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

by Hollandsworth, Skip

  At the very end of the trial, the defense attorneys presented a surprise witness. They had Travis County sheriff Malcolm Hornsby testify about an event that took place on February 9, 1886, a little more than a month after the Christmas Eve killings, when Sheriff’s Deputy William Bracken was called to a saloon in Masontown, a black community located just east of the Austin city limits. Bracken learned that a customer at the saloon named Nathan Elgin—a young black man in his early twenties—was “quite drunk” and “raising Hades in general.” He had gotten into an argument with a black woman, knocked her down, and dragged her to a nearby house, where he had begun to “thump her.” When Bracken arrived at the house, he tried to place some “nippers” (handcuffs) on Elgin’s wrists, but Elgin quickly turned and struck the deputy “severely” on the head. Bracken pulled out his pistol and shot Elgin in the chest, killing him.

  Sheriff Hornsby testified that when he arrived at the scene, he saw that Elgin was missing a little toe on the right foot. Hornsby said he remembered that one of the bloody footprints found outside Eula and Jimmy’s room on Christmas Eve looked as if it had a little toe missing. Suspicious, he had ordered that a plaster cast of Elgin’s foot be made, which was later compared to the Phillips footprint. Hornsby said it was his opinion that the two footprints matched.

  Hornsby also testified that he believed footprints discovered in the alley behind the house where Mary Ramey had been murdered also seemed to indicate the little right toe was missing. Although that footprint had not been preserved, Hornsby speculated that it too probably matched Elgin’s.

  It was a startling piece of testimony: the sheriff of Travis County was suggesting that Elgin was definitely involved in at least two of the Austin murders and that he could very well be the Midnight Assassin.

  Elgin had grown up in Austin, and he was known during his teenage years as “a kind of bad citizen.” In July 1881, according to the Daily Statesman, he and another young black man named Green Alexander had carried on “a row” not far from the governor’s mansion, “cursing each other for some time” before Alexander drew a pistol and fired three shots at Elgin, “none of them taking effect.” One year later, Elgin had been arrested and briefly jailed after he allegedly wrote a note threatening to kill a deputy sheriff.

  But since then there had been no reports of Elgin being arrested. At the time of his death, he was married with two children, and he worked as a cook at the city’s finest restaurant, Simon and Bellenson’s, on Congress Avenue, helping the chef prepare such dishes as quail, venison, and “fine chops.”

  Was there a possibility that Elgin’s four-toed footprint matched the footprint at the Phillips home? Harry White, a deputy U.S. marshal who had studied and measured the footprints at the Phillips home, never mentioned a missing toe when he testified at Jimmy’s trial. He would say only that “the impressions of the heel and toes” were so light that they were “indistinct.” Nor did Thomas Wheeless, a notary public who also made measurements of the bloody footprints at the Phillipses’, make any statement at Jimmy’s trial suggesting there was a missing toe. As for the footprints found in the alley behind the Weeds’ house, five toes had clearly been seen, with one of those toes “peculiarly shaped.” All in all, a Daily Statesman reporter had written, “the rumors relative to Elgin and the crimes … are false in every particular.”

  In fact, at Jimmy’s trial, John Hancock never once brought up Elgin’s name. So why was he doing it now? Had he come to believe that Elgin really was the Midnight Assassin—or, at the least, part of the gang of bad blacks who had murdered Austin’s women? Or was he so determined to get his client Moses Hancock acquitted that he had decided to use every card at his disposal—even if it meant using flawed testimony from a mistaken county sheriff?

  The lawyers made their closing arguments, and after a couple of days of deliberations, the vote among the jurors was six for acquittal and six for conviction. A day later, the vote changed to eight for acquittal and three for conviction, with one “doubtful.” The foreman went to Judge Walker and said no one was budging, and Walker called a mistrial.

  It was now June 6, 1887. After nearly two and a half years of investigations and dozens of arrests, not one man had been convicted for any of the murders of Austin’s women.

