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

by Hollandsworth, Skip

  Figuring that Orange and Gracie were arguing, Dunham went to his back door, shouted at the couple to quiet down, returned to bed, and drifted back to sleep. But several minutes later, he heard another noise. This one sounded like a groan. He grabbed his pistol and walked into the yard just in time to see Lucinda Boddy, one of Gracie’s visitors, staggering out of the shanty. Her head was bloodied and she seemed completely disoriented.

  “Mr. Dunham, we are all dead!” she screamed.

  Dunham ordered her to lie on the back steps of his house. Right about that time, his next-door neighbor, Harry Duff, the co-owner of the Iron Front Saloon, came into the yard holding a lantern. He told Dunham that he too had been awakened by a noise and that he had called the police department.

  The two men stepped into the shanty. Duff held up his lantern. Patsy Gibson was barely alive, lying on her side, blood flowing from her head. Orange was dead, lying facedown on the floor between the bed and the wall in a pool of his own blood. A bloodied ax was on the bedspread beside him. Gracie was nowhere to be found.

  Chenneville and another police officer, James Connor, galloped up to the Dunham residence on their horse and dismounted. Holding lanterns, they followed a bloody trail leading out of the servants’ quarters. They climbed over the backyard fence, which was about four feet high, and kept following the trail of blood into another backyard that abutted the Dunhams’. That yard, belonging to the Hotchkiss family, was at least fifty yards in length, and was used as a small horse pasture. As Chenneville and Connor came closer to the Hotchkiss stable, one of them stumbled over something soft. Under the yellow light of their lanterns, the men stared at what they now realized was the corpse of Gracie. She had been beaten so viciously in the face that it was mostly a mass of bone and skin and blood. Her head was somewhat off center, as if knocked from its moorings. Her hair and her nightgown were smeared with blood. Beside her was a brick covered with blood and bits of her face. The only thing that wasn’t bloodied on her body was a beautiful silver open-face watch, attached to a delicate silver chain that was wrapped around her wrist.

  Suddenly, from an upstairs window, the elderly matriarch, Mrs. Hanna Hotchkiss, shouted, “There he goes toward Nigger Town!” She had seen someone—or she thought she had seen someone—running toward a black neighborhood that was west of the Hotchkiss home.

  Chenneville and Connor fired shots into the darkness—at least eight shots in all, hoping that one of the bullets would hit whoever was supposedly running from them. The two police officers ran back to the Dunham home and mounted their horses. The horses reared, wheeled, and bolted away, raising a cloud of dust in the darkness. Chenneville and Connor held their guns out before them, ready to shoot again. But they couldn’t see anyone. Whoever was there had vanished like a phantom.

  More police officers rode up to the Dunhams’, including the Travis County sheriff, W. W. Hornsby, and a couple of his deputies. Marshal Lee also showed up. (He had made it clear to his officers that he wasn’t going to be left out of any more murder investigations.) Some of the officers began searching the nearby houses and servant quarters, looking for a lead. Except for Mrs. Hotchkiss, however, none of the residents had seen or heard anything. The officers rode into the black neighborhood in hopes of finding men who were awake and on the streets at that hour. But the streets were empty and all the homes were shuttered.

  Dr. C. O. Weller, a physician who lived in the neighborhood, arrived at the Dunhams’ and did quick examinations of Lucinda and Patsy, discovering that each woman had been hit one time in the head with a blunt object, probably with the back of the ax that had been found in the quarters. Weller studied Orange’s wounds. He had been hit at least twice in the head. Then Gracie was carried in from the Hotchkiss backyard and placed on the bed. Dr. Weller noted that besides having the same head wound as the others, she had been hit at least twelve times in the face with the brick. One blow had caught her on the bridge of her nose, shattering the bone, and other blows had smashed against her temples, her jaws, her cheeks, and her eyes. Her face, one reporter would later write, was “like jelly.”

