Men began jumping on horses or piling into hacks and racing back up Congress Avenue. They made a screeching left turn at city hall, and headed for the Phillips home. Whips could be heard cracking against the horses’ flanks. Chenneville’s dogs also sprinted up the Avenue, baying all the way.
The Phillips home was one of the city’s finer two-story residences, built by Phillips himself. Lucy and the other men were led to the backyard and taken to the outhouse. Next to it was Eula, her nightgown pulled up to her neck and her hair rolled in brown curling paper. She was on her back, the blood around her “warm and scarcely coagulated,” a reporter would later write. She had been struck directly above the nose by the blade of an ax: a perfect vertical blow, splitting her forehead wide open. There was another horizontal ax cut across the side of her head. Because her nightgown was tightly twisted around her neck, the police speculated the killer had used it like a rope to drag Eula across the yard.
And there was something new about this murder scene: three small pieces of firewood had been placed, almost ceremoniously, on Eula’s body—two across the breast and one across her stomach. Her arms had been outstretched. It was as if she had been posed to look like a figure in some twisted Crucifixion scene.
Lucy went inside the house and was directed to the room—in a back wing of the house, at the end of a long hallway—where Eula, Jimmy, and their ten-month-old baby boy, Tommy, stayed. Jimmy was still in bed. There was a large gash above his ear. The Phillipses’ family doctor, Dr. Joseph Cummings, who lived in the neighborhood, was already there, pressing a pillow against the wound. A bloody ax was at the foot of the bed.
Jimmy seemed to be in a stupor, unable to communicate at all. His mother, Sophie, told Lucy that at sometime after midnight—maybe around 12:15 a.m., she said, or maybe later—she heard Tommy crying. She walked into Jimmy and Eula’s room and almost fainted when she saw Jimmy curled under bloody sheets and the baby sitting up, holding an apple, unharmed even though his nightclothes were crimson with blood.
Eula Phillips was murdered one hour after Susan Hancock. Her husband, Jimmy, was found in their room, wounded from a blow to the head.
Sophie said she ran back to the master bedroom to alert her husband. Using Jimmy’s nickname, she shouted, “Bud is knocked in the head and Eula is gone!” The elder Phillips went outside and with the help of other men in the neighborhood eventually found Eula. One of the neighbors then ran over to City Hall and took the stairs up to the police department to alert the night clerk about the killing.
After Lucy finished speaking to Mrs. Phillips, he was shown a bloody bare footprint on the wooden floor in the hallway outside Jimmy and Eula’s room, right next to a door leading to the backyard. He ordered that the planks containing the footprint be cut from the floor and taken to the police department. He also ordered that the ax in the bedroom—which the elder Mr. Phillips had identified as his, saying he had last seen it on top of his woodpile behind the house—be brought to the police department and placed next to the ax found at the Hancocks’.
Meanwhile, in the backyard, someone spotted drops of blood on the top rail of the back fence. Chenneville’s dogs were led into the alley and headed off into the darkness, the sound of their baying echoing against the other houses. But soon they again came to a baffled stop. It was as if the scent—if there had been a scent—simply had vanished.
A blanket was placed over Eula’s body and she was carried back into the house. Jimmy, who seemed to be regaining consciousness, murmured to Dr. Cummings, who was beside him, “Where’s Eula?”
But the doctor told him nothing. He later said he didn’t want to say anything that might cause Jimmy to go into shock and die.
* * *
Within minutes, the news was spreading over the telephone party lines. There had been a double murder. Mrs. Hancock and Eula Phillips had been axed to death in their backyards. Someone was now targeting white women.
Grabbing their rifles and tearing open boxes of shells, some men shouted at their wives and children to get out of their beds and gather in one room. They stood in front of their families, the nickel grips of their rifles cold in their hands, waiting to see if whoever was out there was going to come after them.
Other men decided it was far safer to get their families out of their homes. They loaded them onto carriages or wagons and raced toward downtown. It wasn’t long before several hundred people were packed on Congress Avenue, standing under the gas lamps. A reporter who worked as a freelancer for the Western Associated Press ran to the Western Union office, grabbed a clean sheet of white paper, and drafted a telegram to send to his St. Louis office. “The entire population is in the streets, excitedly conversing,” he wrote.
