The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer

by Hollandsworth, Skip

  Another view of downtown Austin in the 1880s

  The biggest party of the night, by far, was the New Year’s Eve Phantom Ball at the Brunswick Hotel. The scene there was like something straight out of a Henry James novel. Women in evening gowns and black masquerade masks swept into the ballroom, followed by their husbands wearing black capes and bearing wooden swords. Waiters stood by the doors, offering flutes of champagne and glasses of lemonade for the prohibitionists. In the center of the ballroom, water poured out of the top of the hotel’s famous five-f00t-tall “rustic fountain” and flowed downward through an array of fake foliage before landing in a tub filled with shiny rocks. A small band began playing, and couples walked out to the dance floor to dance the “German,” the men slipping their hands down to the women’s waists.

  At the stroke of midnight, everyone raised their glasses and made toasts to the future. Outside on the streets, kids shot off Roman candles and sent “sky lanterns”—hot-air balloons made of paper, with small candles suspended at the bottom—into the night sky. A couple of men, filled up with liquor, staggered out of the saloons and fired their pistols, holding them straight above their heads. People cheered. Men and women kissed. The sky lanterns fluttered back to earth, the candles still flickering underneath the paper.

  Mayor John Robertson, Austin’s leading “boomer”

  * * *

  Strolling the streets that night, Austin’s mayor, the Honorable John W. Robertson, must have been swelling with pride. Since his election the previous June, he had been telling just about anyone who would listen that the city was on the verge of a golden new era—and if this New Year’s Eve didn’t prove that the new era was here, what did? Theater and roller skating! A gold-plated shotgun at the Gold Room, a masquerade ball at the Brunswick, and fireworks at midnight! Despite the cold, his constituents were having the time of their lives.

  A forty-four-year-old real estate lawyer by trade, Robertson was an ambitious man who, according to the Daily Statesman, wanted to be known as the politician who led Austin “beyond the good old days of rawhide and chile con carne.” To give himself a more distinguished appearance, he often wore a beautiful black frock coat that he kept buttoned from top to bottom, and in his city hall office he passed around cigars to his most important out-of-town visitors as he talked on and on about all his plans for Austin: graded streets, sewer lines, more schools, and even a magnificent new waterworks plant.

  “No city has the promise of a more healthful prosperity!” Robertson loved to proclaim in his speeches. “Austin’s development is strong and vigorous, and its public improvements will advance along with its wealth and population!”

  Like other mayors in small cities who wanted to attract more residents and thus increase the property tax base, Robertson was a highly skilled “boomer.” But the fact was that when he talked about all the changes taking place in Austin, he wasn’t exaggerating at all. Just a half century earlier, Austin had been nothing more than a primitive settlement on what was then regarded as the edge of the American frontier, populated by a handful of traders and subsistence farmers, along with their families. Few people even knew about the settlement, which was called Waterloo, until 1838, when Mirabeau B. Lamar, the vice president of the newly formed Republic of Texas, stopped there during a buffalo hunt and was so impressed with its natural beauty that he reportedly exclaimed, “This will one day be the seat of future empire!”

  Later that year, when Lamar was elected president of the republic, he announced that the territory’s future lay in westward expansion. He persuaded the Texas Congress to move the capital from Houston (which was named after his rival and predecessor as president, the famous General Sam Houston, who had led the Texas Army in its revolutionary war against Mexico) and place it in Waterloo, 165 miles to the west. Crude log buildings were erected to serve as government offices, a newspaper was started, a church was opened by a group of Presbyterians, and Waterloo itself was renamed Austin, in honor of Stephen F. Austin, the beloved “Father of Texas” who had helped bring many of the first white settlers to the region.

  Built on a small hill next to the Colorado River, surrounded by a rampart of other hills, Austin was indeed a picturesque place. The sunsets were particularly beautiful, the violet light bouncing off the clouds and hills, catching the panes of glass of the homes and buildings, and then vanishing like a bright, shimmering liquid sucked into the earth. Yet life at the new capital was hardly easy. Aside from the Comanche Indians periodically staging attacks on the residents, outlaws in masks showed up to rob the town’s stores and the stagecoaches going to and from San Antonio. Hogs slept on the downtown streets, which after rainstorms would get so muddy that none of the wagons could move.

