On the morning of August 6, 1968, in Elkhart, Indiana, a 51-year-old male train engineer from Niles, Michigan, named John W. "Wes" Marshall became the target of a calculated and brutal ambush. Marshall had just completed a run from Chicago and was in the Robert R. Young Penn Central Railroad yard, standing near his diesel locomotive. As he prepared to finish his shift, he was struck by multiple blasts from a 12-gauge shotgun.
The assailant, firing from close range, hit Marshall in the midsection, side, and the back of the head, killing him instantly. Witnesses in the rail yard later reported seeing a stocky, heavy-set figure with a distinctive, lumbering gait walking away from the scene before driving off in a white station wagon.
For years, the murder of John Marshall remained part of a terrifying pattern of violence targeting railroad employees in the region. Investigators eventually connected the killing to a long-standing grievance held by a former railway fireman named Rudy Bladel. Bladel had harbored a deep resentment since 1959, when a merger between freight yards in Niles, Michigan, and Elkhart, Indiana, resulted in him losing his seniority and job to workers transferring from Niles. Consumed by a desire for revenge against the "Niles men" whom he blamed for his professional misfortune, Bladel embarked on a sporadic shooting spree that spanned over a decade, stalking rail yards to execute unsuspecting workers.
It was not until 1979 that the law finally caught up with Bladel. Police arrested him in Indiana after he was discovered purchasing a weapon, a violation of his status as an ex-convict. Following his arrest, ballistics evidence and witness testimony linked him to the 1968 murder of Marshall, as well as the killings of two other railroad employees, Charles Snyder and Robert Blake. During the subsequent legal proceedings, prosecutors painted a picture of a man driven by a singular, obsessive grudge against the railroad industry and its specific employees.
Rudy Bladel was ultimately tried and found guilty for the murders. In 1979, a jury convicted him on three counts of murder, and he was sentenced to serve three consecutive life terms in prison. The conviction brought a close to the long investigation into the "Railway Killer," confirming that John Marshall’s death was not a random act of violence, but the tragic result of a former colleague's festering vendetta. Bladel remained incarcerated until his death in 2006.