  And in the early morning hours of July 13, the attacks resumed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In the town of Gainesville, 250 miles to the north of Austin, eighteen-year-old Genie Watkins, the daughter of a wealthy cattleman in nearby Dallas, was visiting her friend Mamie Bostwick, also the daughter of a wealthy cattleman. The newspapers would later describe Genie and Mamie as “handsome girls” who “possessed very loveable dispositions” and who were “quite popular in society.” Genie was “a pupil at Dallas High School and stood high in her classes.” Mamie attended an all-girls’ boarding school in Tennessee.

  In the middle of the night, Mamie’s mother heard “a scuffling sound” coming from Mamie’s bedroom. (Mr. Bostwick was in Chicago on business.) She rose and walked into the bedroom just in time “to see the form of a man jump through the east window.” On the bed lay Genie and Mamie “weltering in their blood.” The bright light of the full moon “revealed gaping wounds upon the faces of both girls.”

  Genie had been struck by a hatchet or an ax over the right eye, the force of the blow so strong that it “penetrated both frontal bones” of her forehead. Her right eye itself had been “driven from its socket” and was “lying upon her cheek, hanging only by a slight thread.” Mamie had been struck just under her right eye, struck again in the right temple, and struck a third time in the face, from the right corner of her nose to the center of her mouth. Her upper lip “was almost entirely severed.”

  Mrs. Bostwick began screaming and neighbors came running. Within minutes, the whole town “was in a state of confusion and excitement.” Every officer in the city was summoned to the home. One officer took off his hat and fanned the girls. The police department’s lone bloodhound was brought to the Bostwicks’ backyard, where he sniffed around and quickly took off into the night, running toward a creek bed. But he soon came to a baffled stop.

  The next morning, none of the town’s stores or banks opened. A “citizen’s meeting” was convened at city hall, where the first order of business was to start a reward fund. It quickly reached a total of $200. All of the men at the meeting were “deputized” by Gainesville’s sheriff. Some were sent to the railroad depot to look for any suspicious-looking man with bloodied clothes trying to board a train. Others were ordered to “scour the countryside.” Still others did home-to-home searches, looking for a killer hiding in a back room.

  That afternoon, the son of the Fort Worth sheriff showed up on the train with his bloodhounds. By then, “large footprints” had been found in the Bostwicks’ garden. The bloodhounds sniffed the tracks, but because “the ground around the house had been trampled by the many curiosity seekers,” they were unable to find any scent worth following.

  Although Genie Bostwick never lost consciousness, her brain was so damaged that she could not remember anything about the attack. Mamie Watkins stayed alive for about twenty-four hours before she took her last breath. After a jury of inquest ruled that she had been murdered “by a party or parties unknown,” the police released Mamie’s body to her family, who had it transported by train back to Dallas. According to the newspaper accounts, “at each town along the way people turned out to show their sympathy for the fallen young lady.” A procession “stretching several blocks” followed Mamie’s casket from the Dallas railroad depot to the Floyd Street Methodist Church, where her funeral was conducted. Many of the mourners carried “wreaths and garlands to place upon the bier.” Those who couldn’t get inside the packed sanctuary stood by the open windows to hear the Rev. G. W. Briggs deliver the eulogy.

  Over the next several days, the Gainesville police questioned nine local men—“two Negroes and the rest Mexicans,” the Dallas Morning News reported. The evidence ag
ainst them was “so slight” that they were detained for only a short time. With the police investigations going nowhere, the same fear began to sweep through much of North Texas that had swept through Austin. Residents in Gainesville and surrounding towns, and even as far away as Dallas and Fort Worth, slept with their doors closed and their windows “doubly secured.” Bands of “armed men” walked the streets from midnight to sunrise. The newspaper in the town of Sherman, thirty-five miles from Gainesville, called on the state legislature to pass a law that would “make it justifiable” for every homeowner “to kill a man or any person upon his premises at night upon sight if he be attempting to hide his actions, no matter whether the object be theft or murder.”

