ISOLATED FROM the babble of 21st century America, off the tax and social security systems grids, census reports, governmental and corporate databases, invisible to the myriad eyes-in-the-sky that monitor Uncle Sam s sons and daughters, there exists a whole other state.
This is a culture of cast-outs individuals who have been shunned by mainstream society, or more often, have chosen to live outside its walls: Vietnam veterans, drug addicts, alcoholics, people evicted from mental institutions that have been shut down, welfare recipients who ve had their payments cut off, men who hit the road in order to avoid alimony and palimony payments.
These are what Nietzsche termed the botched and the broken , the flesh-and-blood detritus of the age, and their dog-eat-Darwin netherworld is governed by the law of the hobo-jungle, with its own customs and currencies, hierarchies and hazards.
And like the hobos of a century before, thousands of these destitutes have taken to riding the rails full time, freight train-hopping or catching out . Along America s 170,000 miles of track, an estimated 30,000 people illegally jump trains each year. Most do so out of necessity, but some are weekenders: wayward Deadhead dropouts still lured by visions of Kerouac or Woody Guthrie, or drug-free, vegetarian, yoga-practicing college kids looking to broaden their experiences. And, with their unsoiled rucksacks and barely broken-in hiking boots, these tourists are easy meat for predators like the FTRA.
The Freight Train Riders of America are a rogue gang of several hundred rail riders, originally founded by Vietnam veterans. Many members of the organisation now have strong affiliations with far right gun-toting survivalists or quasi-Nazi groups like the Aryan Nations. Affiliates of the gang are suspected of as many as 300 hobo murders in America over the past ten years.
FTRA originally stood for Fuck The Reagan Administration , a joke concocted by vets who, on returning to a life of disenfranchisement in their homeland, sought freedom in catching out, utilising survival skills picked up in the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam. These original members were regarded with some respect, but recent years have seen the development of a schism in the group, and the name is being appropriated by a violent, younger breed who, in some cases, jump the old guys and assume their identities.
FTRA members sport gang-style bandanas, red for the Southern Line (California to Texas), black for the North (Spokane to Minneapolis). The most popular initiation ritual involves urinating on the rags of an inductee. The new member, or prospect , then rolls up the piss-soaked bandana and wears it around his neck for up to five days. Discipline is maintained by groups of up to 100 Enforcers .
The latest generation have no respect, original member Jerry The Frog Fortin told journalist Alex Kershaw, who recently carried out an in-depth investigation into the FTRA and the phenomenon of railroad killers. They don t understand the proud traditions of the hobo the hard worker who built the West, kept the jungles clean, shared what he had with his fellow bos. Fortin had himself been recently beaten by baseball bat-wielding teenagers in North Dakota.
The FTRA first came to the attention of the Spokane police department in the early part of this decade, during investigations into the deaths of up to ten people on the railway line between Seattle and Minneapolis. Such deaths are often dismissed out of hand by many police officers as the result of drink or drug-fuelled quarrels, and there s even an unofficial code for such deaths: NHI no humans involved.
However, frustrated by the injustices he had witnessed over years of poking through the roominghouses and waystations of Oregon, officer Mike Quakenbush (recently made a Knight Of The Hobo Order Of Merit for his work in bringing railroad killers to justice) decided to dig a little deeper while investigating the death of one William Petit. The trail led him to the most notorious FTRA killer, Sidetrack (real name Robert Silveria), a 180 lb, six-foot heroin addict whose name inspired a Max Cady-like fear along the railway lines, a killer with the eyes of the devil who read the Bible after each murder.
A roofer by trade, Silveria would wait until his victims were asleep or drunk, then bludgeon them to death using a blunt object, usually an axe handle or baseball bat. He frequently adopted the identity of the victim, wearing his clothes and claiming welfare (after his arrest, it was discovered he had up to 28 forged stamp accounts across the states, yielding approximately $3000 a month).
It wasn t until a railyard bull apprehended Silveria in Roseville, one of the largest yards in the west, that Mike Quakenbush realised Sidetrack and Silveria were the same person. To the officer s astonishment, Silveria quickly confessed to two murders and volunteered details of six others (it was believed that he had murdered one hobo a month between April and December 1995), explaining that he was tired and his hands hurt from killing . Silveria was sentenced to 25 years in prison in Kansas in May of this year.

As recently as June, another killer was riding the US rails, and the reports that detailed his exploits would ve seemed more appropriate being churned out by the hiss and clank of archaic printing presses rather than the hum of the Internet. Indeed, the story of Rafael Resendez Rammrez is pure cowboy-gothic, straight out of a haunted Hank Williams tune.
Rammrez, suspected of murdering eight people the most recent victims being George Morber (79) and his daughter Carolyn Frederick (51) at Gorham, Illinois became the target of a massive FBI manhunt this summer. The Feds had already bungled his capture once: while under suspicion for at least two murders, Rammrez had been arrested by Immigration and Naturalisation Service officers as recently as last June 1 in Sunland Park, New Mexico, but they subsequently let him go.
