Howe walked into the servants’ quarters. He noticed that two or three pieces of furniture in the small room had been upended and a mirror knocked to the floor and broken. On the bed, the sheets and pillows were saturated in blood. Blood had dripped off one side of the bed and formed a puddle on the floor. At the foot of the bed was a bloodstained ax. On the wall by the door leading into the backyard was a bloody handprint showing what the police in those years called “finger marks.”
Howe opened the door and followed a trail of blood for more than fifty feet, got to the outhouse, and stopped.
Mollie Smith was on her back. Her head had been nearly split in two and she had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen. Some of the gashes were deep enough to expose her organs. Her legs and arms were also slashed. Blood was everywhere—bright red lung blood and nearly black gut blood. So much blood was around her, filling up the ruts in the alley, that she seemed to be floating in a pool of it.
There is no police record indicating what exactly happened next, but the most probable scenario is that young Howe headed back to Ravy’s, called Delong at the police department, and, trying to keep his voice calm, told him he needed help. Soon, other officers arrived at the Halls’. Sergeant Chenneville eventually showed up on his big bay horse. Trotting behind the horse were his bloodhounds, two slobbering dogs of unknown origin that lived in Chenneville’s backyard when they weren’t tracking criminals on the run.
Chenneville was in his late thirties. He was built like an upright piano through the shoulders, and had a thick mustache that drooped over his upper lip. Whenever he walked into city hall, the employees didn’t have to look up from their desks to know he had arrived because of the heavy thud his boots made across the floor. Some of those employees, especially the less muscular men who worked in accounting, had no particular desire to make eye contact with him, perhaps fearing that he might walk over, thrust forward his gun hand, and say hello. According to local gossip, Chenneville’s handshake was strong enough to crack corn.
Most citizens fondly called Chenneville “Ronnie O Johnnie.” Raised in New Orleans, where he spent his teenage years working as a cabin boy on a Confederate ship that traversed the Mississippi River during the Civil War, Chenneville had come to Austin in the mid-1870s, joined the police department, and quickly became known, in the words of the Daily Statesman, as Austin’s “most industrious officer.” He was often seen barrel-assing down the dirt streets, chasing after troublemakers, his holstered gun slapping against his thigh, and at night he didn’t hesitate to push his way into the saloons to break up the brawls among the cowboys who had ridden into town to “hell around,” as the police officers wrote in their reports. Because his voice was so loud and commanding, he even had agreed in those years to be the auctioneer at the city market held on Saturday mornings in front of city hall, selling off everything from dry goods to sides of beef.
Now, a decade later, there was very little about Ronnie O Johnnie that had changed. To let the city’s rogues and riffraff know that he was still in charge, he continued to work the dirt streets, riding through downtown at least once in the morning and once in the afternoon, always keeping his back perfectly straight—“straight as a bull’s dick” was the phrase some men used in those days to describe horsemen with good posture. He also maintained a network of “pals” throughout Austin: informers who, in return for a handful of coins, kept him abreast of the activities of the city’s more disreputable characters.
Chenneville was so devoted to his job that he had traveled to San Antonio in November, less than two months earlier, just to get a look at all the thieves working the horse races there. He said he had wanted to memorize their faces in case they decided to come up to Austin’s annual fair in December. When the fair passed without a single crime taking place, the Daily Statesman had praised Chenneville for his “untiring vigilance” at watching over “the visiting crooks.”
Chenneville walked into the Halls’ backyard and headed to the outhouse to take a look at Mollie Smith. Unlike young Officer Howe, he had seen his share of dead bodies. He had seen men who had been shot or stabbed. He had watched murderers and horse thieves, black hoods over their heads, hanged from scaffolding behind the county courthouse, their feet continuing to kick even after the rope had snapped their necks. He had come across a lonely prostitute known as Buzzard Liz, named for the smallpox scars across her face, who had “suicided” from a morphine overdose in an alley.
A prominent white Austin family posing with their “servant girl” and her daughter
But he had never seen anything like this. Mollie Smith had been ripped open like a calf at a slaughterhouse.
Despite all the years Chenneville had spent chasing criminals, the truth was that he was not exactly an experienced homicide detective. Almost all the murders he had investigated had taken place in Austin’s saloons and poorer neighborhoods, where small, drunken insults had escalated into deadly brawls and personal scores had been settled with knives or guns. None of the killings had been carefully planned out, and more often than not they were carried out in front of at least one eyewitness. Rarely did a killer even try to flee. All Chenneville had to do was ride up on his horse, remove the smoking gun or bloody knife from the killer’s hand, and drag him to the calaboose—the local jail, which was just down the hall from the police department.
But on this morning, Chenneville had no killer waiting to be arrested. Nor did he have any eyewitnesses or “pals” to tell him who the killer was. What’s more, he had no forensic tools to help him study the murder scene. In 1884, the science of criminology had not yet been invented. Police officers had no idea that the way blood dripped across the floor or spattered against the wall could help them decipher how a murder took place. They didn’t know that hairs or fibers found on a victim could possibly help identify a killer. Through a microscope, they could distinguish the blood of human beings from that of other animals, but so far, no system of blood typing had been created to distinguish one human being’s blood from another’s. Although a scientist, Dr. Henry Faulks, had published a paper in 1880 suggesting that finger marks were so unique to a person that they could be used for identification, no procedure had been devised so that police could accurately record or store those prints.
As part of their standard murder investigations, police officers did look for footprints or shoeprints around a body. Sometimes they would have those prints measured and replicated on a sheet of paper or a piece of wood, or even dug out of the earth and preserved with plaster of Paris, hoping they could later be matched with the prints of a murder suspect. But if there were any prints close to Mollie’s body, they had already been obliterated by the boots of Chalmers, Steiner, and other men from the neighborhood who had come into the backyard to look at her.
The only real investigative tools Chenneville had at his disposal this New Year’s Eve morning were his two bloodhounds. Baying at the top of their lungs, their strange harmonic chorus as complex as part singing, they were led to Mollie’s body and then to Mollie’s room, where they dropped their heads, their nostrils flaring as they smelled the floor, the bed covers, the wall with the finger marks, and the ax.
Like their owner, however, the dogs had never before encountered such a scene. All that they seemed to be able to smell was Mollie’s blood. They didn’t pick up any other scent, nor did they take a single trail.
* * *
From the road came the clatter of hoofbeats and the squeak of carriage wheels. The newspaper reporters were arriving: one from the Daily Statesman, another from the Austin Daily Sun (a poorly funded newspaper that had opened earlier that year and was already preparing to close), and a few more from the Galveston, Dallas, Houston, and Fort Worth papers, all of which maintained bureaus in Austin to report the political news coming out of the state’s government offices. One of the Hello Girls most likely had let the newspapermen know that there had been a call to the police department about a dead woman, and because there was litt
le else going on that New Year’s Eve day, they had decided to check out the story for themselves.
The reporters were a cocky, jabbery bunch. They wore their hats at jaunty angles and chewed on cigars. A few of them drank too much, tipping from pocket flasks throughout the day. They ate their lunches at one of the cheap chili con carne stands on the downtown streets, and they spent much of their free time at the shabby Austin Press Club, above the Horseshoe Saloon, where they played heated games of penny ante poker, argued over the merits of their own prose, and debated the literary talent of the former western newspaperman Mark Twain, whose newest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was being excerpted that very month in Century magazine.
For once, however, they were silent. To keep his stomach from buckling, one of the reporters moved to another part of the Halls’ yard. (“A brief glance at the sickening sight was sufficient,” he would later write.) The reporters knew all about the way the Comanche Indians had once attacked Texas’s frontier settlers. Articles about the old “Indian depredations,” as they were called, were still being published in the state’s newspapers: horrifying (but highly read) accounts of settlers in the 1830s and 1840s being tortured and mutilated, stabbed over and over, their scalps ruthlessly torn from their bleeding heads. Standing in the Halls’ yard, their hands buried deep in the pockets of their coats and their breaths making jets of smoke in the frozen morning air, the reporters must have wondered: was it possible that this was some sort of Indian killing?
But there hadn’t been a report of any kind of Indian attack anywhere in Texas in more than a decade. The last of the Comanches were now huddled away on a reservation in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, their food and blankets doled out by federal employees. The idea that some rogue Indian would have slipped off the reservation and come to Austin to commit this gruesome attack was preposterous.
Maybe, said someone in the backyard, Mollie’s boyfriend—this Walter Spencer fellow—had invented the entire story about waking up to find her missing. Maybe the two had gotten into an argument and he had taken after her with his knife and ax—and then afterward he had hit himself in the head and face with the back of the ax to make people think that he too had been attacked.
Yet those who knew Spencer couldn’t imagine him carrying out such an act. Except for an arrest back in 1881 for disturbing the peace at a black saloon, he had no criminal record whatsoever, and at Butler’s Brick Yard he was considered an excellent worker, carrying five hundred bricks a day to the wagons waiting outside. It was an excruciating job: if a black laborer didn’t get his five hundred bricks loaded on the wagons for any reason whatsoever, including illness or injury, he did not receive his daily pay of seventy-five cents. Rarely, however, did Spencer not make his quota.
The case for Spencer’s innocence was bolstered when Nancy Anderson, a black woman who worked part-time as a nurse in the Hall home, told the police and reporters that Spencer had maintained a “peaceful relationship” with Mollie. She said that Spencer “generally did everything Mollie requested.” The couple was on “the best of terms,” the nurse insisted.
And, Chalmers had to admit, Spencer certainly hadn’t acted the previous evening like a man who had just committed a murder. He had to have known the risk he was taking when he walked unannounced into the Hall home. If Chalmers had shot him between the eyes, there would have been no arrest and no questions asked. “Protection of home from Negro burglar,” a judge would have declared without a second thought. Yet instead of fleeing like any normal killer would have, Spencer had seemed genuinely concerned about Mollie’s fate.
Then a story circulated through the Halls’ yard about an ex-boyfriend of Mollie’s named William “Lem” Brooks. He worked behind the bar at one of the city’s downtown saloons, washing and drying glasses, and on his nights off he was the “prompter” at the city’s black dances, calling “the figures” for the Peacock, the Chicken Wing, and the Cakewalk. Brooks had first gotten to know Mollie in Waco, a town about a hundred miles north of Austin, where they were both born. As a teenager, Mollie had been romantically involved with another black man and given birth to a son. At some point after her son’s birth she had broken up with that man and taken up with Brooks. But when Mollie’s son died at the age of six from an untreated disease, she had decided the time had come to start a new life, and she had moved to Austin. Brooks later followed her there, hoping to rekindle the romance. By then, however, Mollie was already involved with Walter Spencer. Brooks was supposedly so upset that he had tried to start a fight with Spencer when the two of them had recently run across each other.
When Chenneville and his officers heard that story, they jumped on their horses and headed downtown, looking for Brooks. They found him asleep in the shanty of his new girlfriend, Rosa Brown.
Brooks stammered out his alibi—he had spent the evening prompting a dance at Sand Hill, a black meeting hall on the city’s east side, a full two miles from the Hall residence.
For Chenneville, however, Brooks was the only decent suspect he had: a jealous ex-lover, someone who at least had some motive to harm Spencer and do away with Mollie. He decided to arrest Brooks for “suspicion of murder,” which under the criminal code of that era was not the same as being arrested for murder. It only meant that the police wanted to keep a suspect in custody while the investigation continued. Brooks was escorted to the calaboose and thrown into the main holding tank with the other prisoners.
* * *
By then, it was early afternoon, the temperature still below freezing. Ice-lined branches in the trees made cracking noises. Smoke from the chimneys of the nearby homes rose into the air, black against the iron-colored sky. A black man who volunteered as the undertaker for the city’s black community arrived at the Halls’ in his wagon to collect Mollie and take her to the “dead room” of the City-County Hospital for an autopsy.
