It turned out that the key figure in the Hancock case was Mrs. Hancock’s sister, Mrs. Mary Falwell, who lived in the town of Waco. After reading about Jimmy’s arrest, she had paid a visit to Waco’s marshal and told him that she too suspected that Hancock had committed murder. The truth, Mrs. Falwell had said, was that life at the Hancock home had not been peaceful. Her sister, Susan, had grown “nervous” and “uneasy” over Moses’s increasing fondness for alcohol. When he drank, he would shout and cuss at his wife until she cried. He had once kicked the family dog. “From my own knowledge I don’t think Mr. Hancock and my sister lived together happily for the last two or three years of her life,” Mrs. Falwell said.
Mrs. Falwell then had her own bombshell to drop. She had informed the marshal that her sister had begun making plans to “secretly move” with her two daughters to Waco. For proof, Mrs. Falwell pulled out a letter that she said she had come across while cleaning up the Hancock home after her sister’s death. The letter, which apparently had been written in November or December 1885, read:
Dear Husband.
I have lived with you eighteen years and have always tried to make you a good wife and help you all I could. I have loved you and followed you day and night. But you won’t quit whiskey, and I am so nervous I can’t stand it. It almost kills me for you to drink, and Lena [the Hancocks’ eldest daughter] is almost crazy and will lose her mind. If I was to do anything to disgrace you and our children, you would have quit me long ago. Take good care of yourself. Write to me at Waco, and I will answer every letter. Your wife until death, Sue Hancock.
Perhaps hoping to get in on some of the reward money himself, the Waco marshal had contacted Bailes. Bailes, in turn, had paid another visit to Von Rosenberg’s court, claiming that Hancock no doubt had read his wife’s letter, gotten angry, and decided to kill her before she left for Waco with the girls.
Yes, Bailes said, it was a coincidence that Hancock, like Jimmy Phillips, not only had chosen to murder his wife on Christmas Eve but deliberately had made the murder look like it had been carried out by one of the servant women annihilators. But the fact was that coincidences did happen. And in all honesty, which scenario seemed more unreasonable—that two uxoricides were carried out around the same time by two unhappy husbands who had decided to copycat the black killers—or that one mysterious man, for unknown reasons, had devised a plan to dismember one prominent white woman he didn’t know and then race across town to chop up another white woman he didn’t know, all within the space of an hour?
* * *
After hearing what Bailes had to say, at least a few residents thought Hancock’s arrest made perfect sense. One man told the Daily Statesman that Mrs. Hancock’s letter, combined with Mrs. Falwell’s stories, were “of such character as to cast very grave suspicions” upon the carpenter. A story got started about something that had happened to the Hancock family in the 1870s: Hancock supposedly had tried to attack Susan but she had saved herself “by fleeing from the premises and taking refuge with a neighbor.” According to another story that made the rounds, Mrs. Hancock had met with her church pastor in San Antonio and told him that she was worried her husband would someday get drunk and kill her. And some newspaper got hold of a story that Hancock had kept a hatchet “concealed” in a wall of his home on Water Street.
A Daily Statesman reporter went to see Hancock at the county jail. He was a handsome man with thick, swept-back hair and light-colored eyes, but on this day he looked “haggard and careworn.” At first, he wouldn’t talk, saying that all the newspapers “have lied enough about me already, and I don’t desire to have anything to do with them.” But when the reporter asked if he had ever read the letter from his wife telling him she was leaving for Waco, he said, “No sir!” Nor, he added, had he ever kept a hatchet hidden in a wall.
The reporter bore in, asking if he had a drinking problem. Hancock said he had been on a few “sprees” lasting no more than a couple of days.
“Is it not possible, Mr. Hancock, that at such times you abused your wife?” the reporter asked.
“I don’t think I ever did,” Hancock replied.
“Mr. Hancock, can you prove by anyone that at one time, while drunk, you did not abuse your wife and threaten to kill her and that she went to a neighbor’s house for fear you would?”
