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

Home > Other > The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer > Page 17
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 17

by Hollandsworth, Skip


  Although Mayor Robertson was not necessarily worried about his own hanging, he had to be feeling desperate. Every attempt he had made to stop the murders had backfired on him. If something didn’t change soon, he would go down in history as the mayor who presided over Austin’s downfall.

  * * *

  But something did change. An Austin man named Thomas Bailes showed up at city hall and said he had some “significant” information he wanted to pass on regarding Eula Phillips.

  Bailes said that in the weeks before Christmas Eve, Eula had been leading a secret life.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Eula Phillips had always been the subject of curiosity in Austin. She was a descendant of one of the state’s original pioneer families—her grandfather had helped finance the Texas Army during the war for independence—and her father, Thomas Burditt, had been a decorated Confederate soldier who after the war became a prosperous farmer, living outside of Austin. Eula’s mother was Alice Missouri Eanes, a member of a well-known Austin family. In 1880, for reasons never publicly stated, Burditt and Alice had divorced. Alice then had moved to Austin with Eula and Eula’s older sister, Alma, who was quiet, reserved, and rather homely. Eula, however, turned out to be a striking teenager—“a young woman of comely appearance,” a Daily Statesman reporter would later write. With her lustrous curly hair, her winged eyebrows and glistening brown eyes, men could not help but look twice at her. Sometimes she carried a brightly colored parasol, which she twirled above her head.

  No one in Austin was more smitten with Eula than Jimmy Phillips, whose father had been building many of Austin’s finest homes and buildings for the last thirty years. The newspapers described Jimmy as “a fine-looking young man,” “rather portly,” with “blue eyes and light hair.” He sported a barber-trimmed handlebar mustache and often dressed like a dandy, wearing red socks with his dark suits. But he had little ambition. He worked sporadically as a carpenter for his father’s company, and he seemed content living in a back wing of his parents’ grand home. Mostly, Jimmy liked playing the fiddle with a local band and drinking at the saloons.

  Jimmy took Eula on buggy rides, and it wasn’t long before she became pregnant. A marriage was hastily arranged and she moved with Jimmy into the back wing of the Phillips home.

  Almost overnight, Eula was living a life of privilege. She went to ladies’ teas, to church socials, to the city’s finest restaurants, and to the theater at Millett’s Opera House. She had her photo taken by the well-known photographer Samuel B. Hill under his incandescent lights at his Congress Avenue studio. In the spring of 1884, she gave birth to a son whom she and Jimmy named Tom, after Eula’s father. Friends arrived at the Phillips home with gifts. Eula held little Tom in her arms. She smiled softly and chatted with everyone. What no one could have imagined was that the young socialite was already becoming desperately unhappy.

  The problem was Jimmy. Behind his well-oiled mustache was a high-color drinker’s face. Rumors circulated through Austin’s upper class that when Jimmy came home from the saloons after a night of drinking, he often was surly and physically abusive. One friend of the Phillipses’ would later recall watching Jimmy hurl a coffee cup at Eula. Eula’s sister, Alma, said she had seen Jimmy throw a glass of milk at Eula. It narrowly missed her head and smashed into a pie safe in the kitchen. And there was one occasion when Jimmy staggered in from a saloon and started shouting at Eula and his own sister, Adelia. Terrified, they ran to another room and locked the door. Determined to get at them, he kicked in a panel to the door. The two young women opened a window and ran out of the house toward the police department, crying for an officer to rescue them.

  To their credit, Jimmy’s parents did their best to keep him out of the saloons. In January 1885, they sent Jimmy, Eula, and their infant son to live with a family friend on a farm near the town of Georgetown, north of Austin. When they returned early that fall, Jimmy promised he would stay sober. But soon he was back in the saloons, downing whiskey.

  It was not clear to others why Jimmy had turned on his own wife. Perhaps he was angry that he had to give up his wayward life as a bachelor, get married, and become a father—responsibilities he clearly was not ready for. Or perhaps he sensed that his teenage wife was resentful that she had gotten pregnant and had been forced to marry him.

