Do you buy that the Villisca, Iowa and Hinterkaifeck, Germany axe killer are the same?

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The Villisca axe murders occurred between the evening of June 9, 1912, and the early morning of June 10, 1912, in the town of Villisca, Iowa, United States. The six members of the Moore family and two guests were found bludgeoned in the Moore residence. All eight victims, including six children, had severe head wounds from an axe.

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The Hinterkaifeck murders occurred on the evening of March 31, 1922, when six inhabitants of a small Bavarian farmstead, located approximately 70 kilometres (43 mi) north of Munich, Germany, were murdered by an unknown assailant. The six victims were Andreas Gruber (aged 63) and Cäzilia Gruber (aged 72); their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel (aged 35); Viktoria's children, Cäzilia (aged 7) and Josef (aged 2); and the maid, Maria Baumgartner (aged 44). They were all found struck dead. The perpetrator (or perpetrators) lived with the six corpses of their victims for three days. The murders are considered one of the most gruesome and puzzling unsolved crimes in German history.

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Author Bill James, in his book, The Man from the Train, alleges that a man known as Paul Mueller may have been responsible for the murders. Mueller was the only suspect in the 1897 murder of a Massachusetts family, and James believes Mueller killed dozens of victims based on research in American newspaper archives. The Hinterkaifek murders bear some similarities to Mueller's suspected crimes in the United States, including the slaughter of an entire family in their isolated home, use of the blunt edge of a farm tool as a weapon (a pick axe), and the apparent absence of robbery as a motive. James suspects that Mueller, described as a German immigrant in contemporary media, might have departed the US for his homeland after private investigators and journalists began to notice and publicize patterns in family murders across state lines following the brazen 1912 murder of two families in a single night in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a similar family murder weeks afterward a few hundred miles away in neighboring Kansas.

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