Robert Joseph Silveria Jr

Victims

4 CONVICTIONS across three states: two counts of aggravated murder in Oregon, for William Avis Pettit and Michael Andrew Clites, and one count of first-degree murder in each of Kansas, for Charles Randall Boyd, and Florida, for Willie James Clark. Beyond that the figures diverge sharply and none is established: investigators put his total at nine to fourteen, he was said at the time of the Oregon plea to be suspected in at least ten further killings, and he is variously reported to have confessed to fourteen or to twenty-eight. Published estimates run as high as thirty or more. NO FIGURE ABOVE FOUR IS SUPPORTED BY A CONVICTION

Years active

1981 - 1996

Location

Several States, USA

Method

Stabbing with knife or bludgeoned to death

Status

A member of the Freight Train Riders of America who rode freight trains for fifteen years, killing fellow rail riders and transients. Arrested on March 2, 1996 after a transient survived an attack and identified him. On January 30, 1998 in Marion County Circuit Court he pleaded guilty to two counts of AGGRAVATED MURDER, of William Avis Pettit, 39, in Salem and Michael Andrew Clites, 24, of Waldport, both in December 1995, and was sentenced by Judge James Rhoades to two consecutive life terms, avoiding a possible death sentence. Clites was found dead in a boxcar in Portland but police concluded he had been killed in Eugene. His defence counsel told the court he wished to apologise for the grief he had caused; the deputy district attorney said his victims "were usually asleep and unaware of his attacks". He was subsequently convicted of FIRST-DEGREE MURDER in KANSAS for the killing of Charles Randall Boyd, and of FIRST-DEGREE MURDER in FLORIDA for the killing of Willie James Clark, 54, found dead on April 28, 1994 in Tallahassee, so he holds FOUR murder convictions across three states. HE IS HELD AT THE WYOMING MEDIUM CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION AT TORRINGTON, WYOMING, not in Oregon. At the time of the Oregon plea authorities said he was suspected in at least ten other killings of boxcar riders nationwide.

Robert Joseph Silveria junior was born in California in 1959, served in the Army, and by the early 1980s was riding freight trains as a hobo, moving between the rail yards and the camps alongside the tracks, using heroin and methamphetamine.

Between 1981 and 1996 he killed at least fourteen and by some accounts more than twenty other train riders in a dozen states, beating them with a hammer or an axe handle while they slept in boxcars and in camps, or stabbing them. He took their possessions, and, crucially, their identification. He was called the Boxcar Murderer, after the freight cars he lived and killed in.

That last detail is the case. He swapped identity papers with the dead, so that a body found beside a track in Oregon carried the wallet of a man from Kansas, and the misidentification pushed the deaths into different jurisdictions with the wrong names attached. Almost nobody looked for the victims. Train riders in America in that period were a population of tens of thousands of men with no addresses, and a body in a boxcar was recorded and shelved.

He was known along the rails as Sidetrack. He was arrested on March 2, 1996 in Auburn, Washington, and confessed at length, drawing maps for investigators from several states.

He pleaded guilty and received two consecutive life terms without parole in Oregon in 1998, and further life sentences in Kansas and elsewhere. The FBI opened a broader look at deaths in the rail-riding population afterwards, and the number of unsolved killings in it was found to be considerably larger than anyone had recorded.