  Whatever was going on, Jimmy was never arrested or even questioned by police over his behavior. In those years, men were not hauled off to the calaboose for throwing dishes at their wives or backhanding them across the face. The simple truth was that all women, including those from Eula’s social strata, were expected to endure almost any degree of domestic unhappiness, even if it included violence.

  Eula did seem to play by the rules, refusing to complain—at least not too loudly. As her sister Alma said, Eula always acted “lady-like.” But then Thomas Bailes arrived at city hall with a very different story to tell. Eula, he said, was not ladylike at all.

  Bailes was a former assistant U.S. marshal in Austin who in 1884 had gone to work as the “assistant chief” of the Capital Detective Association, the small private detective agency in Austin that mostly collected unpaid bills for local merchants. He was clearly a man with ambition: the previous December, he had submitted his name for the position of city marshal to replace Grooms Lee. But he hadn’t received a single vote from the mayor and aldermen, who by then were enamored with Lucy.

  During his closed-door meeting with city leaders—the Robertson brothers, Marshal Lucy, and leading members of the Citizen’s Committee of Safety were most likely in attendance—Bailes said that he had learned that in the last months of 1885 Eula had been taking a hack to the foot of Congress Avenue, close to the Colorado River, in an area of downtown that was rather neglected. She was almost unrecognizable because her face was hooded behind a shawl, or a veil, or sometimes a feathered hat positioned fashionably low over her forehead. But it was definitely Eula, insisted Bailes. She would step out of the hack and quickly walk to a boardinghouse on that part of the Avenue that was owned by a woman named Mae Tobin.

  The men stared at Bailes. They knew all about Mae Tobin. An elderly woman, small and wiry, who wore black dresses, she was known around Austin as “the bawdy housekeeper” because her boardinghouse was not really a boardinghouse at all but a “house of assignation,” a sort of a discreet hotel, where Tobin made her rooms available to businessmen either to conduct affairs with Austin women or to meet a high-priced nymph du pave. Rooms could be rented by the hour or even the half hour. There was both a front and a back entrance in case an escape was necessary.

  Bailes said that he recently had met with Tobin. She had admitted to him that Eula had come to her house on various occasions and went into a back bedroom, where a man was waiting for her. Bailes then dropped his bombshell. He said Tobin had told him that sometime after 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Eula had arrived at the house and knocked at her window, asking if there was an available room. Tobin had replied that the house was full. Eula returned to a carriage that was waiting on the Avenue just outside the house, and it disappeared into the night. An hour later, she was found dead.

  After Bailes had finished with his tale, a police officer was sent to find Tobin and bring her to city hall. She arrived with her attorney—a man named W. W. Woods. A deal was struck that Tobin would “reveal, make known and tell all she knew as to the murder of Eula Phillips, or information of any kind that she might give, so as to show up the guilty person or persons and convict them.” In return, she would “not be prosecuted” for running a house of assignation.

  Tobin acknowledged that Eula had indeed come to her house in the weeks before her death—sometimes in the afternoons, and sometimes at night. And it wasn’t just to meet one man, Tobin said. She had three lovers who visited her at different times. Tobin cryptically added that none of the men ever told her their names.

  When asked about Christmas Eve, Tobin also admitted that Eula did come by the house and quickly had left. Tobin said that she was n
ot sure if Eula was alone or if there was a man in the carriage with her.

  Tobin left city hall and Bailes sketched out what he believed had taken place. The way he saw it, Jimmy had sneaked off to one of the saloons, gotten drunk, as was his habit, returned home, and passed out on his bed. Eula tiptoed out of the house and either had taken a hack to Mae Tobin’s or was picked up by one of her lovers in his carriage. When she returned home, Jimmy was awake. At first he had done nothing, allowing her to change into her nightgown and put her hair in rollers. But after she had fallen asleep, he had gone outside, grabbed an ax from the woodpile, came back in the room, slammed the ax twice into her skull, and then dragged her into the backyard, where he put pieces of kindling on her body to make the murder look as if it had been done by the crazed black men who had been killing the servant women. Jimmy then returned to their bedroom and hit himself in the head with the back of the ax so that police would believe he had been attacked, too.