  When Sam Houston regained the presidency of the republic in 1841, he tried to relocate the capital back to Houston. A group of his supporters came to Austin in the dead of night to take back the government’s archives. But one of the town’s more devoted female loyalists, an innkeeper named Angelina Eberly, fired a six-pound cannon at the interlopers. Other gun-wielding Austinites recovered the archives and returned them to the General Land Office. Barely, Austin was saved.

  Nevertheless, even after Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845, becoming the twenty-eighth state in the union, Austin remained a dusty cow town with a sagging, wood-framed capitol building where the state legislature met every two years. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Austin’s population was only 3,546 residents. There was practically no industry at all except for a sawmill. About the only businesses that prospered were the saloons, the gambling dens—the city directory listed twenty “professional gamblers”—and the brothels. When the fence that surrounded the governor’s mansion fell down, there was no money to put it back up, and cattle wandered in to eat the shrubs. “Jayhawkers, bandits and bush-wackers had everything their own way,” wrote Elizabeth Custer, who accompanied her husband, General George Armstrong Custer, to Austin after the war. (He had been sent there to command a division of the U.S. Cavalry to prevent the possibility of a Confederate resurgence.) “The lawlessness was terrible.”

  In 1871, railroad tracks were laid that connected Austin to the rest of Texas, and the city begin to grow. But two years later, the Texas economy went into free fall when the price of cotton, the state’s biggest commodity, collapsed from thirty cents to thirteen cents a pound. Land values fell, incomes plummeted, and the state government nearly went bankrupt. In 1876, the state’s four-hundred-pound governor, Richard B. Hubbard, who was described by one historian as being “fat almost to the point of being pitiable,” desperately slashed state expenditures. It didn’t help. Within a year, the state’s debt had risen from three million to four million dollars. Half of the state remained unsettled, undeveloped, and unpoliced. Wrote another historian, Texas seemed to be “headed straight for hell.”

  By 1880, however, the price of cotton was rising again. Cotton production in the state doubled, cattle money brought in more revenue, and soon, a full-fledged economic boom was under way that, according to yet another historian, would eventually transform “nearly every facet of Texas society.”

  And nowhere was that boom more pronounced than in Austin. That year, the state legislature, its tax coffers filling up, agreed to fund the building of the long-planned state university in Austin, a four-story Gothic-style building that would be called the University of Texas, and one year later, in 1881, the legislature voted to build a massive new state capitol building just north of downtown that would be 566 feet across, 289 feet long, and 316 feet high—larger than the German Reichstag and the English Parliament buildings and, by some estimates, 31 feet taller than the U.S. Capitol itself.

  Passenger trains began chuffing into the Union Depot to drop off new residents: lawyers and doctors, bookkeepers and clerks, Jewish merchants and Yankee spielers, Chinese laundrymen and the sons of patrician Old South families, hoping to find fame and fortune of their own. The pounding of hammers and heehawing of saws could be
heard everywhere as builders threw up homes, boardinghouses, offices, schools, factories, churches, restaurants, hotels, and more saloons. A few doors down from J. C. Petmecky’s Gunsmiths, which offered the finest in “Winchester repeating arms” and Bowie knives, Mrs. Doris Barker, a self-described “artist and art instructor,” opened a studio to teach portrait and landscape painting to the ladies of Austin society, and around the corner from Lewis and Peacock’s leather goods store, which featured fine “horse saddles” and “cowman’s boots,” an enterprising businessman named Julien Prade opened an ice-cream parlor, complete with a steam engine that blew air over blocks of ice in order to “air-cool” the parlor in the summers.

