Chenneville went over to speak to Eliza’s seven-year-old son. The boy said that he had been shaken awake in the middle of the night by a man who was wearing a white rag over his face with two holes cut out for the eyes. The boy couldn’t tell whether the man was black or white, but he thought he was white. He said the man asked him where his mother kept her money, and he replied that he didn’t know if his mother had any money. The boy said the man ordered him to put his head under a pillow and not look out again, or else he would kill him. The man then told him that he would be on his way to St. Louis the next morning on the first train.
Eliza’s son said he went back to sleep—(his two little brothers never awakened)—and he had no idea what the man had done to his mother until the first light of the morning sun seeped through the cracks of the cabin and he saw her on the floor.
The boy’s story, of course, sounded completely preposterous. A man in a mask had come into the cabin, slammed an ax into Eliza’s skull, pulled her off the bed, jammed some type of rod between her eyes, stabbed at her with a knife, wrapped her in a counterpane that he must have found in one of the trunks, wrapped her again in a quilted bedspread—and then woke up the seven-year-old boy to ask where any money was? And, to top it all off, he said he was going to St. Louis on a train?
Was the boy in some sort of shock when he told the story? Maybe. But when Chenneville was finished with his interview, a correspondent from the San Antonio Express took the boy aside, asking him several times to go through what had happened, and the boy repeated the same story “without varying it at all.”
Dr. Johnson, clearly distraught, came outside to the backyard and told reporters that Eliza was “an excellent woman.” He described her as hardworking, reliable, and honest—so exemplary, he said, that he, his wife, and children had tended to treat her like a lesser member of the family.
Johnson also said it made no sense that someone would want to murder Eliza for her money, claiming that she had “only a few paltry cents” to her name. Surely, he suggested, a thief would have tried to get into his home instead of his servant’s cabin. A coin collector, Johnson was well-known around Austin for a very valuable coin he owned that had been made during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome in the year AD 161.
Someone asked Johnson if Eliza had had any enemies. Johnson replied that he had no knowledge of anyone disliking her and that he knew of no men with whom she was romantically involved. He said she seemed very devoted to her husband and was patiently waiting for him to serve out his prison sentence. She did not deserve to die in such a manner, regardless of her race, Johnson said. Then he turned around and went back inside his house.
Because of the footprints found by the cabin, Chenneville and other police officers went looking for a barefoot black man. Within a couple of hours, a shoeless black teenager, nineteen-year-old Andrew Williams, who lived near the Johnson residence, was brought in for questioning. He was described as a “half-witted colored boy” who previously had been jailed for “stealing buttons.”
Williams, however, didn’t incriminate himself during his police interrogation, and his footprints didn’t match the measurements of the footprints found in the yard. A justice of the peace convened the inquest, the jurors ruled that Eliza’s death was a murder that had come “at the hands of a person or persons unknown,” and the black undertaker arrived at the Johnsons’ to pick up Eliza’s body and carry her to the hospital for her autopsy and then on to Colored Ground, where she was buried only yards from Mollie Smith’s grave.
Afterward, Mr. Nitschke, the cemetery’s elderly sexton, opened his beautifully bound ledger to add Eliza’s name to those who had been buried at the cemetery. But once again, he was reluctant to go into the details of what had happened to her. He simply wrote that her death was due to a “wound on the throat.”
* * *
The sexton’s sense of propriety didn’t exactly carry over to the newspapers. “Inhabitants of the Capital City Are Again Shocked by a Blood-Curdling Murder,” trumpeted the next day’s Fort Worth Gazette. “A Mother Butchered in the Presence of Her Children,” cried the San Antonio Daily Express. The Daily Statesman’s headline, ghoulishly alliterative, was thirty-three words long: “The Foul Fiends Keep Up Their Wicked Work—Another Woman Cruelly Murdered at Dead of Night by Some Unknown Assassin, Bent on Plunder. Another Deed of Deviltry in the Crimson Catalogue of Crime.”