  * * *

  Bailes left and the city leaders began talking. Had Bailes and Tobin made up the story about Eula in order to get at the reward money? Was Bailes pushing to have Jimmy arrested so that he finally could bask in the fame that had long been denied him?

  Then one of the men reminded the others about the odd behavior of Bob, the prison bloodhound that had been brought to the Phillips home on Christmas Day. After sniffing around the backyard where Eula was found, Bob didn’t take off down the alley but had gone straight into the house, making his way to Jimmy’s bedroom and “rearing up” on Jimmy’s bed.

  Suddenly, it all made sense. The reason Bob had found no good trail to follow away from the house was because there was no trail. Bob had gone after Jimmy because he must have been in that backyard with Eula.

  Now everyone was starting to get excited. Eula, they said to one another, their voices rising, had not been murdered by a Midnight Assassin! What had happened was nothing more than a simple domestic killing.

  A hearing was convened before Justice of the Peace William Von Rosenberg, a twenty-five-year-old lawyer, with Bailes as the star witness. Von Rosenberg promptly issued an arrest warrant for Jimmy for the crime of “uxoricide”—the murder of one’s spouse, which was punishable by hanging. Because Jimmy was barely able to speak or walk due to his own wounds, Von Rosenberg ordered a police officer to stand guard next to Jimmy’s bedroom door at the Phillips home, presumably to prevent him from escaping.

  When the news broke about Jimmy’s arrest, Austin’s stunned citizens dissected every nugget of information they knew about him and Eula. In that still very Victorian period, when the merest whisper of a sexual indiscretion could ruin a married woman for the rest of her life, it was almost impossible for anyone to fathom that an exquisite young wife, one who came from such high social standing, would dare to go to a house of assignation to have an affair with a man other than her husband. So why did Eula do it? Was it because she wanted to exact revenge on Jimmy for the way he had treated her? Had she taken money from her lovers and then hidden it away, planning to use it to support herself when she would leave Jimmy for good?

  Or had Eula come up with the very radical idea that having sex with another man—engaging in just a few minutes of intimacy—was going to be her only way of obtaining some sense of pleasure, maybe even happiness, in her lonely life?

  Residents tossed out the names of men they suspected might have come to Mae Tobin’s to engage in “carnal relations” with Eula. According to the newspapers, the names of “both young and middle-aged men” were “bandied about.” Someone guessed that the men were probably “gentlemen.” Someone else suggested they were members of Austin’s “gay gallant,” young bachelors who loved having a good time with pretty women.

  Doing his best to defend his son and daughter-in-law, Jimmy’s father, James Sr., gave an interview to the Daily Statesman, claiming that Eula had never slipped out of the house to meet other men. The elder Phillips did admit that Jimmy had gone on a drinking “spree” a few weeks before Christmas, which led Eula to leave and stay with relatives. But, he insisted, Eula had been back within a couple of days after Jimmy had promised to straighten up and go to work. Jimmy did get a job, his father said, helping build the new Fireman’s Hall and giving his paycheck to Eula so he wouldn’t spend it at the saloons.

  According to the elder Phillips, the couple had completely reconciled by Christmas Eve. Jimmy had spent that afternoon buying presents, including toys for his son. He had gone by Booth and Sons, a store on Pecan Street, to make a payment on new furniture he had bought to put in his and Eula’s room. Then he had returned home. When Jimmy’s mother went to Jimmy and Eula’s room at around ten o’clock that night to give them cookies, Jimmy had his head resting on Eula’s lap. “They were as happy as any young couple I know of,” said Phillips. His son’s arrest, he added, was “a grievous outrage perpetrated … without the shadow of evidence.”

  The elder Phillips was at least right about one point: there was no actual physical evidence linking Jimmy to his wife’s death. It was impossible, for instance, to know for sure what made Bob the bloodhound go into the Phillips home on Christmas Day. He could very well have been following the trail of Eula’s blood and not any scent left by Jimmy. On top of that, there was the statement made by Dr. Cummings, the Phillipses’ family doctor who had treated Jimmy that night. He said that “no one could administer to himself the sort of ax blow that he has received to the head.” Nor was Eula strong enough, at a mere hundred pounds, to produce such an injury. The blow had to have come from someone else.

