Overview

Blood on the Rails: The True Story of Robert Joseph Silveria Jr. Between 1981 and 1996, a man known on the freight rails as Sidetrack rode the vast American freight network from yard to yard, killing as he went. Robert Joseph Silveria Jr., the Boxcar Killer, is suspected of murdering as many as forty-seven people across twenty-eight states, exploiting the anonymity of the rail world and the invisibility of his victims to conduct one of the longest and most geographically extensive serial killing campaigns in American history. The Boxcar Killer: Blood on the Rails is a full-length narrative account of Silveria's life, crimes, and capture, from the violent household of his Redwood City childhood through fifteen years of predatory violence on the freight lines of the American West to his eventual arrest in a California freight yard in March 1996. Drawing on investigative records, forensic evidence, and confessional material, this book examines the psychology of a career killer, the brutal social world of the Freight Train Riders of America, and the systemic failures that rendered his victims, homeless men, veterans, transients, all but invisible to the law enforcement systems designed to protect them. It is also, above all, a book about the dead: who they were, how they lived, and what was lost when the freight trains carried the wrong man into their world. Meticulous, humane, and unflinching, The Boxcar Killer is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how America's most forgotten citizens became the prey of its most invisible killer.

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Arthur Doyle-Fahy was born in Limerick and spent years working as a criminal justice researcher and writer before turning his attention to the darker chapters of American crime history. A long-standing fascination with the sociology of marginalised communities and the failures of institutional justice drew him to the case of Robert Joseph Silveria Jr. - a story he came to believe had never been told with the seriousness and the human weight it demanded. Doyle-Fahy brings to his true crime writing a criminologist's analytical rigour and a storyteller's commitment to the humanity of those at the centre of the case, particularly its forgotten victims. Blood on the Rails is his most ambitious work to date.

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