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

by Hollandsworth, Skip

  * * *

  One week later, the trial of Walter Spencer began. District Attorney Robertson told the jury that Spencer most likely had caught Mollie with another man and decided to get even. During the fight that had ensued between the couple, either Mollie had hit him with the back of an ax before he grabbed it away and began attacking her, or he had hit himself on the head with the ax after having murdered Mollie, which was his attempt to make himself look like a victim instead of a killer.

  But it quickly became clear that there was no new evidence whatsoever pointing to Spencer’s guilt. Robertson didn’t even have a witness who could tell any tales about Mollie and Spencer having any sort of disagreement. All Robertson was able to tell the jury was that because Lem Brooks (Mollie’s ex-boyfriend, who was initially arrested) had such a good alibi, the only possible person in Austin who would have had any reason to kill Mollie was Spencer.

  After a single day of testimony, the district attorney rested his case. Spencer’s court-appointed lawyer called a couple of witnesses who spoke about Spencer’s peaceful relationship with Mollie. The jury learned that since Mollie’s murder, Spencer had been staying with his mother in east Austin. Although he still suffered headaches from his wounds, he had returned to his job at the brick factory. He also had joined an all-black baseball team that played against other black teams. He was living a very quiet life, avoiding any trouble with the police.

  Regardless of the lopsided testimony, there was still a good chance that Spencer would be convicted. He was, after all, a poor young black man facing an almost entirely white jury. (There was one black man on the panel.) A quick conviction would be the easy thing to do. Such a move would, for the first time in months, give Austin’s citizens some sort of reassurance that Austin’s bad blacks were finally being taken off the streets.

  But the jurors, one of whom was J. B. Blocker, a successful cattleman who had hired black men to work as cowhands on his trail drives, were suspicious of young Robertson’s case from the start. They quickly voted to acquit Spencer—and he walked out of the courthouse a free man.

  Obviously humiliated, the district attorney made no public comment about the verdict. As for Mayor Robertson, he too said nothing. But to show the citizens that he was still taking action to keep them safe, he called the aldermen to city hall and proposed that a search immediately begin to find a new marshal to replace Grooms Lee when his term ended on December 22.

  By all accounts, it had been a very long autumn for Marshal Lee. Residents were still talking about how he had overslept on the morning of Mary Ramey’s murder, and how his attempt to gain respectability by teaming up with the Noble detectives to arrest Aleck Mack had turned out to be a fiasco.

  Lee had done his best to defend himself. He had issued a report noting that his officers had collected a record $9,025.90 in fines for misdemeanors committed in the last fifteen months. But Robertson and the aldermen were ready for him to go. He spent his last days on the job sitting in his office, concentrating on paperwork. According to the Daily Statesman, he “succeeded in obtaining a fine picture of [former mayor] J. T. Cleveland, thus completing his pictorial collection of Austin’s chief magistrates at the City Hall.” He told his friends that, when his term as marshal came to an end, he planned to get out of law enforcement altogether and become a surveyor—a quiet occupation that he had once tried and which seemed to be more fitting to his personality.

  Twelve men submitted their names to replace Lee, including a deputy U.S. marshal, a former county sheriff who was now running a feed store, an attorney, and the proprietor of the Proper Star Saloon on Congress Avenue. Chenneville added his name to the list of candidates, though he probably knew Mayor Robertson and the aldermen were content with him remaining as sergeant.

  He was right. The candidate who most impressed the city officials was James Lucy, a captain with the Texas Rangers, the famed state police organization. Since the end of the Civil War, the Rangers had been “ranging” through the hinterlands of Texas, fighting the last of the Indians and arresting (or shooting) gunslingers, bandits, cattle rustlers, and horse thieves. Although Lucy was not the most physically imposing of Rangers—he was described in one article as “no taller than Napoleon”—he was fearless, and, yes, he was very good with guns. In 1878, he and some fellow Rangers had gotten into a famous shoot-out with the infamous Texas train robber Sam Bass and his gang in the town of Round Rock, north of Austin. (Bass was killed.)

