Dr. Johnson arrived, examined little Mary in the shed, and realized there was nothing he could do. Whenever she took a breath, more blood poured out of her ears and spread below her body. Another doctor, Richard Swearingen, also came into the shed and stared at Mary. Chenneville then showed up. The men conjectured that an intruder, after attacking Rebecca, had grabbed Mary, clamped one hand over her mouth so she could not make a sound, and carried her to the shed, where he had jammed some sort of long iron rod into the cavity of one of Mary’s ears, piercing one side of the brain. Then he had pulled out the rod and jammed it again into her other ear, piercing the other side of the brain—essentially lobotomizing her—before he ran out to the back alley and vanished.
Dr. Johnson cradled Mary’s head in his hand. Just as dawn arrived, she made a tiny ooh sound as the life drained out of her.
* * *
Next to the gate leading from the Weeds’ backyard into the back alley, a police officer found some footprints in the sandy soil. Chenneville’s bloodhounds sniffed the prints and hit a scent. They ran down the alley and came to a stop two blocks away at a stable, where a young black man named Tom Allen was found sleeping in a hayloft.
Allen, whose nickname was River Bottom Tom, worked on the water cart that sprayed the downtown streets to keep down the dust. Chenneville’s dogs lunged at him, sinking their teeth into his legs and arms and hands. He was arrested on a charge of “suspicion of murder” and taken to the calaboose.
By then, a crowd was starting to gather around the Weed home. Some people were wearing their Sunday-best clothes and holding Bibles, on their way to church. They watched as Mary’s body was carried out of the shed and loaded onto the black undertaker’s wagon so that she could be taken to the dead room of the City County Hospital for her autopsy. They kept watching as Rebecca was placed either beside her daughter or in a separate wagon so she could be taken to the hospital’s “Negro Ward,” a small windowless room containing a few beds that was located just down the hall from the dead room.
When the newspaper reporters gathered around Weed, he told them that Rebecca and Mary “were good workers and of quiet habits.” He added that Rebecca “had no men going to see her, and I think her a good and virtuous woman.” She led an “orderly life,” he said. He mentioned that he gladly would give money for a reward fund for the capture of Mary’s killer.
At 11 a.m., a full seven hours after Weed had found Rebecca and Mary, Marshal Lee arrived at the Weed home. Because it was a Sunday, his day off, he had slept late in the back bedroom of his father’s house, where he lived, and by all indications, Chenneville and his officers had been just fine with their marshal staying there. No one from the department had called Lee and no one had come to knock on his father’s front door to awaken him.
Lee talked for a few minutes to Weed. He inspected the backyard shed. Then he headed to the police department and sat behind his desk. He must have felt utterly ridiculous that he had been left out of another murder investigation.
But the investigation was going nowhere. Although one police officer told a reporter that River Bottom Tom’s feet perfectly matched the footprints that had been found next to the Weeds’ backyard gate, even to a “peculiarly shaped toe” on one foot, the fact was that it wasn’t all that surprising that his footprints might have been in the alley, because he lived close by. What also pointed to his innocence was that the police had not found a drop of blood on him or on any of the hay in the stable where he slept.
Nor could Chenneville find anyone who had a story to tell about River Bottom Tom holding some sort of grudge against Rebecca and Mary. Chenneville did his best to get River Bottom Tom to confess, subjecting him to another one of his “examinations.” Like all the other black suspects who had been brought in, however, River Bottom Tom kept saying he had nothing to do with the attacks on Rebecca and Mary and that he knew nothing about any of the other attacks.
Determined to make another arrest before the day was over, Chenneville and his officers went looking for another black man named Aleck Mack, who over the years had been described in newspaper articles as “a petty thief of a particularly quarrelsome nature,” “a very impudent Negro,” and “a notoriously bad darkey.” Among Austin’s white citizens, Mack was especially notorious because he had once defiantly taken a drink from a whites-only water bucket at a construction site on a hot summer afternoon.
