Charles Lee Burton was 32 when he was shot and killed at the Jackson, Michigan, train station on December 30, 1978. Burton, a railroad fireman, was arriving for his shift when he was struck twice with 12-gauge deer slugs; his body was later found inside the crew restroom. Two colleagues, conductor William Gulak and brakeman Robert Lee Blake, were also shot and killed at the same location in the same attack.

Authorities later linked the Jackson station slayings to a string of attacks on railroad employees that stretched from 1963 to 1978. Investigators recovered a disassembled shotgun hidden under bushes at Cascade Falls three months after the murders; ballistics testing matched it to the killings. Rudy Bladel, a former railroad worker who held a long-standing grudge over seniority and layoffs after a 1959 merger, was arrested on March 22, 1979, charged, and convicted in the three murders, receiving three consecutive life sentences.

Did anyone who worked on those Michigan or Indiana freight yards in the 1960s and 1970s remember conflicts that might explain how this campaign of violence began?