The Daily Statesman’s story noted that “clear-headed, conservative men” were huddling on Congress Avenue’s street corners to discuss the attacks on the city’s servant women. Some of the men theorized that there must be some sort of black gang—“a band of colored fiends,” one man said—that was behind the assaults and the killings. According to one rumor circulating up and down the Avenue, the gang worked for a black labor union that had been trying to recruit the city’s servant women to join and demand higher wages—fifteen dollars a month—from their white employers. The gang supposedly had been hired to attack those women who wouldn’t sign up.
William Sydney Porter, the young drugstore clerk who wanted to become a writer, actually came up with a nickname for the gang. After Eliza’s murder, he wrote a friend who recently had moved to Colorado that life in Austin had been “fearfully dull … except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively during the dead hours of the night.”
In Austin’s black neighborhoods, however, no one was talking about a gang. Many of the black residents were literally saying that a “demon” or an “evil one” with an “evil eye” had come to Austin. Some of the city’s elderly blacks who still practiced hoodoo, a slave-era folk magic, gave servant women special powders to scatter around the doorways of their quarters that supposedly would keep them safe from the “evil one.” They made “nostrums,” specially brewed tonics that were supposed to bring long life, for the servant women to drink, and they created “mojo bags,” little leather pouches filled with herbs, roots, seeds, minerals, animal parts, silver dimes, shiny rocks, and shoestrings that were supposed to bring good luck, for the servant women to carry. It was likely that at least one of the hoodoo practitioners performed one of the more honored hoodoo rituals: boiling a black cat in a pot of scalding water, pulling out its bones, and then giving the bones to a servant woman to protect her from evil.
The young Austin writer William Sydney Porter nicknamed the killers the “Servant Girl Annihilators.”
Yet even then, the servant women didn’t feel remotely safe. At night, they stacked furniture against the doors of their quarters. One black man who lived with his wife in the quarters behind the home of a white family said he never expected to leave the quarters ever again at night “for fear his wife would be killed.”
As for Sergeant Chenneville, he met with his “pals” and the department’s two “Negro” officers to find out what they had learned. They told him they had no information at all. On his big bay horse, Chenneville rode through the black neighborhoods, staring intently at every black man he saw, and he dropped into the Black Elephant saloon, which was always a convenient place to find a suspect when an arrest was needed.
On May 10, five days after Shelley’s murder, Chenneville got a break—or so he thought. A black resident named Andrew Rogers came to the police department and said that he believed he knew who had murdered Eliza.
Rogers stated that one of his neighbors, a young black man named Ike Plummer, had carried on a brief romantic relationship with Eliza earlier that year while her husband was in prison. Rogers said that a few weeks prior to Eliza’s murder, he had seen Eliza arguing with Plummer, who was angry with her because she wouldn’t loan him money. Rogers added that he had happened to pass by Dr. Johnson’s home the day of Eliza’s murder and seen Plummer and Eliza arguing again. According to Rogers, Plummer said, “I want some money,” and Eliza replied, “I have none for you. What little I have is for my children, and I don’t want you around me.” Then, said Rogers, Plummer walked off, yelling at Eliz
a, “I’ll see you again!” Rogers claimed that he noticed either a hammer or a hatchet protruding from Plummer’s pocket.
And that wasn’t all, continued Rogers. Later that night—sometime after one in the morning—he had been awakened by a sound outside his window and had seen Plummer entering his own shanty.
After hearing Rogers’s tale, Chenneville immediately had one of the department’s black officers, Lewis Morris, go to Plummer’s shanty and arrest him on a charge of “suspicion of murder.” (Chenneville would later say he worried that Plummer would run, or maybe even pull out a knife, if he saw the sergeant coming after him.) Reporters who got a look at Plummer in the calaboose described him as “a tall, ungainly, ill-kempt Negro” with “a half imbecile grin” and “a countenance suggestive more of idiocy than brutality, and about thirty years of age.” Although Plummer did have a minor criminal record—he had been arrested a couple of times for vagrancy—he had never before been charged with committing a violent crime. A man who had hired Plummer to do some work on his cotton farm told the Daily Statesman that “there was nothing of a vicious disposition about him.”