In those days, black undertakers used certain hopeful phrases whenever they lifted a dead person from the spot where he or she died. “Here you come, my child,” the undertakers would sometimes say, “coming to Jesus.” But it is doubtful those were the words this undertaker used. According to one newspaperman’s account, when the undertaker tried to place her into a crude wooden casket, the body did not “hold together.”
Eventually, after regaining his composure, the undertaker tried again. He scooped up all of Mollie and her body parts, placed them in the casket, and loaded the casket back onto the wagon. The undertaker called out to his horse and the horse trudged forward, disappearing into the distance, the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves like a metronome’s ticks on the frozen streets.
Meanwhile, Tom Chalmers began cleaning the blood off the walls and the floor of Mollie’s quarters. He threw out her clothes and discarded the broken mirror on her wall. Chalmers wanted everything to be perfectly spotless by the time his brother-in-law returned to Austin. He wanted everything to look as if nothing at all had happened there—absolutely nothing at all.
CHAPTER THREE
The hospital’s dead room was in the basement, down a series of stone steps. In the middle of the room was a sturdy wooden table where Mollie’s body was placed. The smell of her blood, combined with the odors wafting from the bottles of chemicals on a shelf, would have been as choking as a wooden spoon pushed down a throat.
Dr. William Burt, the hospital’s staff physician, walked in to do the autopsy. On a sheet of paper, he recorded Mollie’s height and weight. He looked at her hands, her fingernails, her wrists, and the insides of her upper arms. Then he examined Mollie’s wounds. She looked like the victim of some horrific amateur medical operation—an experiment in anatomy. Not sure what else to do, Burt took a few more notes, pulled a sheet over Mollie’s body, walked out of the dead room, shut the door, and headed up the stone steps.
Soon dusk began to descend over Austin. Holding a long wooden pole with a dangling wick, a black man named Henry Stamps, the city’s lamplighter, walked up and down Austin’s two main downtown boulevards, Co
ngress Avenue and Pecan Street, lighting the gas lamps, twenty-five in all. The proprietors of the saloons and restaurants shoved logs into their fireplaces and cast-iron stoves, and they scraped the ice off the wooden sidewalks in front of their doors. A few of the more progressive store owners flicked on their new, electrically powered, “incandescent light bulbs.” The filaments in the bulbs, guaranteed to last for six hours, sputtered and hissed, and the white light poured out of the windows and almost reached the other side of the street.
By seven o’clock that evening, Austin’s residents were heading downtown. Some of them came on horseback, some in leather-topped buggies, and some in horse-drawn hacks (taxis). The wealthier citizens had reservations at the city’s finest restaurant, Simon and Bellenson’s, where the chef was preparing a dinner of quail, venison, “fine chops,” and “Berwick Bay oysters.” Others made their way to Millett’s Opera House to watch The Banker’s Daughter, a comedy put on by a traveling theatrical troupe about a young woman who announces that she will be marrying a man old enough to be her father. Still others paid a twenty-five-cent admission to attend a “Dancing and Roller Skating Carnival” at Turner Hall, with music provided by the fourteen-piece Manning Rifle Band. Couples swooshed in a giant circle around the wooden floor on their metal skates, the women giggling and whooping, trying to maintain their balance in thick skirts that swept around their legs. At intermission, there was a half-mile race for the men, with the winner receiving a basket of apples.
Throughout the night, the saloons were packed with customers—men only, of course. The Gold Room held a raffle for a gold-plated shotgun worth $125, and the Crystal Saloon featured billiards on its three felt-covered tables, which had been shipped down from New York City. Over at Austin’s oldest saloon, the Iron Front, which had an oak bar as long as a railroad car and a buffalo head on the wall the size of a cast-iron bathtub, the bartenders were offering Budweiser, a new beer from St. Louis, for just five cents a draw, and upstairs in the Iron Front’s gambling den, dealers were offering games of monte, chuck-a-luck, stud poker, and keno.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 2
