Chenneville apparently had decided that if anyone in Austin had the ability to get in and out of a servant’s quarters without being seen, it was Townsend—“the great and bloodthirsty robber of the hen roost who has figured in several daring midnight hen murders,” the Daily Statesman called him.
On June 6, two officers found Townsend at the Black Elephant. They dragged him to the calaboose, where they were “forced to listen to some ugly cuss words that the prisoner used in giving vent to his opinion regarding them.… In the choice slang of the day, Mr. Townsend is a tough, and though he may be proof against bullets, is liable to have a hard time with hemp.”
The implication was clear: Townsend was about to get the beating of his life with a rope whip.
However, just like every other black man who had been arrested and interrogated since Mollie Smith’s murder, Townsend swore that he hadn’t attacked any of the servant women and that he didn’t know anyone who had. Chained to an iron ring cemented to the floor, he was beaten again. And still he confessed to nothing.
Eventually, Townsend was released, and Chenneville and his officers returned to the streets to look for more black suspects. Worried that they too would be arrested and hemp whipped, black men began walking to and from their homes with their arms held out so that the officers would know they were not carrying axes or knives. Some of the men were so terrified that Chenneville’s bloodhounds would chase them down that they covered their feet and legs with asafoetida, a strong-smelling putty composed of old tree roots, soured vegetables, herbs, and spices that had been used since slavery days to confound bloodhounds.
As for the servant women, several of them quit their jobs and moved away, carrying with them a couple of tin pots and a bag of clothes. Those who stayed wouldn’t budge from their quarters after sundown. Or they spent nights inside their white employers’ homes, lying on pallets on the kitchen floor. Some held their mojo bags to keep away the demon with the evil eye. They quietly sang spirituals and prayed, asking God to let them fall asleep at least for a few hours before they had to awaken at 4 in the morning to begin another day of work.
* * *
By mid-June, the attacks again came to a stop: not even a rock was thrown at a servant woman’s quarters. Residents speculated that the bad blacks had been scared off by the police department’s strong-arm tactics. Either that, wrote the Daily Statesman, or they had been frightened by all the homeowners who had been sticking rifles and pistols out their windows and “firing away” at anyone they felt was coming too close to their servants’ quarters.
In truth, there was little crime at all in Austin during the month of June except for the usual saloon brawls and a couple of run-of-the mill burglaries. On June 16, William Howe, the young police officer who had conducted the initial investigation into the Mollie Smith murder, did issue a ticket to Governor Ireland for illegally parking his carriage at a street crossing down by the railroad depot, which gave the newspaper reporters a day’s worth of entertainment. (“Something near a dozen assassins and would-be assassins of servant women go scot-free, but a governor is nabbed!” chuckled the Fort Worth Gazette.) Mayor Robertson and the aldermen were so angry at Howe for embarrassing the governor that they fired him. But they still didn’t feel a need to do much more to protect Austin’s citizens, such as voting to hire more police officers. They too seemed to believe that Chenneville and his officers had chased off the “midnight miscreants” who had been committing “deeds of deviltry.”
By July 4—Independence Day—Austin’s pitch of gaiety was back in full swing. There were boat races on the Colorado River and tug-of-war contests at a city park. Some families rode in their carriages to Barton Creek to swim and eat picnic lunches. Men pitched horseshoes. Children attempted to capture an oiled pig. In a “ladies only” section of Barton Creek, a few daring young women jumped into the water wearing bathing dresses that revealed their knees.
At sunset, between 4,000 and 6,000 citizens gathered on Pecan Street in the heart of downtown to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone for a new hotel that Col. Jessie Driskill, a rich cattleman who had lived in Austin for many years, was building. Driskill had announced he would be spending $400,000 of his fortune to construct what he called “the most sophisticated hotel west of St. Louis,” four stories high, with hydraulic elevators, and flush toilets on the top floors. The blueprints called for a large saloon on the first floor along with a billiards room and a barber shop. On the second floor would be a dining room, a bridal apartment, parlors, and a ladies’ dressing room. Each of the hotel’s sixty rooms on the top two floors would contain a chandelier, a large couch, a red rocker, a four-poster bed, a private balcony, and an electric bell to ring for a porter. The twelve corner rooms would come with private bathrooms, an almost unheard-of feature for any hotel in the region.