Although Mack hadn’t been seen around Austin for several months, he had returned earlier that summer. When officers tracked him down in a black neighborhood in east Austin, his feet and legs were covered with asafoetida, which for Chenneville was proof that Mack was up to no good.
During his own examination, however, Mack, like River Bottom Tom, professed complete ignorance about the attacks on the Ramey women. He said he barely knew Rebecca or her daughter. He told a reporter for the Daily Statesman who came to visit him in the calaboose that the only reason he had used the asafoetida was because he was hoping to throw Chenneville’s dogs off his scent so that they would not drag him to the ground and chew him up.
* * *
On Monday, Mary’s body was placed in a small coffin and taken by the Negro undertaker to Colored Ground. Waiting by the cemetery’s front gate, as always, was Mr. Nitschke, the sexton. He pointed mourners in the direction of the grave he had picked out for Mary, underneath a pretty live oak tree, and then he returned to his office to fill out Mary’s death record. When Nitschke got to the column asking for Mary’s cause of death, he wrote, “Murdered.” At this point, he finally realized, it was pointless to pretend that nothing was happening.
It was indeed pointless. By now, all the newspapers in Texas were running stories about the murders, and many of them were lambasting Austin officials for not finding the “bad blacks.” Even the editorialists for the Daily Statesman were losing their patience. “We pay for protection, but why is there none—absolutely none?” one of them wrote. “The citizens are overcome with terror, not now at the bold daring desperado in the open street, but at sneaking midnight prowlers, seeking an opportunity to outrage the unprotected and to shed the blood of the innocent.”
On Congress Avenue, there were more calls for more full-time police officers—as many as twenty—to be hired to work at night. Some men continued to demand that vigilance committees be formed. “If such a step is taken,” one man told a San Antonio reporter, “it will not only certainly put a stop to these nightly outrages, but it will be the means of ridding this city of a horde of loafing, shiftless, vagrant Negroes who have infested it for years.”
An Austin newspaper reporter. The reporters likened the killings to an Edgar Allan Poe short story.
Several citizens said the time had come for Mayor Robertson and the aldermen to impeach the polite and efficient Marshal Lee. One citizen put it this way: “The present marshal is a good, honest, well-meaning man, but he is deficient in the ability which should characterize a man occupying the important position that he does. And if the chief of a police force is inefficient, the force is so, too, no matter how capable the men comprising it may be.… A change is imperatively demanded. The reputation of the city marred and blackened by a fearfully bloody record, demands it.”
Austin’s black leaders were so anxious that they made an extraordinary decision to gather at the county courthouse to ask that the city’s black residents be given better police protection. Among those there were Reverend Grant; Alderman Carrington; Dr. Quinton B. Neal, the city’s sole black physician; William Wilson, the principal of one of the all-black public schools; and Jeremiah J. Hamilton, the publisher of the Austin Citizen, the weekly black newspaper. Two black porters who worked for the state government and were therefore on speaking terms with many white government officials—Lewis Mitchell from the department of the secretary of state and Henry Hollingsworth from the General Land Office—also came.
One of the men stepped forward to read a formal statement: “Whereas, the city of Austin has been wronged, outraged and thro
wn into the intensest excitement; and whereas, not one of the fiendish scoundrels has been caught and punished; therefore, be it resolved, that we, the colored citizens of Austin, pledge ourselves to use every lawful means to aid the civil authorities in arresting and punishing these villains to the fullest extent of the law.” The statement concluded with a request that “the mayor, city council and governor” offer “a suitable reward for the arrest and punishment of the parties who committed the murder upon Mrs. Ramey’s daughter last Sunday morning.”
For most of the year, white Austinites still believed that only black women were being targeted.
The black leaders tried to meet with Governor Ireland and hand him their statement, but they were told he had the dengue. Ireland, of course, wasn’t about to jeopardize his political future by getting involved with the Austin killings. Nor did Mayor Robertson meet with the committee. He didn’t want his constituents to think that he was, God forbid, getting advice from black men.
