The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  Clementine then recounted watching Alexandre’s brother find the bodies, and then claimed that she helped to wash and prepare them for burial, a claim that is clearly untrue.

  Clementine outlined the murder of the Randalls in less detail, skimping on the bloody details. She picked up an axe from a neighbor that Sunday night after a church celebration. On the way to the Randalls, she saw cops and the preacher of the church, King Harrison; she told the latter to avoid the area that night. Taking her brother Tatite’s gun, Clementine said she broke into the Randall home and shot the father in the chest. She claimed to have “caressed” all of her victims, adults and children and babies, for sexual stimulation.

  She gave the names of her alleged accomplices, who appeared in her story as randomly as dropped stitches on a home-knit blanket, sometimes entering the house with her to commit a crime and then welcoming her back to safety after committing the crime. The accomplices were found, sometimes arrested, and then released once they were able to put the lie to Clementine, whose confessions always seemed to unravel at the slightest tug.

  Clementine confessed to murdering eighteen people, but the grand jury charged her with only one murder, that of Azema Randall. Standard practice at that time; prosecutors are always looking for a loophole in the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. Her trial began on October 21, 1912. The previous week she was examined by a team of medical professionals, who said in a court document reproduced by the WPA effort that she was “morally depraved, unusually ignorant and of a low grade of mentality, but not deficient in such a manner as to constitute her imbecile or idiot.” She was eligible to stand trial.

  The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, covered her trial and heaped praise upon her lawyer, a man by the name of Kennedy, saying that he gave “one of the most magnificent presentations ever heard in court.” He argued that her confessions were unreliable and the product of a bad childhood, that the clothes with Randall’s blood on it were bundled with clothes that came from Clementine’s room, and that Metz, the chemist who tested the clothes, was unreliable. Clementine was convicted of the murder of Azema Randall at 10:30 p.m. on October 25. She was sentenced the next day to life in prison.

  * * *

  Clementine confessed to murdering eighteen people, but it would seem to be impossible to believe that she actually did exactly what she said that she did. This leaves two possibilities: that Clementine was involved with a cult or sect of murderers, who continued to commit crimes after she was arrested, or that Clementine had no actual connection to the murders, but has become in history the fall guy for the crimes of others.

  While either of these is certainly possible, the authors are both inclined to believe that the latter option is the more likely. We don’t think Clementine actually had any involvement in the Acadia Parish murders.

  The evidence for Clementine’s involvement in the crimes can be summarized in five points:

  1. Clementine was very close to two of the crimes at the time that they occurred,

  2. She acted inappropriately,

  3. She gave detailed and elaborate confessions to the crimes,

  4. Blood was found on her clothing after one of the crimes, and

  5. Clementine was the first person to offer an explanation of the religious symbolism which is found at a couple of the murder scenes.

  Number 1 isn’t anything. The coincidence of her being near two of the crime scenes triggered her arrest, but really, what does it amount to? When the Boston Strangler was murdering women in the early 1960s, police noticed a crew painting apartments near the scene of the first crime, and then noticed that a crew was painting apartments near the scene of the second crime. When they checked, it turned out to be the same painting crew. It was an odd coincidence, but it was just a coincidence. That was in a big city. The two murder scenes that Clementine was definitely known to be near were both in a small town, in the part of town near where she lived. It isn’t strange that she happened to be near both scenes.

  Her behavior was certainly inappropriate, but (1) she was young, superstitious, and high-strung, and (2) she had been through an extraordinary series of gut-wrenching events:

  1. A family living near to her, and known to her, was murdered in a grotesque and gruesome manner.

  2. Her father was accused of that crime.

  3. (This is speculation, and I’ll deal with that in a moment.) She was put through the wringer by police who were investigating that crime.

  4. She testified against her father, probably under great pressure from the police.

  5. Another family was murdered, again close to her.

  This series of traumatic events would destabilize a good many people. Another young lady in our book, about the same age (Lydia Howell in Houston Heights, chapter III) had a complete nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for months following just one of these stressors, the murder of a family that was well known to her. It seems not the least bit odd, to us, that Clementine went completely around the bend after these five events, and began to behave in a grossly inappropriate manner. For that matter, simply to be living in that area while all of these terrible murders were occurring was no doubt very stressful. It was a bizarre situation.

  The Andrus family was murdered near her home in February 1911, and her father was accused of the crime. It is likely that she was examined by the police about this crime in a vigorous manner. It is likely that she (and her brother, separately) was taken into a small room with two large police officers who probably said to her something like: “We know what happened here and we know that you know what happened here. You are not leaving this room until you come clean.”

  There are many cases now, in the twenty-first century, in which, when a murder occurs, the teenaged family members are “shaken” by the police in exactly this way, to see what they know about the crimes. With white police officers dealing with black teenagers in the South a hundred years ago with no cameras rolling, it is likely that those examinations were rougher and more intense than they would be now. But the problem with this practice is that a vulnerable teenager, “interviewed” in this manner, will often give a false confession or offer false testimony in an effort to bring the terrifying and traumatic police interview to an end.

