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

by Hollandsworth, Skip

  The most exciting news for black residents, however, was that their children were finally being educated. In 1885, three state-funded “colored schools” were open in Austin, serving up to four hundred students who were learning to read English from first-year Freedman’s Readers and Webster’s blue-back spellers. Students who reached their teenage years could attend the Tillotson College and Normal Institute, a building on Austin’s east side that had been opened by the American Missionary Association, an all-white Christian organization based in Albany, New York, that was devoted to creating black colleges throughout the South. Tillotson not only offered classes in arithmetic and English composition, it provided practical training in such fields as carpentry, home building, farming, canning, cooking, sewing, bookkeeping, and teaching. One of the white teachers gave a course in public speaking, claiming that his goal was to eliminate his students’ “old-time thick and indistinct plantation pronunciation.”

  Several white citizens did their best to be pleasant—“accommodating” was the word they used—to Austin’s black residents. Julia Pease, the ex-governor’s daughter, hosted an annual Christmas party at the Pease estate for the residents of Clarksville, giving each child a bag of candy or a dime. The German-born owner of Pressler’s beer garden allowed blacks to rent out his establishment to celebrate Juneteenth, their day of freedom from Confederate rule. (Texas slaves didn’t go free until June 19, 1865, the day Union troops landed in Galveston, two months after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.) Some of the city’s white businessmen had begun to allow blacks to shop at their stores at specified times; a couple of the white-owned saloons had created black areas at the end of their bars (one saloon put a black-only craps table in its gaming room); and Charles Millett, the owner of Millett’s Opera House, periodically allowed blacks to buy tickets to sit in the upper balcony for some of his shows—but never for operas, which he believed were too artistic for black tastes. In 1883, Austin’s white leaders had even allowed a black man named Albert Carrington, the owner of a blacksmith shop, to be elected as one of the city’s aldermen, representing the black-dominated Seventh Ward on Austin’s east side.

  No white leader in Austin, however, was ever heard promoting equal rights for blacks. In Austin—as well as in much of the United States, for that matter—the prevailing belief among even the most educated of white men and women was that blacks were intellectually and morally inferior. In that era, doctors and anthropologists published papers in medical journals declaring that blacks had smaller brains than whites and that the shape of their bodies was conclusive proof that they had developed from “primitive” lower organisms. Newspapers didn’t hesitate to describe blacks as “coons,” “Senegambians,” “Ethiopians,” “Africans,” “sons of Ham,” and “dusky denizens.”

  In Austin, residents regularly wrote to the Daily Statesman complaining about the city’s blacks. They were indignant over such issues as the “raucous” noises that blacks made at their Sunday church services and the way they “loitered” on the downtown street corners. There were also dozens of complaints about Austin’s younger black men. Compared to older blacks who had been raised in slavery, the whites said, the new generation of black men didn’t seem to be as “deferential” or “respectful.” It was a theory widely held throughout the former Confederate states. Some southern writers went so far as to declare that all black men “coming to maturity after Reconstruction” had “a more decided tendency to retrograde and act upon their natural impulses, like the original African type” because they had not been given the chance to experience “the benefits of slavery,” which had functioned as “a civilizing force” for “uneducated Negroes.”

  As a result of such bias, young black men were constantly blamed for all sorts of crimes simply because they were young and black. A Daily Statesman editorial put it this way: “Idleness and drink will lead off these ignorant creatures, and there is no telling, if they are permitted to idle about a town of this size, what they will do finally. There is no doubt but they will resort to theft and then it is but a small step to murder.”

  Curiously, none of the servant women who had been assaulted during the month of March had been able to get a good look at her attacker. A couple of women had told police and newspaper reporters that they believed black men had come after them, but they weren’t completely sure. One of the women said the man who had tried to break into her quarters was possibly “yellow.” Another said her attacker had painted his face coal black like a performer in a minstrel show. And the teenage servant girl from Germany said that she thought the man who had struck her over the head a few days after the capitol cornerstone ceremony was actually white.

