MURDER ON THE SUNSET LIMITED

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

JOHN R. SIGNOR, EDITOR OF SP TRAINLINE magazine, is not accustomed to late-night calls from the FBI. His quarterly publication, which has a circulation of 1,800, goes out almost exclusively to former employees and aficionados of the Southern Pacific rail line--the real buffs, people whose worst railroad-related crime may be occasionally boring their nieces, nephews or grandchildren with boxcar arcana. But early last week the bureau did come knocking at Signor's door in Dunsmuir, California. Did Signor write an article in the fall '95 issue called "Tragedy at Harney"? He did. And was the article not about a terrible crime in 1939, when someone removed a stretch of track, bypassed an alarm system and sent the train City of San Francisco tumbling into a Nevada canyon, killing 24? It was. And was Signor aware that almost exactly the same crime had just unfolded again on a train track in Arizona, like a nightmare repeating itself after 56 years? Signor was aware. He watches the news.

It was a chilly, 60-degree night in southern Arizona last Monday. The moon was full, and Amtrak's 12-car Sunset Limited, bearing 248 passengers and 20 crew members, was doing between 50 and 55 m.p.h. as it approached a gentle curve not too far from the tiny town of Hyder. It was 1:20 a.m., and most of the passengers on the train, which is especially popular among retirees traveling from Los Angeles to Miami and back, were in bed. Suddenly, they were not so much awakened as catapulted from sleep. Those who kept their wits about them remember a terrible, prolonged shriek of metal against metal. For others, their waking sensation was pain, as they smashed into a wall or a chair or a sink. The Limited's two diesel locomotives had safely crossed a 30-ft.-high trestle over a desert gulch. But the next five cars--a dormitory car for crew members, two sleeping cars for passengers and a dining car--had jumped the rails. One hit the ground below; the other three hung down from the trestle like beads in a giant's necklace.

Darryl Taylor, 29, an Amtrak dishwasher, awoke from a concussion to hear people all around him yelling. "Some were screaming 'Where's my wife?' 'Where's my husband?' Some were screaming for their medications," he recalls. Despite his injury, Taylor joined other passengers turned rescuers. (The crash site was so remote that it took emergency personnel half an hour to reach it.) He ventured into the overturned cars nine times. When possible, he freed the occupants by sledgehammering windows. For passengers too fragile to climb or be pulled out by the hands, he and others crafted slings out of sheets. Cuts and bruises abounded. Said one Samaritan: "I picked up a three-year-old, and his face looked like he had gone three rounds with Mike Tyson."

Taylor and the other rescuers did not encounter any dead bodies--at least not until they reached the compartment of his friend Mitchell Bates, a cheerful 41-year-old sleeping-car attendant from Los Angeles with 20 years on the railroad. They found Bates crumpled beneath his mattress. "His body was bent, and his head was smashed," says Taylor. "We were yelling 'Wake up! Please wake up!' I sat by the door and cried."

After rescue helicopters had come and gone with a hundred wounded, Bates was still the only murder victim. For murder it was: a simple, diabolically elegant crime that stirred national fears of a new wave of domestic terrorism and should logically have taken many more lives. Most of the tracks in the U.S. rail system are welded together, but those near Hyder are punctuated with 36-in. connecting bars. The saboteur apparently knew this, and in the 18 hours since the last train crossed the trestle, he removed a connector. Normally, such a disruption would break an electrical circuit that runs through the tracks, automatically triggering red warning lights. But the murderer had foreseen that, and used a length of orange electric cord to maintain the connection. If unconfirmed reports are correct, he also removed 29 spikes, releasing the rails from the wooden crossties that steady them, and wedged the outside rail, which bears most of the train's tens of thousands of pounds as it traverses a curve, out of line. Had the Sunset Limited's engines not somehow navigated the trestle, the whole train would have shot into space, and the death toll might have reached double or triple digits.