Right behind him came the Austin-based reporter for the Fort Worth Gazette. His telegram began, “People tonight are in a state bordering on frenzy. Groups of excited men parade Congress Avenue and ask each other, with white lips, ‘When will this damnable work end? Whose wife is safe as long as these bloodthirsty hell hounds can commit such crimes in the heart of the city?’”
At three in the morning, still more residents were pouring into downtown—shouting, panting, stumbling in the wagon ruts. Horses became spooked and tried to bolt. A carriage racing down one of the streets went up on two wheels as it turned a corner. Policemen blew their whistles and shouted at the crowd to “Stay calm!” Yet downtown remained in a lather of fury and terror. Men stood guard on street corners, holding lanterns or makeshift torches and carrying weapons of all kinds—rifles, hatchets, pipes, and sheath knives. “Had a man with a speck of blood on his clothes appeared, he would have been rent in pieces,” a Houston Daily Post reporter would later write. To increase the amount of light, merchants came to their dark stores to turn on their incandescent lamps. Several women, tears streaming down their faces, huddled in carriages under the “outdoor lamp” that Charles Millett, the owner of Millett’s Opera House, had placed by his front doors so that potential customers walking by at night could read his marquee about upcoming shows.
Finally, the sun rose. Throughout the city, church bells rang to signify the arrival of Christmas Day. But for all practical purposes, Christmas had been canceled in Austin—presents left unwrapped under the Christmas trees and Christmas dinners uncooked. The priest at St. David’s Episcopal (the church with the new stained-glass windows) opened his doors for a 7:30 a.m. Christmas Communion service. But only a handful of his parishioners came to take the sacraments. There was no music at the service because none of the choir members arrived to sing.
By late morning, the newsboys for the Daily Statesman were on the Avenue, hawking the Christmas Day edition, which had been reprinted overnight. “Blood! Blood! Blood!” screamed the new front-page headline, the ink scarcely dry on the paper. “The Demons Have Transferred Their Thirst for Blood to White People!”
The Austin Daily Statesman’s headline for the Christmas Eve murders
People read the story, over and over, in disbelief. Even those who had already been told details of the killings gasped when they got to the part of the story describing the firewood laid across young Eula Phillips’s body—“evidently used for the most hellish and damnable of purposes,” noted the reporter.
Holding their newspapers, some citizens walked down the Avenue to the Hancocks’ home and then back up to the Phillipses’ just to look at the yards where the women had been found. How was it possible, they asked, that neither woman had cried out when struck by an ax? And how could no one have heard the attacks taking place? Both the Hancocks and Phillipses lived in the midst of busy neighborhoods. At the time of the attacks, there were still some Christmas Eve revelers out and about on the streets. And there wasn’t a single eyewitness to either of the killings?
At the police department, Lucy ordered Sergeant Chenneville and his officers to round up the usual black suspects—including Oliver Townsend, Dock Woods, and Aleck Mack—and bring them to the calaboose. In a twisted version of the Cinderella story, each man was told to remove
his shoes, place his bare feet in a bowl of ink, and step down on a sheet of white paper to see if his bare footprint matched the bloodied footprint that had been cut from the floor outside Eula’s room.
There were no precise matches. And none of the men cracked during their interrogations, which no doubt were fierce. They insisted they had spent Christmas Eve at their homes, or at the Black Elephant, and that they had had nothing to do with the attacks.
Later that morning, close to noon, Mayor Robertson convened a public meeting at the temporary state capitol. More than seven hundred men packed into the Texas House of Representatives’ chamber. They jostled against one another, all of them talking at once, their voices thick with anger—“an infuriated multitude, white with heat,” wrote the Houston Daily Post.
Robertson banged his gavel on the podium, begging for order. “I have called you to assemble and adopt some measures that, if possible, will bring these men to justice,” he declared. “It is a matter involving the protection of life and property, as well as the name and fame of our capital city. Something must be done, and I ask you to consider and determine what expedient should be adopted.”
