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

by Hollandsworth, Skip

  Throughout the afternoon, Swain, Ireland, and the other great men of Texas downed their cordials, spoke grandly to one another about the possibilities of the future, and occasionally shot glances across the room at the young women in their gowns that showed off their décolletage. The sweet scent of Magnolia Charm Balm for the Skin hung in the air, as did the oily smoke of cigars, and the delicious wafting smell of roasted pigs and turkey. The fires leapt and snapped in the fireplaces, and the oil paintings, some of which depicted great heroes of Texas history, glimmered on the walls.

  When the open house came to an end, the governor’s guests made their last toasts, gathered up their coats, and walked out the front door. Standing on the mansion’s vast front porch, waiting for their carriages to come up the drive, they were not only able to look eastward and get a full view of the twenty-two-acre grounds where the new state capitol was being built, they could turn to the south and gaze upon all the new buildings of downtown.

  By then, the sun was setting. Henry Stamps, the lamplighter, was already back on the streets, lighting the gas lamps, each light casting off the color of burnished gold. At the far end of downtown, a freight train was pulling into the depot, sparks flying like red insects from the funnel-stacked locomotive. The train sat there for several minutes, exhaling steam, while goods were unloaded: sewing machines, pianos, fine clothing, “hardwood carpets” (linoleum floors), boxes of telephones, and pallets of lightbulbs. Then the engineer clanged the bell, a whistle blew twice, and the train took off, the cars lurching and jangling and the locomotive tossing another plume of cinders above the treetops.

  It was such a beautiful evening, everyone said to one another, and indeed it was. At that very moment, Austin looked like a small, fabled kingdom—shiny and unsullied and so full of promise. If someone at that moment would have walked onto the porch and told the guests that their young city was about to descend into chaos, they would have laughed out loud.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At Governor Ireland’s open house and the other calling parties, Mollie Smith’s murder was no doubt a topic of at least some conversation. The story of her killing, after all, had been splashed on the top of page 3, the page devoted to local news, of the Daily Statesman, which newspaper boys on horseback had tossed onto the residents’ front lawns. Right beside an advertisement for Madame E. F. Duke’s new vapor baths (designed to relieve women of their monthly menstrual pain) was the headline: “Bloody Work! A Fearful Midnight Murder on West Pecan—Mystery and Crime. A Colored Woman Killed Outright, and Her Lover Almost Done For!”

  The Daily Statesman’s reporter—in those years in American journalism, newspaper reporters were rarely given bylines—went through the details of the killing, calling it “a deed almost unparalleled in the atrocity of its execution” and “one of the most horrible murders that ever a reporter was called on to chronicle.” He described Mollie’s mutilated body as “a ghastly object to behold,” and he added that “a horrible hole on the side of her head” was the cause of her death.

  The headline in the Austin Daily Statesman after the first murder.

  The reporter then mentioned that he had conducted an interview with Walter Spencer, whom he had found at his brother’s apartment above Newton’s Restaurant, in the heart of downtown. (Spencer’s brother worked at the restaurant as a cook.) Spencer was in severe pain, with five deep gashes in his head and a puncture under the eye that had fractured the orbital bone. In a halting voice, he had told the reporter that after Tom Chalmers and Dr. Steiner had pushed him out of their homes, he had staggered around the neighborhood, still looking for Mollie, before he finally decided to make his way to his brother’s apartment.

  When asked about Lem Brooks, Spencer did say that he and his romantic rival had had a confrontation in October, but no punches had been thrown. Nor, interestingly, would Spencer suggest that Brooks had killed Mollie. “I don’t know who did it,” Spencer told the reporter. “But anybody could have got into Mollie’s room easily through the door connecting it with the kitchen.”

  The reporter also informed his readers that he had gone to the calaboose to interview Brooks. The young black man said that he liked both Mollie and Spencer and that he had never harbored any ill feelings toward Mollie for leaving him. “I’m innocent of the murder, and can prove by any number of witnesses that I was at a ball at Sand Hill till four o’clock in the morning and was the prompter,” Brooks told the reporter. “They’ve got hold of the wrong man, for sure.”