  Of course, the reporters arrived. Under such sensational headlines as “Two Young Ladies Horribly Mangled While Asleep” and “A Fiend from the Depth of Hades Murders Girls in Their Bed,” they left no doubt that the Gainesville attacks were connected to the Austin murders. Just as the New York Times had done with Patti Scott’s killing in San Antonio, the Daily Statesman put together a kind of forensic analysis of the Austin and Gainesville attacks, noting that “Misses Bostwick and Watkins” were both struck in “nearly the same anatomical region” (the right eye) as the “women and girls who were assassinated in Austin.” The same correspondent from the New York World who had come to Austin after the Christmas Eve 1886 murders soon showed, and he concluded that the two girls had been attacked by the “Intangible Nemesis.” In his article, the World’s correspondent wrote that “the time of night, the time of the moon, the fact that the victims in each case seemed without an enemy, the similarity of the wounds and the impenetrable mystery which overshadowed each of the crimes, all point to the same bloody hand in the awful work.”

  Sensing that the state’s reputation was taking a serious public relations hit—other newspapers in the East were beginning to call the killer “the Texas Jekyll”—an anxious Governor Sul Ross announced that he would be adding $1,000 to the reward fund that had been raised by Gainesville’s citizens. People hurried to their local post offices to mail letters to the governor naming men they believed had done the killings. Someone reported that a traveling salesman was the culprit. Someone else wanted the authorities to check into the whereabouts of a stonecutter who was known to be violent with women. At least one tipster resurrected the old Indian theory, claiming the killer was a crazed Comanche “hiding out” in Indian Territory just north of Texas in Oklahoma (which was not yet a state).

  But no arrest was made, which only set off more waves of fear, even in Austin. Convinced the Midnight Assassin still lived among them, biding his time, waiting for the perfect opportunity to carry out his next attack, many homeowners continued to make sure their houses were secure. More “electric burglar alarm systems” were purchased and installed. One woman told the Daily Statesman that it was a scientific fact that the last image a murdered person saw remained permanently upon the retinas of his or her eyes. She suggested that a photographer be hired to take a close-up photo of the eyes of the next victim of the Austin killings. When developed, she said, the photo would reveal the face of the killer, and the police could finally solve the murders.

  For his part, Mayor Robertson refused to mention any connection between the attacks in Gainesville and Austin. Instead he continued his booming. In one of his speeches, which he gave just after the Gainesville axings, he described Austin as “orderly and prosperous, with a growing moral development and a future promising everything that is good and great.” He announced that Austin was growing more rapidly “in wealth and population” than Atlanta, which was considered the greatest city of the South. When the members of the Texas Medical Association arrived in Austin for their annual convention, he gave a welcoming speech in which he actually bragged that Austin had become one of the safest cities in the country. “In Austin, there is freedom from disorder and wrong-doing which would excite red-hot envy in the breast even of a St. Louisan,” he proclaimed.

  But Robertson’s days as a politician were numbered, and he knew it. The news finally broke that he had not hired the famed Pinkerton National Detective Agency of Chicago back in early 1886. William Pinkerton, the co-owner of the agency, had received a letter from relatives of either Eula Phillips or Susan Hancock asking what his detectives believed had happened regarding their loved one’s death. He had sent that relative a letter of his own, which was eventually published in the newspapers, saying he had never sent anyone from his agency to Austin. Although an investigation by the aldermen found that Robertson had acted “honestly and squarely”—and that it was not his fault that the detectives he had hired were “of little account”—many residents were furious to learn that he had gone ahead and paid out $3,328.27 in city funds to the fake Pinkertons just to avoid embarrassment.

  That fall, Robertson announced he would not be running for reelection in December. He returned to his law practice, his dreams of being known as the man who led Austin into a golden new era permanently dashed. His longtime rival Joseph Nalle quickly declared his candidacy for mayor, calling himself “the people’s candidate.” He described his platform as one of “sound business and fiscal reform.” And he said that unlike the previous administration, he would keep Austin “safe and secure.”