As they staggered out of the train, several passengers found 8 1/2-by-11-in. sheets bearing a typed note. The two-paragraph missive, one copy of which was obtained by the TV show Hard Copy, opened poetically: "Before dawn the women awoke to say their morning prayers..." But it then modulated into a detailed accusation: that FBI agents besieging the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993 intentionally overturned the women's kerosene lamps, causing the deadly fire that consumed the building. The second paragraph listed other perceived transgressions by federal, state and local authorities, including the horribly botched federal raid on the family of white separatist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. It closed with a demand for an "independent Federal agency to police the law enforcement agencies and other government employees." It was signed "Sons of the Gestapo."

On the basis of the note, many immediately assumed that the crime was the work of an antigovernment paramilitary group--a reasonable hypothesis, given that Arizona harbors several active militia, skinhead and white-supremacist organizations. The group's acronym, "SOG," might be seen as a play on "ZOG," the fictional Zionist Occupation Government that several hate groups see as the enemy. Derailment is not a foreign concept in paramilitary circles; a book called The Road Back, advertised in a 1994 catalog put out by the Militia of Montana, offers a detailed plan involving explosives.

But militias nationwide and even some of their critics soon began expressing doubts about the note. "A setup," said Dean Compton, a Northern California paramilitary leader and founder of the National Alliance of Christian Militia, echoing a common sentiment. "We went through every computer data base we had, and there's no militia in the country that has ever heard of the name." At least two aspects of the note seem suspect: most extremists reserve the term Gestapo for the government, and few of them trust the feds enough to suggest that they police themselves. Joel Breshin, head of the Arizona Anti-Defamation League, finds the moniker "almost laughable" as a militia title. And he maintains that, in his state at least, the skinheads who might find the name attractive "don't have the know-how" to pull off the derailment. A veteran FBI agent not assigned to the case was even more dismissive. "Sons of Gestapo," he snorted. "Bullshit. If somebody really wanted to get us chasing our tail, they'd have signed it Arizona Militia."

Speculation shifted. Perhaps the note was a cover for someone with a more personal grudge against Amtrak, the Sunset Limited or someone on that doomed train. In Hyder people wondered about a suspicious brush fire that had threatened a wooden railroad bridge, and a stick of dynamite that had turned up unclaimed in an Exxon station men's room nearby. In downtown Phoenix, authorities foiled two men who may have been up to no good with a railroad device called a derailer. National attention focused more on notices recently posted by Amtrak announcing its intention to end direct service on the 90-mile branch line that includes Hyder and Phoenix. The sabotage, went the theory, could have been the revenge of a soon-to-be-jobless railroad worker. But that hypothesis, too, has flaws: rail-union officials say dropping the Phoenix loop would be unlikely to jeopardize the jobs of Amtrak or Southern Pacific workers. Also, Amtrak has postponed eliminating the branch pending upcoming shifts in the industry.

That left those following the crime right back where they started. For the 90-agent, Oklahoma City-size FBI contingent assigned to the case, that meant, amid the sand, saguaros and 114-degree heat of the Arizona desert, examining every piece of debris as huge cranes lifted the wreckage, and interviewing every possible witness. The agents projected a certain assurance. "I don't know whether the motive is a disgruntled employee or an act of terrorism--but we will find out," said Robert Bryant, the FBI's top counterterrorism officer. High bureau officials estimated that the case could be wrapped up in months, if not weeks.

It is to be hoped their confidence is not misplaced. Back in Dunsmuir, the FBI agent's interview with John Signor about his article progressed positively enough. He provided a list of his subscribers, including the 30 who live in Arizona. He shared what he knew about the tracks outside Phoenix. He remained polite when, almost as an afterthought, the agent asked if he had an alibi for early Monday morning. (He does.) But looming over the conversation was a fact Signor did not have to mention to the agent, since it is clearly stated in his article on the derailment of 1939. No culprit was ever found.

--Reported by Margot Hornblower and Kathy Shocket/Phoenix, Elaine Shannon/Washington and Susanne Washburn/New York

With reporting by MARGOT HORNBLOWER AND KATHY SHOCKET/PHOENIX, ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON AND SUSANNE WASHBURN/NEW YORK