  We believe that Clementine (and her brother) did in fact tell the police what they wanted to hear. Her relationship with her father was rocky anyway. Her parents had split up, and her father was alcoholic and abusive.

  Clementine certainly gave false testimony against her father in his murder trial, and we assume that she did so under great pressure from the police, and we assume that this was a terrible emotional burden for her. When there was another horrible murder near to her, Clementine began to act in completely inappropriate ways and told stories that were not true. She was not in her right mind, which, under the circumstances, is quite understandable. But are those confessions true?

  * * *

  Clementine in her confessions told one fact that could be checked out to a certain degree. She gave information leading to the arrest of the man who had sold her the “candjas,” Joseph Thibodeaux of New Iberia. Other than this one fact, nothing that Clementine said about the murders (a) can be confirmed by any other party, or (b) has the ring of truth about it. A great deal of what she said is demonstrably false.

  In a modern police investigation, if Clementine told police that she had traveled to Crowley in January 1911 to murder the Byers family, the police, interviewing her just weeks later, would have asked about two hundred follow-up questions, like: Which train did you take over there? What time was it? Who sold you the ticket? Do you remember what the ticket agent looked like? Did you see anyone that you knew on the train? Was the train crowded or empty? What clothes were you wearing that day, do you remember? Did you get blood on your clothes? Who was the conductor who punched your ticket, do you remember him? When you got to Crowley, what time was it? Where was the Byers house, from the train? What do you remember about t
he Byers house? Did it have a porch? Did it have a porch swing? Was there anything on the porch that you remember? Did the house have a big yard? Where was the house that you took the axe from? Was the axe sticking up out of the woodpile, or was it just leaning against the woodpile? When you went in the house, what do you remember about the inside of the house? What room were you in when you broke in? Was it the kitchen or a bedroom? Did it have wallpaper? What color were the walls?

  You make the person who is giving a confession answer questions like that so you can tell whether they are lying or telling the truth. If they’re lying, they’ll give a long string of “I don’t remembers” and wrong answers, and they will fail to correct deliberate mistakes made by the interviewer. If things check out, they’re telling the truth.

  This was never done with Clementine; there was never any effort to check out her confessions and see whether she was telling the truth. It is unlikely that the police had any training at all, and it is unlikely that they had significant experience in murder investigation. But also, we believe that they let her confession stand because they wanted it to be true. And they wanted it to be true because they desperately wanted for this thing to be over with.

  So these three points against Clementine are not convincing:

  1. Clementine was very close to two of the crimes at the time they occurred,

  2. She acted inappropriately,

  3. She gave detailed and elaborate confessions to the crimes.

  And that leaves us with these two:

  1. Blood was found on her clothing after one of the crimes, and

  2. Clementine was the first person to offer an explanation of the religious symbolism which is found at a couple of the murder scenes.

  The blood is the best evidence against her. But Clementine’s lawyer argued, at her trial, that the police had seized items from Clementine’s room at the Guidrys’, and had thrown them into a bundle with things taken from the crime scene. It is possible that this is true, and it is also possible (though less likely) that the police, believing Clementine to be guilty, had planted evidence to ensure her conviction.

  On the religious symbolism:

  1. There actually isn’t all that much religious symbolism in the murders. One family was “posed” postmortem in a manner that some people thought looked as if they were praying, and a biblical passage taken actually from Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written on the door of one house. These are the only facts we are aware of that support the theory that a religious cult was behind the murders.

  2. Clementine’s explanation that she had murdered the Randall family to punish them for disobeying her church appears only in her first confession. In her later and much more detailed confessions, she dropped that and told an entirely different story of why and how she and her never-identified friends committed the crimes.

  Clementine knew Azema Randall through her church. When accused of murdering Azema, her first confused, crazy thought was that it had something to do with the church, because the church was the only thing that connected her to Azema.

  We are not arguing absolutely that Clementine was not involved in the murders. We are arguing that, on balance, the theory that Clementine was not involved is (a) easier to believe than the arguments against her, and (b) much, much easier to believe than the theory that Clementine was the leader of a murderous religious cult.

  Clementine, sentenced to life in prison, escaped for a few hours on July 31, 1913, but was recaptured the same day. She was in prison for ten years, was released on April 28, 1923, and disappeared. Presumably she left the area and assumed a different name, but no one knows where she went or what name she began using. You may have known her years ago; she could plausibly have lived into the 1970s. She would have been seventy-seven years old in 1970.

  We think that, if authorities had actually believed that she was behind these terrible murders, it is unlikely that she would have been released after a few years in jail. She was turned loose so soon because the authorities didn’t believe her story, either.