  The other quality about Lucy that impressed Robertson and the aldermen was his intelligence. He had graduated from the University of Missouri, and when he came to Texas in 1873 to join the Rangers, he had been assigned a series of complicated land fraud cases that resulted in at least a dozen convictions. If there was anyone who could stop the murders, said Robertson and the aldermen, it was Lucy.

  * * *

  With the announcement of Lucy’s appointment, Austin’s citizens did feel a definite sense of relief. Now, they told one another, life can go back to normal.

  Which was exactly what happened. There was a dedication ceremony at St. David’s Episcopal Church for its new stained-glass window that depicted the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus. Over at Austin High School, a group of students played a “football game” against a group of students from the Texas German and English Academy. (It was perhaps the first high school football game ever played in Texas.)

  As the Christmas season approached, shop owners decorated their windows with ornaments, red and green crepe paper, and heaps of pine boughs. One merchant placed a string of incandescent lightbulbs around his front window, which featured a stuffed Santa Claus and tiny elves surrounded by fake snow, and another filled his window with a plethora of presents for children: dolls, hobbyhorses, baseballs and baseball bats, bows and arrows, tambourines, accordions, tea sets, and red-topped cowboy boots. At Stacy and Baker’s newsstand and tobacco shop, one of Austin’s portlier citizens dressed up as Santa Claus and sat on a large chair by the front door, where he asked the children who came to see him if they had been good that year.

  Texas Ranger James Lucy was brought in as the new marshal to restore law and order.

  Newspaper reporters wrote that the downtown streets were “literally thronged with all sorts of people” and the stores “jammed with purchasers.” L. Schoolherr & Brothers, one of the city’s better dress shops, held a Christmas sale on shawls, robes, silk gowns, and silk handkerchiefs. Hirschfield’s Dry Goods advertised “Christmas prices” on its sewing machines. And Austin’s most well-known photographer, Mr. Samuel B. Hill, offered discounts on his “portraits.” Many men brought their entire families to his studio. Standing before a painted backdrop—a pastoral landscape, a ruined castle, the hills of Italy—they held themselves still for several moments, looking as dignified as possible, while the negatives were exposed. Women arrived at the studio to have individual portraits made, which they planned to give to their husbands as Christmas presents. The women stared directly at the camera with their backs straight, their mouths slightly pouted, and their noses turned delicately upward. Because Hill used incandescent lamps to light the studio, their eyes shone, and their skin seemed as pale as milk.

  On the evening of December 22, after the 9 p.m. roll call at the police department, Lee turned over his badge to Lucy. According to the Daily Statesman, Lee gave a farewell address, “indulging in a few appropriate remarks, referring to his past pleasant relations with the force, and trusting his successor’s administration would be fruitful of much good.” Sergeant Chenneville and the other officers then stood at attention as Lucy spoke to them about his determination to keep Austin free of crime.

  That night, Lucy helped patrol the streets. He was on the streets the next day, December 23, and again on December 24, Christmas Eve, greeting residents who came downtown to do the last of their Christmas shopping. Throughout that day, people lined up at Bill Johnston’s market to buy meats for their Christmas Eve dinners, the counters loaded with steaks, hams, turkeys
, venison, and some of the last buffalo meat left in Texas. Others went to Prade’s ice-cream parlor, where clerks were selling Christmas fruit baskets, ornamented cakes, and French candy for twenty cents a pound. Men rode in their wagons to Radam’s Horticultural Emporium to buy Yule trees to carry back to their homes for their children to decorate. (Some of them, no doubt, also bought bottles of the florist’s Radam’s Microbe Killer.) A man pulled up in his wagon at H. H. Hazzard’s music shop to purchase a piano as a Christmas gift for his family. At his livery stable just off Congress Avenue, Osborn Weed, who had been the employer of Rebecca and Mary Ramey, offered the city’s children Christmas rides on Tom Thumb, his gentle Shetland pony. Attempting to show goodwill to all, Charles Lundberg the baker provided a Christmas meal to all the prisoners in the county jail.

