understand the world which e can never win. because that is true, we make up understandings of the world which we call religion or political philosophy or xpertise, and we believe these things are true. as consequence of that, we all believe thousands of utterly nonsensical statements to be rue. ben says that politicians are lying, but i don't know that

they are lying quite. oliticians 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. does that make any sense at all? brian: i will just let it lie. [laughter] let me ask you, though, do you still watch and what do you see from lawrence, kansas, that we don't see living from this place? bill: that is the reason that i am a c-span junky, it is what ppened, you refuse to answer feed b.c.a., it's your --

feedback, it's your discipline and commitment to getting as close to the facts without your own interpretation, without your own overlaying of it, as you possibly can do. i take a lot of crap from my iberal friends because i watch fox news, but i also watch cnn and pbs. it is not that i -- i am 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 c-span is more useful for that than sources which think they have the world figured out, if that makes sense. brian: you tweet.

i will ask you in a second why you tweet. here's one of your tweets in december. "how many of us are old enough to remember 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? rl"the 10 minutes with a newsmaker and 50 minutes with a talking head is successful. it is commercially successful. why do you think that is more successful than the old way? bill: it is part of a system that has developed. e headed in that direction when people, probably in the lbj administration, but when -- maybe it was f.d.r., before my time. i don't know. 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 he newspeople would try to get away from the talking points, that they would try to escape he talking points. he talking head format developed as a way -- let me come at this from a different angle. what i was saying before, my basic philosophy of life is everybody has to have a system of understanding everything. and that is unfortunate because all of the systems of understanding everything are just bullshit. none of them work. none of them have any real -- no one understands the world.

no one has the capacity to understand the world, and all of the carefully articulated ystems to place everything are inherently false, but everyone has one. almost everyone is either a conservative or a liberal or a libertarian or a lunatic of some other stripe. in a competitive news nvironment, 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. [video clip] bill: one of the great problems with the human race is that

greed has no natural limit. and if greed had a natural limit we would all -- then it would -- we would all work through our problems a lot quicker, but it doesn't. brian: why doesn't greed have a natural limit? bill: organized religion and philosophy and politics are efforts to form philosophies hich 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 put more value on his hour of satisfaction than he did on the lives of the 100 or so people that he killed. his greed had no limit. i simply -- most of us limit our greed. most of us limit our greed by philosophy or religion, but it has no inherent and natural limit if philosophy and religion are taken away. brian: as a baseball aficionado and observer and advisor and all of that for the boston red sox, you look at the baseball

business and you can pick any of these businesses but what do you think will happen with the incredible amount of money being paid for somebody to throw a baseball or hit a baseball and the agents and the team owners and all of that, and the cost of the rights for television as they keep going up? where does that all go, and is there any greed in that mix? bill: brian, i know you try not to express opinions, but there is absolutely greed in that mix. in the long-term, eventually a competitive structure will evolve which results in a more reasonable distribution of the assets of games. eventually there will be --

either the major sports will expand to where they have 200 teams each or there will be competitive leagues established so that there are 200 teams in each sport in the united states. once that happens, the money that gets concentrated into relatively few hands will blow across the horizon more. however, is that going to happen in the next five years? probably not, but it will happen at some point in the next two lifetimes or so. brian: another 38 seconds of your philosophy in a speech you gave at longwood university back in 2015. [video clip] bill: certainty is the immediate cause of the most awful injustices in the world. there is a story in the last week or so that fbi analysts

for dna have testified improperly over a long period of time, almost always for the prosecution, and now a society will have to come to terms with that. bill: why did you want to say -- that in that speech? bill: it is the core of my belief system, these philosophies we create out of nothing, these false explanations of all phenomena in the world, are the core of our being. that was the news story which was in the news at that time, and so i picked that up and used it to tie into the general

point i was making. however, i was also working on this book at that time. at the time i gave that speech i was working on the book. one of the things that happened in these towns where the man from the train committed his crimes is that in at least two cases, what would always happen is that people would decide ased on no evidence at all that they knew who committed the crime. but in at least two cases, and possibly three, black men were murdered by lynch mobs because they were certain that this person had to have committed the crime. if you go back and look at what was their reason for believing that, it was nothing. that they knew who committed the crime. but the certainty that they

knew who committed the crime led to injustice, as it always does. i was terribly bothered by the case of ryan ferguson, a young man in missouri who spent several years in prison for a crime that should have been obvious for anyone who looked at it for 20 minutes he could not have possibly committed. but the prosecutors were certain that they knew what happened, and their certainty that they knew what happened ed to injustice. if you look at any crime story and walk backward on it and say, where did this crime story began, the answer is that it always begins in a fantasy. basically all crimes begin in a fantasy. to look at a case of injustice and walked backward and say, where did this injustice originate, it originates in the certainty that we know what

happened when in reality we do not know what happened. brian: i found this to be a bill james-ism. i'm not sure it is. at the end of the book in the acknowledgments, i want to ask why you wrote this sentence this way. "i would like to thank some very nice lady at the kansas historical society who may have been susan forbes, sara keckleson or sarah garten. i am sorry, i have lost the slip of paper that had your name on it." bill: i did some research at the kansas historical society and wrote down the name of the very nice lady who helped me, but i lost the name and rather than pretending i knew who it was and thanking the wrong person, i just thanked them all. brian: why didn't you call them and ask them? bill: it was two or three years later and i did not think they would remember me. also i am lazy.

