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

by Hollandsworth, Skip

  But now, Matt Pinkerton suddenly found himself being asked to investigate what at the time was the most highly publicized murder case in America.

  There is no record indicating exactly who Pinkerton sent to Austin. His detectives could very well have been graduates of his “correspondence school.” For a fee, a would-be detective was mailed a “certificate of membership,” a “Pinkerton badge,” a “letter of credential” from Matt Pinkerton himself, and a booklet that taught the detective how to stalk and interrogate suspects.

  Nor is there any record indicating what Mayor Robertson did when he realized he had hired the wrong Pinkertons. The mayor had to have realized that if the news got out that he had just wasted the city’s money on the wrong detectives—in the same way he had wasted its money on the Noble Agency back in September—his political career definitely would be over.

  Robertson decided to say nothing about his blunder. Apparently the Pinkerton men also agreed to tell no one about their real backgrounds. The mayor introduced the detectives to Marshal Lucy and Sergeant Chenneville, who gave them an update on the Christmas Eve attacks. The detectives studied the bloodied axes found at the Hancock and Phillips homes and they examined the bloodied footprints cut out of the floor by Eula’s room. They asked several questions that had been laid out in Pinkerton’s correspondence school materials about the “homicidal impulse.”

  The fake Pinkertons then headed off to begin their own investigations, and it became clear that they were not going to be making an arrest any time soon. They walked through the Hancock and Phillips backyards, interviewing the same witnesses the police had interviewed. They trooped up and down the Avenue, hoping to pick up some new gossip. At the city’s finest restaurants, they ate dinners expensed to Mayor Robertson.

  A frustrated Alexander P. Wooldridge, the president of the City National Bank who had been named chairman of the Citizen’s Committee of Safety, quickly realized the Pinkertons had no more idea how to solve these murders than anyone else did. He called a meeting and proposed that the committee offer a huge reward—one of the largest in Texas history—for information leading to the arrests of the killers. He believed that if the reward was high enough, there was no way the killers could remain in hiding for very long.

  By the end of the meeting, the members of the committee agreed to offer $1,000 to the person who provided information leading to “the arrest and conviction of the party or parties who murdered Mrs. Eula Phillips”; $1,000 to the person who provided information leading to “the arrest and conviction of the party or parties who murdered Mrs. Susan Hancock”; and $1,000 to the person who provided information leading to “the arrest and conviction of the party or parties” who had murdered one of the five black servant women.

  The committee printed up a circular—which was headlined “REWARD! $3,000!”—and had copies pasted to the walls of downtown buildings and printed in the Daily Statesman. “Every good citizen ought to be zealous in aid of the committee,” the circular declared.

  Not wanting to look stingy, Governor Ireland announced that he too would offer a reward: $300 for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the man who murdered Mrs. Hancock and another $300 for the arrest and conviction of the man who murdered Eula Phillips. (Significantly, he didn’t offer any reward for solving the murders of the black women.)

  When added together, the reward money was indeed a hefty sum. With that kind of cash, a man could buy a nice home or farm and have enough left over to purchase a new set of clothes and a couple of tickets for a show at Millett’s.

  Just as Wooldridge had hoped, the police did receive numerous new tips. Although almost all the potential suspects were black, one man excitedly called the police department and said that he had seen a white man washing bloody clothes in a creek next to a lime kiln a couple of miles outside of Austin. Lucy quickly ordered a posse of his officers to race for the kiln, and they got there just in time to nab a poor white “wood hauler” named J. D. Echols. It turned out the clothes he had been washing had been colored reddish-brown—from pecan stains, not blood.

  Another anonymous tipster was convinced that a Mexican, in fact, was the Christmas Eve killer. He recommended that the police investigate Anastazio Martinez, a middle-aged immigrant who lived in a shack next to the city dump and spent his days picking up rags, pieces of tin, scraps of old iron, and anything else that interested him. The tipster said he had seen Martinez on Christmas Day carrying a bundle of women’s apparel. Perhaps, the tipster speculated, Martinez had broken into the Hancock and Phillips homes to kill the women and steal their clothes.

