So that they would not, as he put it, feel “penned up like prisoners,” he had the ten-foot-high picket fence surrounding the main grounds torn down and replaced with a much smaller fence, only four feet in height. He also had the asylum’s cemetery, where unclaimed dead lunatics were buried, moved from its spot next to the main building to a plot of land over a hill so that his patients would not have to see it and be overcome with morbid thoughts.
He also set up a daily schedule for the patients in which they were awakened before dawn, given a bountiful breakfast (a leading theory of the day was that much of insanity was due to a lack of proper nutrition), sent off to work (most of them labored on the asylum’s 120-acre farm or its 15-acre orchard), and then encouraged at the end of the day to develop what Denton called “their gray cellular material” by reading books and newspapers in the day rooms, singing patriotic songs around a piano, playing cards, chess, or billiards, or bowling on the single ten-pin lane in the asylum basement.
Denton envisioned the wedding of his daughter Ella to his young assistant Dr. Given as the ideal opportunity to introduce his modern asylum to members of Austin society. Dressed in their most fashionable clothes, his guests rode up Asylum Road in their varnished carriages, went past the front gates emblazoned with the letters SLA (State Lunatic Asylum), stopped in front of the main building, and walked up the steps carrying tasteful wedding presents: bronzes, sterling silver, china, linen, and laces.
Some of the guests had to have felt a little jittery as they looked around the nearly fenceless asylum. A few of them, no doubt, peered in the direction of the Cross Pits building, which that day housed fifty-two criminally insane lunatics, including an infamous madman named Lombard Stephens, who had sent Governor Ireland several letters vowing that he would eat the governor’s brains if he was not paid $500,000.
But standing with his wife, Margaret, in the high-ceilinged foyer, Denton let his guests know that they had nothing to fear. He liked to point out that the bell installed in front of the main building, which was to be rung whenever a patient was seen fleeing for the distant fields, had not clanged in the last several months. His patients had no desire to run away, Denton said. For them, the asylum was a rural paradise, a peaceful refuge, an Eden-like outpost far away from the unbearable rigors of civilization.
The guests were led to the asylum’s chapel. An organist played Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and everyone stood. Miss Denton, dressed in white with a train that flowed behind her, walked down the aisle to the front of the chapel, where Dr. Given waited to take her hand.
Given was a striking young man—tall, trim, and athletic, with dark brown hair, eyes that gleamed like marbles, and a beautiful handlebar mustache, the tips perfectly oiled. An Episcopalian priest performed the traditional wedding ceremony, and then the entire entourage recessed out of the chapel and headed for a dining room, where steaming dishes of breakfast food were brought forth by waiters, some of whom were patients at the asylum.
Several friends of Dr. Given and Ella rose from their seats to toast the couple. Dr. Denton himself made a toast, asking that good fortune follow his daughter and son-in-law for the rest of their lives. At the end of the breakfast banquet, Denton led his guests to the asylum’s front door to watch the newlyweds ride off in the back of a carriage to the downtown railroad depot to begin their honeymoon in St. Louis and New Orleans.
Everyone cheered and waved. The asylum’s patients, standing at their dormitory windows, their faces pressed against the glass, cheered and waved along with them. For Denton, the wedding had been a success beyond his wildest dreams—“the most enjoyable event that ever occurred within the asylum,” wrote one of the reporters who also attended. If someone had come out onto that porch and told Denton and his guests that Austin soon would be descending into chaos, they too would have laughed out loud. For a few precious hours the sane had come to the land of the insane, and not a single person there had been afraid.
CHAPTER FIVE
March arrived, and according to one reporter visiting from the town of Waco, Austin remained caught up in “a pitch of gaiety.” On March 2, the forty-ninth anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico, Mayor Robertson and other city leaders put on what was unquestionably the biggest event in the city’s history: a lavish parade up Congress Avenue to celebrate the laying of the 16,000-pound granite cornerstone for the new state capitol. Weeks earlier, announcements had been placed in the state’s newspapers encouraging all Texans to come to Austin to watch the cornerstone being lowered into the earth. Circulars had been sent to Texas public schools, inviting students and their teachers. More than 3,000 invitations had been mailed to prominent citizens outside of Texas, including an invitation to the president of Mexico.
