Were the 1906 deaths of 4 Cape Bretoners the work of an American serial killer?

In the chilly, early hours of Feb. 16, 1906, the engineer of a coal car heading to the Dominion No. 1 colliery in Cape Breton spotted a house on fire next to the rail line in Old Bridgeport.

Inside the home was an Austrian immigrant, Anton Stetka, who worked at the mine, his wife and their two young children. Despite efforts to save the family, the Stetkas died in the fire.

Once it was safe to examine what remained of the small, one-storey home, people noticed something was amiss with the victims' bodies.

"The skulls of the children have been crushed in with a heavy weapon like an axe, while it is said that the skull of the man was found some distance away from the body, as if it had been severed entirely," said a Feb. 17, 1906, article from the Barre Daily Times.

It was believed someone had killed the family with an axe and then set fire to the home. An axe was found in the rubble close to the bodies.

For author Bill James, the circumstances are eerie. He's the co-author of The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery. His book details 59 murders in the U.S. between 1898 and 1912 that he's confident were committed by a man named Paul Mueller, as well as others he thinks the man may have committed.

The man killed in the middle of the night, in his victims' homes, using the blunt side of an axe as his weapon. When he was done, the home was left to burn while the killer made his escape via railroad, always conveniently located within a quarter mile of his crime scenes. The murders happened primarily in areas where lumbering or mining were major employers.

The Stetka case, which James details in his book, checks off all of these boxes.

"It's a perfect copy," said James.

In late February 1898, a man matching Mueller's description was arrested in Sydney, N.S. He had been talking a lot about the murder of a family of three just weeks earlier in Brookfield, Mass., which were the first murders James believes Mueller committed.

"Nothing came of it, but it could be that that somehow is related to the parts of the story that we don't yet know," said James.

After the Stetka deaths, a coroner's inquest was held immediately, which heard from around 30 witnesses. The verdict on Feb. 22 said the Stetka deaths "occurred under most unusual and suspicious circumstances." It was recommended the matter be investigated "under the direct supervision of the Crown."

Halifax's police chief, Nic Power, was brought in.

"He was a bad detective in terms of his investigational skills and probably more importantly, he was a bad detective morally," said Bob Gordon, the author of The Bad Detective: The True Story of a Victorian Sleuth, which is scheduled to be released July 7.

"He was concerned infinitely more with this media image, particularly in the yellow press of the day, than the pursuit of justice, frankly."

Gordon said Power had a track record of reaching hasty conclusions on cases, with little regard for the facts.

One example was in October 1883 when he supposedly foiled a plot by two Americans to assassinate Prince George — the future King George V — who was aboard HMS Canada in Halifax harbour. The Americans planned to use dynamite to blow up the vessel and kill the people on board, Power crowed to the press.

"It was entirely untrue," said Gordon.

When the matter went to trial, the accused — who had dynamite on them because they were going to work in gold fields in the province — were convicted of not paying customs duty on the dynamite, and were sentenced to six months in jail.

Gordon said no retractions or corrections were published in the newspapers of the day. Rather, the Morning Herald ran an inch of copy on the front page about the matter on May 8, 1884.

"No one seemed to want to dispel the myth," said Gordon. "It made great copy and sold newspapers."

After a brief investigation into the Stetka case, Power said there was no crime.

"And his justification was quite simply, 'I've solved many cases of arson in the past and I say this was an accidental fire, period,'" said Gordon.

"No investigation, no evidence. And based on the testimony at the coroner's inquiry, it's quite hard to not believe they were murdered and the house burned down around them. That's particularly true when one knows the backstory to the Stetka family."

Tragic backstory

In the month before the deaths, a local man, James Snelgrove, was charged with attempting to rape Mrs. Stetka. Gordon said the trial was supposed to begin on the morning of Feb. 16, the very day the Stetkas were found dead.

At the time, Snelgrove was incarcerated. He was later sentenced to four years in prison for the attempted rape.

In another cruel twist of fate, before their deaths, the Stetkas had made plans to return home and had even started packing their belongings.

The case against the man from the train

But while the Stetka case shares many similarities with the man from the train, there are several reasons why James doesn't believe it's part of the series.

One has to do with the victims themselves. Mueller's victims often included a girl around the age of 12 who was sexually assaulted after her death. The Stetka children, however, were much younger: a four-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy, according to a Feb. 17, 1906, article in the Windsor Star.

Nova Scotia's cold winter weather also raises doubt in James's mind. If Mueller was responsible for the Stetka deaths, James said it would have been only the second time he killed in cold weather. James said the man hated the cold and as winter approached, he'd head south to warmer locales.

Environment and Climate Change Canada records show that on the day of the Stetka deaths, the temperature in nearby Sydney fell somewhere between –1.1 C and –10.6 C.

The previous murders James attributes to Mueller happened in Cottonwood, Ala., on Feb. 7, 1906, just nine days before the Old Bridgeport deaths.

James said it would have been possible to travel thousands of kilometres to Nova Scotia from Alabama in that time frame using trains, but it would have been challenging given the author believes the serial killer train hopped as his means of transportation.

James is best known for his work as the godfather of sabermetrics, the practice of using advanced analytics in baseball as shown in the movie Moneyball. A numbers guy, he pegs the chance that Mueller was the murderer in the Stetka case at 35 per cent.

If the man from the train was, in fact, responsible, James doesn't believe the Stetkas were chosen at random.

"I think that if he committed this crime, he went there to do it," he said. "I think he knew the family somehow from something that happened years ago and went there to take care of them."

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