  Two officers rode to Martinez’s shack, where they did indeed discover some female apparel and white silk ladies’ handkerchiefs. They also found an old six-shooter, seven butcher knives, a small ice pick, and a long iron spike, “such as might have been driven into the ears of Becky Ramey and Mrs. Hancock,” the Daily Statesman reported. The officers quickly brought Martinez back to the police department, along with two “flour barrels full” of Martinez’s items.

  During his interrogation, he seemed disoriented; his mind rambled when he spoke. He launched into a bizarre story in Spanish about being “told and ordered by the Almighty to go out at night and draw blood.” Well, at least that’s what the police officers, who didn’t speak much Spanish, believed he was saying.

  But it turned out that none of the clothes in Martinez’s bundle belonged either to Mrs. Hancock or to Eula. And there was something else: he didn’t own a horse. It was hard to imagine that he would have had the strength and endurance to break into a house, murder a woman, carry her body out to the backyard, then run uptown to do the same thing all over again.

  * * *

  Because Martinez seemed so befuddled, he was taken by police to the State Lunatic Asylum, where Dr. Denton gladly took him in. As for the other tips that came into the police department, they too led nowhere. Not sure what else to do, Marshal Lucy announced that he was going to have his officers round up all of the city’s “tramps” and “vagrants,” take them to the city limits sign—or better yet force them into the empty boxcars of freight trains that were headed out of Austin—and tell them they were never to return. Essentially, in the words of one reporter, Lucy was going to attempt a “cleaning out” of Austin, getting rid of anyone who was a potential killer.

  Lucy’s dragnet, however, didn’t seem to make anyone in Austin feel much safer. That New Year’s Eve, one week after the Christmas Eve killings, there were a few parties—but only a few, as most residents stayed home. Unlike the previous year’s festivities, there was no masquerade ball at the Brunswick Hotel, no roller skating at Turner Hall, no fireworks, and no exuberant champagne toasts to Austin’s future.

  The next day—New Year’s Day 1886—Colonel Driskill, the cattle baron, did host a “calling party” at his mansion north of the university, and Dr. Johnson, whose servant woman Eliza Shelley had been murdered in front of her children back in May, hosted another at his home. And over at the governor’s mansion, Governor Ireland threw his annual “open house.” One reporter who was there estimated that at least three hundred “well-dressed ladies and gentlemen” arrived throughout the afternoon to shake the governor’s hand, and another reporter noted that Charles Millett, no doubt hoping to boost ticket sales at his opera house, had brought along Frederick Warde, the Shakespearean actor who was performing in Julius Caesar.

  Nevertheless, at all of the parties and at the open house, there was little celebration. The great men of Austin huddled together, murmuring to one another about the murders as they downed cordials. Later that evening, there was another gathering to commemorate the opening of the newly built Firemen’s Hall, the downtown fire station where volunteer firemen would house their fire wagons, hoses, and ladders. Mayor Robertson welcomed the crowd—about 150 in all—with a speech that completely ignored the murders. “We are here to join our social greetings on the advent of a new year, and to gather hope and inspiration from the future—ho
pe and confidence in the continued prosperity of our common country and of our great state, of this beautiful city and we of ourselves as individuals,” he proclaimed. “May the city grow and prosper, and may success, health and happiness bless the people of Austin! Let the disagreements of the old year die and be forgotten and let each one of us on this bright day declare that there shall be no bickering in 1886!”

  An Austin saloon. By New Year’s Day 1886, dozens of men, white and black, had been accused of being the killer.