  Nevertheless, Austin’s white citizens simply could not imagine that white men would want to terrorize harmless servant women for no particular reason at all. Surely, they said, the German girl, overcome with fright, had to have been mistaken about the skin color of the man she had seen. The string of attacks almost certainly had to be the work of blacks—“ruffians on the rampage,” one man called them—who had retrograded.

  One man was so angry over the servant women assaults that he proposed that Austin’s police department round up the city’s known black criminals, take them outside the city limits, whip them to within an inch of their lives, and tell them never to return. Another man sent a letter to the Daily Statesman encouraging all homeowners to pull out their guns and fire away, no questions asked, whenever a late-night black intruder was seen around a servant’s quarters. A Daily Statesman editorialist made the same recommendation, writing that “the killing of one or two of these characters cannot help but have a wholesome effect on the remainder of these night hawks.… The first citizen who plants a charge of buckshot where it will do the most good in the carcass of one of these ‘toughs,’ should be voted a gold medal and the thanks of the community.”

  There were a few older white citizens who thought whippings or buckshot didn’t send a strong enough message. They wanted to form “vigilance committees”—in other words, lynching parties—just like the ones that had been formed back in the slave days to help patrol the city. “And if one of the scoundrels who have been out scaring and shooting our servant girls can be caught,” declared one man in his own letter to the Daily Statesman, “let him be strung up to a limb or a lamp post without mercy or delay.”

  * * *

  Hoping to find out more details about what was happening, a couple of reporters headed to city hall and took the stairs up to the police department to talk with Marshal Lee, who had recovered from his bout with the dengue fever that had kept him out of the office through much of January. Tall and fence-post lean, with a long, narrow face and the elongated arms and legs of a marionette, Lee was only twenty-nine years old. He had been appointed marshal by a vote of the mayor and aldermen in December 1883, just a year and three months earlier. Prior to his appointment, he had spent six months on a tour of duty with a battalion of the Texas Rangers, followed by a three-year stint as a deputy to the county sheriff, in which he mostly performed minor tasks. One of his duties was to find cattlemen in rural parts of the county who were grazing cattle on lands that did not belong to them.

  Austin’s previous marshals had been swaggering men who were very good with guns. The city’s most famous marshal, who had been elected in 1880, was Ben Thompson, an English-born gambler and deadeye pistoleer who dressed in a high silk hat, a morning coat, and silk trousers. He was the master of the spin move, able to whip around on his heels while simultaneously drawing his Colt pistol from his belt, cocking the hammer, and firing away at his adversary. In his book Gunfighters of the Western Frontier, Bat Masterson, the buffalo hunter, frontier lawmen, and best-selling author, wrote of Thompson, “It is doubtful that there was another man who equaled him with the pistol.”

  The problem, however, was that after Thompson had downed a few drinks, he liked to engage in what the newspapers described as “promiscuous shooting.” One evening, he had drunk
enly risen from his seat at Millett’s Opera House and shot off his pistol because he believed the performance was poorly staged. In 1882, a year after he was elected marshal, he was forced to resign when he killed a politician in a San Antonio shootout. In 1884, Thompson himself was shot to death in another San Antonio gunfight.

  After Thompson’s demise, the city aldermen decided to find a marshal who would not pull any Thompson-like escapades, and as far as they were concerned, Lee was the perfect candidate. For one thing, he was a teetotaler—“the first city marshal in Austin history to decline the bottle,” a Dallas newspaper noted. He was also a blueblood, the son of one of the city’s senior statesmen, Joseph Lee, a lawyer and former judge who had lived in Austin since the 1830s. The elder Lee was described as “a great lover” of the city: he had lobbied legislators to approve building the University of Texas, and he had helped plan the creation of the new state capitol building. Surely, said the aldermen, young Grooms would have no desire to embarrass the city.