Nathan Shelley, a former Confederate general, rose and demanded that “a cordon of sentinels” (armed men) be placed around the city’s limits that very afternoon. He said he would have these sentinels start moving forward, step by step, questioning every man in their path and asking about his whereabouts in the last hours of Christmas Eve. If a man’s answers were “inadequate,” Shelley said, the sentinels would be allowed to take “appropriate measures.”
Frank Maddox, a general land agent, called for the city to hire a hundred secret agents, known only to the marshal, who would hunt down “the assassins.” He also wanted a city ordinance to be passed that would require all of the lower-class saloons, where he said “the murderers” were no doubt gathering to drink and plot their crimes, be closed by 10 p.m. each evening. Ira Evans, the president of the New York and Texas Land Company, said that it wasn’t only the saloons that needed to be closed. He wanted city authorities to “shutter” all of Austin’s “gambling dens,” “bawdy houses,” and “other means of dissipation which lead to greater crimes.”
A number of men called on Mayor Robertson and the aldermen to agree to a temporary suspension of normal criminal statutes and allow for “lynch law,” which would grant anyone the power to make a citizen’s arrest of a murder suspect, do whatever he wanted to do to that suspect, and not suffer any legal consequences for his actions.
But Alexander Terrell, a longtime Austin lawyer, begged everyone in the hall to let Marshal Lucy handle the investigation. “A vigilance committee means blood, and is likely to victimize the innocent,” he said. “When it rules, reason is dethroned and ceases to act. It would be fruitless of results and bring about calamities you would deplore.”
Terrell pointed to those supporting a vigilance committee. “You men can’t find the killers, marching around the city,” he roared.
The men roared back that they damn well could. One of them yelled that the killers, when apprehended, should be taken to the expansive grounds of the new capitol building so that their hangings could be witnessed by all of Austin’s citizens.
It was finally agreed by a voice vote that a “Citizen’s Committee of Safety” be formed, made up of four men from each of the city’s ten wards. The committee’s task would be to raise money for a reward fund and assist in the police department’s murder investigations—or, if need be, conduct its own investigation.
The meeting was adjourned, and Mayor Robertson and the city aldermen headed to city hall for another meeting. They passed an ordinance authorizing Marshal Lucy to hire twenty additional police officers, giving him thirty-four officers in all—exactly the number Grooms Lee had asked for many months earlier. They passed another ordinance requiring all saloons, “or any place where intoxicating liquors are sold or kept for sale,” to close at midnight and not reopen until 5 a.m. Finally, they then passed an ordinance authorizing Robertson “to employ the most skillful detective talent available for a period of ninety days or so long as in his judgment the present emergency may demand.”
Robertson let it be known that this time he would not be hiring amateurs. He strode straight to the Western Union office and addressed a telegram to the Pinkerton Agency in Chicago, asking for its best detectives to come to Austin as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, that very afternoon, George Thompson, the “dog man” for the state prison in the town of Huntsville, got off a train at the depot with half a dozen bloodhounds. (Lucy apparently had contacted Thompson earlier that day, asking for his help.) The bloodhounds were reputed to be the finest trackers in the state—certainly better than Chenneville’s slobbery dogs. It was said they could stay on an escaped prisoner’s trail even if that man took off his shoes and ran through water or jumped on a horse and rode away. According to one newspaper account, the lead bloodhound, who was named Bob, was known for “his wicked but intelligent eye.… There is only one thing he really enjoys better than beef steak and eggs and that is to get on the trail of some fellow free from obstacles, and run him over hill and dale.”
Bob and the other dogs were taken to the Hancocks’ and Phillipses’ backyards. But they found no scents to follow: by then, sixteen hours had passed since the killings and both of the yards had been trampled, over and over, by other men’s boots. While at the Phillipses’, Bob, the lead bloodhound, did do something that seemed rather peculiar. He suddenly turned to the house—“barking ferociously,” wrote the Daily Statesman reporter who was there—and headed straight for Eula and Jimmy’s bedroom. “Although there were several persons in the room,” wrote the reporter, “he passed by them all, and approaching the bed, reared up on it and smelt Jimmy.”