  One entrepreneur, Gus Barnett, even built a roller coaster, a modern marvel of flight and speed that he claimed was exactly like the one at New York’s Coney Island. He had his customers walk up a long flight of steps to the top of a tower, climb inside tiny open-air railroad cars, and race down an undulating 500-foot-long track in an exhilarating sixteen seconds. As the cars tilted sideways on the curves, everyone squealed with delight, making sure to keep their faces inclined “slightly downward and forward,” as Mr. Barnett had advised them, to avoid insects hitting their faces.

  Now, at the dawn of 1885, Austin was four square miles in size, and Mayor Robertson and other city leaders were predicting the population would soar to at least 20,000 within another year. Compared to such eastern metropolitan centers as New York City, which was already twenty-two square miles in size and filled with more than a million people, Austin still looked like a small western town. On a road just east of Austin, herds of bawling Longhorn cattle sometimes could be seen making their way from south Texas ranches to the Fort Worth or Kansas cattle markets, pushed along by cowboys on horseback.

  But what no one could deny was that the city was changing, in the words of one reporter, as quickly “as the turn of a kaleidoscope,” hurtling from its sepia-toned past into America’s glittery new Gilded Age. Every afternoon except on Sunday, Congress Avenue, the city’s main boulevard, was teeming with brightly painted, mule-driven streetcars and livery wagons, the drivers pulling at their reins to miss children swerving gleefully past them on velocipedes (also known as bicycles). The members of Austin society—the men dressed in their best suits and Stetsons, and the women in feathered hats and freshly ironed dresses with wiggling two-inch bustles—promenaded up and down the Avenue’s wooden sidewalks past Mexican immigrants selling tamales out of carts. Unmarried Texas farmgirls who had come to Austin to get their first taste of “urban life” slowed before shop windows to admire the bedecked mannequins beckoning with gloved hands while businessmen stood outside Fatty’s Barber Shop, where they had just had their mustaches twirled, to discuss the latest prices on the commodities exchanges.

  On the Avenue’s street corners, shoeshine boys whistled off-key, hotel drummers shouted the names of the hotels they were being paid to advertise, and traveling salesman hawked everything from medicines to Opera Puff cigarettes—“guaranteed,” they said, not to stick to one’s lips. An Italian organ grinder named Berninzo performed with his monkey, which turned backflips, and a woman who called herself “Madame Stanley, the Gypsy Fortune Teller” offered customers the chance to sit at her table while she flipped tarot cards and unveiled their futures.

  And always walking the sidewalks was Professor Damos, an elderly, befuddled man who wore numerous tattered overcoats that flapped behind him like the tails of a kite and who stopped beside the gas lamp posts to deliver orations on such subjects as shipwrecks and the end of the world.

  “Beware!” cried Professor Damos. “Beware!”

  One young man who had moved to Austin in 1884—William Sydney Porter, a wry, mustachioed North Carolina native who had dreams of being a writer—was so fascinated by what he saw that he sometimes slipped out of Harrell’s Cigar Store, where he worked, just to wander the streets. A couple of decades later, after the young Porter had moved to New York, changed his name to O. Henry, and become the most popular American short story writer of the late nineteenth century, literary scholars would study his fiction, wondering just how much of it was based on what he had experienced during his Austin days.

  And how could they not? For a young writer—any writer, for that matter—Austin in that era was a feast for the imagination. On Saturday afternoons, there were chess tournaments sponsored by the Austin Chess Club, rope-jumping contests sponsored by the Austin Athletic Association, and horse races on the downtown streets. Out at the fairgrounds, the city’s semi-professional baseball team, the Austins, faced off against semi-professional teams from other Texas cities, with as many as fifty runs being scored each game due to a lively ball, extraordinarily small gloves for the players, and absolutely horrendous pitching. One weekend, two midget sisters from Chicago came to Austin to perform musical duets, and on another weekend, the great boxer John L. Sullivan put on an exhibition at Millett’s Opera House, decking a group of hopeful Austin men who stepped into the ring, one by one, to challenge him. The circus owner Mollie Bailey occasionally paraded down the Avenue with her clowns, sword swallowers, painted ladies, trained canaries, camels, and an elephant that deposited droppings the size of cannonballs, and a young man named William Iry, known in the newspapers as the “Boy Rope Walker,” also showed up on the Avenue to string a rope between the roofs of two downtown buildings and walk serenely back and forth, thirty feet in the air, waving at the cheering crowds below him.

