When a railroad officer arrested Robert Joseph Silveria Jr. in the rail yards at Roseville, California, northeast of Sacramento, on March 2, 1996, the backpack he was carrying held a dead man's Social Security card, birth certificate, food stamps and hair beads. William Avis Pettit Jr., thirty-nine, had been found beaten to death in a boxcar at Millersburg, Oregon, three months before. In the same pack were the identification card and food stamp papers of Paul Wayne Matthews, found dead in a homeless camp outside Whitefish, Montana, the previous October, and the credit cards of Charles Randall Boyd, found beaten to death in Kansas that July. Silveria told detectives he used his victims' birth certificates, Social Security cards and names to get food stamps and other public assistance.
He was born on March 3, 1959, in Redwood City, California, and by his own and investigators' accounts rode the freight trains from 1981 onward, one of the transients who moved between rail yards and the camps beside the tracks. Along the rails he was called Sidetrack, and he was held to be a member of the Freight Train Riders of America, a loose gang of rail riders with a reputation for robbery and violence; his case was what first brought the gang national attention, and more than twenty law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, learned of it through his investigation. Other riders who had shared food and drink with him described him as moody and foul-tempered, and no different from anyone else on the road. "I thought he was just another homeless guy on the streets," one old hobo in Albany, California, told a reporter.
The dead were men no one was looking for. Darren Royal Miller, nineteen, stopped with two friends to party beside a pond at Thompson Springs, Utah, and was found the next morning, July 8, 1992, in his sleeping bag with severe head injuries. Willie James Clark, fifty-four, homeless but working as a Salvation Army bell ringer, was robbed and killed by a blow to the head in Tallahassee, Florida, and found on April 28, 1994. Michael Garfinkle, twenty, of Tarzana, had just graduated from Pierce College and was heading north on the rails toward Santa Cruz with a friend when he was found bludgeoned at Emeryville, California, on August 2, 1994; a detective there said Garfinkle had told Silveria, "This is my area," and Silveria later admitted killing him with an ax handle. Roger Lee Bowman, thirty-eight, last seen walking his dog along the tracks, was found in Salt Lake City on April 21, 1995. James E. McLean, fifty, was stabbed to death in his shack at a homeless camp in Albany, Oregon, on July 23, 1995, and robbed.
Charles Randall Boyd, forty-six, had met Silveria in El Paso, Texas, where Boyd was building a bunkhouse for a youth ranch, and traveled with him to Kansas; he was found beaten to death in a collapsed tent at a Kanopolis Lake campground on July 28, 1995. Paul Wayne Matthews, forty-three, was found at Whitefish on October 15. Then came Oregon in December: Pettit, found at Millersburg on December 3, and Michael Andrew Clites, twenty-four, of Waldport, found bludgeoned to death in Portland on December 5, though a Eugene detective traced his last hours to Eugene and found an eyewitness who put Sidetrack with him. Utah police already had Silveria in mind for Bowman before he confessed, but they had been looking for him under another name, Brad Foster.
During ten days in the Placer County jail after his arrest, he gave investigators from seven states enough detail to open cases across the West. He was charged with murders in Oregon, Kansas and Florida and confessed to killings in Montana, Utah, Washington and California. Police noted that he had intimate knowledge of the Garfinkle killing. In June 1996 officers raided an apartment building and a law office in Roseville and found more than a hundred pages of letters and notes that appeared to have been written or dictated by Silveria to a former Placer County jailmate. A Salem police detective and a prosecutor there worked the case back to its start, and by the end of their investigation Silveria had confessed to twenty-eight killings. Some reports put the count lower, at more than a dozen or at least fourteen, and published estimates run from nine to thirty or more.
In January 1998 he pleaded guilty in Oregon to the aggravated murders of Pettit and Clites, which spared him a possible death sentence, and received two consecutive life terms. He was also convicted of first-degree murder in Kansas for Charles Randall Boyd and in Florida for Willie James Clark. The other deaths, Miller's among them, have been attributed to him without a charge. He is serving his sentences at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington.