Spitzka then spent several minutes expounding on the behavior of Jack the Ripper, describing how he would slaughter a woman without being seen, slip away, and emerge weeks later to slaughter again. Spitzka told his audience that the Ripper’s killings were so expertly carried out that he must have honed his technique somewhere else before coming to Whitechapel.
And that very place, Spitzka said after a pause, had to be in Austin, Texas, which had experienced murders that were “terribly similar in every detail” to the Whitechapel killings, in which the victims were “so mutilated that they fell apart on being lifted up.”
Spitzka continued, “I would suggest that the same hand that committed the Whitechapel murders committed the Texas murders.” He went on to describe this man as having possessed “Herculean strength, great bodily agility, a brutal jaw, a strange, weird expression of the eye—a man who has contracted no healthy friendships, who is in his own heart as isolated from the rest of the world as the rest of mankind is repelled by him.”
Perhaps most disturbing, Spitzka added, was that there was no telling where this Texan was today. Spitzka speculated that he may have already “discontinued his work” in London and moved to another city to create his “bewildering horror.” Perhaps, said Spitzka, he had returned to the United States and was right there in New York City.
Spitzka even suggested that the murderer of the Texas and Whitechapel women “could be sitting among us at this moment” so that he could hear all the speeches being made about him!
There was a silence. Some of the men in the hall broke out into nervous laughter. But the great Spitzka did not crack a smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In February 1889, just two months after Dr. Spitzka’s speech, the New York Sun printed a startling story from the city of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. According to the newspaper, the bodies of six women had been found in that city over a period of ten days.
“Like the women of Whitechapel, they were women who had sunk to the lowest degradations of their calling,” stated the Sun. “They have been found murdered just as mysteriously, and the evidence points to almost identical methods. Two were found butchered out of all recognition. Even their faces were most horribly slashed, and in the cases of all the others their persons were frightfully disfigured. There is no doubt that a sharp instrument, violently but dexterously used, was the weapon that sent the poor creatures out of the world.”
The Sun’s story was picked up by the wire services and reprinted in newspapers everywhere, from the London Times to the Taranaki Herald in New Zealand to the Daily Republican in Mitchell, South Dakota. Reporters eagerly speculated that, as Dr. Spitzka had predicted, the Herculean man was on the move. In Austin, under the headline, “Is It the Foul Fiend Himself?,” the Daily Statesman wrote, “From the surrounding circumstances, does it not seem possible that one and the same person—some wandering, bloody demon, who, after finishing his dreadful tasks, seems to vanish with supernatural skill—may be the author of the Austin homicides, the Whitechapel butcheries and the Central American assassinations?”
It was soon discovered, however, that the entire story was a hoax: police in Nicaragua had not issued any report about prostitutes being killed. Apparently, the Sun’s editors had made up the tale just to sell more newspapers. They had learned, as had other newspapers, that any scoop involving Jack the Ripper would give them whopping newsstand sales for that day.
Spitzka continued to push his Herculean-man theory. He published a paper for the Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease that reiterated the points he’d made in his New York speech, claiming that one killer had used a small city in Texas as his training ground, honing his skills until he was ready to travel to London, the world’s greatest metropolis, to become Jack the Ripper. He went into more detail about the killer, describing him as a man driven by either “singular antipathies” or “romantic notions of revenge.”
Yet other alienists found Spitzka’s scenario just too hard to swallow. For one thing, the Herculean man’s travel itinerary—Texas straight to England—didn’t make much sense. If he was obsessed with ripping apart women, wouldn’t he have stopped somewhere in between Texas and England to do a few killings? After carrying out the seven murders in Austin between 1884 and 1885—which was followed by the murder in San Antonio of Patti Scott a month later, which was followed by the Gainesville attacks of July 1887—would this Herculean man really have stayed hidden away for a year before reemerging in Whitechapel, of all places, in late August 1888?
Maybe, as one New York reporter wrote, a literate but very disturbed man in London had “read about the Austin murders,” which in turn had inspired him to become “the gory slasher of Whitechapel.” But that would be about the only connection. The most likely scenario was that the Texas killer was still in Texas.
* * *
But if that was the case, what had happened to him? At this point, more than three years had passed since an Austin woman had been assaulted or murdered. Marshal Lucy was no longer conducting an official investigation into any of the murders. All of the leads had dried up. There were no more phone calls from tipsters, and no one was coming forward to say he had overheard someone making a drunken confession at one of the saloons. As far as Lucy was concerned, there was nothing more to do.
Similarly, District Attorney Robertson had given up attempting to prosecute anyone for any of the murders. By then, he had decided not to retry Moses Hancock, just as he had earlier decided not to retry Jimmy Phillips, and he had decided to stop pushing his grand jury to come up with new indictments.
Was there a reason Robertson had backed off taking anyone to trial? Had he known all along that he had lacked the evidence to secure a conviction? Robertson wouldn’t say. He seemed perfectly content just to forget about the murders altogether. As long as they had stopped, why stir the pot?
Besides, he was hoping to be appointed to the office of state district judge to replace Judge Walker. The last thing he needed was a rival accusing him of botching the prosecutions of the Austin killings.
