A justice of the peace and six inquest jurors arrived from the courthouse to listen to testimony from Cummings, police officers, and various members of the Phillips household, all of whom said that they could not think of anyone who would want Eula dead. Jimmy didn’t testify at the inquest due to his head wound. It was reported he was still too dazed “to give any intelligent account of the affair.” When the hearing concluded, the jurors ruled that Eula’s death had resulted from “wounds inflicted with an axe in the hands of parties unknown.” Monroe Miller, the city’s most prominent white undertaker, came into the house to prepare Eula’s body for burial. Assisted by one of the Phillipses’ black servant women—her name was Sallie Mack, and she just happened to be the mother of Aleck Mack, the “impudent Negro” who nearly had been lynched—Miller took off Eula’s bloodied night dress, washed the blood from her body with towels, and dressed her in a lovely white gown. He used cotton balls and putty to cover up her head wounds, he brushed her hair, and he applied some makeup to her face.
Miller then put Eula into his finest casket and had it carried out to his varnished hearse, which was drawn by a gleaming black horse. He climbed up to the driver’s box, flicked the reins, and headed toward the First Presbyterian Church. Behind the hearse came a cortege of Eula’s relatives and friends—the men wearing mourning suits and black bow ties, the women wearing hats with black veils and hooped dresses with “mourning fringe.”
Austin’s citizens lined the streets as the procession passed by. Women wept. Men snatched their hats from their heads. Out of respect for the young Eula, the drivers of the mule-driven streetcars stopped in their tracks.
When the funeral service was over, Eula’s body was taken to Old Ground, the highest point of the forty-acre city cemetery, a fenced-in area that was reserved for Austin’s wealthiest families. Handfuls of dirt were thrown onto her casket as it was lowered by ropes into the ground, and the pastor said a prayer.
The mourners just stood there, still in shock, staring at the casket. In the distance, they could hear the faint sound of baying bloodhounds. George Thompson from the state prison was still in Austin with his dogs, and they were on the move again, crisscrossing the back streets, trying to find a scent to follow.
Of course, they found nothing.
* * *
For the rest of the day, hundreds of citizens remained on the Avenue. According to one reporter’s count, at least three hundred people alone were gathered at the intersection of the Avenue and Pecan Street. More men stood in line at J. C. Petmecky’s to buy more guns and ammunition. Some women did, too. (Besides the usual Colt pistols and Winchester “center fire” rifles, Petmecky sold “boob guns,” small derringers that Austin’s women could put inside their corsets or attach to garters high on their legs.) Sensing a business opportunity, a salesman arrived on the Avenue to hawk “electric burglar alarm systems,” which consisted of “electric bells” that were to be placed on the doors of homes and servants’ quarters and which were guaranteed to ring whenever the doors were opened. Another salesman offered Atwell’s Patent Window Bolts. “They are beyond all question the best invention for security against burglars and murderers ever offered for sale,” he proclaimed in an advertisement that he later took out in the Daily Statesman. “In view of the recent outrages committed in this city, these locks are just the thing to secure people against the midnight invaders.”
For a second straight night, all of Austin’s police officers rode their horses or walked along the streets of downtown and through the white neighborhoods, looking for any stranger acting in a suspicious manner. Yet residents still did not feel safe. So few of them left their homes that restaurants closed early. The city’s drinking men did show up at their favorite saloons, coming in early because of the new closing time, but they kept their conversations to a low murmur. It was as if they were waiting for the sound of running boots and the voices of police calling out that another murder had been committed.
As midnight approached, more women were overcome with fear. (“A sound in the darkness makes them unconscious,” wrote one reporter.) At least a couple of women were convinced they saw a man standing by their bedroom windows, well-muscled in the moonlight. Just before sunrise, a meat delivery man accidentally slammed his wagon into a wall as he backed it up to the kitchen window of the downtown Southern Hotel. Two black female cooks, sleeping in an adjoining room to the kitchen, woke up and began screaming, “Murder! Murder!” One of the hotel guests opened his window, pulled out his six-shooter, and began firing away.