To top it all off, Driskill had ordered that enormous stone busts of himself and his two sons, Tobe and Bud, be carved into the exterior of the hotel because he relished the notion of future generations of Texans looking up to see his family. To show his unending loyalty to the old Confederacy—he had made his fortune supplying beef to Confederate troops throughout the Civil War—Driskill had ordered that his own bust be facing south.
In July, 6,000 citizens came downtown for the cornerstone ceremony of the Driskill Hotel, said to be the finest hotel west of St. Louis.
For the cornerstone ceremony, hundreds of small incandescent lights were strung over Pecan Street in front of the hotel. Both a brass band and a string band performed. Edward Shands, a popular Austin real estate agent, entertained the crowd with a Jules Verne–like speech predicting what Austin would look like on July 4, 2000, 115 years away. Shands announced that 75,000 people would be living in Austin, that 60,000 copies of the Daily Statesman would be delivered each day through pneumatic tubes to every building in Austin, and that the U.S. mail would be transported in “electrical airships” and dropped directly onto people’s yards. He also declared that “modern aerial flights” in those electrical airships would take passengers “from Austin to San Francisco, then thence to China and Japan, then over Europe and across the Atlantic to home … a pleasure trip around the globe in a few days.”
Most exciting, Shands concluded, was that electricity would be used “to send shock waves through people, causing them to live longer and end all diseases,” and that “entire armies and navies” that dared to attack America would be “instantaneously destroyed with one electrical bolt!”
The crowd roared its approval. Fireworks were set off: Roman candles and sky lanterns and firecrackers that battered the ear. Showers of red, white, and blue fell like stars and then burst. Afterward, citizens lingered on the streets, many of them greeting one another by name, the men tipping their derbies or their Stetson hats at the ladies. A group of businessmen and politicians headed down to the Pearl House Hotel and Restaurant, just across the street from the railroad depot, for a dinner to honor Colonel Driskill. Seated at one long table, they consumed a lavish eight-course meal and drank Mumm’s champagne. At the end of the night, amid curls of cigar smoke, they rose to make increasingly inebriated toasts to everything from the new hotel to the city’s banking system to the entire educational system of Texas.
Mayor Robertson gave the final toast, and it was, of course, a masterpiece of booming. “To the Capital City,” he declared, “with the natural beauty of its location, the salubrity of its atmospherical influences, and a proper diversification of its labor and investment of its money.… No city has the promise of a more healthful prosperity!”
* * *
Later that July, Mayor Robertson held a meeting of the Texas Semi-Centennial Organizing Committee to begin planning the fiftieth celebration of Texas’s independence, which would be held in Austin in March 1886—seven months away. Although the mayor had no idea what he would do to surpass the parade and cornerstone ceremony from the previous March, he vowed that the coming celebration would “eclipse anything ever attempted in Texas.
”
In early August, he headed down to the railroad depot to greet J. W. Olds, a very important visitor who was coming in from San Francisco. Olds was a researcher and ghostwriter for Hubert Howe Bancroft, one of the most popular American historians of his day. For the last several years, Bancroft had been working on a massive thirty-nine-volume project detailing the history of the western half of the continent, from Central America to Alaska, and he recently had decided to devote a volume to Texas. Bancroft had ordered Olds, who was one of his chief ghostwriters, to come to Austin to “collect material” on Texas’s history, beginning with the arrival of the first white settlers in the 1520s and concluding in the 1880s, with Texas, and its capital, Austin, on the very cusp of modernity.