But Robertson did not have to be told that his own political future would be in grave jeopardy if he could not bring the killings to an end. The city elections were scheduled for early December, and Joseph Nalle, a wealthy lumberman who had lost to Robertson in the last mayoral race, had already let it be known that he planned to run for the office again. Nalle was telling voters that if he was mayor, they would not have had to worry about their servant women being attacked. He said Austin would not be overrun with Negro criminals, because he would make sure a real marshal was in charge of the police force, not some rich man’s son who knew nothing at all about law enforcement.
And so, determined to save his reputation and win the election, Robertson came up with a plan. He wrote a letter to the owners of the Noble Commercial Detective Agency in downtown Houston, asking if they would send him their best private detective, a man named Capt. Mike Hennessey.
PART THREE
SEPTEMBER 1885–CHRISTMAS DAY 1885
“A woman has been chopped to pieces! It's Mrs. Hancock! On Water Street!”
CHAPTER TEN
In 1885, every city in Texas had a private detective agency. Austin’s was the Capital Detective Association, a three-man operation that had opened in 1884. The tasks that the detectives performed were almost always routine. They were hired by merchants to watch over their establishments at night, or recover stolen merchandise, or track down an employee who had run off with a store’s strongbox—crimes that the local police didn’t have the time or manpower to solve. Periodically, a bank asked them to look for a swindler who had cashed a forged check and left town.
In Houston, however, the owners of the Noble Commercial Detective Agency—C. M. Noble, a former Houston sheriff, and John F. Morris, a former marshal of the Houston Police Department—were promoting themselves as the Texas version of the legendary Chicago-based Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which had opened in 1850. Every American knew the Pinkerton motto: “The Eye That Never Sleeps.” Many of them bought books, published by the agency itself, that dramatically recounted the tales of its “private eyes” chasing bank robbers, railroad bandits, swindlers, kidnappers, political assassins, and such cold-blooded outlaws as Jesse James and the Dalton Gang. In the books—which had such titles as The Molly Maguires and the Detectives and The Railroad Forger and the Detectives—the Pinkerton men were always able to “penetrate beneath the thick veil of night,” “lay bare the fearful mysteries of the metropolis,” and “see things that others cannot see.” No criminal, no matter how smart, was able to get away from the Pinkertons.
When the murders resumed, Mayor Robertson hired a famed Houston private detective agency to come to Austin.
Noble and Morris unabashedly claimed their team of six detectives were of “Pinkerton quality.” The owners had gone so far as to take out ads in the state’s newspapers that made them look as if they were the Pinkertons’ affiliate in Texas. “We are prepared to furnish Detectives of unquestioned ability to perform all Railroad, Bank, Insurance and all branches of Detective Work,” the ad read. “We are in daily communications with the Pinkerton Agency, East and West.”
Actually, Noble and Morris were not in touch with the Pinkertons at all. But their marketing campaign was definitely getting them business. In the last year, they had opened branch offices in San Antonio and Dallas. To drum up even more work, they gave interviews to the newspapers trumpeting their detectives’ latest arrests. Most of the publicity was focused on the thirty-nine-year-old Hennessey, a former New Orleans police captain. According to one laudatory story in the Houston Daily Post, Hennessey had both a national and a “foreign reputation” as “one of the most skillful detectives in the profession.” Among the cases he had solved, the Daily Post noted, were “the celebrated Diamond Robbery, the Meade Murder, the case of the celebrated Italian bandit Espiloso, and that of Johnson the Fire Bug.”
Built like a boxer, with broad shoulders and a tapered waist, Hennessey was considered to be an expert tracker, able to slip into a city and hunt down either a criminal or a witness to a crime whom no one else could find. Recalling how he had once caught a man who had gone into hiding in New Orleans after being accused of murder, Hennessey proudly said in an interview, “By day and night, I was upon his track. When he moved a shadow was after him. When he slept, his very breathing was watched and reported.”