  This time around, Nalle won the election in a landslide vote. To make sure citizens did feel safer and more secure, he proposed to the aldermen that the Austin Water, Light and Power Company be authorized to set up twenty-five electric lamps on poles twenty to thirty feet high in order to light up more parts of downtown. (The aldermen agreed.) Meanwhile, Marshal Lucy asked Sergeant Chenneville to establish a mounted patrol division: a team of five to ten officers who constantly rode through the city on horseback, ready at any moment to race to the scene of a crime.

  By the spring of 1888, Austin had returned again to its “pitch of gaiety.” The Driskill Hotel was filled almost every night with visiting businessmen and politicians. (To impress its customers, the hotel’s restaurant had begun printing its menus in French.) Charles Millett expanded the stage of his opera house so that he could bring in larger opera companies to perform. Several new downtown businesses opened, including another tobacco shop, another ice-cream parlor, and a hardware store that sold everything from porcelain toilets to wallpaper. And William Radam was selling so much Radam’s Microbe Killer that he had announced he would be building factories around the country to manufacture his potion so that all of America’s citizens could experience “the greatest discovery of the age.” Indeed, Radam was about to get so rich that he would soon leave Austin and move to New York to live in a mansion on Fifth Avenue.

  On May 16, the new state capitol building, which had finally been completed after six years of work, was opened with a formal dedication ceremony. The building was, as advertised, a “noble edifice,” the biggest statehouse in the union, a Romanesque palace of polished red granite covering three acres of ground, with 392 rooms, 924 windows, twenty-two-foot-high ceilings, and seven miles of wainscoting carved in a variety of woods. On top of the capitol’s dome, the Goddess of Liberty smiled placidly, her head crowned in laurel and a sword in her hand. Her facial features had been exaggerated by the stonecutters to make them discernible to everyone on the ground, 311 feet away.

  The ceremony for the new capitol was described by one reporter as “one of the highlights of the century in Texas.” Dignitaries from around the state came to participate. “Splendid carriages swung up Congress Avenue, through the pink granite gateposts, and up the drive that circled the capitol to discharge party after party of well-dressed officials and observers,” wrote another reporter.

  During the ceremony itself, six bands alternately played. A chorus sang patriotic songs. Governor Ross rose and gave what a reporter described as “an eloquent and feeling address” about Texas’s “unbridled future.” Among those in attendance were ten Chicago businessmen—led by contractors Abner Taylor, Charles B. Farwell, and his younger brother John V. Farwell—w
ho had made an agreement with the state legislature back in the early 1880s to build the capitol in return for 3,050,000 acres of raw land, an area the size of the state of Connecticut, located in the Texas panhandle. Already, the Chicago men were transforming their acreage into the largest cattle ranch in the world. They had named the ranch the XIT, which, depending on who one talked to, was either an acronym for the ten Chicago men in Texas or for the fact that the ranch was spread over ten Texas counties. So far, 781 miles of the ranch had been fenced with barbed wire to hold 150,000 head of cattle, and a ranch manager named B. H. “Barbecue” Campbell out of Wichita, Kansas, had been hired. Old-time Texans shook the Chicago men’s hands and just laughed. Who would have thought, they said, that the biggest ranch in Texas would be funded and operated by a bunch of non-Texans?

  Workmen standing beside the Goddess of Liberty before she was placed atop the capitol’s dome in May 1888

  The completed state capitol building

  The celebration went on for another five days, with each day marked by parades, concerts, grand balls, and fireworks. Military drill teams came from as far away as Montgomery, Alabama, to perform. The famous Battle of Gettysburg Cyclorama, a giant, 360-degree panoramic painting on the inside of a cylindrical platform that depicted Pickett’s Charge, was shipped down from Pennsylvania and set up on the capitol grounds. One afternoon, there was a moment of silence at the capitol for the fallen heroes of the Alamo.

  At least 50,000 out-of-town visitors witnessed the week of festivities, and it is probably safe to say that a few of those visitors couldn’t help themselves: they hired hacks to drive them past the quarters of the murdered servant women and then past the Hancock and Phillips homes. The visitors swapped shivery stories about the way all the women had been axed and bludgeoned, and they talked in nervous tones about the possibility that the Midnight Assassin was still somewhere in Austin—a man hiding in the shadows.