The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Eliza Shelley had been attacked on the property of Dr L. B. Johnson, a former state congressman who lived at the corner of Cypress and Jacinto Streets near the railroad track with his wife and niece. Hired as a cook the previous month, Shelley lived in a cabin behind the house with her three children. On the night of the attack, Mrs Johnson had heard screams emanating from Eliza’s cabin, and sent her niece to find out what was happening. Seeing something was terribly wrong, she summoned Dr Johnson, who went to investigate.

  He found Eliza Shelley lying on the floor, dead. She had sustained numerous grievous head wounds. One gash that appeared to have been made by an axe nearly cleaved her head in two and there were puncture wounds made by a sharp, pointed instrument. This time the killer had taken the murder weapons with him.

  The pillows were covered in blood, indicating that she had been asleep in bed when she was attacked. Then she had been dragged to the floor and her nightdress pulled up. Her naked midriff was raised on a pile of blankets and her genitals exposed, so it was thought that she had been raped by her attacker.

  Her eight-year-old son said that a man had come into the cabin in the middle of the night. The boy had woken up, but the man pushed him into a corner and told him to be quiet. He had placed a blanket over him and the child had passed out, possibly as the result of chloroform that had recently been stolen from a dentist’s home in Austin. The boy had no recollection of what had happened to his mother. His younger brothers, who slept in the same bed as their mother, knew nothing.

  Marshal Lee’s bloodhounds failed once again. A set of shoeless footprints led to the cabin. At the time, Eliza’s husband was in prison and it was not thought she had any other boyfriends, so it seemed clear that the shoeless person was to blame. Marshal Lee quickly arrested a 19-year-old, slightly backward black youth who walked around barefoot. But when the tracks were compared against his, it was clear that he had not made them. Another African-American male who had once lived with Eliza was arrested. He had no alibi and had recently quarrelled with her. But he, too, was released when there was a third murder just over two weeks later.

  On 23 May, another black servant girl was attacked in the middle of the night in her cabin, across the road from a beer garden. Her name was Irene Cross. This time the attacker had used a knife. But the attack was just as ferocious. Her arm had been practically severed from her body and the perpetrator had stabbed her so viciously in the head that she appeared to have been scalped. This time there was no suspect at all and no arrest was made.

  The newspapers blamed the influx of migrant workers. Austin was then a city of just 23,000 people. But Texas was just recovering from the Civil War and the Reconstruction era and the attacker could have been any one of the thousands of strangers who had come to town, attracted by the prospect of work. There were even gangs of convicts employed in public building works. The newspapers were also unanimous that a black man was to blame – again, perhaps, a hangover from the Civil War.

  A fourth attack took place on 29 August at the home of livery-stable owner Valentine Weed on Cedar and San Jacinto Streets, a block south of where Eliza Shelley had been raped and murdered. Weed’s servant Rebecca Ramey had been attacked while she slept and left unconscious while her 12-year-old daughter Mary was dragged outside into an alley and brutally raped. Then she was stabbed through both ears with an iron rod and died sometime later. Rebecca survived but could remember little of the attack.

  This time, the bloodhounds set off after a black man who was walking nearby. He was arrested, but released the next day. Even though news of the killings filled the papers, the white middle classes felt they had nothing to fear. However, their servants insisted on keeping the windows closed in the sweltering heat of summer. Soon the papers were gunning for Lee, who was now widely perceived as incompetent.

  On 26 September, Lucinda Boddy, a cook in a house near the newly founded University of Texas, went up to the nearby home of her friend Gracie Vance to tend her during an illness. Gracie lived in a servant’s cabin behind the house of her employer, the attorney Major W. D. Dunham, with her boyfriend, Orange Washington. There was possibly a fourth person present, another servant girl named Patsie Gibson.

  That evening Washington and Gracie had a row. The argument was so furious that the major overheard it and had reported it to the police. But by midnight, everything was quiet and everyone was asleep. At around 2 a.m., someone climbed in through the cabin window. Gracie woke and screamed. Orange jumped up, but a blow from an axe felled him, crushing his skull. Lucinda was also hit on the head, fracturing her skull. It seems she was raped and she blacked out. Patsie, too, had been badly beaten, possibly with a sandbag.

