On December 30, 1978, Rudy Bladel checked into a hotel in Jackson, Michigan, with the parts of a 12-gauge shotgun in a suitcase. He had bought the gun at a shop in Elkhart, Indiana, about two years before. The next day, New Year's Eve, he carried the suitcase to the Amtrak depot, set it down on the platform, put the shotgun together and walked to the door of the railroad crew's locker room. He shot the flagman, Robert Lee Blake, forty-two, of Southgate, where he stood, and then the conductor, William Gulak, fifty, of Lincoln Park, who was sitting at the table. He put another slug into each man and turned for the door. As he went out he saw the fireman, Charles Lee Burton, thirty-two, of Jackson, looking into the room, and shot him too; the blast threw Burton back onto the platform. Bladel took the gun apart, hid it under bushes at Cascade Falls and went home to Elkhart, where he was living at a mission for homeless men.
He was born in Chicago on December 8, 1932, into a railroad family. His father, Holgar, worked for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific, and Rudy grew up at 67th Street and Ashland Avenue and took auto shop at the Vocational High School on the South Side. After graduating in 1951 he went to work as a fireman on the Rock Island, then enlisted as an army engineer and served in Korea, where he hostled locomotives in a roundhouse, sometimes under fire. He later said an army test had put his IQ at 145. A motorcycle accident after he came home left him with a posture and a walk people remembered.
Railroading was his whole life, and in 1959 it went wrong. The New York Central moved its operations from Niles, Michigan, to a new yard at Elkhart, and most of the jobs there went to local men; the Michigan men, Bladel among them, were bumped down or laid off. He blamed the union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, for selling them out.
The first killings came on August 2 or 3, 1963, in a yard at Hammond, Indiana. The signalman, Virgil Terry, fifty-two, got no answering signal from a locomotive cab, climbed up to look and found the engineer, Roy Bottorf, sixty, and the fireman, Paul Overstreet, forty-five, slumped over the controls, each shot in the back of the head with a .22. A witness had heard a motorcycle leaving. Bladel was then living alone in a trailer in Blue Island, Illinois, and getting around on a motorcycle. Nobody was charged.
On August 6, 1968, the engineer John W. Marshall, fifty-one, of Niles, was standing beside his diesel in the Elkhart yard when he was hit at close range with 12-gauge shotgun blasts to the body and twice in the head. Men saw it happen, but they could describe the killer only by his build and his odd walk.
On March 30, 1971, Louis John Sayne, thirty-eight, an engineer from New Buffalo, Michigan, was shot twice in the back with a .357 Magnum revolver. He lived, wrestled the gun away and shot his attacker in the stomach, and both men were taken to the same emergency room, where Sayne recognized an old workmate. When he asked Bladel why, Bladel said he wanted "to get the Niles men out of Elkhart." On December 31, 1971, he was sentenced to one to five years for attempted murder at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, and he was out in eighteen months.
On April 5, 1976, the engineer James M. "Tiny" McCrory, fifty-one, of Niles, was sitting in his cab near the diesel house at Elkhart when he was shot in the head with a deer slug from a 20-gauge shotgun. In January 1978 federal agents arrested Bladel after local police told them he had bought a .357 Magnum in South Bend, which as a convicted felon he could not legally own. He was given another one to five years, served at the federal prison in Sandstone, Minnesota, and was released on November 16, 1978, six weeks before Jackson.
Police connected the Jackson murders to the earlier railroad killings at once. Bladel was picked up on January 1, 1979, questioned twice and released on January 3 for lack of evidence. Divers went into the Grand River, helicopters searched rooftops for the gun, and investigators even consulted psychics. About three months later the shotgun parts were found at Cascade Falls; ejector marks on the spent shells proved it was the weapon, and its serial number led back to Bladel, whose 1971 conviction had by then put him back at the top of the list.
He was arrested at the mission on March 22, 1979, and talked to police that evening without a lawyer. At his arraignment the next morning, Friday, March 23, with the detective in charge of the case in the courtroom, he asked for appointed counsel because he could not pay for one. The court mailed a notice to a law firm, which did not receive it until Tuesday, March 27. On Monday, March 26, two officers read him his Miranda rights in the county jail and took a confession. He had asked several times about his lawyer and had not been told one had been appointed. He later withdrew the confession, said the police had coerced it, and told a different story: he had come to Jackson to pick up his broken motorbike, had gone into the depot only to wash his hands, and had sold the shotgun to a stranger in Elkhart weeks earlier.
The trial court admitted the confession, and Bladel was convicted of the three murders and sentenced to three consecutive life terms. The Michigan Court of Appeals first upheld the conviction, then reversed it on reconsideration and ordered a new trial, and the Michigan Supreme Court, taking his case together with that of Robert Bernard Jackson, held that both men's confessions had been obtained in violation of the Sixth Amendment. In 1986 the United States Supreme Court agreed. In Michigan v. Jackson it ruled that once a defendant asks for a lawyer at arraignment, any waiver he gives in a later interrogation started by police is invalid. Chief Justice Burger concurred with a warning about hard cases making bright-line rules; Justice Rehnquist dissented. The Supreme Court overruled Jackson in 2009, in Montejo v. Louisiana.
Retried without the confession, Bladel was convicted again and again sentenced to life. The Jackson County prosecutor, Edward Grant, called it the costliest case the county had ever tried. The Hammond, Elkhart and Sayne shootings of the 1960s and 1970s were never brought to trial as murders. He died of thyroid cancer on November 15, 2006, at a hospital in Jackson, the city where he had killed the last three men.