The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  Certainly neither King Harrison nor Christ Sanctified Holy Church approved of murder, but Clementine claimed she was the leader of a group within the Christ Sanctified Holy Church known as the Church of Sacrifice. She said she had murdered the Randalls because they disobeyed the church’s orders. She also claimed she had a charm from a local voodoo doctor that would prevent her from being punished.

  Well, that’s a hell of a story, and as you can imagine, the newspapers had a field day. Her race was always noted, usually in the headline, often alongside the claim that she was light-skinned. Usually the observation of how white she might be was followed by a tribute to her beauty and cunning. Many stories about her claim that she was only one-eighth black, which cannot be true. The reports reached newspapers on both coasts, and like a story retold by a six-year-old, the basic facts of the case were retained while the details were embellished or made up. Stories featured dialogue written in insulting dialect and tales of voodoo churches and unsubstantiated sacrifices. These accounts, as far as we know, were carried only in white newspapers. All accounts agree that Clementine was “being examined for her sanity.”

  For two months, Clementine sat in jail while the authorities figured out what to do. According to the WPA account, she curtailed her confessions and spoke to no one, “like a sphinx,” but occasionally she asked for her mother.

  On Saturday, January 20, 1912, Harriet Crane stopped by her daughter Merle Warner’s house, a small home near the railroad tracks on the west side of Crowley. She stopped by to see Merle and her three children, Pearl (aged nine), Harriet (eight) and Garry (seven). Mrs. Crane found the house to be eerily silent, sensed that something was wrong, and could not stand to go inside. The Galveston Daily News doesn’t record whether the door was locked or the windows covered. What it does say is that she was “afraid to enter and willed a colored man to go for her.”

  You can probably guess what had happened to the Warners, and this will save me the awkwardness of putting it in words. The bodies had been moved to lie together in bed after death, and the axe was dropped at the scene, though it was bloody and not cleaned.

  Well, Raymond Barnabet was in jail, and Clementine was in jail, so what now? Sheriff Lacoste arrested Zepherin (Ferran) Barnabet. He had an alibi, but Lacoste figured he was acting on the orders of his incarcerated father and sister.

  But on the very night that Ferran was arrested, January 20, there was another crime about fifty miles from Crowley (seventy-five miles from Lafayette) in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In 1912 the city was still recovering from a huge fire that had wiped out most of downtown in 1910. The Broussards lived not far from downtown at 331 Rock Street, “the last one on the street towards the river and within a few rods of the Kansas City Southern switch track,” according to the Galveston Daily News. Felix Broussard was an older man, around the age of fifty. He worked at the rice mill, where he got along well with his coworkers and employers, and lived with his wife, who we believe was his second wife. We are told that she was pretty but know nothing else about her, not even a name. They had three children: Margaret, aged eight, Alberta, aged six, and Louis, aged three. Felix also had two adult children living in Texas.

  In the newspapers, Felix Broussard got the same “good sort of negro” treatment that Walter Byers, Alexandre Andrus, Louis Casaway, and Norbert Russell had received after their deaths. Acknowledging the humanity of these victims provided some journalists an excuse to bite off a little more racism and take liberties with the details of their life and death, especially the superstitious gossip such as that published in a special report on the crimes by the Los Angeles Times on January 30, 1912:

  The day before the tragedies, [Felix] told some friends he was “going home to glory and going mighty soon.” Although Saturday is not the usual negro wash day, his wife washed all the clothes for every member of the family. From this it has been argued that the victims must have knew, in advance, their fate.

  This is gossip, or possibly just straight-up fiction. You have to understand: newspapers in this era would just make stuff up—not all of them, but some of them. This article was reprinted in the El Paso Herald on March 14, 1912. In its different iterations, it is the most colorfully and emphatically racist article that we have come across in researching this book.

  If you’re counting murdered families in this chapter we are now up to seven—the Opelousas, Byers, Casaway, Andrus, Randall, Warner, and Broussard families; however, we said that there were eleven in 1911 and 1912, and the Opelousas family doesn’t count in that total because that crime happened in 1909.

  The Broussards’ murderer had broken into the house through a back window. An excellent account of the crime published in the Galveston Daily News of January 22 speculated as to whether the killer had cased the home beforehand:

  The belief is that the murderer doubtless spotted out the place some time in advance, and thus learned of the family’s size and the arrangement of things in the house, as no bungling was done by the fiend. The negro woman who lived next door was up at 1:30 o’clock Sunday morning cooking for the next day, and said that she heard nothing at that time.

  At ten o’clock the next morning, a neighbor found them. The parents were alone in bed, heads crushed by the blunt end of an axe, but not Felix’s axe, which was still in the kitchen. In the next room were the children, still in the positions of sleep, apparently unmoved. The axe was beneath their bed, the blood patterns showing that only the blunt side of the axe had been used. A bucket was placed under their heads to catch the blood.

  This crime shows the competence of The Man from the Train—which few crimes do that aren’t his—but this one clearly isn’t. Putting the axe under the bed and using a bucket to catch the blood would be departures from pattern for him, but moderate ones. But someone had written on the inside of the kitchen door the following words:

  “When he maketh inquisition for blood, he forgetteth not the cry of the humble.”

