Their name sounds innocent enough: Freight Train Riders of America.

But some law enforcement officers who have traced their activities also know them as the “boxcar killers,” and at least one murder in Kansas in the past seven years was committed by one of them.

“It’s like being in a street gang,” said Kansas City, Mo., homicide detective Everett Babcock. “FTRA gives them an identity.”

Since Nov. 9, 2001, when a transient was found slain along a Kansas City railway, Babcock had been looking for James Sali, a transient known to travel by hopping trains and believed to be a member of the train riders group.

Then, two weeks ago, Sali was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” television show and was soon captured after jumping off a freight train in New Orleans.

Sali later told reporters, “Make sure you put down the FTRA.”

In 1995, another suspected member killed a Virginian named Charles Boyd at Kanopolis Lake. Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent Bruce Mellor worked with a Salem, Ore., detective and others to track down Robert Silveria.

“That was the first I’d heard of FTRA,” said Mellor, who works out of the KBI office in Great Bend.

Nobody knows how many FTRA members there might be. But they are reputed to be a group of hobo killers who primarily prey on other transients, robbing them for what they can get. Stolen identification is then used to obtain money and food.

The group is thought to have started in the 1980s as a brotherhood with racist overtones. And law enforcement agencies soon began taking a closer look at transients killed along railroads and in rail yards.

“A transient can be killed, and there isn’t usually any big public outcry,” Mellor said.

¢ Information from the Spokane, Wash., police

Silveria pleaded guilty to the Kanopolis murder as well as to three others, two in Oregon and one in Florida, Mellor said.

Searches for Silveria and Sali led investigators into the world of hobos. In Kansas City, a series of slayings of transients in the late 1990s and 2000 caused police to start studying the hobo community.

“We went down into the camps, and we got to know them pretty well,” Babcock said. “That was the first we heard about FTRA.”

Detectives later determined those deaths weren’t connected to FTRA, Babcock said.

That experience, however, helped detectives when it came time to investigate the death of the transient Sali is charged with killing. Police were told that a few months before the November 2001 slaying, there had been an FTRA convention in the Kansas City area, Babcock said.

In searching for Silveria, Mellor and Salem detective Mike Quakenbush visited the annual hobo convention in Britt, Iowa. They sought information about Silveria.

“That was very interesting,” Mellor said. “We walked in wearing jeans and T-shirts, and they knew right away we were cops.”

With a couple of exceptions, most of the hobos at the convention wouldn’t talk about Silveria or FTRA, Mellor said.

Eight months after the Kanopolis slaying, Silveria was arrested in Auburn, Calif., – carrying his victim’s credit card.

Unlike most of the other homicides, the Kanopolis case didn’t involve railroad tracks. The victim, Boyd, and Silveria met in El Paso, Tex. Boyd, described by Mellor as a Good Samaritan, recruited Silveria from a soup kitchen to help build a bunk house for a church.

Boyd and Silveria later left El Paso and ended up camping out at Kanopolis. Silveria then robbed and killed Boyd.

Mellor said he knew of no other cases in Kansas attributed to FTRA nor does he know of any remaining unsolved murder cases in which FTRA members might be suspects.