  Was Brooks lying when he said he liked both Mollie and Spencer? It was hard to tell. But according to a handful of other black men the Daily Statesman reporter had interviewed, Brooks definitely had been at the Sand Hill dance until four o’clock, which was around the time that Tom Chalmers said he had been awakened by Spencer. If those men were telling the truth, the reporter surmised, then Brooks would have had to have run the two miles from Sand Hill to the Halls’ home “at almost lightning speed” in order to have knocked Spencer unconscious and slashed Mollie nearly to pieces.

  And there was one other thing. If Brooks was the killer, why didn’t he murder Spencer? Why did Brooks take the time to rip apart his ex-girlfriend but only knock Spencer unconscious?

  The reporter did point out that there had been speculation that Spencer himself could be the killer. But he added that there was no way of telling for sure. “The reader is left to draw his own conclusions,” he concluded. “Whether slain by her lover, or some party from the outside, is as yet a mystery that envelops as foul a deed as was ever done in Austin.”

  * * *

  In those years in Texas, before the establishment of medical examiner’s offices, a justice of the peace was required to conduct an inquest into any death that was deemed unusual, unexplainable, or suspicious. The inquest was held before “a jury of inquest”: six male jurors who were required to listen to statements from eyewitnesses, police officers, or doctors regarding the way the deceased met his or her end. At the end of the testimony, the jurors were required to declare what they believed was the official cause of death. If the death was due to murder, the jurors had the additional responsibility of declaring who they believed had committed the murder, and the justice of the peace would issue a warrant for that person’s arrest, if he or she hadn’t been arrested already. If the jurors couldn’t find enough evidence pointing to a particular killer, they were required to rule that the murder had taken place “at the hands of a person or persons unknown.”

  Mollie Smith’s inquest was conducted in private, which was then perfectly legal. Standing in the hallway outside the courtroom, the newspaper reporters tried to pick up some scraps of new information about her murder. They learned that no one who testified could come up with the name of anyone other than Brooks who might have had any reason to harm Mollie. They also learned that there was some testimony (probably coming from Sergeant Chenneville) suggesting that Brooks could very well have gone to the Halls’ before the dance to commit his murder. After a brief deliberation in a back room of the courthouse, the inquest jurors returned to the courtroom and the foreman read the verdict. “We, the jury of inquest over the remains of Mollie Smith find that she came to her death between ten o’clock p.m. and three o’clock a.m. on the night of December 30th from injuries on her head inflicted with an ax, and we believe that said injuries were inflicted by one Lem, alias William Brooks.”

  Why didn’t Brooks kill Spencer? Well, the jurors speculated, perhaps Brooks kept him alive because he wanted the police to believe Spencer was the culprit. Or maybe Brooks planned to go back to the servants’ quarters and use the ax he had left there to do away with Spencer—and then was scared off by something, perhaps a noise.

  The black undertaker returned to the hospital’s dead room, gathered up Mollie’s body, put her back in the casket, loaded it into his wagon, and headed for Colored Ground, the black section of the city cemetery. Located at the bottom of a hill, Colored Ground was the most beautiful part of the cemetery except when
the rains arrived and flooded all of the graves. A few of Mollie’s friends came to witness her burial, shivering in their threadbare coats, their faces squinting in the cold. After singing some spirituals, they headed back to their own little homes and shanties, completely at a loss to explain what had happened.

  Later that day, the cemetery’s elderly sexton, Charles Nitschke, walked into his office by the front gates and opened a beautifully bound ledger that listed everyone who had been buried at the cemetery. In one column, he wrote down Mollie’s name. In another column, he wrote that her birthplace was Waco.

  The kindly sexton decided, however, that it would serve no purpose to go into the details of her murder. Under the column in the ledger that asked for the cause of death, Nitschke simply wrote that Mollie Smith had died from “a broken skull.”

