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

by Hollandsworth, Skip

In mid-October, Robertson and the aldermen voted to cancel their contract with the Noble Agency. One of the alderman, Joseph Platt, snapped that the only thing the private detectives had done during their month-long stint in Austin was “stand on the capitol steps” and “with a great flourish of trumpets announce the arrest of a nigger.” An indignant Hennessey and his men packed up and left for Houston with their bloodhound. The mayor and the aldermen then passed a broadly written ordinance offering a reward of $250 to anyone who provided evidence leading to “the arrest and conviction of any party for murder, rape, arson, burglary or assault with intent to murder in the nighttime in Austin.”

  Determined to get the reward money, some Austin citizens arrived at the police department to pass on names of even more black men they believed were responsible for the attacks. A few people got so caught up in the guessing game that they spent their evenings leafing through the city directory, studying the names of all the city’s black men, wondering which one could be a killer. (In the directory, there was a little c at the end of black residents’ names to denote that they were “colored.”)

  Based on the citizens’ tips, the police did make some more arrests, one of whom was a black man named James Thompson, who supposedly was overheard making a drunken confession at a black saloon that he had murdered one of the servant women. A fourteen-year-old black boy was also arrested after he had been seen carrying a knife. But after brief interrogations, they were released.

  Acting on another tip, a couple of officers spent a few days following a man known only as Maurice, an immigrant from Malaysia, in southeast Asia. Maurice, who looked to be in his early thirties, worked as a cook at the Pearl House (the restaurant where Colonel Driskill had held his July Fourth dinner celebrating his new hotel) and he lived in a cheap boardinghouse not far from the Weeds’ home, where Mary Ramey had been murdered.

  It was said of Maurice that he would get “beastly drunk” after work and wander the city late at night. What’s more, “fresh blood” supposedly had been discovered in a pool of water not far from Maurice’s boardinghouse on the day after little Mary’s killing.

  During the period that Maurice was being watched, however, he did not engage in any suspicious behavior. He went to work each night at the Pearl House, did his cooking without complaint, and returned straight to his room at the boardinghouse.

  As October came to an end, the newspapers were writing that the Austin police remained clueless about what to do. “It is beginning to be believed that the detection of the Austin servant girl murderers is as far off as ever,” noted the Galveston Daily News. More newspapers, including the Fort Worth Gazette, went after Austin’s leaders for not being able to stop the murders. “If a radical change is not made in the government of the city so that crimes may be prevented and glaring vices suppressed, it will be far better for Texas to close her university and cast the keys into the sea,” wrote a Gazette editorialist. “A city incapable of governing itself is not a place for building up a university of a first class.”

  In Austin itself, worried homeowners stood in line at J. C. Petmecky’s to buy guns and ammunition. Those who couldn’t afford Petmecky’s prices went to Heidbrink and Co. Pawnbrokers, which sold secondhand guns. A few elderly residents pulled out rifles so old that one police officer said they could have been used in the Texas Revolution back in the 1830s. “It may be safely stated that Austin is the best armed city in the United States,” wrote the Daily Statesman. “It is probable that each home in town contains at least fourteen rounds of ammunition.”

  Some men took their servant women out into the backyard, gave them pistols, and taught them to shoot bottles off fence posts. Yet even with all the guns and bullets, more servant women were leaving Austin—so many, in fact, that the Dallas Daily Herald wrote, “The servant girl will soon become one of the rarest and costliest of capital luxuries.”

  One black woman in Austin who was too old to move was an eighty-year-old former slave known fondly around town as Aunt Tempy. She was so terrified of being killed that she not only kept the doors and windows of her shanty bolted and barred, she left a lamp burning next to her bed throughout the night. In early November, a few hours before sunrise, the lamp fell onto the bed. Within seconds, Aunt Tempy’s sheets and blankets were on fire. Within minutes, the shanty was in flames. Outside in the yard, people could hear Aunt Tempy’s screams.