Hancock said that he did not believe any such thing had happened, and he referred the reporter to several people around Austin “who will say we got along well.”
* * *
Hancock didn’t give himself a particularly convincing defense. Still, there were plenty of other Austin citizens who were not persuaded that he, or Jimmy Phillips, were killers. Austin’s white women, in particular, remained terrified that there were more killings to come. Walking toward their houses, even before the sun set, they would suddenly swing around with a muted cry, thinking they’d heard footsteps behind them, and they’d run for their lives, kicking up dust, getting their stockings dirty. Late one night, a young single mother who had heard a noise was found by police crouched against a wall with her daughter, both of them “half dead with fright.”
Petmecky’s continued to do a brisk business selling guns and ammunition. On the Avenue, the salesmen were still pushing electric burglar alarm systems and Atwell’s Patent Window Bolts. Druggists sold sleeping potions and tonics that were guaranteed to calm women’s “nerves.”
In an attempt to make Austin’s citizens feel more at ease, Marshal Lucy continued to have Sergeant Chenneville and his officers patrol the neighborhoods at night. Chenneville also purchased two more bloodhounds, which the seller had guaranteed were far better trackers than the two that already lived in Chenneville’s backyard. According to the Daily Statesman, he kept them out until “the wee hours” so that they would be ready to chase down the killer—or killers—in case another attack occurred.
Meanwhile, the talk about a Midnight Assassin—or, as a writer for the Western Associated Press wire service had begun calling him, “the Talented Sensationalist”—kept getting louder. Some citizens called on Marshal Lucy to station officers around the State Lunatic Asylum to make sure no one was escaping. An editor of the Waco Daily Express was so disturbed by the asylum’s lack of security that he wrote, “It seems to us that the very first thing to be done would be to have the asylum closely watched day and night, without permitting either the officers or patients to know anything of it.”
There were other calls for Lucy to have his officers interrogate all men in Austin of “unsound mind,” including the eccentric Dr. Damos, the old man who walked the sidewalks of Congress Avenue, giving speeches about shipwrecks and the end of the world. “It has often been the case that the harmlessly insane, who have been tolerated for years to walk freely about, have suddenly turned into bloodthirsty madmen,” noted the editor of the Austin-based Texas Vorwaerts, a German-language newspaper written for the state’s German immigrants.
Police officers did reinterrogate more suspects from the previous attacks on the servant women just to see what they were up to. One officer went looking for Maurice, the Malaysian cook, at the Pearl House—the man who supposedly had been seen walking through the city “beastly drunk” around the time in late August 1885 when little Mary Ramey was murdered. But when he arrived at Maurice’s boardinghouse, the proprietor, Mrs. Schmidt, said that Maurice had just moved. Mrs. Schmidt was not certain, but she thought Maurice had told her he was going to Galveston, where he planned to sail for England on a freighter, working as the ship’s cook to pay for his fare.
The officer looked at Mrs. Schmidt. England? Maurice the cook actually had said he was moving all the way to England?
That’s what he told me, said Mrs. Schmidt.
As for the newspapers, they continued to run wild with columns of lurid speculation about who the Midnight Assassin might be. A reporter for the Dallas Mercury wrote that the killer could be some otherworldly figure straight out of “the weird legends of the dark ages, when ghosts and vampires gl
utted their fiendish appetites with horrors indescribable.” A reporter for the San Antonio Light hinted that the attacks could literally be the work of Satan. “Many hitherto have not believed in a personal Devil, but it looks like He has broken loose in the capital of Texas,” he wrote.
And then there was George Monroe, the owner of Korman and Monroe, a successful New York publisher, who was so taken with the idea of a Midnight Assassin that he commissioned Kenward Philp, a former New York journalist turned novelist, to write a fictional short story about him. Philp was well-known: in 1870, he had written “The Bowery Detective,” which had been called “the first dime novel detective story.” Monroe telegraphed newspapers around the country, letting them know that after doing extensive research, Philp had come up with “an original theory” about a white man committing the murders. Monroe offered each newspaper the rights to print Philp’s Austin story for a cost of six dollars.