On Congress Avenue, at restaurants and in the saloons, some citizens continued to swap theories about what had happened to their city. Interestingly, there were plenty of people who were still of the opinion that there never was a Midnight Assassin. They adamantly believed the murders had been committed by uneducated “bad blacks.” A few even stuck with the mystical “killing mania” theory. The Daily Statesman printed a long interview with a detective from Memphis who was visiting Austin. He said he had been studying the Austin murders and had concluded that both lower-class black criminals and well-regarded white men had been affected by some mystical “suggestion” to murder their girlfriends or wives.
At least some of Austin’s residents had to have been comforted by the fact that only a couple of men who had been suspects in the original murders were still living in Austin in 1889. Walter Spencer, Mollie Smith’s boyfriend, remained at his mother’s home, working at the brick factory, and Anastazio Martinez, the mentally unbalanced Mexican ragpicker, continued to reside at the State Lunatic Asylum. According to a staffer’s report, Martinez quietly spent his days “cultivating flowers in the front yard.”
As for Oliver Townsend, the infamous chicken thief, he had been sent away to the state prison to serve out a ten-year sentence on what appeared to be a trumped-up burglary charge. Not wishing to suffer the same fate as Townsend, other black suspects like Dock Woods had packed up and left Austin for good.
The white suspects were also gone. Moses Hancock had given up his carpentry business, sold his home on Water Street, and moved to Waco, where people didn’t stare at him on the streets. Jimmy Phillips had moved with his young son to the town of Georgetown, forty miles north, where he had found a job at a chair factory. He rarely mentioned the events of 1885 except to complain about his recurring headaches from his ax wound. He met and married a young woman who lived across the street, raised four more children, taught all of them to play music
al instruments, and started the Phillips Family Band, which performed at local events.
And William Swain had moved to Houston. After his loss in the 1886 gubernatorial race, he had never been able to build a successful law practice in Austin. Nor had he been able to overcome the rumors that he had been Eula Phillips’s lover and perhaps was involved in her murder. In 1888, according to a story in the Daily Statesman, when a young woman named Maria Dowd, who had rented a floor of a home owned by Swain’s son Walter, got into a dispute over her lease and was evicted, she strode up to Walter and snapped, “Your whole family is just as low as can be. Your father before you was a midnight murderer, and you are no better!” Once he left for Houston to join another law firm, Swain was rarely seen in Austin again.
Mae Tobin was also nowhere to be found. Despite the deal she had made with Mayor Robertson’s administration allowing her to maintain her house of assignation off Congress Avenue in exchange for her testimony in Jimmy Phillips’s trial, new mayor Joseph Nalle unapologetically had ordered Marshal Lucy to have Tobin escorted out of town. Her house had then mysteriously burned to the ground. “When the last flames were extinguished and the smoking remains were examined,” a Daily Statesman reporter wrote, “it was plain to be seen that no more scandals would be hatched within its walls; no more victims to murder would be selected from those who frequented its confines; and that all that would be left of it was a charred and blackened mass of weatherboarding, odiferous carpets and ruined second-hand furniture.”
Nalle seemed determined to do everything he could to erase all memories of the killings. He proved himself to be as worthy a boomer as his predecessor Robertson, declaring in one speech, “Crimes of a serious nature are almost totally unknown in our midst. A sense of security dwells among the humblest as well as the highest, and a general observance of the law among all classes is a conspicuous virtue that is not passed unnoticed by those who come among us.”
Yet the memories—and the fear—were never completely extinguished. Residents were still coming to the Avenue to buy electric burglar alarms, door locks, sleeping potions, and tonics for the nerves. At night, before going to sleep, men set their rifles and pistols beside their beds. One widow, Mrs. Delores Johnson, who was described as among the city’s “kindest and most charitable ladies,” kept a pistol under her pillow. She and her husband, Dr. Lucian Johnson (who had died earlier that year from natural causes), had been the employers of Eliza Shelley, the servant woman who had been murdered in her quarters behind the Johnsons’ home back in May 1885. Mrs. Johnson had been so horrified by what had happened—and so determined that nothing like that would ever happen to her—that she had kept the pistol as close to her as possible.
But that July, while Mrs. Johnson was changing the sheets of her bed, the pistol fell to the floor, discharged, and sent a bullet into her abdomen, almost instantly killing her. The news devastated Austin’s residents. It was a cruel twist of fate, they said, that Mrs. Johnson had become one more victim of the Austin killings.
* * *
Throughout that year of 1889, Alexander P. Wooldridge, the president of the City National Bank who had led the Citizen’s Committee of Safety in the aftermath of the 1885 Christmas Eve killings, had been meeting with members of Austin’s Board of Trade (the precursor to the Chamber of Commerce) to discuss an idea that he believed would restore Austin’s reputation as one of America’s great new cities. He wanted the city to build a sixty-foot-high dam on the Colorado River, upstream from Austin, and send the runoff water through an adjoining power station—or “dynamo,” as it was then called—to create low-cost electricity.
