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 beaten to death in Salem, Oregon, on December 1, and his body was found two days later in a boxcar at Millersburg. Three weeks after Pettit died, a homeless shelter in Bakersfield had issued papers in his name. 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.
The officers had been watching for him. Fliers about a homicide suspect known to ride the rails had gone out to railroad police, and the agents who found him in the yard searched his belongings on the strength of them. Silveria told California 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 word "Freedom" was tattooed on his neck.
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.
Oregon came in December. After Pettit, Michael Andrew Clites, twenty-four, of Waldport, was found bludgeoned to death in a freight car in Portland; reports give the date as December 5 or December 6, 1995. A Eugene detective traced Clites's last hours to Eugene and found an eyewitness who put Sidetrack with him, and police concluded that he had died there. 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; he was also suspected in a death in Arizona. Court documents described his confessions as giving "exact and specific detail." 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, later filed with the court. In them he called himself "the leader of my nation: the homeless" and wrote that he could have tortured others of the reader's world, "but I chose to torture my world, because I preyed on the weak."
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. Only four ended in convictions.
Silveria was indicted in Salem for Pettit's murder on March 12, 1996, and pleaded not guilty that summer before Marion County Circuit Judge James Rhoades. His lawyer, Tom Bostwick, filed notice that he might raise a defense of mental disease or defect, to keep the option open, and the deputy district attorney, Diana Moffat, said the state would seek the death penalty.
The trial was set for March 1, 1998. On January 30, a month before it, Silveria pleaded guilty to the aggravated murders of Pettit and Clites. In a prepared statement read to the judge he admitted beating both men to death in order to rob them, and he wept. Bostwick told the court that his client wanted to apologize for the grief, pain and sorrow he had caused the victims' families. Moffat acknowledged that Silveria had behaved well in jail but called the crimes brutal and cowardly. Rhoades sentenced him at once to two consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole; under the plea he gave up his right to appeal, and he avoided a possible death sentence.
Kansas came next. In March 1998 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for Charles Randall Boyd's death at the state park and received a life sentence. The prosecutor there, defending the deal, said a trial would have pulled stretched police and prosecutorial resources away from other work for a man already serving life. Florida followed with a guilty plea for the killing of Willie James Clark, by most accounts on May 20, 1998, in Leon County. The other deaths, Miller's among them, have been attributed to him without a charge. He was later transferred to the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington.
March 3, 1959: Robert Joseph Silveria Jr. is born in Redwood City, California.
1981: by his own and investigators' accounts, he begins riding the freight trains.
July 8, 1992: Darren Royal Miller, nineteen, is found with severe head injuries in his sleeping bag at Thompson Springs, Utah; the death is later attributed to Silveria without a charge.
April 28, 1994: Willie James Clark, fifty-four, is found killed by a blow to the head in Tallahassee, Florida.
August 2, 1994: Michael Garfinkle, twenty, is found bludgeoned at Emeryville, California; Silveria later admits killing him.
April 21, 1995: Roger Lee Bowman, thirty-eight, is found in Salt Lake City.
July 23, 1995: James E. McLean, fifty, is stabbed to death in his shack at a homeless camp in Albany, Oregon.
July 28, 1995: Charles Randall Boyd, forty-six, is found beaten to death at a Kanopolis Lake campground in Kansas.
October 15, 1995: Paul Wayne Matthews, forty-three, is found dead at Whitefish, Montana.
December 1, 1995: William Avis Pettit Jr., thirty-nine, is beaten to death in Salem, Oregon.
December 5 or 6, 1995: Michael Andrew Clites, twenty-four, is found bludgeoned to death in a freight car in Portland.
March 2, 1996: a railroad officer arrests Silveria in the rail yards at Roseville, California, carrying dead men's papers.
March 12, 1996: he is indicted in Salem for Pettit's murder.
June 1996: officers find more than a hundred pages of letters and notes that appear to have been written or dictated by Silveria.
January 30, 1998: he pleads guilty to the aggravated murders of Pettit and Clites and is sentenced to two consecutive terms of life without parole.
March 1998: he pleads guilty to first-degree murder in Boyd's death in Kansas and receives a life sentence.
May 20, 1998: by most accounts, he pleads guilty in Leon County, Florida, to killing Willie James Clark.