The guest missed both the delivery man and his horse before officers raced to the scene.
* * *
The next morning, December 27, the crowds returned to Congress Avenue. At some point that day, a rumor got started that an arrest had been made in the town of Belton, ninety miles north. A police officer there had detained two men just as they were stepping off the train that had come straight from the Austin depot. The officer had seen drops of blood on their coats and vests, the sleeves of their shirts, and their shoes. Suspicious, he had handcuffed the men and taken them to the Belton police department to talk to the marshal.
It turned out the two suspects were poor, uneducated white brothers in their early twenties named J. T. and J. P. Norwood. They worked on a farm in Hays County, south of Austin. They had told Belton’s marshal that they had gone to the town of San Marcos that morning to board a train, started arguing, and had gotten into a fistfight, which accounted for the blood on their clothes. They hadn’t even been in Austin on Christmas Eve, they said.
The marshal didn’t believe a word they were saying. Apparently, he suspected that the Norwoods had been infected by the same “killing mania” that had been infecting Austin’s black men. He had called Marshal Lucy, told him he believed he had apprehended the Christmas Eve killers, and said he was sending them back to Austin on the next train, escorted by a couple of his officers.
On the Avenue, as word spread about the Norwoods, some men said they wanted to get a look at them. They walked to the depot to greet the train. But the brothers were not on board. Lucy and the sheriff of Travis County, W. W. Hornsby, worried that the brothers might be dragged away and beaten or even lynched, had stopped the train north of the city, removed the brothers and taken them to the county jail, which was far more heavily fortified than the calaboose.
Their tempers rising, the men marched back up the Avenue to the jail. More men joined them. They “looked like a mob,” wrote one reporter, “their faces scowling and ugly.” At least one man yelled, “Bring us the Norwoods!”
Hornsby and the deputies came outside and said the brothers had been “thoroughly investigated” and were “believed to be innocent.” They already been sent back to their farm, Hornsby said. There was no reason for the Norwoods to be harmed.
Reluctantly, the mob dispersed and headed for their homes, and for a third straight night, fear gripped the city like a vise. An entire black neighborhood on the east side of the city was awakened by a series of piercing shrieks coming from an elderly woman who thought she had heard her doorknob being rattled.
At the Hancock home on Water Street, Mrs. Hancock finally breathed her last, dying in her bed, surrounded by her husband, her daughters, and her doctors, who had been giving her morphine injections to ease the pain. According to a Daily Statesman reporter who was there, she had been given so much morphine that even after the pronouncement of her death, “the quivering nerves of the murdered woman did not quite cease their functions.”
The inquest was held the next morning just after breakfast, with the jurors ruling that Mrs. Hancock’s death was the result of “the effects from a fracture of the skull and from a sharp pointed instrument being driven into her right ear, inflicted by the hand or hands or a person or persons unknown.” Monroe Miller arrived to place Mrs. Hancock’s body in a casket, and after a funeral was held for her at a Methodist church, the casket was carried to the city cemetery, where she was buried on a hill betwee
n Eula’s grave and the graves of the black servant women.
* * *
Since the Christmas Eve attacks, Marshal Lucy had been hanging on to the slim hope that Mrs. Hancock would be able to regain consciousness—at least for a few minutes—and reveal the name of her attacker. But now, with her death, his investigation was back to square one, and Austin’s citizens could sense it. More of them lined up at Petmecky’s and Heidbrink’s to buy guns and ammunition. “The whole city is arming,” wrote a Houston Daily Post reporter who was on the Avenue that day. “If this thing is not stopped soon, several corpses will be swinging from the tree limbs.”