  * * *

  And that seemed to be that. A few days after Mollie’s burial, a hundred or so of Austin’s more prominent white citizens headed up to the University of Texas to hear Dr. M. W. Humphreys, the chin-whiskered professor of ancient languages, speak in the university’s lecture hall on “The Debt We Owe to the Ancient Athenians.” (“Surely he is one of the most accomplished Greek scholars of modern times,” trumpeted the Daily Statesman.) A week later, more than six hundred citizens packed into the Millett’s Opera House to watch the acclaimed New York actress Clara Morris, who had arrived in Austin in her private railroad car attached to the back of an International and Great Northern passenger train, perform the lead role in the melodrama Miss Multon. Renowned among New York drama critics for her “spectacular depictions” of death-bed scenes, Miss Morris portrayed a disgraced, brokenhearted wife who had returned to her home in disguise to care for her own children. As the play came to an end, with Miss Morris dying in her bed, the theatergoers wept. They stood and shouted “Bravo!” as she came out for her curtain calls. Some were so enraptured by her performance that they went to the railroad depot the next day to call out her name and wave as she left in her private railroad car.

  Then the state’s cattlemen arrived for their annual convention, throwing raucous parties for four consecutive nights. To welcome the cattlemen, city officials stretched banners across Congress Avenue, bearing legends in big red letters. (One read, “Greetings Texas Cattlemen!”) At the Cattleman’s Ball, the highlight of the convention, large decanters of whiskey were placed on every table and steaks were served as thick as a man’s arm. The cattlemen stood and made toasts: “To Texas’ cowboys, sentinels on the outposts, may their shadows never grow less!” “To the grain fields of Texas, that must feed more of our longhorns!” They drank from their decanters of whiskey, they danced with what one newspaper called “Austin’s most beautiful belles”—single women who had been invited to the ball—and at the end of the night, some of them slipped away to the Variety Theatre at the foot of the Avenue to watch Miss Ida St. Clair, a scantily dressed blond beauty “whose skill in lofty kicking,” one newspaperman earlier had penned, “has commanded the admiration of every cowboy from Austin to the Rio Grande.” Other cattlemen visited the brothel of Guy Town’s most prominent madam, Miss Blanche Dumot, who according to another newspaperman was always dressed in “silk” and “lace.” In her beautifully modulated but entirely fake English accent, Miss Dumot let the cattlemen know that her lovely nymphs du pave were available for two dollars a session, which she promised would be money well spent compared to the dollar fee charged by the whisker-burned prostitutes at the cheaper whorehouses down the street.

  In late January, there was a brief item in the Daily Statesmen about Lem Brooks being released from the calaboose. Apparently, the police hadn’t been able to find any new witnesses who could link Brooks to Mollie Smith’s murder, and the Travis County grand jury—made up of a group of Austin men who decided which felony arrests should be taken to trial and which ones should be no-billed and dismissed—had decided there was not enough evidence to indict him.

  But no one in Austin—at least no one who was white—seemed particularly bothered by the news of Brooks’s release. The white citizens were convinced that Mollie’s death was nothing more than a “Negro killing” committed by “a jealous or deceived Negro lover”—a murder that had all the significance of a hangnail that had been snipped off someone’s finger. Instead of trying to meet the governor to ask for improved seating arrangements on the railroad trains, wrote the Austin-based reporter for the Galveston Daily News, Austin’s black pastor Reverend Grant “would serve his race better by addressing his efforts to the suppression of their murderous instincts.”

  As the weeks passed, there were more parties, including an “onion sociable” held at the home of a young Austin socialite. (The socialite and five of her female friends went into a bedroom, where one of the women took a bite of an onion, after which they all walked out into the parlor and were kissed by a young man who tried to guess who had onion breath.) At Turner Hall, the Austin Press Club hosted its annual “Grand Literary and Musical Concert,” featuring young ladies from the city’s more prominent families who gave recitations and sang such popular songs as “Thou Art So Near and Yet So Far.”

  And Miss Louise Armaindo of New York City, billed as “the lady velocipede champion of the world,” came to Austin to race the city’s best trotting horses at the fairgrounds. Her thighs as muscled as tree trunks, Miss Armaindo sped down the track before an enthusiastic crowd of spectators, covering a quarter mile on her velocipede in forty-six seconds, beating the closest horse by a full length. Later that evening, she put on a weight-lifting exhibition, holding heavy Indian clubs above her head and waving them back and forth in the air.