  And then, to the side, the words “HUMAN FIVE,” sometimes written as “HUMAN, FIVE.” We believe that these words were written with a pencil, although we can’t be certain of that.

  The quote, repeated in papers from the Galveston Daily News to the Washington Post, is always described as a biblical quotation, although it actually isn’t. It’s actually a quotation from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, misquoted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin from Psalm 9:12. The actual quotation from the King James Bible reads:

  “When he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he forgetteth not the cry of the humble.” [emphasis added]

  This was not an obvious reference to that most “cussed and discussed” novel, as Langston Hughes described Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Every newspaper account from the time took the phrase to be direct from the Bible. This was not a commonly written version of the psalm, which appeared in many publications of the day. So far as we know, Rachel McCarthy James was the first person to realize that the quotation did not actually come from the Bible, but from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Clementine confessed to murdering the Broussards, although she had been in jail at the time. (Probably Clementine was confused about the calendar of events, and did not realize that the Broussards had been murdered after her arrest.) Newspapers from as far away as India were enthralled with the religious and racial aspects of Clementine’s confession. Many newspapers claimed that she targeted families with five people because of the magic number five, which they claimed to have had some significance in voodoo. This is simply not true. The Opelousas family contained four people, the Byerses were only three, and the Andrus family four, while the Randall family numbered six.

  The gruesome murders of the Broussard family set off a flurry of police activity. Clementine’s brother Ferran was released from jail. King Harrison, the preacher of the Sanctification Church, which had branches in each of the towns mentioned here, was arrested not long after the bodies were found, and released shortly after that. Eliza Richards, a friend of Clementine’s, was arrested and released,
as were other people.

  By early 1912 the police had lost the trust of the black community. Many black lodges, churches, and organizations volunteered information, help, and funding to catch the killers of the Byerses and the Casaways, but after the Broussard murders they were focused on protecting themselves or packing up and leaving. The Los Angeles Times noted the shift in sentiment, but attributed it to the popularity of voodoo.

  The El Paso Herald report based on the racist Los Angeles Times piece recorded the death of a family named Wexford in the early months of the year 1912. This report spends a lot of time trying to explain why the killer would be satisfied now that they had killed five families of five, despite the fact that of the families they cite, only the Broussards actually numbered five. During their summary of the murders, they wrote the following:

  Two months ago six members of the Wexford family perished at the hand of the fanatics but one was an infant born only the day before the tragedy and in all probability had not been taken into consideration when the plans for the human sacrifice were consummated.

  We can’t find any other evidence of a “Wexford” family being murdered in this area and are not inclined to believe that this ever happened. Perhaps by “Wexford” they meant “Warner,” but since the Warners didn’t have a day-old baby, either, that wouldn’t help all that much. But we could be missing something.

  In any case, the murderous rampage was not over, but was crossing state lines and entering a new phase. If you get on the train in Lafayette, Louisiana, and head west, in eighteen miles you will hit Rayne. Get back on the train and go another seven miles, and you come to Crowley. Get back on the train and go another fifty miles west, you’re in Lake Charles. Get back on the train in Lake Charles and go another sixty miles, you’re in Beaumont, Texas.

  The family of Hattie Dove lived at 1428 Cable Street in Beaumont, Texas, right next to a Baptist church and a third of a mile from the railroad track. Hattie and her family are going to meet an unfortunate end in just a moment here, but at some point these crimes cease to be part of the original series and become copycat crimes. The authors of this book believe that someone or someones, perhaps motivated by racism and perhaps by some other sickness, took the template of the Louisiana/Acadia Parish murders, which were all over the newspapers at that time, and used it as the basis for a series of unrelated crimes, committed not by Clementine or her friends or by The Man from the Train, but by some third actor, probably two men acting together. We don’t believe that any of the Texas crimes in this series were actually committed by the same people who committed the Louisiana crimes, except that The Man from the Train probably committed crimes in both states. Other people who have written about these crimes have put them together as one series, and you can believe what you want to believe.

  But let’s go back and tie up the story of Clementine a little bit, before we go on into Texas and Mississippi. Clementine is in jail by this time, and her conviction is beginning to look ever more certain, because by now she is filling up notebooks with her confessions. The Lafayette prosecutor, District Attorney Bruner, began preparing a grand jury investigation. In January 1912, a chemist named Metz had tested the bloody skirt and shirtwaist found in Clementine’s closet to see if the blood was menstrual or not; he found it was blood “which flowed from wounds of a living body,” as the Thibodaux Sentinel of January 27, 1912, put it. There is certainly a difference between period blood and regular old circulating blood; period blood is partially the shedding of the uterine lining. We’d like to know more about his 1912 methodology, but OK.