  Several newspaper reporters made it clear that they too were highly skeptical of the evidence against Jimmy. “The charge that Phillips Jr. murdered his own wife in the city of Austin on Christmas morning is declared to be an outrage of the deepest dye,” snapped the Fort Worth Mail. “The only charge that can be alleged against Phillips is that he would get on a spree occasionally. And if all men who are guilty of that charge had to be hanged, a thousand women would be forced to cling to one man’s coattail, at least until another generation of men could be raised.”

  The Travis County Courthouse, also known as “the Castle,” where all the murder trials were held

  But the city’s leaders were not backing down. Citizen’s Committee of Safety chairman Wooldridge announced that the committee would be raising funds to hire Taylor Moore, a well-regarded Austin lawyer and former district attorney himself, to “assist” District Attorney Robertson as a “special prosecutor” at Jimmy’s trial.

  Interestingly, a few days after the Christmas Eve attacks, Moore had given an interview with the St. Louis Republican suggesting that he, too, suspected that the murders of Austin’s women were probably the work of “a maniac who at regular intervals feels an uncontrollable desire to outrage and murder women.” But after accepting the Citizen’s Committee’s fee, he obviously changed his mind. He now told reporters that he and young District Attorney Robertson were already “up to their armpits” preparing their case against Jimmy. He noted that at least a couple of people who had known Jimmy and Eula were planning to testify that Jimmy had made specific threats to kill Eula if he ever found out she was cheating on him. One man reportedly would be testifying that a drunken Jimmy had come to his home one afternoon in November 1885, holding a small pocket knife, angrily asking if he knew Eula’s whereabouts.

  Still, for many of Austin’s citizens, there was one question to be answered—and it was maybe the biggest question of all. If Jimmy really did murder Eula, then who murdered Susan Hancock?

  It didn’t take long for them to get their answer. A couple of weeks after Jimmy’s arrest, Justice of the Peace Von Rosenberg held another closed-door hearing in his courtroom. When it was concluded, he walked outside and announced that Thomas Bailes of the Capital Detective Association—yes, the very same Thomas Bailes who had come up with the “evidence” to arrest Jimmy—had presented “new evidence” regarding the Hancock case, which had led Von Rosenberg to issue an arrest warran
t charging another Austin man with murder.

  Everyone leaned forward, eager to hear the man’s name. According to the evidence that had just been presented in his courtroom, Von Rosenberg said, Mrs. Hancock’s killer was none other than her own husband, Moses.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Once again, when the news reached the Avenue, people stopped in their tracks. Moses Hancock had axed his wife to death on Christmas Eve, right around the same time that Jimmy Phillips had axed Eula? He had dragged Susan into his backyard, just like Jimmy had dragged Eula into his backyard, presumably to make the police think that she too had been attacked by the black killers of the servant women?

  Almost everyone shook their heads in disbelief. At the least, they said, Jimmy Phillips had a motive to kill his unfaithful wife. But Susan Hancock had been a quiet, placid woman, with nothing in her personality to cause offense. Most days, she had sat in her home on Water Street overlooking the Colorado River, reading novels and writing letters. (One newspaperman wrote that she possessed “much literary ability.”) She had worn unadorned blue dresses with imitation pearl necklaces, perhaps to conceal her somewhat thickening neck.

  Moreover, there had been no outward sign that she and her husband had any significant marital problems. According to one of the Hancocks’ neighbors, Moses and Susan had “lived peaceably.” The idea that this fifty-five-year-old carpenter suddenly would want to rip apart his gentle wife on Christmas Eve was, well, insane.

  An editorialist for the Daily Statesman was so perplexed by Hancock’s arrest that he wrote that Bailes’s testimony “will need to be as strong as Holy Writ to convince the people of this murder-ridden community that Mr. Hancock—whatever motives might have existed—was the author of the damnable and hellish crime that sent his wife to the grave.” Another reporter stated that Bailes and the prosecutors had better provide some intelligent explanation as to why Hancock and Phillips, two men who reportedly didn’t even know each other, would “transform themselves at the same hour into infernal fiends.”

 

‹ Prev