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For Shannon, Hailey, and Tyler, with all my love
“The crimes still remain a mystery. They are abnormal and unnatural, as compared with ordinary crimes among men. No one, not even the expert, skilled in the detection of crime, can find a plausible motive. The mutilated bodies of the victims are always found in parts of the city where crime is not expected or anticipated, and beyond the fact of the murders we have never been able to penetrate.”
—John W. Robertson, Mayor of Austin, Texas, November 10, 1885
A panoramic view of Austin, Texas, in the 1880s
PROLOGUE
“A killer who gives to history a new story of crime.”
PROLOGUE
I first read about him when I was shown a pamphlet, the pages umber with age, titled “Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel.” Published in the year 1888, the pamphlet chronicled a series of murders that were then taking place in London. An unknown killer, who was being called Jack the Ripper, had attacked five prostitutes in the city’s East End over a three-month period, slitting their throats and mutilating their bodies. On page 10, the author mentioned that London police officials were speculating that the Ripper was the same man who had committed a series of similar murders three years earlier in “a small city in Texas.”
Why is it that certain sensational events in history are remembered and others, just as dramatic, are completely forgotten? Jack the Ripper has haunted the imagination of the public like no other killer in Western civilization. He is universally considered to be the prototype of the modern-day criminal monster, his exploits the subject of at least a hundred books and dozens of films and plays.
But beginning in December 1884, Austin, Texas, was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London’s Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Austin killer crisscrossed the entire city, striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women. On Christmas Eve of 1885, almost exactly one year after the killings began, he brought Austin to the brink of chaos when, in the space of an hour, he slaughtered two prominent women in separate neighborhoods, cutting up their bodies in their backyards before vanishing in the briefest imaginable time.
The story was treated as one of the great American murder mysteries of the late nineteenth century, a blood-curdling whodunit chronicled on the front pages of newspapers from New York to Chicago to San Francisco. Joseph Pulitzer, the famous publisher of the New York World, was so fascinated by what was happening that he commissioned a reporter to produce a 7,000-word article under the headline “Why These Assassinations? The Extraordinary Series of Similar Murders in a Texas City.” Several journalists proclaimed in their articles that the murders were nothing less than an Edgar Allan Poe tale of terror come to life. One reporter nicknamed the killer “the Midnight Assassin … who strides at will over Austin’s sacred soil.”
For the first time on record, an American city was forced to confront a brilliant, brutal monster who for some unknown reason was driven to murder, in almost ritualistic fashion, one woman after another—“a killer who gives to history a new story of crime,” the New York World declared. Baffled Austin police officers sat around a table, attempting to predict what circumstances would make this Midnight Assassin strike again. Anxious citizens came up with increasingly desperate proposals to stop the murders. (One citizen suggested that every woman in Austin be given a large guard dog. Another wanted the city to be lit with newly invented electric “arc lamps” so that the killer would have no place at night to hide.) Self-proclaimed “private eyes” arrived in Austin to begin their own investigations in hopes of finding the killer so that they could claim the sizable reward money being offered by the city’s businessmen and by the governor of Texas himself. Even a group of distinguished medical doctors in New York City who were known as “alienists,” experts in the study of mentally troubled minds, gathered in the lecture hall at the New York Academy of Medicine, just across the street from Bryant Park, to discuss the methods of the Midnight Assassin, hoping that they too might somehow uncover his identity.
Before it was all over, at least a dozen men would be arrested in connection with the murders. There would be three murder trials of three different suspects, all of whom would vehemently proclaim their innocence. Along the way, the murders would expose what a newspaper described as “the most extensive and profound scandal ever known in Austin,” one that ruined the careers of several prominent Austin men and set off sensational allegations that one of the state’s most well-known politicians was himself the Midnight Assassin. And yes, when Jack the Ripper began his attacks in 1888, London police investigators did wonder if the killer from Austin had crossed the ocean to terrorize their own city.
Who was the Midnight Assassin, and why did he go on such a rampage? Was he a crazed, itinerant outlaw? Was he, as many Austin residents believed, a deranged black man? Or was he well known in Austin society—someone who lived respectably, dressed neatly, and who periodically felt the need to slip out of his house to slaughter a woman? Was it also true, as rumor had it, that he was quietly caught and then put away by city officials who were determined to avoid more public scandal?
It has taken me years to put the story together, looking for facts hidden away in faded newspaper articles and in old scrapbooks, in the crumbling pages of diaries and letters, in long-forgotten records boxed up in the back storage rooms of libraries and government offices, and in files at the state’s former lunatic asylum, the once-imposing limestone fortress that loomed over the northern edge of Austin. Some details about the killings were discovered in abandoned sections of cemeteries, the tombstones nearly covered by time. Others were provided by grandchildren and great-grandchildren of residents involved in the Midnight Assassin’s murder spree. And then there were records that should have been readily available but had curiously—tantalizingly—disappeared.
