Rudy Bladel

Rudy Bladel (December 8, 1932 – November 15, 2006), known as The Railway Killer, was an American serial killer who committed the murders of seven railway employees in the Rust Belt region from 1963 to 1978. Convicted of three of them, Bladel was sentenced to life imprisonment, and later died from thyroid cancer in 2006.

Early life Bladel was born into a railroad family with one half-brother in Chicago, on December 8, 1932. His father, Holgar, worked for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad company. Bladel grew up on 67th Street and Ashland Avenue, studying at the Vocational High School in the South Side, where he took automotive shop courses. After graduating in 1951, he went to work at Rock Island as a fireman, before enlisting in the army as a military engineer, to serve in the Korean War. Bladel later claimed that when he went under a routine check-up in the military, he scored an IQ of 145. While in South Korea, he "hostled" locomotives in a roundhouse, sometimes under enemy fire. In addition, most of the employees would be locals, leaving the previous ones from Michigan, among whom was Bladel, with a lower-rank job or were just laid off. This angered Bladel, to whom the railroad work was his entire life, to such an extent, that he decided to take revenge on the union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, whom he felt had sold him out.

Death On November 15, 2006, Bladel died from thyroid cancer, in the Henry Ford Allegiance Health Hospital in Jackson.