Robertson was determined that Olds see the best of Austin. It was arranged for him and his wife to stay in a suite of rooms in one of the city’s finest boardinghouses. Dinners were thrown in his honor. Governor Ireland and William Swain, the state’s barrel-chested comptroller who was already campaigning to be the next governor, met with Olds, hoping to be included in Bancroft’s book. (“An excellent man,” Olds later wrote about Swain.) As part of his research, Olds visited the shops and restaurants of Congress Avenue, went to talk to the professors at the new University of Texas, and even made the two-and-a-half-mile trip north of downtown to the sprawling State Lunatic Asylum, where the effusive Dr. Denton showed off the newly landscaped grounds, the freshly repainted dormitories, and the lovely, flower-laden chapel, where his daughter and his son-in-law Dr. Given had been married.
And, of course, Olds took a tour of the new state capitol, which was still under construction—by all accounts, the biggest and most expensive construction project in the country, costing at least $3.7 million ($85.3 million in today’s dollars). More than five hundred workers were swarming over the twenty-two-acre capitol grounds, erecting iron girders and pillars, excavating the basement, constructing the foundation walls, and installing water pipes and ventilation shafts. Every afternoon, on a narrow-gauge railroad track that ran straight from the quarry to the site of the capitol, a locomotive called The Lone Star pulled flatbed cars laden with red granite, which were unloaded by cranes and cut into perfect rectangular blocks by trained stonemasons who had been brought in from England and Scotland. Olds was so overwhelmed with the capitol that he wrote that upon its completion, it would “rival in dimensions and magnificence any other edifice of its kind in the United States.”
Olds was almost certainly told about the servant women attacks. In his notes, he wrote that citizens periodically had to endure the behavior of “debased Negroes” who “engaged in frays among themselves, which generally terminated in bloodshed.” But he made it clear that the “frays” were of little significance. He noted that the state’s criminal laws were being enforced “with undeviating justice” and that violent criminals were being taken off the streets and put in the penitentiary. All in all, concluded Olds, the state once known as “the abode of savages” was being converted “into a civilized country.”
* * *
Throughout the month of August, several residents left the city to go on their summer vacations, some traveling back to their old family homes in the South, and others taking the train to Galveston to stay at the Tremont Hotel and swim in the Gulf of Mexico. Sergeant Chenneville himself took a few days off because there was little to do. “If something doesn’t turn up soon,” wrote a reporter, “Austin’s police force will probably adjourn for a fishing frolic.”
In the last week of the month, the temperatures soared, thermometers hitting 100 degrees Fahrenheit. A crew of men in a water wagon traversed downtown’s heat-baked streets, spraying them with water to keep down the dust. On Saturday, August 29, a couple of hundred residents who were not on vacation trooped out to the fairgrounds to watch the Austins, the city’s semi-professional baseball team, play the neighboring Georgetowns for the regional championship. Before the game, the Austins donned new uniforms made of gray flannel pants that came down to their knees, gray flannel jackets trimmed in white, gray flannel caps, blue stockings, and black shoes. The players were so hot that sweat poured down their bodies. Still, they won by a convincing score of 19–10 to advance to the state playoffs.
That night, there was the usual activity on the downtown streets. Couples dined at the restaurants and later dropped by the “air-cooled” ice-cream shop owned by Julien Prade. At the saloons, the usual array of men gathered to drink and play cards. On the Avenue, a salesman sold a new soap that he vowed would remove all grease spots from skin and clothing, and a self-described “street astronomer” offered sidewalk strollers the opportunity (for a small fee) to look through his telescope and view the heavens. It was a beautiful night, he said, to see the moons and the stars—which was no exaggeration. There were only a few clouds in the sky.
An Austin ice-cream parlor. Through much of the summer, the people of Austin thought the murders had come to an end.
Then, a short time past midnight, just a couple of blocks southeast of the Avenue, a man made his way down an alley behind the home of Valentine Osborn Weed.
CHAPTER NINE
Valentine Weed was a successful young businessman who owned a downtown livery stable that leased horses, wagons, buggies, and carriages. He and his family lived in a two-story Queen Anne home, which was only a block away from Dr. Lucian Johnson’s residence, where Eliza Shelley had been murdered back in early May.