As the journalists once wrote, it is a story worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, a multilayered Gothic saga of madness and intrigue, panic and paranoia, beautiful women and baying bloodhounds, and flabbergasting plot twists and sensational courtroom drama. In fact, a well-regarded New York mystery writer, Kenward Philp, was commissioned by his publisher to produce a short story, filled with shivery Poe-like prose, based on the Austin murders. The publisher then attempted to sell the story, which was titled “The Texas Vendetta,” to newspapers around the country.
But only a handful of editors ran the story. Apparently, they concluded, the truth needed no embellishment.
The truth, they said, was scary enough.
PART ONE
DECEMBER 1884–APRIL 1885
“Doctor Ste
iner reports a woman lying near Ravy’s.”
CHAPTER ONE
A few days before the first murder, the telegraph lines began buzzing with news about a storm making its way south from the Canadian Rockies. A Western Union operator in Sioux City, Iowa, punched out the words “13 degrees at 2 p.m.… ice … trains slowing.”
It was a blue norther, people were saying, the oncoming clouds low and dark blue along the horizon. The storm swooped through the Great Plains, where the cattle turned their rumps against the wind, and then it rushed into Texas, moving so quickly that a cowboy, traveling on horseback across a treeless stretch of land near the town of Archer City, froze to death before he could find shelter. According to a newspaper account, when the cowboy was finally found, he was slumped on the ground, a rim of ice covering his mustache, his eyelids, and the edges of his hat.
When the norther reached the city of Austin, the capital of Texas, in the early morning hours of December 31, 1884—New Year’s Eve—it was still cold enough to drop thermometers there by another thirty degrees. The wind knifed through the cracks in the houses, rattling coffee cups laid out on kitchen tables. Ice bounced off the roofs like dried peas. A young man named Tom Chalmers, who was lying in bed at the home of his brother-in-law on the western edge of the city, heard a knocking sound at the front door. Chalmers then heard the voice of a man.
“Help me.”
Chalmers and his wife, who lived outside Austin on a small ranch, had come to the city earlier that week to celebrate the holidays. They were the only ones at the home that evening. Chalmers’s brother-in-law William Hall, an insurance agent, was with his wife in the coastal city of Galveston, where they had once lived, visiting friends.
The knocking at the door persisted. “Help me,” the man shouted again.
Chalmers was not an easy man to intimidate. A former member of the Texas Rangers, the state’s police force, he had once been featured in the Austin Daily Statesman after he had been thrown by his horse, face-first, onto the ground, breaking all of his front teeth. The article had congratulated Chalmers on his fortitude, noting that he had spit out his broken teeth, returned to his horse, and kept riding.
On this frigid evening, however, he was not all that eager to leave his warm bed. Then he heard the front door open.
The home of Chalmers’s brother-in-law was one of Austin’s nicer residences, more than 2,000 square feet in size, with two chimneys and ten-foot ceilings. The master bedroom was toward the back of the house. Chalmers rose, crept to the bedroom doorway, and peered down the hall. He had no weapon: his gun was sitting in another part of the house. In the deep gloom of the foyer, he saw a man move past the draperies and stagger over the wooden floors. Based on what Chalmers later told police and newspaper reporters, the man said, “Mr. Tom, Mr. Tom, for God’s sakes, do something to help me! Somebody has nearly killed me!”
Chalmers lit a match and held it before him. The light flickered across the face of Walter Spencer, a twenty-nine-year-old black man who worked as a laborer at Butler’s Brick Yard. Spencer was also the boyfriend of Mollie Smith, who worked as a cook and maid at the Halls’ home. Mollie was a pretty young woman, about twenty-three years of age. She was known as a “yellow girl,” a phrase used by white people in those years to describe a light-skinned black person. She worked six days a week in return for a monthly salary of ten to twelve dollars and a free place to live, which consisted of a tiny one-room servants’ quarters—a shack, really, that was in the backyard.
Spencer was barefoot, clad only in a nightshirt. Blood was oozing from several gashes in his head. He was wobbling, as if he was having trouble keeping his balance. He told Chalmers that someone must have attacked him while he had been asleep in bed next to Mollie, hitting him over the head and knocking him unconscious. And the person who attacked him, he said, must have done something with Mollie. She was nowhere to be found.
Spencer seemed terrified, his breaths coming in gasps. He said he had looked for Mollie in the back and front yard, and that he had searched for her up and down the street. Without a lantern, however, he could see nothing: the sky was as black as a skillet. The blood from Spencer’s head wound was still flowing down his face and pouring into his mouth, making it difficult to breathe. He had trouble keeping his head up.
“Mr. Tom, please…,” Spencer pleaded.