  Inside the shanty, Chenneville and his police officers snipped off the ends of cigars and smoked to keep the smell of the blood out of their noses. Trying to reconstruct what had happened, they figured that someone had slipped into the shanty and quickly whacked Gracie, Orange, Lucinda, and Patsy on their heads. Perhaps because Orange continued to struggle, the assailant had hit him again, killing him. The killer had carried Gracie out of the shanty, lifted her over the Dunhams’ back fence, and taken her into the Hotchkiss yard, where he brutally beat her to death with the brick. The entire attack, they figured, had taken place in complete darkness within a space of five, no more than ten minutes.

  * * *

  By sunrise, the news of the attacks was whipping through the city. Soon, the crowds at the Dunham home were so large it was like a carnival. According to the Daily Statesman, mule-driven streetcars were doing “a thriving business” as they hauled sightseers from downtown to the scene of the murder. College boys walked over from the University of Texas hoping to get a look at Orange Washington and the bludgeoned servant women, and a group of Mexican-born citizens also showed up, one of them shouting “Viva los vigilantes!” The Daily Statesman reporter wrote that when he got to the Dunhams’ home he had trouble getting to the window to “obtain a glimpse at the prostrate forms within.”

  Eventually, a path was cleared and Gracie and Orange were carried away to the City-County Hospital’s dead room. Lucinda and Patsy were taken to the hospital’s Negro Ward to join Rebecca Ramey. At some point that morning, the police learned that a black man named Dock Woods had tried to win Gracie’s affection earlier in the year and had gotten upset when she turned him down in favor of Orange.

  Woods resided in a shanty on a cotton farm about eight miles south of Austin. A posse of officers, along with Marshal Lee, rode to the farm and found him picking cotton in one of the fields. He seemed flabbergasted. He said that he had not left the farm the previous night. But the officers noticed some blood on the bottom of his shirt. Woods was arrested for “suspicion of murder” and hauled back to Austin.

  As word spread of his arrest, a group of saloon men, fortified on whiskey and Budweiser, began making plans to march to the calaboose, take Woods away, and string him from a lamp pole on the Avenue. A Fort Worth Gazette reporter raced to the telegraph office and dictated a dispatch that began: “There is definitely a deep-seated intention to lynch Woods, provided he can be got at.” Incredibly, added the reporter, “a large body of Negroes” were also gathering in east Austin to form their own lynching party to take their revenge on Woods, if it turned out he was guilty. “The indignation of the Negroes themselves is terrible,” the reporter noted.

  Several of Austin’s 3,500 black residents moved out of the city, terrified of the killer they called “the evil one.”

  But within hours, the case against Woods was falling apart. A doctor who examined him discovered that he had an open wound on his genitalia, the result of an untreated venereal disease, which was the cause of the blood on his shirt. Moreover, the owner of the cotton farm told police that he not only had seen Woods at the farm the evening of the murders at 10 p.m. but also had seen him the next morning at four o’clock, when all the workers had been awakened to start work in the fields.

  As the men at the police department were pondering the latest information about Woods, a man named John R. Robinson, the owner of a dry goods store, arrived at the police department with his Swedish teenage servant girl. He said that since Mary Ramey’s murder, the girl had been sleeping in a bedroom in the main house, only going back to her quarters behind the house during daylight hours to change clothes.

  That very morning, Robinson continued, when his servant girl had walked into her quarters, she had discovered that someone had been there. Her dresses had been pulled from the closet and thrown to the floor, her trunks filled with clothes had been upended, and her sheets
and blankets had been torn off the bed. The girl had gone through her belongings and realized only one item was missing: a silver open-face watch, attached to a delicate silver chain, which she had received from her father when she still lived in Sweden.

  One of the officers retrieved the silver watch that had been found on Gracie’s wrist and showed it to the girl. She gasped, turned over the watch, and pointed to her name inscribed on the back. When asked if she knew how her watch had ended up on the wrist of a murdered black servant woman, she shook her head. She said she didn’t even know who Gracie was.