  A man finally got inside the shanty and dragged her out into the yard. Aunt Tempy gripped the man with charred fingernails, screamed again, and died.

  * * *

  Finally, on the evening of November 10, one week after Aunt Tempy’s death, Mayor Robertson decided to give a formal speech about the murders. The occasion was his annual State of the City address, which he had titled “The Report of the Mayor on the Work of the Present City Administration.” Robertson had spent days on the speech: he knew it had to be good. Joseph Nalle, the lumberman who was running against him in the upcoming city elections, was breathing down his neck, gaining support among voters. He was even having large banners that read “Joseph Nalle for Mayor!” attached to the sides of downtown buildings.

  Predictably, Robertson began with good news. He told the standing-room-only crowd that the finances of the city were in “excellent order.” Debts had been paid, he said, and the cash balance in the treasury was $31,048.30. There was plenty of money available to build new bridges over the creeks, regrade the streets, and perhaps add a new wing to the hospital.

  Robertson paused, looked down at his written speech, and read:

  During the last year, a number of the most dastardly crimes known to the law have been committed in this city. These crimes have been of the most revolting character, attended with evidences of the grossest brutality, and perpetrated at the dead hours of night, in nearly every instance upon unprotected colored females.

  Much has been said and written about these crimes, and the city government has been subjected to severe criticism, sometimes unfriendly and sometimes bordering on the malicious. I undertake to say that the city authorities, ably aided by the state and county officers, have faithfully and earnestly labored to detect the perpetrators of these crimes and to bring them to punishment, but they have failed at success. I employed detectives who came with the highest endorsements as honest and skillful men. They, too, have failed to detect the guilty parties. Great vigilance and energy has been displayed by private citizens, who have devoted much time and labor to bring to light the real criminals. They have accomplished nothing.

  There was a silence in the chambers. Robertson kept reading:

  The crimes still remain a mystery. They are abnormal and unnatural, as compared with ordinary crimes among men. No one, not even the expert, skilled in the detection of crime, can find a plausible motive. The mutilated bodies of the victims are always found in parts of the city where crime is not expected or anticipated, and beyond the fact of the murders we have never been able to penetrate.

  Robertson did his best to reassure his audience that the killings soon would come to an end. “I have faith to believe that the authors of these crimes will yet be discovered,” he declared. “No human is strong enough to hold such a secret. Some guilty conscience will unburden itself sooner or later.”

  He then tried to raise everyone’s spirits, booming, “This city has a great future. Its magnificent location, its picturesque surroundings, its invigorating and healthful climate, and its refined and cultured people, invite the stranger to make his home among us. I hope that before many years we may see a great population dwelling upon these hills!”

  But the men who had come to hear his speech were hardly reassured. They walked out of city hall, gathered on the Avenue, and started talking. Had Robertson really said that the only way the murders would come to a stop was when one of the killers confessed? Did he genuinely believe that there was nothing more that anyone could do?

  * * *

  Everyone agreed that Robertson was right about one thing: the murders were “
abnormal and unnatural.” At this point, four servant women and one servant woman’s daughter—Mollie Smith, Eliza Shelley, Irene Cross, Mary Ramey, and Gracie Vance—had been slaughtered with axes, knives, iron rods, and a brick. It wasn’t clear whether any of the victims had been raped, but the fact that many of them were half naked and organs exposed suggested some twisted sexuality was involved. What was peculiar was that two of the women apparently had been “decorated” after their deaths, with blankets wrapped tightly around Eliza’s mutilated body and a silver watch wrapped around Gracie’s wrist.

  What was even more peculiar was that all of the victims had been left in full view for everyone to see, as if they were works of art. None of them had been carried away to confound the police—hidden, for instance, in a thick grove of woods or thrown into the Colorado River.

