This is murder in the rain where where each week Emily Rowney, Alicia Holland, and Josh McCullough tell true crime stories of the Pacific Northwest. Murder in the Rain contains graphic content, listener discretion is advised. Oh, Last week I told you about Robert Silvera, aka the Boxcar Killer, and his years long series of murders.

Sidetrack traveled at will, with no record of his movements, and his pool of victims were the unhoused, the drifters, and the

fellow railhoppers he encountered.

People on the fringe, the kind who wouldn't be missed.

This week, the end of the murders, the arrest and many

confessions of Robert Silvera, as well as the California police detective who

moonlighted his Elvis, a quirk which endeared him to the killer, and also led to this cop writing the actual book on the case.

This is Freedom Part 2.

Retired Spokane Police Detective Bob Granadetti

had compiled perhaps the largest database of information about

the FTRA, the Freight Train Riders of America, and linked them to food stamp fraud, trafficking,

hundreds of thefts and assaults, and murders.

Grandinetti discovered the FTRA's existence after recording 10 unsolved deaths between 1990 and

1992 on the High Line between Seattle and Minneapolis.

Bodies found near the tracks along the route from Cheney, Washington to Sandpoint, Idaho.

This was the same period Grandinetti noticed a significant presence of FTRA members rolling through Spokane.

The element that stood out in these reports was the state in which the bodies were discovered,

with their shirts or coats pulled up over their heads and their pants pulled down.

Later learned to be a trademark of FTRA killings, though not a trademark of Silvera's murders.

So multiple people were doing that and leaving them that way?

Yeah, there were a ton found that way.

There was a guy named Juan Lara, I believe, who was killed by several men,

...