When Rammrez prints were run through the INS computer, nothing came up their system was not linked to those of other law enforcement agencies. The next day, he was marched to the middle of one of the international bridges in El Paso and released into Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Two days later, another murder occurred, this time that of Josephine Konvicka, a 73-year-old widowed grandmother of six.
The earliest of the suspected Rammrez murders dates back to August 1997, when two University of Kentucky students were killed near the railroad tracks in Lexington. Junior Christopher Maier and his girlfriend were out walking late one night when they were accosted by a man demanding money. Although Maier did as he was told, the man killed him with a 50 lb rock, then raped the girl and left her for dead.
DNA samples reportedly linked the suspect to another murder, that of Dr Claudia Benton, a 39-year-old pediatric neurologist at the Baylor College of medicine in West University Place, a well-to-do Houston suburb situated near the railroad tracks. On December 18 1998, while her husband and daughters were away for the weekend, Benton was attacked and sustained multiple blows to the head and stab wounds to the back.
Five months later, on May 2 of this year, in Weimar, Texas, police found the bodies of Rev. Norman Sirnic and his wife, both 47, lying in their blood-soaked bed. Their heads had been smashed in with a 16-lb hammer, which had been casually left leaning against the wall at the scene of the crime. Again, Weimar is a railway town, serviced by dozens of freight trains hauling chemicals, cars and gravel. When police found many similarities between the Benton and Sirnic killings, they concluded that they had a serial killer on their hands.
Next came the Konvicka homicide, also in Weimar, immediately after Rammrez release at the border. This was swiftly followed on June 5 by the murder of 26-year-old elementary school teacher Noemi Dominguez, who had a small apartment near the railway line.
By June 8, when a federal task force of 200 agents led by Don Clark in Houston had been called in on the hunt for the killer, Rammrez was their chief suspect.
A 39-year-old migrant farmer with fluent English and a tattoo of a snake on his left forearm, Rammrez had as many as 30 aliases, and a criminal record dating back to 1976. Local police described him as a highly mobile predator who travelled the country by hopping freight trains, murdering without mercy, taunting authorities by returning to the scene of previous murders and killing again. If you look at the time frames between killings, they re getting shorter and shorter, Weimar Police Chief Bill Livingston said last June. It s almost like a dope user who needs to get a fix with greater frequency.
Police noted a pattern to the killer s crimes: in almost every case he had attacked the victim only about the head, and the bodies were typically covered with a sheet or blanket. Evidence also suggested that some of the women had been raped after death. He takes time with (his victims) the Harris County prosecutor told The Houston Chronicle. It appears that he enjoys hurting these people.
By the time of the most recent murders, those of George Morber and Carolyn Frederick in Illinois on June 15, the suspect had assumed the status of a mythic bogeyman in the mid and southwest, a shapeshifting transient with the ability to kill at will. The state of Texas offered a $60,000 cash reward for information leading to his capture.
Sightings grew more frequent; on June 21 in Louisville, a drug abuse counsellor reported speaking to a disheveled but happy and cheerful Hispanic male. The next day, another witness saw a man of similar appearance hopping a freight train in Ohio, and police searched all 75 cars and combed the area with bloodhounds. The day after that, in Cape Girardeau, a man living near the railroad tracks mistakenly shot his neighbour after she pounded on his door late at night. The man explained that he was afraid it had been Rammrez.

Rammrez was born Angel Leoncio Reyes Recendis in Puebla, Mexico in 1959. His mother, Virginia Resendez Di Maturino, raised the boy alone until the age of six when he went to live with the uncle from whom he would later take his name. At the age of 13 or 14, Rammrez was sexually assaulted by a group of older boys while swimming. Within three years he had begun crossing over into the United States to labour in the tobacco, cotton and rice fields. He also worked as a coyote , helping to smuggle illegal aliens across the border, as well as teaching English at a convent school, before settling with his common-law wife Julieta Dominguez Reyes and their infant daughter Liria, in the rural town of Rodeo, Mexico, about 300 miles from the Texas border.
Julieta, who works as a lab technician in a public health clinic, has referred to her husband as a perfect gentleman , describing how, when she was pregnant, he would massage her legs before she would go to work. Other sources in Rodeo paint a picture of an eccentric loner given to long bike rides accompanied by his dog, Patol.
However, Julieta admits that while in the US, Rammrez fell in with an anti-everything right-wing hate group opposed to gays and abortion clinics. (When asked for an official statement by INS officials as far back as 1988, Rammrez gave his name as Jose Mengele, the Spanish variant on the name of the famous Nazi Auschwitz doctor.) A local shopkeeper spoke of Rammrez talking about Christianity or right-wing politics in a soft and sweet voice.
On June 10, Rammrez received a phone call at his family bungalow in Rodeo. After ending the call, he told his wife that he would have to leave her, explaining that he was being pursued. He didn t say by whom, or why. Remembering the event, Julieta said that it was as if worms were consuming her husband s spirit from inside.
If they find me, he told her, let them kill me.
It didn t come to that. After a six-week tenure on America s most wanted list, Rammrez surrendered himself to police officers near El Paso, Texas on Tuesday July 13 last. The Feds finally got their man. n