Some newspapers, such as the Omaha Bee in the state of Nebraska, quickly agreed to run the story. But the only newspaper in Texas willing to pay for it was the Fort Worth Gazette. Other editors, including those at the Daily Statesman, didn’t want to spend such an exorbitant fee without reading the story first, which Monroe would not agree to do.
In his opening paragraph, Philps described the killings as “a mess of horrors … more frightful than Edgar Allan Poe or Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas ever conjured up from their romantic brains.” He then launched into a rather straightforward narrative about a New York newspaperman named Gerald Shanly coming to Austin and eventually discovering that the murders had been committed by “a gentleman farmer … a steely-gray-eyed man of powerful build, sallow complexion, six feet in height, slow-spoken, with bushy, standing-out black eye-brows.” Several months earlier, the newspaperman learned, this farmer’s brother had been convicted of murder by a jury made up of both black and white men. Enraged over the verdict, the farmer had decided to get revenge by murdering female relatives—wives, daughters, sisters, and nieces—of the male jurors. The farmer rode to and from the home of each woman in a carriage driven by his male black servant—“a gigantic Negro,” wrote Philp—who took a circuitous route around the city, crisscrossing over his tracks several times, to confuse the bloodhounds.
Philp’s short story was arguably the first piece of American fiction ever written about a serial killer. But his tale was hardly riveting—or even frightening. It didn’t have a gruesome opening murder scene or a climactic chase in which the killer tried to get away. The gentleman farmer was quietly arrested at his farm, after which he soon confessed.
The biggest problem with Philp’s story, of course, was that it didn’t come close to capturing the real mystery of the murders. And on January 31, that mystery only deepened when police in San Antonio, one hundred miles to the south, were informed that the body of Patti Scott, a twenty-eight-year-old black servant woman, had been found in her quarters.
When the police arrived, they discovered Miss Scott had been struck three times in the head with the blade of an ax.
* * *
This time, there was an obvious suspect: Patti’s husband, William, whom she was divorcing. William was known to be a violent man who, according to the San Antonio newspapers, had “brutalized” Patti several times and once had attempted to cut her neck with a razor. But after Patti’s murder, police didn’t find any blood on him, and they couldn’t break his alibi of being asleep that night at a local hotel.
Without an arrest, the newspapers immediately began to suggest that the killing was connected to the Austin murders. A New York Times reporter actually did a comparison of Patti Scott’s wounds with the wounds inflicted on the Austin women. “There was the same deadly cut across the base of her skull that three of the Austin victims bore, and the blow on the crown of her head was identical with that in the Austin tragedies,” the article concluded. “It is the general belief that the deed was done by the Austin murderer. This belief has created a perfect panic among the females of the city [of San Antonio].”
Indeed, there was a replay in San Antonio of the very same fear that had taken place in Austin: women hid behind barricaded doors while police officers, “special policemen,” and citizens’ vigilante groups roamed the streets at night. Editorialists for the San Antonio newspapers added to the fear by writing that one or more of the Austin killers had almost certainly moved to San Antonio, pushed out of Austin by Marshal Lucy as part of his plan to “cleanse” Austin of its criminals. “Is it just for any city, when it fails to manage its own lawless elements, to shove them off to depredate on other cities?” cried an editorialist for the San Antonio Times. An editorialist for the Daily Statesman came right back with a defense of Lucy. “Right or wrong, that is just what other towns and cities have been doing until they have caused Austin to be over run with thieves and murderers, and Austin now proposes to keep them running, even if it has to run some of them through the gates of Hell,” he wrote.