It turned out that there was no physical evidence linking Plummer to the killing: no blood was found on his clothes, and his footprints didn’t match the footprints around the front door of the cabin. Moreover, the police could not find anyone who could corroborate Rogers’s story.
At least a couple of couple of reporters were suspicious about what Rogers had said. Would Plummer really have gone after Eliza with a hatchet, a knife, and some sort of ice pick all because of a dispute over a very small amount of money? And if he did, wouldn’t Eliza’s son have recognized Plummer—or at least recognized his voice—even if he was wearing a mask? Wasn’t it more likely that Rogers had made up the story for his own reasons—perhaps he was in some sort of feud with Plummer and saw a chance at putting him behind bars?
“It is scarcely probable that the slight circumstantial evidence pointing to his [Plummer’s] guilt will ever warrant a conviction,” noted the Austin-based reporter for the San Antonio Express, who also predicted that it would only be a matter of time before “the regular nocturnal Negro carving of the Capital City” would again be taking place.
The reporter’s prediction came true only two weeks later. On the evening of May 22, a shoemaker named Robert Weyermann, who lived with his family northeast of downtown, just across the street from a popular German-owned beer hall called the Scholz Garten, heard a low, painful moan coming from the backyard. The moan turned into a scream: a terrible, piercing scream.
Weyermann and other family members ran outside and found Irene Cross, their thirty-three-year-old black cook, lying on the ground. Her right arm was nearly severed in two. A long horizontal gash extended halfway around her head, from her right eye past her right ear. It looked as if someone had tried to scalp her.
Irene tried to speak, but blood was running out of the gash in her head and into her mouth. More blood was spurting from her half-severed arm. Weyermann had her carried to a spare bedroom in his home—something that was at the time considered an amazing act of generosity by a white man, to let a black servant bleed to death in one of his beds. A cloth was wrapped tightly around her arm and another cloth around her head.
“Who was it?” someone asked. “Who did this to you?”
Irene tried again to say something to those around her. But there was a look of confusion on her face and no words came out of her mouth.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After sunrise, a steady parade of visitors came to the Weyermanns’ home hoping to get a look at Irene through the bedroom window. She was, amazingly, still alive. A Daily Statesman reporter was allowed to come inside and talk to her. “Familiar as he was with repulsive sights, the reporter could not help being horrified by the ghastly object that met his view,” he wrote, referring to himself in the third person. The reporter added that when he bent down toward the bed and asked Irene if she could identify her attacker, she was only able to emit a faint groan.
Meanwhile, Chenneville’s bloodhounds were brought to the Weyermanns’ yard—and for the third murder in a row, they failed to find a scent. Some of the men who were there, leaning against the fence, just shook their heads. Had the dogs again been overwhelmed by all the blood? Was there too much blood for the bloodhounds? Or had Chenneville simply been sold some bad dogs?
As was the case with Eliza Shelley’s killing, all that the police had to go on was the story of another child. Irene’s twelve-year-old nephew, who lived with her, had been sleeping in one of the cabin’s two rooms. The boy said that he had opened his eyes and glimpsed the shadowy figure of a man coming through the outer door leading into his room. The man, who was holding a knife, had quietly told the boy that he was not there to hurt him, and ordered the boy not to scream or yell. The man then walked into Irene’s room, which contained two single beds: one for her (her husband had left her years earlier) and one for her seventeen-year-old son, who was not there (he worked nights as a porter at one of the city’s saloons). According to the nephew, the man spent just a couple of minutes in his aunt’s room, and then ran out her door leading into the backyard.
Later, when the newspaper reporters interviewed the nephew, he said that he believed his aunt’s attacker had been “a big, chunky Negro” wearing a brown wide-brimmed cloth hat, a ragged coat, a blue shirt, and black pants rolled up over his bare feet and ankles. For at least some of the reporters, the boy’s statement was baffling. It was hard for them to imagine how, in the pitch-black darkness of that cabin, he had been able to get such a good look at the man, considering that he was there for only a few seconds. Had the boy, in his excitement, gotten carried away and made up parts of his story to please Chenneville and the other police officers? Had he, perhaps, been prompted about what to say?