  Afterward a small band began to play waltz music, and couples walked out onto the floor of the new hall to dance. But despite the mayor’s relentless positivism, the party ended early: everyone wanted to be home well before midnight. In the early morning hours, the wind rose, rattling windows and doors. Another cold front was coming in from the north, but many people woke thinking they were being attacked. Men grabbed their guns. Women put clothes over their nightgowns in case they had to flee.

  Few people fell back asleep until the sun rose.

  * * *

  Since Christmas Eve, there had been more talk about the possibility that the killings had been done by one man—a “Midnight Assassin,” as other reporters were now calling him, borrowing the term first used by the San Antonio Daily Express. Some citizens speculated that this Midnight Assassin was a deranged “maniac,” perhaps a patient at the State Lunatic Asylum who had been slipping away at night—which wouldn’t have been very hard to do, considering that Dr. Denton, as part of his grand plan to create a utopian outpost of civilization, had removed the high fence surrounding the asylum—making his way into Austin, murdering a random woman, washing himself off in a creek, and then returning to the asylum undetected.

  Other citizens took note of the fact that all of the murders had taken place either right before, immediately after, or during a full moon. In those years, there was still a widespread belief that too much exposure to moonlight could cause someone to act in very peculiar ways. (The word “lunatic” itself comes from luna, meaning “moon,” and tic, meaning “struck”: moonstruck.) These citizens believed that on certain evenings, when the moon was full, some man—one who wasn’t necessarily a patient at the asylum—was being transformed into a werewolf-like beast. A reporter for the Fort Worth Gazette actually suggested that Austin was being terrorized by a real-life version of Frankenstein’s monster, the hideous, yellow-eyed creature created by Mary Shelley in her 1823 novel. (The reporter, who obviously had not read the novel, spelled the monster’s name as “Frank Einstein.”)

  And then there was a theory proposed by one of the out-of-town reporters who came to Austin that week: a correspondent, his name unknown, who worked for the New York World, which was owned by the newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer. In 1883, Pulitzer had bought the World from the New York railroad magnate Jay Gould, and in a mere two years had boosted its circulation to more than 150,000—a tenfold increase—largely by running sensational crime stories that he knew would grab the public’s attention. Needless to say, Pulitzer and his editors didn’t have to be told that the story of a Texas city under siege was perfect fodder for their readers.

  The World correspondent filed three stories from Austin, one of which was an astonishing 7,000 words in length and ran under the headline “Those Extraordinary and Similar Assassinations of Women at Austin. Facts as Marvelous as the Most Extravagant Fiction.” In his stories, the correspondent carefully detailed all the killings. He noted that not one woman had cried out prior to being attacked—“Death came always swiftly, silently and certainly,” he wrote—and that at every murder scene all of the bloodhounds had been “confounded” and “baffled.” Although police officers and private detectives had “sifted to the bottom of every fact connected with the appalling deeds,” he continued, “the clues, seemingly fresh at the start, rapidly have drifted away into a mist of uncertainty and finally disappeared altogether.… Numerous arrests have been made from time to time but not one has been productive.”

  What most intrigued the World’s man was that the motive for the murders remained a complete mystery. Almost always in history, he wrote, violent murders of women “have love, passion, ambition or the supernatural for a background, as a somewhat relieving motive. But here in the city of Austin in the Nineteenth Century, these crimes seem to have nothing to palliate their naked brutality and gaping wounds. As yet, the ablest detectives can advance no satisfactory theory to account for their commission.”

  The reporter made it clear that he did not believe an “organized gang of vile Negroes” did the killings. Nor did he buy into the theories that the killers were hardened criminals with prison records or saloon drunks with violent streaks. He pointed out that “all the worst characters in town” had been “kept under watch” by the police since the murder of little Mary Ramey back in late August. If such men were guilty of the murders, he wrote, “they would have betrayed themselves long ago.”