Just before the parade began, at least 25,000 people were lined along the downtown streets, “and it is safe to say ten thousand of that number were visitors,” wrote William P. Lambert, a local writer who would later publish a pamphlet about the celebration. The upper stories of buildings along Congress Avenue were “thronged with ladies and children dressed in holiday attire,” and the buildings themselves were festooned with bunting and large Texas flags. The sun was high and bright and a breeze blew off the Colorado River. From somewhere in the distance, the fourteen-piece Manning Rifle Band started to warm up, the high notes of the trumpets hanging in the air. At the stroke of noon, a whistle blew and the crowd let out a roar.
Architects planned for the Texas state capitol, under construction in 1885, to be larger than the U.S. Capitol.
The parade lasted for close to an hour. Governor Ireland, Mayor Robertson, and at least one hundred other government officials rode up the Avenue in open-topped buggies. Marching on foot were representatives from Austin’s workmen’s unions, professors and students from the new University of Texas, wrestlers and boxers who trained at the Austin Athletic Association, a contingent of Jewish citizens (Lambert called them “Austin’s Israelites”), members of Austin’s German immigrant community, and a small group of “colored representatives.” Local businessmen rode by on “floats”—decorated horse-drawn wagons. The home builder S. W. French had doors, window sashes, glass windows, and buckets of paint on his float; Charles Lundberg the baker featured pastries and cakes on his float; and R. W. Bandy, the owner of a tack and saddle shop, had a float displaying “full cow-boys’ outfits” as well as his best horse-riding gear. At the back of the procession were the owners of the Iron Front Saloon, probably a little tipsy, their float covered with signs advertising their drink specials and casino games.
After the last float had passed by, the celebration moved to the capitol grounds, where a half-dozen construction derricks rose high in the air. (One observer earlier had said that the derricks made the capitol site look like “a harbor of big ships.”) Suspended from the front derrick was the cornerstone. Inside the cornerstone was a zinc box containing more than two hundred trinkets and mementoes that had been donated by Austin citizens. There were photographs and drawings of such famous Texas personalities as Sam Houston, photographs of prominent Austin families, and various photographs of Austin itself. The Austin Bible Society had donated a Bible, the Texas State Dental Association had donated a set of artificial teeth, and the Texas State Grange, a farmer’s organization, had donated two ears of corn. Austin’s most beloved poet, the portly Mrs. Martha Hotchkiss Whitten, had submitted a poem, “Austin City,” that she had written in iambic pentameter especially for the occasion. (“Austin! Fair city of our Southern Land,” the poem began. “By Nature’s gifts adorned on every hand!”) Mayor Robertson, predictably, had placed several reports in the cornerstone detailing the excellent state of affairs in Austin along with a city directory listing the names of all of Austin’s residents as well as a roster of all the children who were attending Austin’s public schools.
After a speech in which Governor Ireland described the capitol as “a monument to the wisdom, taste and energy of our age … as durable and substantial even as Aus
tin’s everlasting hills,” the cornerstone was carefully lowered into place by officers of a Masonic lodge and, in the distance, the Travis Light Artillery fired a rousing forty-nine-gun salute, the smoke from their guns floating across the capitol grounds like gray ghosts.
One week later, a young servant woman awoke in the middle of the night and swore she saw a ghost standing by her bed.
* * *
The young woman, a recent immigrant from Germany, lived in a one-room servants’ quarters that adjoined the kitchen in the back of a large home on Hickory Street, close to downtown. She later told police that the man just stood there for a few seconds, his face hidden in darkness. Suddenly, he said, “Your money or your life.” The young woman screamed. He whacked her over the head with a hard object, cutting her scalp. Hearing his servant woman’s screams, the homeowner in the front part of the house headed toward her quarters, but by the time he got there, the man was gone.