  There was a long silence. The men at the police department just stared at one another, trying to put everything together. Why would someone break into the quarters of Robinson’s servant girl, steal her watch, and make his way to the Dunhams’ home (with perhaps a stop at Dr. Morris’s home along the way in order to frighten the cook) to brutally assault Gracie Vance and her three friends? Why would he then drag Gracie away to bash her face in until she was dead, and afterward take the time to wrap the Swedish girl’s watch around Gracie’s wrist before disappearing into the night?

  Was someone out there toying with the police—letting them know that there was nothing they could do to stop him?

  No one seemed sure what to think—or what to do. And then the door to the police department was flung open. Captain Hennessey had returned to Austin.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Hennessey was filled in on the details of the attack at the Dunhams’, and soon he was on the streets with his assistants Hannah and Himmel, interviewing sources they had been cultivating. Two days later, he asked the newspaper reporters to meet him on the front steps of the temporary state capitol. There he announced that the Noble Commercial Detective Agency had made a break in the case.

  The reporters looked at him expectantly. Hennessey said that he and his assistants had come across a black teenager by the name of Jonathon Trigg who had agreed to reveal some very important information.

  According to Hennessey, Trigg claimed to have been at the Black Elephant on August 29, the night of the murder of Mary Ramey. There he found himself standing near Oliver Townsend, Austin’s fleet-footed chicken thief. Townsend was telling one of the saloon’s patrons that he was preparing to murder little Mary. Trigg decided to follow Townsend as he walked from the Black Elephant to V. O. Weed’s residence, but he left before seeing what Townsend actually did.

  There was more, Hennessey told the reporters. Trigg claimed that he ran across Townsend again on the night of September 28—the night of the attacks on Gracie, Orange, Lucinda, and Patsy. This time, Trigg saw Townsend in the heart of downtown, on the corner of Congress Avenue and Pecan Street, the busiest intersection in the city, talking with another black man Trigg didn’t know. As Trigg got closer, he heard the man say to Townsend, “You will be caught up with.” And Townsend replied, “I have been killing them all and I have not been caught up with yet.” Townsend added that he was going to murder Gracie Vance that very night, and he started walking north up the Avenue. Trigg followed him to the Dunham home, where Townsend met yet another black man Trigg didn’t know. Moments later, the two men walked toward the Dunhams’ servants’ quarters and stepped inside. A woman cried out, “Please don’t kill me.” Fearing for his own life, Trigg ran away.

  Standing before the reporters, Hennessey held up a typed statement that he said Trigg had signed detailing his allegations. “I am certain Oliver Townsend is the man I followed to the house where the murder [of Gracie Vance] was done,” the statement quoted Trigg as saying. “The reason I followed Oliver Townsend was because I heard him say he was going to kill Gracie Vance, and I wanted to see if he would do what he said he would. The reason I did not tell [the police] that I saw Oliver Townsend go to Mr. Weed’s, on the night Becky Ramey was killed, was because I did not know for certain that he killed her. I thought I would wait and see, so when I heard the other threats made by him and followed him and learned what he did, I told what I knew.”

  Hennessey wasn’t finished. He announced that he had gone to the City-County Hospital to talk with Lucinda Boddy and Patsy Gibson, and that Lucinda had reiterated that she had seen Dock Woods, Gracie’s former suitor, standing at the window of Gracie’s servant quarters just before the attacks began. Clearly, said Hennessey, Woods and Townsend were the guilty parties.

  So what about the watch on Gracie’s wrist? Hennessey and his assistants had an explanation for that as well. They said that Woods must have slipped away from the cotton farm in the afternoon—the farm’s owner must have been mistaken about seeing Woods—ridden into town on a stolen horse, and taken the watch from the Robinsons’ servants’ quarters, hoping to give it to Gracie at the Sunday night church service held at Reverend Grant’s church, thinking the gift might win her away from Orange Washington. When she had refused to accept the watch, Woods had contacted Townsend, who had agreed to help him exact his revenge.