Just about everyone had ideas about how to stop the killings. Someone proposed that all Austin women be given guard dogs. Someone else proposed that twelve police officers on horseback scour the countryside “for at least six miles from Austin” to look for suspects. Meeting with members of the Citizen’s Committee of Safety, Governor Ireland piped up with his own proposal—and it was a strange one. Whenever the next attack occurred, he said, someone who lived nearby should run to the closest fire alarm and set it off. As soon as Austin’s men heard the alarm, they should rush out of their homes with their guns, head in the direction of the alarm, and stop all those “passing by” who were not known as “good citizens.” The men would then escort the “suspects” they had apprehended to the police department for further questioning, the governor said.
As for Mayor Robertson, he begged everyone to stay patient. There was already a near army of police officers at work on the streets, he said, keeping the killers at bay. What’s more, he had some more good news to pass on. The Pinkertons—the greatest detectives in all of America—were on their way to Austin! They should be here at any time. The “mystery of the murders” soon would be solved!
Robertson asked the citizens to go on with their lives—to return to their jobs, shop at the stores, and dine at the restaurants. He encouraged them to attend a long-scheduled show which was taking place that very afternoon at Millett’s Opera House, featuring the famed New York operatic diva Emma Abbott and members of her Grand English Opera Company.
Months earlier, when Charles Millett had learned that Abbott, one of the country’s most popular sopranos, was planning a tour of the West, he had arranged for her and her company to come to Austin to do back-to-back operas: a matinee performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, followed by Ambrose Thomas’s Mignon. Millett had even promised to spend $1,500 on new props for the performances and provide a local chorus.
Needless to say, after making such an investment, Millett was not about to cancel the show. And to make sure the diva didn’t try to back out of her trip, Millett had arranged for an off-duty police officer to act as her bodyguard, meeting her at the train depot in San Antonio and accompanying her to Austin.
Abbott had no complaints about her bodyguard. But she had to have felt a sense of dread when she arrived in Austin and saw the newspaper boys holding copies of the Daily Statesman over their heads and shouting out headlines about the Christmas Eve killings. She and the members of her company were taken in carriages up Congress Avenue, past the milling crowds, and were dropped off at Millett’s, where they changed into their Japanese costumes for The Mikado. The city’s art patrons arrived and were led to their seats. The curtain rose, and The Mikado began.
According to the newspaper reviewers, Abbott was “in exceedingly good voice, and musically, her performance was a treat.” But they didn’t mention the reaction of the audience to the opera, as they usually did. Perhaps The Mikado’s theme—about a young Japanese man who risked having his head cut off so that he could be with the woman he loved—didn’t seem particularly enticing to the art patrons that day. Nor did the reviewers mention the audience’s reaction when Abbott and her singers returned to the stage that evening to perform Mignon. It’s possible that there wasn’t much of a reaction at all. Many of the ticketholders no doubt had left, determined to be back in their barricaded homes well before midnight. They weren’t even tempted to stay around to hear Abbott perform her encores—what Millett in his advertisements had described as her “famous renderings” of “Home Sweet Home” and “The Last Rose of Summer.”
It’s likely that Abbott herself was worried about the approach of midnight. When her encores were over, she and her fellow singers rode in carriages back to their hotel, escorted by the bodyguard. Like everyone else in Austin, they locked their doors and huddled under their blankets, praying that they stayed alive until sunrise.
* * *
The next morning, December 29, Abbott and the English Opera Company boarded a train and disappeared from Austin. The ever hopeful Charles Millett promptly put a sign on his marquee promoting his next event: the English Shakespearean actor Frederick Warde, who was touring the country with his acting troupe, would be arriving for the New Year’s weekend to perform Julius Caesar.
Only a few of Austin’s citizens, however, bought tickets. They obviously had no interest in theatrical tragedy. As one reporter put it that day, “The bloody and cruel murders are the only subject of conversation.”