  As the sun began to set, Henry Stamps performed his usual role lighting the gas lamps. The owners of the restaurants and saloons turned on their incandescent lights. Dr. J. J. Tobin, one of the city’s pharmacists, invited fifty of his friends to his home to watch fireworks. Children from the state’s Asylum for the Blind held a concert, performing a popular new song about Santa Claus coming to town, and over at the state’s Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, another group of children stood around a Christmas tree decorated with candy and popcorn, making what one reporter said were “mute testimonials of affection.”

  There was even a Christmas party at the State Lunatic Asylum, north of the city. Dr. Denton had arranged for selected patients to gather in the main day room, eat popcorn, sing Christmas carols, and stay up one hour past their usual nine o’clock bedtime curfew, and he had one of his employees dress up as Santa Claus and pass out candy.

  An hour passed, and then another. The shop and restaurant owners turned off their lights, locked their doors, and headed for their homes. Throughout the city, families ate their Christmas Eve dinners and decorated their Christmas trees, covering the branches with ornaments, strings of popcorn, candy-filled paper cornucopias, candles, and Japanese lanterns.

  Eventually, parents put out the fires in the fireplaces, telling their excited children that they didn’t want Santa to burn himself on his way down the chimney. A thin breeze swept through the city, carrying with it the aroma of evergreen and cinnamon and wood smoke. Soon, the moon rose. The stars appeared. According to what a reporter for the Daily Statesman would later write, the moon and the stars “were at their most effulgent and shot their mellow light over all the earth and in nearly every crevice of our houses and garden fences.”

  At midnight, the clock above city hall began to chime. Marshal Lucy, Sergeant Chenneville, and several of the officers remained on the downtown streets, keeping watch. A couple of officers checked the saloons to see if any suspicious characters were drinking at the back tables; a couple of other officers walked the alleys behind the Congress Avenue buildings, looking for tramps; and a couple more wandered through Guy Town to make sure the men at the brothels were behaving themselves.

  Suddenly, there was sound of hoofbeats. A horse was seen coming straight up Congress Avenue from south of downtown, and it was coming fast, whipping through the cones of light thrown out by the gas lamps. On the back of the horse was a man named Alexander Wilkie, who worked as a night watchman for one of the saloons.

  “A woman has been chopped to pieces!” Wilkie yelled. “It’s Mrs. Hancock! On Water Street!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Susan Hancock was the forty-three-year-old wife of Moses Hancock, a prosperous carpenter, and the mother of two daughters. People who knew Mrs. Hancock would later describe her as “one of the most refined ladies in Austin,” a “handsome woman” who “bore an unblemished character” and was a “tender mother” and “devoted wife.” She was also white.

  The police officers leaped on their horses and raced to the Hancocks’ home, which was at the southern end of downtown, just a block off the Colorado River. Those who didn’t have horses simply began running. They ran so hard that their stomachs heaved and their breath tore at their throats. Marshal Lucy and a Daily Statesman reporter, who happened to be standing together outside of Martin’s Shoes and Boots on Congress Avenue, piled into a hack. It barreled down the Avenue, rocking back and forth like an old stagecoach.

  Lucy found Moses Hancock in the parlor of his one-story home. He was dressed in his long underwear, which was stained with blood. On the floor of the parlor, lying on a quilt, was his wife. There were two deep wounds in her head—the result of ax blows. One blow had cut into the cheekbone. The other, which was between her left eye and left ear, had perforated her skull and sunk into her brain. Her right ear also had been punctured by some sort of rod.

  Mrs. Hancock was breathing erratically. According to the Daily Statesman reporter who had taken the hack to the house with Lucy, “cupfuls of blood” were pouring from her mouth. From a back bedroom could be heard the desperate cries of the Hancocks’ daughters, one fifteen years old, the other eleven. Dr. Burt, the physician from the City-County Hospital, arrived, as did another physician, Dr. R. S. Graves. They worked feverishly to save Mrs. Hancock’s life, pressing bandages over her wounds to stop the bleeding, giving her a shot of morphine and pouring a little brandy into her mouth to see if she would swallow it. She couldn’t. Nothing but the whites of her eyes could be seen beneath her half-closed lids. In the gaslight, the blood over her skin had an almost glossy sheen.