  The attacker then dragged Gracie Vance out of the cabin and into some bushes near the stable, where she was also raped. It seems she put up a terrific fight before the killer finished her off by beating her skull with a brick.

  During the attack Lucinda came round and lit an oil lamp to have a look around. She saw Orange lying unconscious on the floor and another man was in the room.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said and, cursing, told her to put the light out. Instead, she threw it at him and ran. Her screams alerted the major, who came out of the house with a gun.

  “We’re all dead!” Lucinda screamed at him before she passed out again. He noticed the blood on her clothes and crept gingerly into the cabin. There he found Washington lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Beside him was an axe. Knowing of the other attacks on black servants in the area, the major called his neighbours for help.

  Soon after he found Gracie’s body. Her head had been turned to pulp and a bloody brick lay by her corpse. In her hand was a gold watch that did not belong to her, its chain wrapped around her arm. According to one source, a strange horse was found, saddled, in the stable. But neither the watch nor the horse led the authorities to the culprit.

  Vigilante committees were set up and there were calls for all undesirables to be run out of town. The circumstances of the last attack indicated it was possible that more than one assailant was at work. Marshal Lee promptly arrested two black men, Dock Woods and Oliver Townsend. It seems that Lucinda Boddy implicated Woods, who was known to harass Gracie. When he was arrested, he was in possession of a blood-soaked shirt. Another witness claimed to have overheard Wood’s friend Town-send, a petty thief, threaten to kill Gracie.

  Lee also invited professional detectives from the Noble Detective Agency in Houston to assist him in the investigation. They immediately extracted a confession from a man named Alec Mack, who admitted killing Mary Ramey. But Mack said that they had threatened to lynch him unless he confessed. Bruises were found on his body from a beating. Lee said that Mack had sustained them resisting arrest. But confidence in Lee and his Houston detectives was so low that Mack, Woods and Townsend all had to be released. Lee then turned to an even more unlikely suspect. He arrested Walter Spence, who had been injured in the attack on Mollie Smith. After a three-day trial, Spence was acquitted.

  It was clear that Lee’s idea of going after suspects that might have had a motive in a single case was not working. Instead, state prosecutor E. T. Moore speculated that all the murders had been committed by a single culprit who hated women. No one had heard of such a thing before and he was mocked. Nevertheless, Lee was sacked from the case and a new marshal, a former Texas Ranger named James Lucy, was brought in.

  Up until this point all the victims had been black. But that was to change on Christmas Eve 1885. After attending a concert at the State Institution for the Blind, Moses Hancock had been dozing in a chair at his home on San Jacinto Boulevard. When he woke he found his wife Susan missing. She had been dragged from her bed. He found her lying dead in the back yard, her head cleaved open with an axe, and a sharp, thin implement was sticking out of her brain. Blood was pouring from her ears and soaking into her hair. Amazingly she was not dead, though she never regained consciousness. It was also plain that she had been raped. But unlike the other victims M
rs Hancock was white.

  Like his predecessor, Marshal Lucy brought in the bloodhounds. Again they drew a blank, but the killer had not finished for the night. Within an hour, society beauty Eula “Luly” Phillips was dead. One of the loveliest women in Austin, she had dark curly hair, pale skin, doe eyes and an exquisite figure that turned men’s heads in the street. She lived with her husband and infant son in her father-in-law’s house in one of the richest neighbourhoods of Austin. But although she was married to the son of a prominent citizen, it seems that she also entertained other distinguished lovers.

  As before, she had been attacked at home in bed. Her husband Jimmy, who lay beside her, had also been assaulted. He was left unconscious with a huge gash on the back of his head. Their son, though, who was also present, was uninjured. The bloody axe was left in the middle of the bedroom floor. A trail of blood led from the bedroom, down the stairs, out of the house and into a nearby alley. There Eula Phillips had been raped and her head smashed in. Her naked body had been left spread-eagled with her arms pinned under timber. The only clue was a bloody shoeprint left on the porch. It was large and made by a man.