Four nights later, a black cook who worked for a physician was awakened by what was later described as “a violent shaking” at the locked door to her servants’ quarters. When the cook looked out the window, no one was there. Within an hour, in a nearby neighborhood, two young black women were awakened by the rattling of the locked doorknob at their servants’ quarters, located behind a mansion owned by their employer, Major Joseph Stewart, a former Confederate officer who spent his time touring the state, delivering a lengthy prose poem he had written on the glories of the Old South. One of the women opened the door and stepped outside to see who was there. Suddenly, she felt herself being grabbed from behind. She cried hysterically for help, and her assailant, whom she never saw, released her and disappeared.
Too terrified to be alone, the Stewarts’ servant women spent the rest of that night in his kitchen. But when they returned to their quarters the next morning, they discovered that a lamp, which was not lit at the time they raced away from the room, was mysteriously burning. They also found their clothes and bedding in a great heap in the middle of the room. Apparently, whoever had tried to get inside earlier had slipped back into the quarters while the women were in the main house just to tear their room apart.
Two nights after the incident at Major Stewart’s, an intruder slipped into the servants’ quarters attached to the back of the home belonging to Abe Williams, the owner of a shop that sold fine suits and silk dresses. In the darkness, the intruder committed what one of the newspapers would later describe as “a determined and brutal assault” on Williams’s housekeeper, “tearing the covering off her bed, and several times striking her on the head and face” before vanishing as quickly as he came.
For a couple of days, the attacks stopped. Then, on March 19, there was a tapping on the window of the servants’ quarters located just behind the residence of Col. J. H. Pope, a cotton planter who owned a large farm outside of Austin. Pope’s two servant girls—Swedish immigrant teenagers named Christine and Clara—lay in their beds, too scared to move. The tapping stopped and there was the sudden sound of a pistol shot. The bullet passed through the window and lodged in a wall. Screaming, the girls raced outside and headed toward the main house. One of the girls, Clara, was grabbed from behind, but she was not able to turn around to see who it was. She kept screaming, which brought Colonel Pope and others outside with their guns. But they could not find the man. He had let Clara go and disappeared almost instantly.
The Swedish teenagers returned to their room, and they locked and barricaded the door. But within minutes, another shot was fired through a window into their quarters. The bullet hit Christine between her shoulder blade and spinal column, knocking her to the ground, but it did not hit any of her vital organs.
* * *
Like so many other growing cities, Austin had been experiencing an increase in thefts and property crime. “The anticipated lively times in Austin have brought an influx of thieves,” one newspaper had reported back at the first of the year. In January, a thief had entered the house of a family on East Walnut Street and, according to another newspaper story, “took all the eatables.” A few days later, a thief had thrown a heavy piece of wood through the bedroom window of an elderly woman named Mrs. Cope and grabbed her small purse lying on a table.
There were black chicken thieves in Austin who stole chickens from the backyards of the city’s white residents, which they then sold to poorer black residents for mere pennies. Men who traveled the country on freight trains occasionally jumped off at the Austin depot and wandered the city for a day or so, looking for something to steal before they returned to the trains.
But these crimes were perplexing. Whoever was trying to break into the servants’ quarters seemed far more interested in attacking the women—or just frightening them—than taking their money or their meager belongings.
The assumption—at least the assumption among Austin’s white citizens—was that the servant quarter “invasions,” as one reporter called them, were being carried out by black men. “Bad blacks!” the Daily Statesman called them. “It seems from the sameness of the deviltry and its constant repetition that there must be a regular gang of these brutes who perambulate the city at the small hours of night to do their unholy work.”