Although Mayor Robertson said nothing about the latest turn of events, he couldn’t have been all that displeased. Finally, with Patti Scott’s killing, the headlines about murder were no longer focused on Austin. Sensing that this was the perfect time to restore the city’s luster—and in the process, restore his own reputation—he met with businessmen to come up with new promotional projects. Sadly for the mayor, it was too late to do anything about the fiftieth celebration of Texas’s independence, which was coming up in a few weeks. The Texas Semi-Centennial Organizing Committee, which he formed, had disbanded in the aftermath of the Christmas Eve murders. (Apparently, none of the committee members were interested in working on such a project while the city’s women were being struck down.) Still, Robertson remained upbeat. He and his fellow businessmen decided to put together another pamphlet, this one titled, “Austin—The Healthiest City on the Continent.”
The pamphlet claimed that only 331 people had died in Austin in the year 1885—a death rate of “less than 12 per 1,000 inhabitants,” which few other cities in America could match. Only a dozen of those deaths “were from violence or unnatural causes.” (Of course, the pamphlet did not go into detail about those violent deaths.) The pamphlet went on to call Austin the best city in the country for those who wanted to live long lives. “Austin, the admiration of strangers and the pride of all Texas, is the most beautifully situated and healthful of any city on the continent.” “Her elegant residences, broad drives, and clustering groves growing in tropical sunlight; and her modest but picturesque mountains, her changeful landscapes, her flowers and sunshine and balmy breezes, all tell of health and life and ripe old age.”
No doubt at Robertson’s encouragement, the downtown merchants and shop owners held early spring sales in hopes that people would come inside the stores to shop instead of lingering on the streets to talk about murder. The irrepressible Charles Millett did his part, of course, bringing in New York actress Blanche Curtis—“undoubtedly the greatest actress in her line in America today, perhaps in the world,” read his advertisements—to perform the lead role in a play titled The Farmer’s Daughter. The University of Texas invited all residents to hear a lecture delivered by its physics professor, Dr. Alexander MacFarlane, titled “The Habitation of the Planets.” In his talk, MacFarlane conclused that the four large outer planets had “not yet sufficiently cooled down to allow life on their surface such as is seen on the earth,” but that someday humans would be living on Mars.
The audience enthusiastically applauded. There will be life on Mars! Robertson, of course, was thrilled—the topic of conversation was changing to more hopeful subjects. Now, all he needed was for Jimmy Phillips and Moses Hancock to be convicted at their trials, and Austin would be able to move past the murders once and for all.
PART FIVE
FEBRUARY 1886–MAY 1888
“A prominent State officer and an active candidate for the Governorship of Texas … knows something about Eula Phillips’ murder.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In lat
e February, Jimmy Phillips was led into the main courtroom of the grand two-story county courthouse, which had been built with gleaming white limestone—it was nicknamed “the Castle”—for a pretrial evidentiary hearing. Jimmy stumbled toward his chair and didn’t speak. His doctors said that he was still “delirious” from his severe head wounds.
District Attorney Robertson and special prosecutor T. E. Moore laid out their case against him. They said his parents had lied about Jimmy and Eula reconciling before Christmas and having a happy life. It was also significant, they argued, that no one in Austin had been able to produce the name of any other man who would have wanted Eula dead. Texas District Judge A. S. Wright, an elderly, stern man who was presiding over the case, nodded, tapped his gavel on his desk, and announced that Jimmy’s trial would begin in May.
But two days later, the news raced up and down the Avenue that there was, in fact, a new suspect in Eula’s murder—and it was the Pinkerton detectives, of all people, who had identified him. After six weeks of work, the private eyes from Chicago had finally made a breakthrough. According to newspaper accounts, the Pinkertons had received a telegram from a “prominent citizen” alleging that one of the men Eula had secretly met at Mae Tobin’s house of assignation was “a distinguished politician.” It just so happened, this citizen wrote in his telegram, that the politician was “a prominent State officer and an active candidate for the Governorship of Texas” and that he “knows something about [Eula’s] murder.”
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 18