  Now that leading – white – citizens were being struck down the newspapers went into overdrive. Some suggested that, as the killer could come and go without being seen, he had supernatural powers. Marshal Lucy brought in more detectives from out of town. Citizens kept loaded guns to hand. Five hundred attended a public meeting. Fresh rewards were raised and bars were closed at 12 o’clock. But the murders suddenly stopped.

  With no fresh leads there was nowhere for the investigation to go. Consequently, both Moses Hancock and Jimmy Phillips were suspected of killing their wives – even though Phillips had been badly injured in the attack. The suggestion was that they had both raped their wives, then killed them with an axe to make it look like as the Servant Girl Annihilator had done, though that they had both chosen to do the deed at the same hour on the same night seemed something of a coincidence. Nevertheless they were both arrested. A letter found in a trunk at Hancock’s house indicated that his wife had intended to leave him over his drinking. The DA maintained that Moses Hancock had found the letter, got drunk and attacked his wife, but the jury were not convinced that Hancock had even seen, or knew of, the letter. He was acquitted.

  A more substantial case was brought against Jimmy Phillips, a known alcoholic. His two-year marriage had been troubled. The prosecution caused a sensation by suggesting that his wife had been prostituting herself at a “house of assignation”. Indeed, she had even gone there on Christmas Eve. Witnesses were called to testify about her comings and goings and their suspicions that she had been seeing another man behind her husband’s back. A number of local politicians were implicated. Phillips was known to have thrown things at his wife and threatened her with a knife. Indeed it was Eula who had brought the axe to the bedroom to protect herself from him. This had given him the opportunity for a copycat killing, murdering his wife for personal reasons and blaming it on the serial killer that was stalking the streets. He had attacked her with the axe then carried her body outside. A bloodhound called in to track the killer had returned to the Phillips’ bedroom and the bloody footprint on the porch, the DA said, was his.

  In court, Phillips had to ink his foot, so that the prints could be compared. When this ink print turned out to be much smaller than the print on the porch, the prosecution insisted that carrying the dead weight of his wife would have made Jimmy’s foot spread, leaving a larger print. So Phillips picked up his own defence attorney. Still the footprints did not match.

  Nevertheless, Phillips was convicted of second-degree murder and was sentenced to seven years. However, the Texas Court of Appeals overturned the conviction before the end of the year. No one was ever caught for the Servant Girl Annihilator killings and soon the Austin newpapers had the opportunity to compare their own killings with those in London’s Whitechapel.

  One of the largely overlooked suspects in the Ripper murders was a Malay cook named Maurice who sometimes worked on ships. In October 1888, The Times of London said that he had threatened to kill Whitechapel prostitutes, but had then disappeared. The Austin Daily Statesman discovered that he had been employed at the Pearl House, a small hotel in Austin, in 1885, leaving in January 1886, just after the last murder. Most of the victims lived near the Pearl House. Jack the Ripper and the Servant Girl Annihilator could have been one and the same man. It is an intriguing theory but now, with the passage of time, impossible to prove.

  For over a hundred years, the Servant Girl Annihilator was overshadowed by the famous Jack. But now he has come into his own and Austin offers a tour of his murder sites.

  The Baton Rouge Serial Killer

  Nearly 120 years after the Texas Servant Girl Annihilator, another serial killer set to work in Louisiana. The first known victim was Gina Wilson Green, a 41-year-old nurse and office manager for Home Infusion Network. A divorcee, she lived alone in a block on Stanford Avenue in Baton Rouge, near Louisiana State University. Her body was found in her apartment on 23 September 2001. She had been sexually assaulted.

  The cause of death was strangulation. According to the autopsy report she died at about nine o’clock in the morning. Her purse was missing, along with her Nokia cell phone. This was later found in an alleyway on the other side of town.