In 1885, about 3,500 black citizens were living in Austin—20 percent of the population. Many lived in servants’ quarters, or “alley houses,” in their employers’ backyards; others in one-room apartments above the stores or restaurants where they worked; and still others in small, all-black neighborhoods (which the white citizens called “nigger patches”) that were on the edge of the city. One of the black neighborhoods, known as Clarksville, had been built on several acres of land that a former governor of Texas, Elisha Pease, had given to his emancipated slaves at the end of the Civil War, twenty years ago. The typical Clarksville house consisted of three rooms, one room directly behind another. Sometimes as many as ten members of a family lived in a house. The front doors were so small and the ceilings so low that everyone had to stoop to avoid bumping their heads. The roofs leaked and the thin wooden walls strained and groaned, pushing against the nails. A creek carrying sewage periodically flooded the homes.
And Clarksville was one of the nicer black neighborhoods. Austin’s poorest black neighborhood, which consisted of nine shanties, was located right next to the city dump. On windy days, trash and refuse blew into the homes. The neighborhood’s residents regularly scoured the dump, gathering watermelon rinds, rotting fruit, potatoes, and dog-chewed bones for their meals.
Most of Austin’s black adults were still uneducated, unable to read or write. Their working life consisted of the lowest-paying jobs in two fields: common labor and domestic service. The men were employed as janitors, barbers, porters, carriage drivers, cloakroom attendants, bootblacks, waiters, and bellhops. They shoveled coal for the railroads, worked at the sawmills and the brick yards, and picked cotton on farms just outside of town. A few worked as “Negro cowboys,” watching over white men’s cattle.
The city’s black women mostly did servant work. Their days began as early as four in the morning. They’d wash themselves with rags dipped in pails of water, eat a breakfast of molasses and cornmeal, and head to the kitchen of the main house, where they’d remove the ashes from the previous day’s fire, gather more firewood, and carry the wood back into the kitchen to start a new fire. The rest of their day was filled with dozens of duties: cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, mopping, emptying chamber pots, hauling garbage and liquid waste to the refuse pile, and doing all the laundry, which was a Herculean task in itself, requiring endless cycles of soaking, rinsing, scrubbing, starching, drying clothes on lines out in the backyard, and ironing with a scalding hot flatiron that had been heated over the fire.
Finally, after serving dinner and cleaning the kitchen again, they would eat scraps of leftovers that had been set out for them by their white employers, and they’d head back to their quarters to fall asleep on thin mattresses. They got one day off each week: Sunday, or at least part of a Sunday, so that
they could attend one of the black churches.
Compared to the years of slavery and post–Civil War Reconstruction, when “darkies” who were deemed “insolent” were viciously beaten—“getting Ku-Kluxed” was the term used—or even hanged in a grove of oaks on the city’s east side, black life definitely had improved in Austin. In their neighborhoods, black residents had opened shops and churches. The members of Rev. Abraham Grant’s African Methodist Episcopal Church had pooled their money and raised an astonishing $8,000 to build a new church building, forty by seventy feet in size, with a Gothic roof and a church bell that had been made in Baltimore. On the eastern edge of downtown, a group of black businessmen had formed a business district of sorts. One of those businessmen, a former slave named Thomas Hill, ran a grocery and an unofficial bank, loaning money to other black residents from his office in the back of the store. A block away was the Austin Citizen, a weekly newspaper for those black residents who could read. (No copies are known to exist today.) A restaurant also opened, as did a blacksmith shop, a dress shop for women, and the Black Elephant, an all-black saloon.
On weekends, Austin’s black residents entertained themselves with horse races, baseball games, and dances at Sand Hill. A group of men formed the Austin Cadet Band, described in the Daily Statesman as “a colored marching band,” and another group of men formed a fraternal society called the Dark Rising Sons of Liberty. Black traveling acts came to Austin to entertain the residents—among them a man who gave glass-eating demonstrations, a man named Joe Slick who played the banjo, and a black cowboy who called himself “Dick the Demon Negro” and who wrestled steers to the ground, holding on to them only with his teeth.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 5