  There was one other bewildering detail: a potential witness had been left alive at the scene of each murder. Whoever had slaughtered Mollie Smith back in the early hours of New Year’s Eve had allowed her boyfriend, Walter Spencer, to live. Whoever had killed Eliza Shelley in early May hadn’t touched her three boys, who were in the bed with her, and whoever killed Irene Cross didn’t harm her young nephew. On that August night when little Mary Ramey had been brutally attacked, her mother, Rebecca, had been struck with a club that had only rendered her unconscious. And during the September rampage at the Dunhams’, Gracie’s friends Lucinda Boddy and Patsy Gibson also had been knocked unconscious before Gracie herself was dragged away and beaten to death. True, Gracie’s boyfriend, Orange Washington, had been killed by two blows to his head, but the doctors and police believed that that had happened by accident.

  For the first time, some of the men on the Avenue were beginning to talk openly about the possibility that the murders, for all their gruesomeness, were not the work of “ordinary” Negro criminals. In their own way, the men said, these murders were very well planned—“carefully directed” and “intelligently consummated.”

  The Austin-based reporter for the San Antonio Daily Express actually suggested that one man was behind all the murders. He even came up with his own moniker for this man. He called him the “Midnight Assassin”—a killer, he wrote, who “strides at will over Austin’s sacred soil.”

  The correspondent went on to explain: “The fact that this series of crimes is composed of some of the boldest, most startling flagrations in criminal annals, that they have extended over a period of many months, and that the perpetrator has, so far, not only accomplished his ends but successfully escaped and blinded the police, would seem to indicate that he is a criminal of no mean ability … but one of the most remarkable ghouls known to the death history of any section of the country.”

  Today, of course, no explanation would be required: everyone would know that a depraved but brilliant serial killer was at work. The Austin Police Department would be putting together a task force. “Profilers” from the Federal Bureau of Investigation would be flying in from their offices in Quantico, Virginia, to study similarities of the physical evidence at the various murder scenes in hopes of creating a psychological profile of the killer. A large Crimestopper reward would be offered in hopes of encouraging citizens to reveal what they knew.

  In late nineteenth century America, however, the term “serial killer” did not yet exist. It wasn’t that people were unfamiliar with the concept of one person committing multiple murders. Periodically, there would be headlines about “maniacs,” gripped by psychotic rages, who had gone on killing sprees. One of the most infamous of these maniacs was a twelve-year-old boy in Boston named Jesse Pomeroy, dubbed the “boy fiend,” who in the early 1870s was imprisoned for life after he stabbed at least two other children to death. And, of course, the old outlaws were, in their own way, serial killers who didn’t hesitate to shoot or stab anyone who got in their way.

  But the maniacs clearly looked and acted insane, and they were almost immediately identified by police because they rarely attempted to cover their tracks. As for the outlaws, they seemed to act out of clear self-interest, killing other men for a financial reward, or dispatching rival outlaws who posed a threat. What’s more, most outlaws rarely operated under the cloak of anonymity. The blue-eyed Texas bad man John Wesley Hardin actually wrote an autobiography in which he proudly took credit for his killings, saying the men he had shot deserved to die.

  What no one in that era had ever heard about was an anonymous killer who set out to mutilate women, one after another, in almost ritualistic fashion in order to satisfy some private libidinous craving or a pathological hatred. Even writers of fiction had not yet invented such a character. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which had been published in 1841, begins with a mother and daughter who have been ripped apart in a bedroom in Paris. The killer in Poe’s story, however, turned out to be an escaped orangutan, not a human being.

  As a result, for the vast majority of Austin’s residents, this concept of a Midnight Assassin was extraordinarily difficult to grasp. For them, it was almost impossible to believe that someone could act perfectly normal during the day, with nothing in his looks or manner to attract attention, let alone raise alarm, and then at night walk out of his house to perform acts of sadism that surpassed anyone’s comprehension. Surely, they said, such a crazed, bloodthirsty killer could not have gone unnoticed for so long in their small city.