  * * *

  In the months and years to come, when newspaper reporters would arrive from around the country to ask Austin’s residents if they sensed anything—absolutely anything—going wrong in their city during those last days of 1884, the residents would just shake their heads. They truly believed, as Mayor Robertson kept telling them, that they were on the verge of a golden new era. Even the old-timers could feel the excitement: grizzled men in buckskin jackets and battered hats whose eyes would widen in wonder when they talked into the new telephones, or when they watched the electric lights hissing through the night, or when they stood in front of Mr. Barnett’s Austin Roller Coaster as it swooped up and down the tracks.

  And on New Year’s Day 1885, as Austin came one year closer to the twentieth century, its citizens were determined to celebrate their good fortune. That morning there were at least a couple of dozen “calling parties” at homes throughout the city. The wealthier couples were shuttled from one house to another by what were known as “the blacks and bays”: black boys who drove carriages pulled by chestnut-colored mares. Standing at the front doors to greet the guests were young unmarried women, wearing velvet gowns that had been ordered months in advance from the city’s couture clothier, Phil Hatzfield, who had been described by one Austin diarist as “the dictator of fashion in Austin who makes two visits each year to Paris in his efforts to keep his customers up to the minute in fashions and styles.” The men handed their calling cards, which were six inches long and two and one-half inches wide, to the young ladies, who folded their gloved hands over the cards and led the men inside toward the tables covered with candies and cordials.

  Later in the afternoon, the state’s governor, John Ireland, hosted his annual New Year’s Day open house at the two-storied, white-columned Greek Revival governor’s mansion—at 6,000 square feet in size, the biggest governor’s mansion in the country, built on a small hill overlooking the city. Ireland was a good-looking man, slender, with a high forehead, a broad-ridged nose, deep lines in his face tracking outward from his eyes, and a Lincolnesque beard, his whiskers as stiff as quills. He had once been described as being “a great favorite with the ladies.” Just two months earlier, he had been reelected to another two-year term as governor, and there was already talk among his supporters that he would be running for the U.S. Senate in 1886.

  On this New Year’s Day, the governor was in an ebullient mood. Earlier that morning, he had gone to his office and signed pardons for a handful of convicts at the state prison over in the town of H
untsville who he believed had served enough time. He graciously had met with Reverend Abraham Grant, the pastor of Austin’s all-black African Methodist Episcopal Church, to listen to his complaints about the railroads in Texas ordering black citizens to buy first-class fares but forcing them to ride in second-class cars, and he had met with a delegation of sightless children from the state’s Institute for the Blind, who presented him with brooms they had made in the institute’s broom factory.

  Now, standing in the foyer of the governor’s mansion with his wife, Anna, who was dressed in a black silk gown with lace trimmings, he greeted all of his guests, including members of the state legislature, judges from the state’s supreme court, and valued members of his administration. At some point that afternoon, the man who wanted to replace Ireland as governor made an appearance at the mansion. Six feet, six inches tall and as big as an oak wardrobe, William Swain was the state’s comptroller, in charge of revenues and taxes. In November, he had been reelected to his office by more than 240,000 votes, the largest majority of votes ever cast in favor of any candidate for public office in Texas history, and almost all of the state’s newspapers were predicting a gubernatorial victory for Swain in the 1886 elections.

  Before the murders began, Governor John Ireland (left) was considered to be the favorite as Texas’s next United States senator. Comptroller William J. Swain (right) was an overwhelming favorite to be the next governor.

  According to the newspapers, Swain, a Democrat, was “a modern financial Moses,” the kind of leader that Texas needed in order to prepare for the complexities of the twentieth century. He possessed “a strong personal magnetism” and “immense intelligence” that captivated just about everyone who met him. One newspaper, the Fort Worth Gazette, went so far as to write that Swain had “that dignity of intellect and personal bearing which would make him a leader of men anywhere.”