  * * *

  The family of Hattie Dove lived at 1428 Cable Street in Beaumont, Texas, right next to a Baptist church and a third of a mile from the railroad track. Beaumont, as I mentioned earlier, is sixty miles west of Lake Charles, Louisiana. Hattie, still a young woman in her thirties, was separated from her children’s father, who lived in Nagadoches. She lived in Beaumont with her three teenaged children, Ernest, Ethel, and Jesse. Jesse, eighteen, was married but had separated from her husband and come back home. A man named John Smith, who worked nights, boarded at the house. The Dove family had lived in Beaumont only about a year, and had not made many friends or any enemies in Beaumont.

  The house on Cable Street was still active at 9:30 on the night of February 19, 1912. Around midnight, an axe was removed from the woodpile in a yard about two blocks over, and replaced with another. Probably the assailant had picked up an axe, then saw the other axe and decided it was better for his purposes. The assailant or assailants broke into the Dove home through a kitchen window. The blunt end of the axe was used to bash the head of Hattie and the sharp end to destroy Ernest, who shared a bed in the back room.

  Most reports said that the victims appeared to be killed in their sleep with the back of an axe, but the Beaumont Enterprise described the scene of the daughter’s bodies to be one of struggle, with bedclothes and blood everywhere. The axe was dropped at the scene along with the cloth that wiped it clean. With no better explanation, the Dove family murders were added to the list of the Church of Sacrifice Murders, what might better be called the Acadia Parish crimes.

  At this point we need to go into quick-summary mode, although (a) some of these murders we are rushing past are actually very interesting stories, (b) I can’t absolutely guarantee you that they are all unconnected to our series, and (c) many people have concluded that these other crimes are connected to the Acadia Parish murders, although they probably are not.

  • The family of Ellen Monroe (five people) was murdered in Glidden, Texas, on March 27, 1912.

  • The family of William Burton (four people) was murdered at 724 Center Street in San Antonio on April 11, 1912. The house at 724 Center Street is two blocks from where the Casaway family was murdered in March 1911.

  • The family of Alice Marshall (three people) was murdered in Hempstead, Texas, on April 15, 1912. Several other people also survived that attack.

  The last murder to be commonly tied to the Church of Sacrifice series . . .

  Let’s back off of that. There is no “Church of Sacrifice,” OK? There never was. Clementine made it up while she was confused and panicked and out of her mind, and it gained credibility because of racist stereotypes. Some of the cops in the later cases tried to solve their crimes by chasing down rumors about the Church of Sacrifice, rather than by doing normal police work, not that that was going to work, either. But there wasn’t any Church of Sacrifice.

  The last murders to be commonly tied to what had begun in Acadia Parish in 1909 were the murders of the Walmsley family near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in November 1912. Philadelphia, of course, would be made famous by another three murders a half-century later, the three civil rights workers murdered in 1964. In 1912 the murdered three were William Walmsley, his wife, Sallie, and their four-year-old daughter. Their bodies were discovered on November 23.

  In the spring of 1912 the Mississippi River flooded, killing hundreds of people—two hundred in Mississippi alone. Memphis was flooded, Arkansas, Louisiana; eastern Texas was flooded, although not directly by the Mississippi. In Acadia Parish, the murders became the parish’s second-biggest problem, starting their long march toward the dark attic of history, where they would rest hidden behind wars, scandals, and assassinations.

  Do you know what an aneurism is? An aneurism is like a balloon effect in a vein or an artery. A portion of the vein weakens so that, under pressure, it suddenly swells up much larger than it is supposed to be.

  In the history of axe murde
rers the years 1911 and 1912 are like an aneurism. In the course of researching this book, we looked at hundreds, perhaps thousands, of murders committed between 1890 and 1920. We did not attempt to count every single murder, but we did try to record every instance in which most of a family was murdered at once, whether with an axe or by some other method. We surely missed a few, because this is not an encyclopedia, but we identified 248 familicides, comprising a thousand people. It’s about eight families murdered per year. More than half of those crimes had obvious solutions, such as a murder committed by a family member or a jealous neighbor. There is usually in there one or two murders a year which have some of the earmarks of The Man from the Train—the use of an axe, the proximity to the railroad, the town too small to have a police force, the attack within an hour of midnight and utterly without warning, the use of the blunt side of the axe, etc. etc. etc.

  For most of this era it is actually fewer than eight families murdered per year (with an axe or by any other method). And then you come to the 1910 to 1912 era, and . . . Jesus H. Christ, what is happening here? Axe murders start appearing like dandelions. Murdering your neighbors with an axe became the nation’s fourth-largest sport. In part this is because The Man from the Train was hyperactive in that era, and in part it is because of the Acadia Parish murders, and in part it is because of the New Orleans Axeman, but there is more to it than that. There are things happening here, in these two years, that we cannot and do not understand.

  Those who investigated the crimes in Villisca and other places in 1911 and 1912 frequently attributed them to religious cults. The sheriff of Montgomery County, Iowa, thought that the Villisca crime had been committed by a negro religious cult (using his terminology). This explanation makes no sense to people who don’t know the story of Clementine Barnabet. If you know the story the explanation is still wrong, but at least it makes sense.