  The reporters stared at the detectives in disbelief. Did he really expect them to believe that this teenager just happened to be close enough to Townsend on two occasions to hear him talk about murdering servant women? And that this same teenager had followed Townsend to the scenes of two murders without ever being seen?

  It wasn’t long before the reporters learned that Trigg worked as a waiter at the Carrollton House, the very hotel where the Noble men were staying. Obviously, many residents surmised, Hennessey and his assistants had gotten to know Trigg and persuaded him—perhaps even bribed him—to make up a story fingering Townsend and Woods.

  To make matters worse for Hennessey, a Daily Statesman reporter made his own visit to the hospital’s Negro Ward to interview Lucinda Boddy to see if she would verify that she had seen Woods. What he discovered was that both Lucinda and Patsy Gibson were in such extreme pain from the blows to their heads that they were unable to carry on any conversation whatsoever. Lucinda’s “brain matter,” the reporter later wrote, was “oozing from the wounds in her skull every few moments.” He stated that Dr. Burt, the hospital’s staff physician, was preparing to subject her to trepanning, a medical operation in which a hole would be drilled into her skull in hopes of relieving pressure on the brain. “There appears to be a chance for the loss of her mind,” the reporter added.

  Trying to save face, Hennessey said that perhaps Lucinda Boddy, in her delirium, had misidentified Dock Woods during their conversation. He also acknowledged that Trigg could very well have exaggerated parts of his story. But the detective insisted that he was certain of one thing: Oliver Townsend was the leader of what he called “a gang of scoundrels” that was murdering the city’s servant women. What’s more, he said, he was already accumulating more information on other members of Townsend’s gang and soon would be making another arrest.

  On Saturday night, October 3—one week after the attack at the Dunhams’—Hennessey let Marshall Lee know he was ready to make that arrest. He told Lee he had new evidence linking Aleck Mack, “the impudent Negro” who already had been questioned and released by police, to the gang of scoundrels.

  Perhaps to keep watch on Hennessey and his assistants, or perhaps because he was so determined to be involved in the murder investigation, Lee said he would be coming along to help make the arrest. (Significantly, Sergeant Chenneville did not. He obviously had lost all trust in Hennessey.) Hennessey and his two assistants and Lee and two of his officers headed over to the Black Elephant, where Mack was drinking. Hennessey asked Lee to go inside the saloon and tell Mack that he wanted him to answer a few questions.

  Because Mack didn’t fear Lee, he didn’t try to run. He followed the marshal out the front door and down the street, where he was suddenly grabbed by the detectives and the officers. When Mack tried to fight back, they kicked and pounded him with their fists. A white resident named Press Hopkins, who was standing on his front porch, watching the encounter, would later say that Mack’s screams woke up everyone in the neighborhood.

  Mack was dragged to the calaboose, thrown into
a cell, and chained to the iron ring cemented to the floor. For the next couple of days, Hennessey used all his interrogation skills to get him to confess. But Mack continued to say—just as he had earlier told Chenneville—that he was completely innocent. He went straight to the newspaper reporters when he was released and accused Marshal Lee and the Noble detectives of wrapping a rope around his neck as if to hang him—what was known in those days as “nigger neck stretching.”

  In his typical formal style, Lee released a statement calling Mack’s allegation “a malicious falsehood, concocted in the most damnable spirit.… If Mack has any bruises or scars on his person, they are the result of his own desperate efforts to resist arrest and incarceration. I never struck him, nor saw any one else strike him. Only one pair of nippers were used on him. He was not maltreated in any way, and only such force used [as] was absolutely necessary to conquer him.”

  As for Hennessey, he too said that he and his assistants had not physically abused Mack. By now, however, it was becoming clear to just about everyone in Austin that the Noble men were abject failures. And things only got worse. Hennessey’s assistant Himmel spent an evening at one of the saloons, ostensibly in hopes of picking up gossip about potential suspects. Instead, he drank too much, got into an argument with another patron, and pulled out his pistol and shot a bullet into the ceiling—a violation of a city ordinance.

  * * *