  Although it was just his third day on the job, Lucy made it clear that he alone would be in charge of this murder investigation. He interviewed the fifty-five-year-old Hancock, who was leaning against a wall of the parlor. In what would later be described as a “distracted, disconnected narration,” Hancock told Lucy that his wife had spent the late afternoon shopping downtown. After she returned home, the two Hancock daughters had gone to a Christmas party, escorted by a neighbor. He and Susan had sat by the fireplace, reading and sharing a piece of cake. They had gone to bed between ten and eleven o’clock, sleeping, as they always did, in adjoining rooms. A gas lamp had been left burning by the front door.

  On Christmas Eve, Susan Hancock became the first white woman to be murdered. Her husband, Moses, told police he had found her in their backyard.

  According to Hancock, the two daughters returned home from their party a little after 11 p.m. and went straight to bed. Just before midnight, Hancock was awakened by a noise. He walked into his wife’s room and saw that her sheets and bedspread were piled in a heap on the floor. Her trunks were open and her clothes pulled out. The window of her room, facing the backyard, was also open and blood was on the windowsill.

  Hancock said he walked out to the yard, where he found his wife lying in a pool of blood. As he bent over her, he heard a noise coming from behind the back fence. He turned and saw a shadowy figure, wearing dark clothes. The man—Hancock could not tell if he was white or black—jumped over the fence and ran off down the alley. Hancock started yelling, grabbed a rock, and threw it in the direction of the man. His next-door neighbor, a brick mason named Harvey Persinger, came into the yard and helped Hancock lift Mrs. Hancock from the ground and carry her into the parlor. Then Persinger ran for help. He found Wilkie, the night watchman, who rode up Congress Avenue, crying out the news of the Hancock attack.

  Mayor Robertson, alerted by telephone, arrived at the Hancocks’ home, as did District Attorney Robertson. Within minutes, the front and back yards were filled with men from the surrounding neighborhood and the nearby saloons. Some of the men struck matches to their oil lamps, dialed the flames to the highest possible height, and held the lamps above them, trying to cast as much light as possible into the shadows. Dr. Burt’s teenage son Eugene, who was there, spotted a bloodied ax three feet from the window of Mrs. Hancock’s bedroom. He picked it up and waved it around. When Hancock was shown the ax, he said it belonged to him and that he kept it on top of the woodpile by the back fence.

  A police officer arrived with Sergeant Chenneville’s bloodhounds. They sniffed the ax, the woodpile, and the sp
ot where Mrs. Hancock had been found. But because so many men had already tromped through the yard, the dogs could not find any tracks to follow. They were led out to the alley, where they began running westward, alongside the Colorado River. A group of officers chased after the dogs. They slid their six-shooters out of their holsters in case they saw someone to shoot. But they came across no one. Minutes later, the dogs lost whatever trail they were following.

  The men at the Hancocks’ kept waving their lamps over the backyard, hoping to find some piece of evidence.

  Then, in the distance, there was the sound of more hoofbeats.

  * * *

  Henry Brown, the night clerk at the police department, was on his horse, coming at a full gallop straight for the Hancock residence. When he saw Marshal Lucy, he began yelling that a woman had been found on Hickory Street, on the northwest side of downtown, just two blocks from city hall.

  Lucy and the other men in the yard stared at him.

  “It’s Eula Phillips!” Brown shouted. “Her head’s been chopped in two!”

  The men kept staring at him. Eula was the seventeen-year-old wife of Jimmy Phillips, who was the twenty-four-year-old son of James Phillips, a very successful Austin architect and home builder. Slim as a fawn, barely one hundred pounds in weight, Eula was regarded as one of Austin’s most beautiful young women, with eyes the color of syrup, a delicately cut chin, a Mona Lisa–like smile, and auburn hair that she swept back from her temples and bunched in curls on the nape of her neck. Whenever she walked the sidewalks of Congress Avenue, she was stylishly dressed, wearing broad hats heaped with feathers and tight crinoline dresses, underneath which were wiggling bustles and corsets that pushed up her bosom.

  “It’s Eula!” the man cried again. “She’s in the Phillipses’ backyard!”