  Meanwhile, over at the temporary state capitol building, the legislators gathered for their biannual session. They walked to the podium to make one grandiloquent proposal after another to improve their beloved state. One politician, his beard as luxuriant as mink, called for more money to be spent on public education, another to spend more money on railroad tracks, and yet another wanted to deepen the harbor in the coastal city of Galveston so that bigger ships could come in from Europe, thus expanding international trade.

  There was even a radical proposal made by a couple of state senators—one of whom was Temple Houston, the liberal-minded son of Sam Houston—asking that half the clerks employed in the state government’s main offices be women. According to newspaper reports, “scores of handsomely dressed and intelligent ladies” came to the capitol building to show their support for the bill. They applauded “vigorously” when Houston rose to speak. Although the proposal had no chance of passing, the women were thrilled. Women’s rights were coming, of all places, to Texas! Maybe, the women said, the politicians will someday give us the right to vote!

  Then, on the twelfth of February, a wedding was held at the State Lunatic Asylum between Miss Ella Denton, the lovely and delicate nineteen-year-old daughter of Dr. Ashley Denton, the asylum’s superintendent, and Dr. James P. Given, the asylum’s thirty-two-year-old first assistant superintendent.

  The Texas State Lunatic Asylum was a three-story building with a classical façade, great Corinthian columns, long clerestory windows, and a huge porch. It stood two and a half miles north of downtown, in an area of the city where there were no houses, only one lonely dirt road (called Asylum Road) that led to the asylum’s cast-iron front gates. Adjoining the sides of the main building were the dormitories: one for the men and one for the women. A third dormitory for the “male colored lunatics” was located a short distance away—the “female colored lunatics” stayed in the basement of the main building—and farther on was the Cross Pits, a small building with barred cells that housed the most violent patients.

  In past years, few people in Austin would go near the place. One resident recalled that he and his friends grew up riding their horses past the asylum “at a gallop so that an escaped lunatic couldn’t come out of the woods and catch us.” A newspaperman who had taken a tour of the institution in 1880 wrote that the cells and day rooms were “crowded
to suffocation with inmates in insufficient clothes, dirty and untidy.” Up and down the long corridors could be heard screeches and “caterwaulings,” wrote another reporter, and the odor of unemptied bedpans and unwashed bodies was “so stifling” that it was hard to breathe.

  Since his appointment in 1883 as superintendent, however, Dr. Denton had been carrying on an extensive renovation program to transform the asylum into what he described as “a refuge for those unfortunates whose voices cannot be heard.” The forty-eight-year-old Denton was the portrait of the distinguished gentleman, with swept-back graying hair and a carefully cultivated beard. He had used a generous $200,000 appropriation from the legislature to buy new beds for the patients’ rooms, paint all the walls a gleaming white, and relandscape the main asylum grounds, adding lily ponds, gazebos, benches, flower beds, ornamental shrubbery, statuary, and dirt paths—the paths always curving, which according to such scholarly periodicals as The Journal of Insanity were more therapeutic than paths that were straight. While Denton’s staffers were required to wear gray uniforms with long sleeves and high necks, he allowed his patients to wear ordinary clothing so that they would feel more dignified. To further improve the patients’ dispositions, he ordered that fresh flowers be placed in the hallways, and he allowed cats and dogs to wander the asylum grounds.

  Superintendent Dr. Ashley Denton (above left) and his son-in-law Dr. James Given (below left) oversaw the 550 “lunatics” housed at the Texas State Lunatic Asylum (right).

  As opposed to previous superintendents, Denton gladly took in anyone who was brought to him, regardless of their affliction—and that year, the asylum was filled to the brim with more than 550 patients who embodied almost every nervous disorder known in that day. Denton believed that within the quiet confines of the asylum, all of his “unfortunates” had a better opportunity to regain at least a portion of their sanity and perhaps someday return to the real world.