  The members of the Travis County grand jury certainly weren’t buying into a Midnight Assassin. In fact, a mere two weeks after Mayor Robertson’s speech, the grand jurors released the list of its most recent indictments. Toward the bottom of the page was the name “Walter Spencer”—the boyfriend of Mollie Smith, who had been murdered in the early hours of New Year’s Eve 1884, exactly eleven months earlier. The grand jurors had determined that when Spencer burst into the home of Mollie’s employer, W. K. Hall, frantically crying that Mollie was nowhere to be found, he was only pretending to be innocent. They claimed that enough evidence existed that proved Spencer was Mollie’s killer and they wanted him put on trial, charged with first-degree murder.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The man who had presented the case against Walter Spencer to the grand jury was the county’s thirty-one-year-old district attorney, James Robertson. It just so happened that he was the younger brother, by thirteen years, of Mayor Robertson. In the mid-1870s, James had followed his older brother to Austin from the family home in east Tennessee, studied law at his brother’s firm, taken the bar exam, and moved to the small town of Round Rock, just north of Austin, where he married, started a family, and began his own law practice. In 1884 he had returned to Austin to run for district attorney.

  Although James didn’t have his brother’s oratorical skills, he was regarded as a very bright lawyer, and with the support of his brother and other members of the city’s establishment, he handily won the election. (It didn’t hurt his campaign when the incumbent district attorney, James Sheeks, had decided to withdraw from the race after he was arrested for drunkenly driving his carriage too fast along Congress Avenue and making crude remarks at women.)

  So far in his short tenure, which had begun in January 1885, the younger Robertson had prosecuted a handful of felony cases and had won convictions for a couple of routine killings. As for the servant women murders, however, he had never pushed for indictments of any of the black men who had been arrested, concluding that there had been too little evidence to take their cases to court.

  Mayor Robertson’s brother James, the district attorney, was pressured to prosecute an innocent black man.

  Obviously, the young district attorney’s opinion had changed. There is no documentation—no paper trail whatsoever—indicating exactly what led to Spencer’s indictment. But something had to have happened. Had new evidence been discovered that proved Spencer’s guilt? Or was it possible that Mayor Robertson, who realized his political future was on the line, approached his younger brother and begged for help? The city elections, after all, were jus
t a couple of weeks away. Or was it even possible that District Attorney Robertson himself had decided, on his own, to help out his older brother by securing an indictment against one of the murder suspects?

  Whatever took place, the grand jury’s announcement must have pleased Mayor Robertson. During his strolls up and down Congress Avenue, he was able to say to all his detractors that justice in the servant women murders was being served. On Election Day, December 8, he was out early, shaking hands with voters. Joseph Nalle was also on the streets, asking for votes. “The friends of both candidates were everywhere, watching and working as if everything depended on their individual efforts,” noted a Daily Statesman reporter. “Hacks, loaded down with voters, hurriedly deposited their loads at the polling places and whirled off after others.”

  That day, there were allegations that Nalle had brought in more than a hundred men from out of town, paying them to cast “illegal votes.” If so, he could have used fifty-three more men. Robertson was narrowly reelected by a vote of 1,390 to 1,338. In an interesting side note, Albert Carrington, the lone black city alderman, representing the Seventh Ward, lost his election to Dennis Corwin, a white surveyor who had been a captain in the Confederate army. A large number of Austin’s white residents had organized an “Anti-Colored Movement” to prevent Carrington’s reelection. For them, the servant women murders had only proven that the black race could not be trusted with any civic responsibility. They were also no doubt infuriated by newspaper reports claiming that members of the Carrington family believed the servant women were being killed by a white man.

  Later in the evening, after all the votes had been counted and recounted, Robertson’s supporters came to his home and shouted his name. The mayor and his socialite wife, Sophronia, a descendant of Stephen F. Austin’s, stood on their porch and waved—and then, of course, Robertson gave one of his speeches about Austin’s golden new era. The future, he said, never looked better.