  According to one reporter who met him, Lee was indeed “polite” and “efficient.” In one of his first acts as marshal, he purchased new uniforms and copper badges for his officers. He also took down a shaggy buffalo head on one of the department’s walls and replaced it with solemn portraits of past Austin mayors. When he appeared at city council meetings to discuss police matters, he gave very formal speeches. At one meeting, when he was asked to discuss a new hiring method for police officers, he read from a prepared statement that concluded with the lines, “It becomes my duty to suggest a remedy, and fear that in so doing I may be but able to dimly indicate what you, in your superior wisdom, may be able to more fully digest and mature.… I am not prepared to say how far such a plan of appointment may conflict with the existing city charter, and ordinances under it upon the subject, but feel satisfied that if such change can be legally made it will result in great good.… Hoping that these suggestions may receive your favorable consideration, I have the honor to subscribe myself, H. G. Lee, City Marshal.”

  The University of Texas was then “overflowing” with 230 students.

  Needless to say, Lee was not exactly the second coming of Wyatt Earp. But then again, Mayor Robertson and the majority of the aldermen believed that as long as they had the always reliable Sergeant Chenneville around to handle the criminal investigations, they had little to worry about. In fact, they gave Ronnie O Johnnie a raise soon after they appointed Lee to the marshal’s post, paying him $1,500 a year—only $500 a year less than what Lee himself made—to make sure he didn’t leave.

  Marshal Grooms Lee and his officers were utterly baffled by the killings.

  Besides, the mayor and aldermen were starting to realize, Austin no longer needed an old-fashioned, gun-slinging marshal who could hold his own against an outlaw in a street showdown. The fact of the matter was that almost all of the old outlaws who used to terrorize Austin were long gone, shot dead or hanged or sent off to prison. Even the blue-eyed “bad man” John Wesley Hardin, the most feared desperado in Texas history, whose quick-draw ability reportedly had sent forty-four men to their graves, was in the state prison in the town of Huntsville, running the prison Sunday school and studying to become a lawyer.

  True, there were plenty of men who still harbored outlaw ambitions—“embryo desperadoes,” one of the reporters called them. They tried to stop trains and get to the money bags locked away in the mail car’s safes, using the latest in criminal technology, nitroglycerin instead of gunpowder, to blow open the safes. What’s more, a few women were getting into the business. Belle Star, dubbed “the Bandit Queen,” was said to be rustling cattle and stealing horses around the Texas-Oklahoma border and posing for photographs in a plumed hat with a pistol strapped around her waist. But this new crop of outlaws rarely came to the cities like Austin. They didn’t have to be told that they had a better chance surviving in the state’s hinterlands, where there were no gun-toting ordinances, like the one that Austin had passed, which levied a twenty-five-dollar fine on anyone caught carrying firearms in public without a license. The city’s leaders were convinced that their new marshal would do just fine.

  When the reporters came to see Lee about the attempted break-ins of the servants’ quarters, he had no new information whatsoever to pass on to them. He did say, however, that more police officers were needed to keep up with Austin’s growth. According to law enforcement manuals that Lee had been reading, police departments should have at least one officer for every 500 inhabitants. For Austin’s 17,000 inhabitants, that would equate to 34 policemen. “That I have too few officers with which to properly guard the city, every man who will give the subject the least attention, is bound to admit,” Lee declared in his typically convoluted style.

  On this point, Lee was exactly right. In 1883, when two humor writers, Alexander Sweet and J. Armory Knox, published what became a national bestseller about their Texas travels—On a Mexican Mustang Through Texas, from the Gulf to the Rio Grande—they noted that the policemen in Austin were so scarce that they were forced to “walk over more ground in a day than a professional pedestrian does,” and that at night “they are so far apart that they cannot hear each other snore.”