Irene hung on for another day, finally dying in the early morning hours of May 25, mumbling words to herself that no one could understand. A court of inquest ruled that she had been killed by “a party or parties unknown,” and the black undertaker arrived to carry her away to Colored Ground. After her burial, Mr. Nitschke, the cemetery sexton, once again opened his ledger to note Irene’s passing. He was still having trouble coming to terms with what was happening. This time, under the listing for cause of death, he wrote, “Wounds.”
* * *
Austin’s clear-headed, conservative businessmen gathered for another day on Congress Avenue. Several of them continued to insist that a murderous “Negro gang” was at work. At least one man speculated that the gang lived like “a band of outlaws” in one of the caves or cliffs along the Colorado River just outside of Austin, and that they swooped into the city at night to do their killings, which was the reason Sergeant Chenneville had not been able to find them.
A couple of men on the Avenue believed that the gang was made up of “escaped convicts” who had vowed eternal “enmity” against servant women in Austin because the gang’s leader had received some sort of venereal disease, or maybe even tuberculosis, from a servant woman. Others believed that the gang was a “secret, oath-bound association” made up of religiously fanatical black men who disapproved of black women having “sexual relations” with men who weren’t their husbands. The goal of this association was to “stamp out Negro prostitution” and “compel the members of the Negro race to live in the bonds of matrimony.”
And then there were a few men who had come up with an even more astonishing theory. They had concluded that some sort of mystical “killing mania” was sweeping over Austin’s black neighborhoods. The way they saw it, the murder of Mollie Smith had inflamed the bloodthirsty instincts of other young black men, leading them to commit similar murders of those black women they didn’t like.
For his part, Marshal Lee did his best to reassure the public that nothing was amiss, saying that Chenneville and his officers were pursuing several good leads. But on June 2, two weeks after Irene Cross’s murder, someone stuck his pistol through the slightly
raised window of the servants’ quarters adjoining the home of Henri Tallichet, the professor of modern languages at the University of Texas, pulled the trigger, and shot a .42-caliber bullet into the arm of the Tallichets’ young black servant woman. Hearing the shot, Professor Tallichet seized his own pistol and hurried toward the kitchen. Just as he opened the door of the servants’ quarters, a bullet whizzed past his head. The intruder fled before Tallichet got a chance to get a look at him.
That same night, someone visited the residence of Major Stewart—the same Major Stewart whose two servant women had been attacked back in March—and threw a large rock through the window of the servants’ quarters. Sleeping in the quarters with the servant women was a black man—the women had asked him to stay there at night to protect them—who grabbed his pistol, ran after the rock thrower, and fired away. But the invader quickly disappeared down an alley, and no one had any idea what he looked like.
Chenneville and his officers did the only thing they knew to do—they chased down more black men and arrested them for various infractions—vagrancy, disturbing the peace, public intoxication—hoping that one of them, during his uncomfortable stay in the calaboose, would confess that he knew something about the murders.
There was one man in particular whom Chenneville wanted to arrest and interrogate: a twenty-two-year-old chicken thief named Oliver Townsend. Although he was only five feet, seven inches tall and 150 pounds, Townsend was a larger-than-life figure in the black neighborhoods. According to stories told about him, he was able to slip into a white man’s chicken coop “as noiselessly as a cat,” grab some sleeping chickens, snap their necks, and disappear into the darkness, running away as quickly “as a deer” before the other chickens awakened and began their frantic screeching. During the previous Christmas season, an Austin homeowner had paid a couple of night watchmen to keep watch on his residence, where he had a coop full of fattened turkeys and chickens for his holiday dinners. The next morning, six of the fowl were found missing, and the assumption was that only Townsend could have pulled off such a theft.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 8