But Chalmers had no intention of walking outside in such weather and looking for a black man’s missing girlfriend. That was a matter, of course, that could wait until daylight. What Spencer needed to do, Chalmers said, was wrap a bandage around his head before he bled to death. Chalmers escorted Spencer out of the house, shut the front door, cleaned the blood off the floor, and returned to bed.
CHAPTER TWO
By the time the sun rose at 7:28 that morning, the norther had passed on to the south, but there was still a stinging cold. Only a handful of Austin’s 17,000 citizens dared to step outside. It was the kind of morning, a newspaper reporter would later write, “when the average Austin man prefers to lie still … and let his wife get up and make the fires.”
A little after nine o’clock, the telephone began ringing in the Austin Police Department. The department was located in a large room on the second floor of city hall. It contained a few chairs and tables, a potbellied stove, and a couple of tarnished brass cuspidors for the officers to use whenever they needed to spit out their chewing tobacco. On a wall was the telephone: a walnut box with a hole in the middle, a trumpet-like receiver on one side, and a crank on the other. The department’s day clerk, Bart Delong, picked up the receiver, turned the crank, and shouted “Police!” into the hole.
There was static over the phone—after a storm, the telephone wires hanging above the streets would usually get tangled, causing heavier static than usual—and then came the voice of a Hello Girl from the downtown telephone exchange. She told Delong that she was patching through a call from the phone box at Ravy’s Grocery in the western part of the city.
Congress Avenue, the main boulevard of Austin in the 1880s
After some more static, Delong heard the voice of Dr. Ralph Steiner, a surgeon who had been working in Austin for more than twenty years. Steiner kept his remarks brief. All that Delong wrote on the daily police log was the following:
Doctor Steiner reports a woman lying near Ravy’s store and wishes an officer sent out to take charge.
The Austin Police Department consisted of twelve men. Only a few of them were in the office that morning. Grooms Lee, the city’s young marshal (chief of police), was home in bed, suffering from dengue fever, a virulent form of the flu. The number two man in the department, Sergeant John Chenneville, was taking the morning off; he would be working the streets later that evening, keeping watch over the New Year’s Eve revelers. Delong pointed to William Howe, a young officer who was in his midtwenties, and ordered him to Ravy’s to find out what had happened.
Howe mostly did patrol work, spending his shifts on the downtown streets, handing out tickets to citizens who left horses unhitched in front of businesses or who drove their carriages faster than a “slow trot.” He arrested vagrants, gun toters, sneak thieves (shoplifters), and moll buzzers (pickpockets who specialized in robbing women). He collared drunks who urinated in the alleys behind the saloons and prostitutes who wandered outside the boundaries of Guy Town, the city’s vice district in the southwest corner of downtown.
One thing Howe did not do was investigate the four or five murders that occurred in Austin every year. Those were left to Sergeant Chenneville, who handled all the major criminal investigations. Nevertheless, because Dr. Steiner had said nothing in his phone call about foul play, there was no reason to think the woman’s death was due to anything but an accident. Perhaps she had slipped on some ice during the previous night’s storm and succumbed to exposure—the kind of death that would require a minor police investigation, if that. Surely, if the woman had been murdered, Steiner would have mentioned that fact to the police.
Ho
we put on his department-issued Stetson hat and double-breasted gray overcoat with two vertical rows of buttons and a tin police badge pinned to the lapel. He walked down the iron stairs leading to the first floor and headed for the police department’s stable behind the city hall building. He mounted a horse and rode toward Ravy’s, which was a half mile from downtown. When he arrived, he was directed across the street to the home of the young insurance man William Hall.
Tom Chalmers and Dr. Steiner, who lived a couple of houses away, were waiting for him. A few other men from the neighborhood were also standing around. Chalmers told Howe about Walter Spencer coming to the house, looking for his girlfriend, Mollie Smith, and begging for help. Steiner mentioned that Spencer had come to his home after leaving the Hall residence, where Steiner bandaged his head and sent him on his way. Chalmers then said that just after daylight, a black man who worked for one of the Halls’ neighbors had stepped into the back alley to collect some firewood. The man had looked down the alley and seen a “strange-looking object” lying on the ground behind the Halls’ outhouse. At first, he thought it was a dead animal. But after taking a closer look, he had seen the scrap of a nightdress. He realized there were legs coming out of that dress: human legs, grotesquely bent. Then he had started screaming.
Chalmers told Howe that he, Steiner, and others had come out of their homes, hurried over to the outhouse, and looked at what the black man had found. Steiner had volunteered to walk over to Ravy’s to call the police. Perhaps because he didn’t want to offend the sensibilities of the Hello Girl, whom he suspected would be listening in on the phone call, he had decided to say very little to Delong, the police clerk, about what he’d seen.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 1