Hennessey intrigued Robertson. At that point, the mayor did not have to be told that Marshal Lee was utterly helpless when it came to hunting down the killers. Nor did Sergeant Chenneville seem to have any idea what to do. The fact was that the sergeant, for all his reliability, had all the intellectual depth of the tacks that held up the wanted posters on the walls of the police department. Robertson called the aldermen to city hall and told them that Captain Hennessey was just the man they needed.
Impressed, the aldermen agreed to pay for Hennessey’s services—he cost ten dollars a day, plus expenses—and on September 9 he arrived in Austin with his assistants George Hannah and Ike Himmel. Using assumed names, the detectives checked into rooms at the Carrollton House, a hotel only a couple of blocks off Congress Avenue. They also brought along their own bloodhound, which they put in the hotel’s small backyard.
The three men headed over to the police department, where they were brought up to date on the details of the various murder investigations. They then went to work. Hats pulled down over their eyes, they walked past the homes where the murders had occurred. They visited with some of the servant women who had survived attacks, trying to get them to reveal new information about whomever they had seen in their rooms. In the evenings, dressed in seedy clothes, wigs, and false whiskers, the detectives slipped into the saloons in the poorer First Ward and eavesdropped on conversations. At the end of each night, they went back to their rooms at the Carrollton House and scribbled notes on sheets of paper about what they had learned.
Their anonymity didn’t last very long. Austin was soon buzzing with the news that the Noble detectives had come to town. Reporters began hanging out in the lobby of the Carrollton House, hoping to land interviews. Women came to the hotel just to swoon in the great Hennessey’s presence. Kids went out to the Carrollton’s backyard to pet the bloodhound.
Hennessey clearly loved all the attention. A few days after his arrival, he told newspaper reporters that he and his two assistants were already “drawing a net pretty closely around a number of suspicious characters,” and that “developments may be looked for at any time.”
Indeed, said Hennessey, there was nothing to fear. He, Hannah, and Himmel would find these killers. All they needed, he said, was a little time.
* * *
The Noble detectives prowled around Austin for a few more days. At least one reporter—the Austin-based correspondent for the San Antonio Light—began to get the sense that they had no better idea how to catch the killers than Chenneville did. “The detective force that has been trying to run down the murderers of the girl, Mary Ramey, reported some days since they had a clue to the fiends,�
�� the Light’s man wrote sarcastically on September 22. “They left the trail to go and inform the newspaper reporters of the fact, and thereby lost it [the trail], which they have not been able to find since, even with the aid of their blood-hound.”
Hennessey replied that he and his assistants were definitely making progress. Good detective work required large amounts of patience, he liked to say. Sources had to be carefully cultivated and physical evidence collected. The key was to accumulate all the facts—and then pounce upon the killers.
On the last weekend of September, Hennessey decided to take a short break and return to Houston to catch up on personal matters.
And it was on that very weekend that all hell broke loose.
* * *
It began on Saturday night, September 27. Two black servant women who lived in the quarters behind a home on Rio Grande Street, close to downtown, heard a noise. One of the women saw a man at the door. “I’ll kill you if you open your mouth,” the man whispered. The woman screamed anyway, and the man fled. When Chenneville and other officers arrived, she couldn’t offer any description of the man at all except to say that she believed he was white.
The next evening—Sunday, September 28—a cook residing in the servants’ quarters of Dr. Wade A. Morris, who lived just a couple of blocks west of the site of the new state capitol, began screaming because she had heard a noise at her window. Once again, the woman had no physical description of whoever it was making the noise.
An hour or so later, W. B. Dunham, the publisher of the Texas Court Reporter, a journal that covered Texas legal matters, was awakened by some sort of muffled cry coming from his servants’ quarters in the backyard of his north Austin home on Guadalupe Street, just past the University of Texas. Dunham’s cook, a pretty young black woman named Gracie Vance, lived in the quarters with her boyfriend, Orange Washington, who worked at Butler’s Brick Yard. Also staying in the quarters were two young black servant women, Patsy Gibson and Lucinda Boddy, who worked for other Austin families. They were there because they were too afraid to sleep alone in their employers’ quarters.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 10