From there, Bob bounded toward the parlor, where Eula’s body had been laid out, just a few feet from the family’s Christmas tree. Bob began barking again, and Thompson, baffled by the dog’s behavior, dragged him away because he was “frightening other ladies” who were in the room.
* * *
By now it was five o’ clock. The sun was beginning to set. At the police department, Lucy began hiring his new officers, pinning badges on their street clothes and sending them out on the streets to work with Chenneville and the other officers. He ordered all of his men to “halt” strangers they saw, demand their name and addresses, and have them explain why they were out and about. If any stranger could not give “a good accounting of himself,” he was to be taken to the calaboose, given a more “extensive interrogation,” and kept there “until morning, at least.”
Besides the Austin police officers, deputies from the sheriff’s department and the U.S. Marshal’s Office showed up to help patrol the neighborhoods. Members of the Citizen’s Committee of Safety came out of their houses to walk around their wards. Even the publicly humiliated Grooms Lee showed up at the police department to man the telephone while everyone else was looking for the killers.
Despite the overwhelming police presence, however, few residents slept. Inside many of the homes, husbands pushed furniture against doors and nailed wooden planks or blankets across windows. Fully dressed, they walked their floors, cradling rifles, stopping every few moments to listen with straining ears for the sound of an invader. Those who owned telephones periodically picked them up to hear if any new attacks were being reported on the party line.
But there were no attacks and no attempted break-ins. There were no sightings of a “stranger.” Periodically, a police officer would bring his horse to a complete stop because he thought he had heard the snap of a stick. He would sit there for seconds, staring at the shadows. But no one emerged. The only sound came from the officer’s own horse blowing steam into the air, twitching his tail, and occasionally letting loose dollops of shit.
Twenty-four hours had passed since the Christmas Eve attacks, and still no one had a clue as to what was happening.
PART FOUR
DECEMBER 26,
1885–JANUARY 1886
“The whole city is arming. If this thing is not stopped soon, several corpses will be swinging from the tree limbs.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By the morning of December 26, the story had gone national: newspapers from coast to coast had printed the Western Associated Press dispatch on the ax attacks on Mrs. Hancock and Eula Phillips. “A Ghastly Tale of Terror from Austin!” was the headline in the San Francisco Examiner. “City Cursed with a Secret Band of Woman Slayers,” declared the Missouri Republican out of St. Louis. Even the editors of the New York Times had deemed the story significant enough for their subscribers, its headline reading: “Two Women Dragged from Their Beds, Maltreated and Murdered.”
In Texas itself, all of the state’s newspapers had devoted large swaths of their front pages to the Christmas Eve attacks, splashing such melodramatic headlines above the fold as “Another Chapter of Crime from the State Capital That Makes the Blood Run Cold” and “Hell Broke Loose. Dark and Damnable Deeds Done in the Blackness of Night by Fiends.” Knowing this was their chance to sell an enormous number of newspapers—it was, after all, one thing for black servant women to be attacked, but something else entirely when the victims were proper white ladies—the reporters let loose with lip-smackingly lurid prose. They played up Mrs. Hancock’s and Eula’s social standing, calling them “the wives of respectable citizens” and “the ornaments of highly respected homes.” They described the way the two women had been found in their backyards—“weltering in blood,” “bleeding and mangled,” and their limbs contorted “as if in a dance of death.”
The reporter from the Fort Worth Gazette gave the young Eula an almost angelic portrait. He wrote that she was “so beautiful, so frail, her face turned upward in the dim moonlight with the expression of agony that death itself could not erase.”
To everyone’s amazement, Mrs. Hancock was still alive that morning, lying in her own bed, unconscious but at least breathing. Eula’s body remained in the parlor of the Phillips home. At the request of the family, she had not been moved to the dreary dead room at the City-County Hospital. Dr. Cummings, the family doctor, conducted the autopsy. Noticing that Eula’s “private parts” were “distended,” he wondered if she had engaged in intercourse just before her murder—or perhaps she had been “outraged.” But he could not come up with an answer.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 14