Indeed, for the fifth straight day, crowds gathered on the Avenue. A group of businessmen passed around a petition demanding that Mayor Robertson and the aldermen close down all “bawdy houses, disorderly drinking saloons and gambling halls”—“those murdering grounds of virtue and innocence,” one man called them. And from a group of progressive citizens came a rather startling idea: they wanted the entire city to be illuminated at night by powerful electric lamps—maybe even high-powered incandescent “arc lamps” like the ones that had lit up the grounds of the 1885 New Orleans Exposition, cutting through all shadows and shining on every back alley.
“The recent crimes, which have so lately horrified all lovers of peace and personal safety, would, no doubt, have been averted had there been sufficient light to prevent the fiend [from] finding easy hiding places,” one man wrote to the Daily Statesman.
The whole notion seemed quirky and absurd: the city would spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to erect electric lamps? Electric light could save Austin from murder?
But before the conversation went any further, another train pulled into the depot. Out of a passenger car stepped two or three men, dressed in suits, carrying suitcases. Quickly, word began to spread along the Avenue. The Pinkertons had arrived! The greatest detectives in all of America!
The men were whisked away to city hall to meet a very pleased Mayor Robertson, who handed them a contract guaranteeing them at least $3,000 in payment for ninety days of work.
And here’s what probably happened next: after the contract was signed, the mayor pulled out his best cigars from his humidor. He asked the detectives about their famous bosses, the brothers William and Allan Pinkerton.
The detectives shook their heads. We don’t work for William and Allan Pinkerton, they said.
Robertson just stared at them.
No, the detectives continued. We work for Matt Pinkerton.
There must have been a very long silence.
Who, the mayor finally asked, is Matt Pinkerton?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When Robertson had sent his Christmas Day telegram to the “Pinkerton Agency,” he naturally had assumed it would be delivered to the offices of the famed Pinkerton National Detective Agency. But Robertson had not written out the entire name of the agency on the telegraph. As a result, the delivery boy mistakenly had taken it to the Pinkerton & Co. United States Detective Agency, another Chicago detective outfit that Robertson didn’t even know existed.
Pinkerton & Co. was owned and operated by thirty-two-year-old Matt Pinkerton, a balding, thickset man with manicured fingernails and a beautifully trimmed imperial beard in the hollow of his chin. He was not related in any way to William and Allan Pinkerton. He briefly worked for their agency as a night watchman—an entry-level position—but had been fired in 1882 for incompetence. Undeterred, he had started his own agency, advertising himself in his
promotional literature as one of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency’s best men—“the author of several brilliant captures.” According to his literature, he possessed “such a remarkable tact for detective work” that “the most difficult operations of that agency” were often placed in his hands.
Matt Pinkerton, owner of the “other Pinkerton agency,” which Mayor Robertson mistakenly hired.
Livid, the Pinkerton brothers had sent a circular to the Chicago newspapers describing Matt Pinkerton as a con man who was simply capitalizing on his last name. But the young Pinkerton somehow stayed in business, getting hired by people who had never read the circular. He was a master of public relations, portraying himself as an expert in criminal behavior. He gave speeches to civic groups and ladies’ clubs about what he described as the “homicidal impulse.” In a book that he wrote—which he grandly titled Murder in All Ages: Being a History of Homicide from the Earliest Times, with the Most Celebrated Murder Cases Faithfully Reported, Arranged Under Controlling Motives and Utilized to Support the Theory of Homicidal Impulse—he declared, “The first real clue to the perpetration of a mysterious homicide is furnished by the discovery of a tangible motive. It is this matter that instantly engages the attention of the trained detective, into whose hands a murder case is placed.”
Despite his eloquence as a writer, neither Matt Pinkerton nor any of his detectives had in fact ever investigated a murder case. They were hired mostly to look into claims of divorce and small-time financial fraud. One company had employed the agency to find an ex-employee who had fled to Virginia after embezzling several hundred dollars. The owner of a Michigan wood mill had asked the agency to provide private security officers for the mill during a labor strike.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 15