  Seven months later, there was a similar killing. At around two in the afternoon on 31 May 2002, the body of 22-year-old Charlotte Murray Pace, a graduate student at Louisiana State, was found by her roommate at a townhouse on Sharlo Avenue in Baton Rouge. Death was due to stab wounds, but she, too, had been sexually assaulted. She had put up a fierce fight and it was likely that her killer had been wounded. Another strange coincidence linked the two killings. Charlotte Pace had moved into the townhouse on Sharlo Avenue only two days before. Previously she had lived just three doors away from Gina Green, although there was no evidence that they ever knew each other.

  Again items were missing. The killer had taken the keys to Charlotte’s BMW along with a brown and tan Louis Vuitton wallet that contained her driver’s licence. A silver ring had been stolen and, again, her cell phone was missing. However, her assailant left behind a clue in the form of a footprint. It been made by a man’s Rawlings brand trainer, size 10 or 11. It was easy to identify because it had a unique pattern on the sole. Unfortunately it was a brand found widely in discount stores.

  Then, on 12 July 2002, Pam Kinamore went missing. She was an antiques dealer who ran her own business, Comforts and Joys, in Denham Springs, a few miles east of Baton Rouge. It was a Friday evening and she shut up shop as usual before driving home to 8338 Briarwood Place in Baton Rouge itself.

  Her husband arrived home later to find his wife’s car in the driveway, but she was nowhere to be found. He was immediately concerned. She did not usually head off without telling him where she was going. Time passed and still she did not show up. Eventually he phoned the police and reported her missing.

  As she had only been gone for a matter or hours and there was no sign of forced entry at the house, the police showed little interest. Maybe she had made plans for the evening and had forgotten to inform her husband, or there had been an emergency concerning a family member and she had been called away. Days passed. She did not return. Nothing was heard from her. All reasonable explanations had been checked out and discarded. The family grew gradually more convinced that she had been the victim of foul play. Posters were distributed offering a reward of $75,000 for information concerning her whereabouts or her safe return. After that, all they could do was pray that she would be found alive. Then came the hammer blow.

  On 16 July 2002, a team of surveyors working in a boggy area of woodland under the Whisky Bay Bridge in Iberville Parish between Baton Rouge and Lafayette saw something at the water’s edge. It was the naked body of a dead woman, later identified as Pam Kinamore.

  At the post mortem conducted at the Orleans Parish Coroner’s office, it was discovered that she
had been sexually assaulted. The cause of death was a knife wound to the neck. Again something was missing. The killer had taken a silver toe ring from Kinamore’s body. The police quickly tied her killing to those of Gina Green and Charlotte Pace – and another case.

  Two days after Pam Kinamore had gone missing, a 28-year-old Mississippi woman was raped by a man who had forced her into a white pick-up on Interstate 10 that runs westwards from Baton Rouge to Layafette. After the assault, he had let her go and she gave the police a good enough description of her attacker for them to put together a composite.

  Then, a week after Kinamore’s body had been found, a woman came forward claiming that she had seen a woman answering Kinamore’s description slumped in the passenger seat of a white pick-up truck the night she had gone missing. She appeared to be sleeping or, perhaps, dead. The truck had been speeding westwards down I–10 at around three o’clock in the morning. It had turned off at the Whisky Bay exit, the ramp nearest to where Pam Kinamore’s body was found. The driver was a white male who, the witness said, had a slight build. This was surely the same man as the mystery rapist.

  The police now put together a detailed description of the vehicle. They said they were looking for a white General Motors – or possibly a Chevrolet – pick-up truck, thought to be a 1996–97 single cab model. The licence plate was thought to contain JT341, though it was not known which state had issued it. The witness also said she had seen the shape of a fish on the rear offside of the pickup.

  In August 2002, a multi-agency murder task force was formed, comprising 40 officers from Baton Rouge Police Department, West Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office, Iberville Parish Sheriff’s Office, the Louisiana State Police and the FBI. They believed that drawing on the resources of all their agencies would help catch the killer more quickly.

  DNA evidence linked the murders of Gina Green and Charlotte Pace. Later the Louisiana State Crime Lab managed to show that Kinamore had been killed by the same man. Now certain that they had a serial killer on the loose, the police began combing through unsolved homicides over the last ten years.