On pallets in Weed’s kitchen that night were his servant woman, Rebecca Ramey, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Mary. The two had been sleeping in the kitchen because they, like so many other servant women, were too afraid to sleep in their own quarters. Rebecca was about forty years of age, a large woman, weighing close to two hundred pounds. She was well known in the black community—her brother was Albert Carrington, Austin’s lone black city alderman. Rebecca formerly had worked at the Austin Steam Laundry and had been married to a man who was a bellhop at the popular Avenue Hotel. But when he disappeared from Austin a couple of years earlier—rumored to have run off with another woman—Rebecca had come to work for the Weeds so she could always have her daughter, Mary, at her side.
Mary spent the mornings at the all-black Central Grammar School. In the afternoons, she helped her mother. She did everything—iron clothes, make beds, chop wood, bring in water, start fires, clean, and cook. Because of her education, she had a bright future: someday she would be able to enroll at the Tillotson College and Normal Institute to study and become a teacher.
The man in the alley opened the back gate to the Weed home. He probably stood there for several seconds, completely still, to avoid spooking Tom Thumb, Weed’s miniature Shetland pony that lived in the backyard.
The yard was dry, the fallen leaves from the surrounding live oak trees even drier. As the man started walking toward the house, however, he didn’t make a sound. Nor did the floorboards creak when he slipped onto the back porch—or at least they weren’t loud enough to wake Rebecca or Mary, or any member of the Weed family. Like a highly skilled burglar, he slowly and silently opened the kitchen door.
In his hand was a club, about a foot long, containing several ounces of lead packed in sand that was all wrapped in buckskin. A leather strap was at the bottom end of the club, which the man had wrapped around his wrist. He stepped into the kitchen and loomed over Rebecca and Mary.
When Rebecca realized someone was there, she tried to get her eyes to focus so that she could see just who it was. But the man was a dark silhouette against the blackness. Rebecca didn’t have a chance to draw a breath, let alone scream, before he slammed the club against the side of her head. It hit her so hard it was like a fist going through a light plaster wall. But because of the sand surrounding the lead, the sound was muffled—a dull thunk. Rebecca fell back to the floor, knocked completely unconscious. The man dropped the club and grabbed little Mary.
* * *
At some point in the early morning hours, Rebecca regained consciousne
ss and began to groan. V. O. Weed awakened, lit a small lantern, and walked toward the kitchen, his wife in her nightgown following him.
He opened the door. Her eyelids fluttering, Rebecca was on her hands and knees, her head lowered to her chest. She must have crawled into that position without thinking, like a wounded animal that had retreated to a corner. Blood was flowing from two cuts in her left temple. Part of her forehead looked caved in and the line of her jaw was crooked. The pain was so great she could barely speak. “I’m sick,” she murmured to Weed. When he asked about her daughter Mary’s whereabouts, she just shook her head.
Weed noticed the club on the kitchen floor—left there almost as a taunt. He grabbed his shotgun, stepped outside, and yelled toward the home of his next-door neighbor, Stephen Jacqua, the co-owner of a flour, feed, and hay supply store. Jacqua met Weed at the fence, where Weed told him that someone had attacked Rebecca and dragged away her daughter. He asked Jacqua to come with him to look in the backyard shed, where tools were stored. “I carried the light and Mr. Weed pushed the door of the outhouse open with the barrel of his gun,” Jacqua would later say. “We saw the girl lying on the floor, as I supposed, dead.”
Mary, however, was not dead—not yet. Her eyes were partly open, dazed, peering up at the two men with no expression at all. Blood was trickling out of her ears and blood bubbles coming out of her nose. The men stepped out into the yard and looked around, as if expecting to be attacked. But there was only silence.
Weed told Jacqua to remain in the yard and not to allow anyone to come in. He was smart enough to realize that the crime scene needed to be preserved until the police arrived. He had his wife run to the home of Dr. Johnson and ask him to come tend to Rebecca and Mary. Then Weed himself either ran or rode a horse to the home of Sergeant Chenneville, who lived only a couple of blocks away, to ask him to come with his dogs.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 9