[laughter] brian: chapter 40 was written by your daughter? y is that the chapter about -- brian: no. i was not yet an author of this book. just a researcher. bill: she wrote a great deal of that chapter, yes. brian: the reason i ask that is has anybody else ever found someone they thought was the man from the train? you name a person, tell us where he died, all that kind of stuff. i am not going to give it away here, but were you the first people to discover this? bill: we were the first people to tie him to the crime. there were two people in villisca who were tied to the villisca crime. there were people who were murdered for the belief that

they committed an isolated crime. but i don't think -- and there have been -- if i could be arrogant for a moment, there have been people claiming that the person responsible for this series of crimes was a or b or c, but you cannot really take them seriously because they are not serious researchers and do not do the work to establish that they know what they are talking about. we were the first serious people to nominate somebody. brian: another tweet. "guys, relax. our president is not crazy, he just has a debilitating lack of self-awareness and has spent 60 years compensating for that by trying to appear superman. when you phrase it that way it sounds crazy, but he's no

crazier than napoleon or caesar or..." bill: like all good liberals, i have a rather intense dislike of our president. however, i had a great respect for democracy. i didn't vote for him, but he was elected. he had an idea. he had a set of things he wanted to work on. he had a set of ideas that he put in front of the american people. those ideas won the election. that fact is entitled to respect, and i am always trying in my own way to lower the temperature a little bit and get people to work back toward the facts rather than, well -- temperature a little bit and you know as well as i do the media has been running around the past couple of weeks saying the president is crazy.

it doesn't help our democracy to work well to be doing that. brian: you say in a 1914 "new republic" interview, "on politics we have made no progress at all. people who are perceived as learned experts go on television to say stupid stuff and nobody says that is really stupid. don't you find that to be true?" bill: the explanations that politicians give for the phenomena that are happen -- not politicians, but the talking heads -- the explanations they give for phenomena are patently untrue i hate to pick on david brooks phenomena are patently untrue in case after case left and

right. because he is a good one, but i remember in the example that always stuck with me, the 2008 democratic campaign. david brooks promised us that illary would beat barack obama because the democratic contest always comes down to someone who is favored by the educated public, the democratic college raduates, the democratic working-class, and the person favored by the working class always wins. it is such a stupid analysis that it is difficult to believe that anyone ever said that. i mean, if in baseball you ffered a comparable analysis

of why one team would win the world series, you would be laughed off the stage. it is true that baseball analysis in the 1960's and 1970's relied on generalizations of that nature in which you take -- the problem with a generalization of that nature is you take seven or eight contests and problem with a generalization draw a generalization about how hey came out and then say that that generalization has to hold n all future contests. i find this to be generally true of all talking head analysis, and that is why i want to go back to "face the nation" interviewing the newsmaker rather than another ournalist.

i find the liberal analysis and conservative analysis of the facts to be filled with such obvious, silly generalizations that i can't comprehend why people can't see through them. i thought about this for years. why aren't people able to see through generalizations of that nature? but we hear them everyday. brian: our guest has been bill james, who lives in lawrence, kansas, works for the boston red socks, and has a book, "the man from the train." years. thank you for joining us. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018]

announcer: for free transcripts or to give us your comments on this program, visit us at q-and-a.org. this program is also available as a c-span podcast. >> the u.s. house taking a break before gaveling back in for short speeches at 2:00 p.m. eastern. legislative work starts at 4:00 this afternoon. nine bills on the calendar today. including one expediting military sales to jordan and another providing for cyber security assistance to ukraine to help fend off russian cyber attacks. requested votes will take place at 6:30 p.m. eastern. with the house taking another break later this afternoon, we'll take the opportunity to bring you live coverage of president trump. he's traveling to cincinnati.

he's expected to talk about tax reform. we'll take you there live when he starts now scheduled for 2:30 p.m. eastern. >> tonight, on the communicators, we're in las vegas for the second part of our coverage from the consumer electronic show where each year tech companies unveil new products and give insight to what's ahead this. week the latest on robot and drone technology using artificial intelligence and sophisticated cameras. watch the communicators tonight t 8:00 eastern on c-span2. >> tuesday morning, live in jackson, mississippi, for the next stop on the c-span bus 50 capitals tour. mitts miss attorney jim hood will be our guest on the bus during "washington journal" starting at 9:30 am eastern. >> joining us on the set is christopher