  No, the World reporter suggested to his readers, the only logical conclusion was that a “cunning maniac” of “great strength, fleetness of foot, and a superior intellect” was doing the “foul deeds.” The maniac was able “to plot these crimes, carry them out in every particular without a mistake” and then “disappear into thin air almost immediately.” He most likely had “a secret hiding place” where he went after each murder so that he could clean off his victim’s blood and change clothes before returning, chameleon-like, to the streets, looking like just one more man in the crowd—a man hiding in plain sight.

  The correspondent had his own name for the killer: he called him the “Intangible Nemesis.” What was especially interesting about the Intangible Nemesis, he explained, was that he was not emotionally out of control. He did not slay indiscriminately, attacking any woman he saw. “He does not thirst with the blood with insatiable desire,” the reporter wrote. “This man is frugal. He kills only when necessary.”

  Indeed, the reporter concluded in his final article, what this killer was doing was not just a different form of murder. It was a different form of thinking. “I do not believe any man figures in the world’s history with such a terrible and horrifying distinction from the rest of humanity,” the reporter declared. “He may well give to history a new story of crime—the first instance of a man who killed in order to gratify his passion.”

  * * *

  The World articles were telegraphed to Texas. The Dallas Morning News, which was sold on Austin’s newsstands, reprinted the 7,000-word article in its entirety. Although the Daily Statesman did not publish any of the World’s dispatches, it began printing more statements and letters from citizens who were starting to believe that a very devious and very smart killer was on the loose.

  One resident recommended that the police stop focusing on the “tramps” and instead “have an eye to the upper crust which may be found, after all, the author of these terrible crimes.” Another man wrote that he had read about a doctor in London who had been murdering numerous people. It’s almost certain the letter writer was referring to the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, which had just been published in England to great acclaim. The story involved a good man named Dr. Edward Jekyll who at night became the murderous Henry Hyde, unable to control his darkest desires. Maybe, the letter writer surmised, the police in Austin should be looking for a “practicing physician” who probably had used some of his medical instruments to rip apart his victims.

  Such talk set off even more paranoia and panic. Some Austin husbands decided that their best hope for keeping their wives alive was to leave the capital city altogether. One man said he would be moving his family to Monterrey, Mexico, “where there is some protection of life and property.” Another said he would be taking his family to a farm in East Texas. And more black residents were talking about moving—to Houston, to Galveston, or as far away as to Kansas, which had a reputation as a safe haven for black Americans.

  At the same time, newspapers around the state began advising
their readers to cancel any upcoming trips they were planning to take to Austin. A couple of editors recommended that parents who had daughters attending the University of Texas (of the 230 students at the school, 58 were women) send letters to the university’s president letting him know that their daughters would be staying home until the murders came to a stop.

  Maybe the lowest blow of all came from the Laredo Times, a newspaper from the dusty, sunbaked town of Laredo on the Texas-Mexico border. Its editors literally launched a promotional campaign hoping to persuade Austin’s residents to move to their city. The editors described Laredo, which had seen its share of desperadoes over the years, as the ideal spot for those in Austin needing “a safe and quiet breathing spell” from murder.

  Indeed, those first days of 1886, Austin’s reputation was sinking into ruin. The San Antonio Times began calling Austin “the dark and bloody ground” (a phrase used twenty-five years before to describe Civil War battlefields) and the Dallas Daily Herald was calling it “the Criminal City.” Under the headline “Worse Than Babel,” the Fort Worth Gazette continued its attacks, writing that the city, “which once had been held up to the world as the Athens of the South, a shining example of virtue,” was now “a by-word for lawlessness of the most repulsive type.”

  There were more calls by other newspapers exhorting Austin’s citizens to bring in new leaders. The editor of the Temple Times, in central Texas, told his readers that Austin’s voters should impeach all of its officials, “from the mayor on down.” The editor snarled, “The city is a wealthy community and there is no lack of money. But nothing worthy of its name has been done to ferret out the hellhounds who with periodical regularity have butchered citizens without hindrance.… Austin’s citizens should let the mayor know that if this thing is not stopped he will be swung by the neck!”