  The department’s twelve-man roster included Bart Delong, the day clerk; Henry Brown, the night clerk; and “Uncle” Dick Boyce, the elderly boss of the chain gang who each morning took prisoners out of the calaboose to clean the horse manure off the streets. One of Austin’s officers, Fred Senter, took a leave of absence every June so he could work as a cowboy on one of the few remaining cattle drives that came out of Texas. (His nickname was “Hit the Trail Fred.”) Also working part-time in the department were two black men, Lewis Morris and Henry Madison. They were known as the city’s “Negro police officers.” They were allowed to interrogate and arrest other black citizens but were not allowed to interrogate or arrest whites. They could wear uniforms, but were not allowed to carry guns.

  On most nights, only four officers were working the streets, and they were stationed downtown. But Mayor Robertson and the aldermen rolled their eyes over Lee’s proposal to triple the size of his staff. If they did such a thing, they said, the city’s budget would be swamped and taxes would have to be raised. Voters would no doubt throw them out of office during the next elections.

  At a city council meeting which was convened after the March attacks, one of the aldermen, James Odell, the manager of the Singer Sewing Machine office, suggested that instead of hiring more police officers, the city offer a $500 reward to anyone who shot a black man invading a servants’ quarters. Alderman Radcliff Platt, the owner of a livery, feed, and seed company, said that the reward should instead go to the first servant woman who “plugged” her assailant with “buckshot.” Platt’s suggestion was met with laughter. Everyone knew servant women couldn’t shoot.

  More ideas were thrown around. Alderman Lou Crooker, the owner of a lumber and home building company, proposed the idea of “special policemen.” What if some of the city’s white men were temporarily deputized and ordered to patrol the white neighborhoods, essentially acting as night watchmen, until Chenneville and his officers found the “responsible parties”? Alderman Max Maas, an employee of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, seconded the proposal, but he suggested that no public announcement should be made about the temporary policemen. That way, he said, the bad blacks wouldn’t be tipped off that a manhunt was on.

  Nonsense, said Alderman George Brush, who had become wealthy selling flush toilets and new gas stoves at his hardware store. The “class of people committing these crimes,” he said, “are unable to read.”

  At the end of the meeting, the aldermen agreed to pay about a dozen men two dollars a night to work the white neighborhoods. Many of those hired were friends or acquaintances of the aldermen who needed a little extra spending money or who just wanted to get away from their wives for a few nights.

  A saloon in Austin with black employees. The immediate suspects in the murders were young black males.


  By the last week of March, the temporary policemen were walking the streets and alleys. Meanwhile, Chenneville and his officers threw a couple of black men into the calaboose. Gus Johnson, a laborer, was charged with breaking into the quarters of one servant woman, and Abe Pearson, who worked in a barber shop, was charged with breaking into the quarters of another servant woman and raping her.

  Both men claimed they were innocent. Nevertheless, after the arrests, the attacks on the servant women came to a stop. There were no more assaults or shootings, no more tappings on servant women’s windows. The only reported instance of anyone using a gun on an intruder involved, of all people, Chenneville’s young wife, Ellen. Late one night, while Chenneville was working the streets, she heard a noise in the front yard, saw the outline of a man, pulled out a six-shooter, and started firing.

  It turned out she was shooting at a neighbor who had been drinking at a saloon and was so intoxicated that he had no idea he had stumbled into the Chennevilles’ yard.

  Fortunately, she missed.

  PART TWO

  APRIL 1885–AUGUST 1885

  “Who was it? Who did this to you?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Another crime-free week passed, and then another. By mid-April, some of the temporary policemen were so bored that they began slipping away from their beats to spend their two-dollar daily pay at one of the saloons or brothels. Mayor Robertson and the aldermen, however, decided to keep the special policemen working at least through April 21. That date had been deemed “Texas Day” by the organizers of the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, a kind of world’s fair that had opened in December and was expected to draw as many as four million visitors from around the country and even from as far away as Europe before it closed in June.