Found some interesting history. Maybe somehow it motivated the killer(s).
In 1939, on August 5, widow Ethel Raver married Theodore Fife and moved from Lafayette to Delphi with her family. On the morning of August 14, shortly after moving from Lafayette to their second-story apartment at the corner of Market and Franklin Street, she and two of her children, Bertha Raver, 14, and Dora Mae Raver, 22, were killed by fast freight 92, being pulled by Engine 2904, on the Wabash
bridge at Delphi over Deer Creek (
Mother and Two Girls Die in Trap at Rail Trestle). Bertha, 14, probably jumped and was found deceased 40 feet below the bridge, her head apparently having hit the base of a cement abutment (per
Kokomo Tribune). Dora Mae, 22, was killed quickly, having been horribly mangled by the train. Ethel Raver Fife's back was severely cut and bruised by the passing freight as she tried to lie down between the tracks, and Mrs. Fife, 50, died a few hours later after having been removed from the bridge and taken by ambulance to Lafayette Home Hospital, where her right leg was amputated in unsuccessful effort to save her life. Mrs. Fife indicated before dying that she and her daughters had heard the train but thought they could get across before its arrival.
True, the Wabash bridge over Deer Creek (just southwest of Delphi) is different from the Monon bridge over Deer Creek (just east of Delphi). But one newspaper article, on the front page of the August 14, 1939,
Logansport Pharos Tribune, explains why they were on the Wabash bridge:
The three local residents were enroute from Delphi to the home of Mrs. Fife's father-in-law, Charles Fife, in West Delphi, to do a washing, and they believed they were on the Monon [emphasis added] railroad instead of the Wabash. The two railroads cross in Delphi and they had followed the wrong track, having resided in Lafayette until recently and being unfamiliar with the city, it was reported.
According to the
Pharos-Tribune of August 18, 1939, the 1939 victims were buried at the Paint Creek Cemetery east of Camden.
At midnight on May 25, 1918, German sympathizers may have tried to burn up the same Wabash RR Bridge over Deer Creek [
The Richmond Item, May 29, 1918].