  Metz also tested and found that some blood on a pillow in the Randall house matched the blood on Clementine’s clothes. This is clearly BS designed to help the prosecution. Blood typing had just been developed a few years earlier by Karl Landsteiner in Austria. There was little knowledge or understanding of it, even in the scientific community, at that time. The public in 1912 knew that blood typing was possible, because it had been used in some high-profile paternity cases, but knew almost nothing about it. Metz took advantage of this to make a claim which seems to the authors to be well beyond the scientific envelope of 1912. Since there were six victims from three unrelated genetic backgrounds in the Randall murders, all of whom had shed blood, there would almost certainly be blood from multiple blood types (A, B, O, and AB). It is likely that Clementine had the same blood type as at least one of the six victims, which would render this “match” meaningless by any methods available into the 1970s. It is our opinion that Dr. Metz was taking advantage of the gullibility of the public to make a claim that would have seemed reasonable at the time but which lacks credibility in retrospect.

  But Clementine was also helping the prosecution. Clementine now claimed that her first murders had occurred in Rayne. Her sister Pauline lived in Rayne, and she now claimed that she had traveled to Rayne to visit her sister and, while there, had murdered a woman and her four children:

  I went to my sister, who lived at Rayne, near the O. G. railroad depot, and later during the night went up town, disguised as a man, and securing an ax in a yard near the cabin where I killed the mother and four children. . . .

  Upon entering the house, I struck the woman on the right temple and killed her instantly. One of the children was awakened by the noise, and before he could raise his head from the pillow I struck him a blow somewhere near the left ear, then I struck the other two. I left the man’s clothes which I wore in the house and left the house in woman’s clothes, returned to my sister’s house and later during the same night I boarded a night train for Lafayette arriving here about midnight. It was about nine when I killed them.

  The police in Rayne now arrested Pauline, alleging that she was acting “suspicious.” Back in Lafayette, Sheriff Lacoste arrested Valena Mabry, whom Clementine called Irene and claimed had been her assistant in the murder of the Randalls. Mabry vigorously denied any connection to the crime, and was eventually released without being prosecuted.

  When Clementine met the grand jury in April 1912, she had more than just laughter for them. She made a full confession not just to the officers of the court but to a reporter named RH Broussard from the New Orleans Item (and yes, there are a lot of Broussards in this story). RH Broussard’s version of her story began in New Iberia, a town south of Lafayette. Clementine and four friends met an “old negro who told us that he could sell us ‘candjas.’ ” (The spelling of that last word seems to be unique, to the best of Google’s ability, at least. In the WPA account, this item was referred to as a “conjure bag.”) In her confession, Clementine stated that the conjure bag was promised to allow her and her friends to “do as we pleased and we would never be detected and would be protected from the hands of the law by the mere fact of these ‘candjas’ being in our possession.”

  This fact about the candjas is the entire basis for the belief that these crimes are related to voodoo. Thousands and thousands of newspaper articles and many subsequent books and articles link these crimes to voodoo, but as far as we know the only actual link to voodoo is just this one fact—that Clementine and a couple of her goofy teenaged friends had once bought a couple of conjure bags. The man who sold them the charms was named Joseph Thibodeaux. Thibodeaux was arrested by Sheriff Lacoste, who hoped that Thibodeaux could lead them to the killers of the rest of the victims—those who had been murdered after Clementine was already in custody. The forty-five-year-old Thibodeaux admitted to selling people papers “for various things” but denied selling charms. Sheriff Lacoste brought him in front of Clementine, and she identified him as the man who sold her the charms and described his house. “Yes, you said I wouldn’t be arrested,” she told him, “but look here I am in jail.”

  After buying the charms for three dollars, Clementine said that she and her friends returned to Lafayette and began making plans for what to get away with. She claimed that before the conjure bags, they had never thought to commit murder. They drew straws to see who would kill first, and she drew the short str
aw. She then went to Rayne, to visit her sister, and murdered a family while she was there. She said she chose the family because they had left a light burning inside while they slept, and she could see them sleeping. She said. Clementine returned to Lafayette and her friends, and, in her telling, they waited to see whether they would be arrested. When they were not arrested, she said they figured that the charm had worked and they were free to murder at will.

  She next confessed to the murder of the Byers family in Crowley, Louisiana:

  In Crowley I entered the house with one of the women, while the other kept watch, and as I had the ax in my hand I committed the murders. I struck the man first and just as I did so the woman woke up, I struck her a blow in the face with the butt end of the ax and felled her. I then struck her once or twice to be sure that she was dead. Once this was done it was an easy matter to get rid of the two small children. We thought it was better to kill them than to leave orphans, as they would suffer.

  As stated earlier, we believe it is more likely that this crime was committed by The Man from the Train, but there is no point in arguing about that now.

  Back in Lafayette, Clementine claimed that she and her friends sat back and enjoyed the furor they had created. There was a semblance of a logical plan to the strategy to commit the next murder, that of the Andrus family in their hometown; she claimed to plan the event on the evening of an election, when all the police officers were busy campaigning. She said she and her friends did not preselect their victims, but again a home near the railroad was targeted. From her confession:

  When we reached the railroad crossing we saw a light burning in a cabin near Ramagosa’s store. We decided that that was a good place so we went there; myself and one of the women entered the house and I struck [Alexandre Andrus] first, then his wife, and afterwards his two small children, one of whom was an infant in the cradle near the bed. We had overlooked him until he woke up and began to cry. I turned around and struck him in the forehead, killing him instantly.