Wooldridge had originally come up with the idea of a dam one year earlier, claiming that farmers around Austin would be able to use the runoff water to irrigate farmland and grow more crops. But the idea was tabled by a majority of the board members, who wanted instead to promote Austin’s religious and social institutions and its temperate climate. Now, with his new proposal for a dynamo, Wooldridge had a better argument. Not only would the owners of factories and manufacturing plants want to move to Austin to take advantage of the dynamo, there would be enough electricity left over for the city to power electric streetcars and to install as many streetlights as it wanted.
Mayor Nalle opposed Wooldridge’s proposal, claiming that the cost to build a dam, which was estimated to be at least $1.4 million, would send the city into “ruinous” financial circumstances. Furthermore, he said, there was no telling what the dynamo would cost.
To Nalle’s surprise, however, the Board of Trade was thrilled with Wooldridge’s idea—and so were Austin’s citizens. At the December 1889 city elections, they voted Nalle out of office and voted in John McDonald, a building contractor and unabashed supporter of the dam. A new set of candidates for aldermen, all of them dam supporters, also won their elections, and they quickly agreed to hold a bond election to raise the money to build the dam and the dynamo.
The election was not held for another year; it took place on May 6, 1890. Nevertheless, public support for the project did not waver. The bond package passed by an overwhelming margin, and several hundred citizens gathered on Congress Avenue to celebrate. “A band played and rockets were sent high up to the heavens. Great crackers were fired and Roman candles and colored lights illuminated the whole city,” wrote the Daily Statesman, which also pointedly noted that among those on the Avenue were “scores of ladies, all in high feather and rejoicing with exceeding great joy.”
Were the women celebrating the dam? Or were they celebrating the fact that lights were coming that would allow them, for the first time in at least five years, to walk the streets at night without fear? Was it because they believed the Midnight Assassin would no longer want to live in a city that never went dark?
The Daily Statesman did not say. It did not refer at all to the murders. Its reporter simply concluded his story with the line, “Things are brighter and more hopeful for us than ever before in the history of Austin.… It is hurrah and huzzah and tol-de-roll loll!”
* * *
It took three years for the dam to be completed, after which work began on the dynamo. Mayor McDonald and the aldermen met and agreed to spend $153,000 on a “citywide lighting system.” Instead of choosing a more modest plan involving more electric streetlights on top of twenty-foot-high poles, like the ones Mayor Nalle had installed when he first took office, McDonald and the aldermen decided to go with the arc lamps, set on very tall towers. With such towers, there not only would be plenty of light, but drunk cowboys leaving the saloons on Saturday nights wouldn’t be able to shoot out the lamps the way they had been shooting out the electric lights that had been stationed on the downtown streets.
Ironically, in 1893, there was only one American city—Detroit, Michigan—that was still using the taller arc lamps, and officials there were preparing to take them down and return to streetlights. Like other cities that had tried them, Detroit officials had found the lamps too expensive to maintain. Indeed, arc lamps no longer captivated the country the way they once had—except in Austin. McDonald and his staff cut a deal with Detroit officials to buy thirty-one of their towers. Made of wrought iron and cast iron, they looked like miniature Eiffel Towers. Each of them was 165 feet tall and weighed approximately 5,000 pounds. To keep them from falling over in a windstorm, guy wires were connected from their triangular frameworks to the ground. On top of each tower, a ring of six high-powered carbon arc lamps were installed.
As opposed to other cities that had put their arc lamps only above railroad depots and downtown shopping districts, Austin’s officials placed their lamps across the city to cover as much ground as possible. Finally, on May 5, 1895, everything was ready. At 8 p.m., a switch was flipped at the dynamo, and the turbines started churning, sending electricity racing toward Austin as the engineers gave the lights a ninety-minute test. “There was a sudden blinding flash and the town was in a blaze of white light that hid the rays of the moonlight with its brilliancy,” observ
ed a Daily Statesman reporter. “In every nook and corner the brilliant lights sent their shooting rays and the whole face of creation was transcendent.”
Startled, everyone poured out of their houses to stare at the light. It was so strong, shooting out from each tower in every direction for more than 3,000 feet, that people could read the time on their watches and recognize their neighbors three or four houses away.
“From every section of the city loud shouts of joy were heard,” the Daily Statesman reporter wrote. “All up and down the Avenue gentlemen were sauntering along, meeting, shaking hands and congratulating one another on the successful outcome of their long cherished scheme.”
Once again, the newspaper did not directly connect the arc lamps to the murders. But the reporter did happen to write that Austin’s residents had spent years “groping around in that darkness that threatened the life and safety of all.” They had been forced to nervously walk streets that were “steeped in utter darkness.” Now, he declared, the people of Austin had “every cause for rejoicing” because the fear of the night was gone forever. “For an hour and a half, the citizens were permitted to gaze at that which might justly be said to be the dawn of a new era in Austin’s history … the hour of Austin’s triumph … the realization of Austin’s golden dream.”
In the 1890s Austin erected giant “moonlight towers,” which some residents hoped would keep the Midnight Assassin away for good.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 23
