Indeed, he concluded, “The brilliant day of prosperity is now near at hand.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
As the weeks passed, there were, predictably, some residents who didn’t like the lamps. They complained about the buzzing sound the lights made. They were bothered by the ash from the carbon that drifted down onto their heads, singeing their hair. The city’s gardeners were worried that the constant light would cause their corn and bean stalks to grow around the clock, which would require them to use saws to cut the plants down, and owners of chicken coops feared their chickens would ceaselessly lay eggs twenty-four hours a day until they dropped dead from exhaustion. The drunken cowboys who came to town on Saturday nights were not deterred at all by the tall towers. They circled them on their horses, firing their pistols at the lights, whooping with glee.
Nevertheless, the members of the Board of Trade were so delighted with the lamps that they decided to change Austin’s official nickname from “City of the Violet Crown” (in honor of Austin’s stunning sunsets) to “The City of Eternal Moonlight.” The board published a pamphlet encouraging all Texans to move to Austin to enjoy the benefits of “the greatest illumination of electric light” ever seen in the state. Exuberant real estate developers began building more homes under the moonlight towers, telling potential buyers that they would never again have to worry about crime. One developer, Monroe Martin Snipes, told customers that the upper-class neighborhood he had built on a swath of land in north Austin, which he was calling Hyde Park, was unsurpassed in America. It not only had a moonlight tower, he said, it had “the coolest weather in Austin, the best streets, and absolutely no dust, mud, tenants, liquor or Negroes.”
In 1898, three years after the moonlight towers had been erected, Marshal Lucy retired, saying his work was done. He went into private business, taking a job as a vice president of the American Surety Company. The new marshal, Robert Thorp, asked for Sergeant Chenneville’s resignation, saying it was time for the old cop to go, his body worn out from all the years he had spent chasing criminals. But Chenneville wasn’t able to give up law enforcement completely. He went to work for a private detective agency in Austin called the Merchant Police and Southern Detective Agency, and he kept his bloodhounds in his backyard, in case they were ever again needed.
Even after they had left the police department, neither Lucy nor Chenneville spoke to the newspapers about what they believed had happened in Austin in 1884 and 1885. They never revealed their opinions about the attacks—whether they had been carried out by one man or many. They never speculated—at least not in public—about the existence of a Midnight Assassin.
They weren’t the only ones who stayed quiet. After he left office, Mayor Robertson did not speak about the murders, either. His brother James, who did become a state district judge, also said nothing. And the once effusive Dr. Denton of the State Lunatic Asylum never addressed the rumors that one of his own patients had been slipping out at night to chop up women.
What’s more, as far as can be determined, Denton never again spoke about his son-in-law, Dr. Given, the asylum’s former assistant superintendent who had been legally declared insane six weeks after the Christmas Eve murders. Only a few months after Given had been sent to the branch asylum in the North Texas town of Terrell, he had died of what asylum officials in Terrell described only as “paralysis.” Did it turn out that he had been stricken with a bout of syphilis that had made its way to his brain? Denton would never say. He obviously wanted to put that part of his life behind him. By the time the moonlight towers were turned on, he had left the asylum to open the Austin Sanitarium for Nervous and Mental Diseases, a small private hospital filled mostly with wealthy women who suffered afflictions ranging from headaches to hysteria.
A lot of people were ready to put the murders behind them. At least a half-dozen histories of Texas were published in the decade between 1885 and 1895, and not one of them made any reference to the story that Austin had been terrorized by a Midnight Assassin. The California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, who had sent his researcher and ghostwriter J. W. Olds to Austin in August 1885, right at the height of the killings, had decided the murders were not significant enough to fit into his lofty 841-page opus, History of the North Mexican States and Texas: 1531–1889. In his two-volume History of Texas from 1685 to 1892, the well-known Texas newspaperman and historian John Henry Brown also ignored the murders, preferring instead to focus on such heroes as Sam Houston, who led Texas in its fight for independence from Mexican rule. Needless to say, Mrs. Anna Pennybacker, the very proper schoolteacher who wrote a textbook in 1888 for the state’s public schools, A New History of Texas, did not think it was appropriate for the children of Texas to be reading about women being chopped to pieces.
Even the young writer William Sydney Porter, who had written a letter to a friend back in May 1885 about the “Servant Girl Annihilators,” never returned to the subject. In 1894, when he started an Austin humor magazine that he titled Rolling Stone, he didn’t make one reference to the murders, and he didn’t write about them when he moved to New York City—after having served a three-year prison stint for embezzling money from an Austin bank, where he had briefly worked as a teller. In New York, he published nearly five hundred short stories under his pen name O. Henry. Several of his characters were based on people he had met in Texas or in prison. He wrote about bums, swindlers, kidnappers, and safecrackers. He wrote stories about a stagecoach robber named Black Bart and an Old West outlaw named the Cisco Kid. But he didn’t use the killings as fodder for any of his writing. He didn’t create his own fictional version of a Midnight Assassin. Apparently he had concluded that the entire saga was far too grisly for his more lighthearted literary temperament.
At least for a while, the Austin killings did remain a topic of interest among the country’s alienists. When they met at New York’s Academy of Medicine—the very place where Dr. Spitzka had delivered his infamous speech claiming that the Midnight Assassin and Jack the Ripper were the same “Herculean” man—they periodically discussed the issue of “moral insanity,” which at the time was considered to be a medical condition, no different than a physical illness, afflicting those who in almost all ways were normal except that they were unable to control certain emotions. At one meeting, several alienists declared the servant girl assassinations were a prime example of the damage that a morally insane man could inflict on society with his “abnormal conduct.” In this case, he couldn’t control his ingrained hatred of women.
The alienists came up with a list of factors that they believed would lead seemingly normal human beings with “unimpaired mental facilities” to come down with moral insanity and go on a killing rampage. Some declared that the morally insane were obviously the offspring of “intermarriage among criminals and drunkards.” Others said they must have suffered some sort of childhood injury, such as a blow to the head or a mental shock that destroyed part of their mental capabilities. There were alienists who argued that certain people had been born with “impaired or defective nervous tissue” that led them to a life of crime. Dr. Graeme M. Hamfriend, a professor of nervous and mental diseases at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital, declared in one speech, “As the artist and musician get their power of artistic creation from some brain conformation that was born in them, so this criminal gets his life tendency in the same way.”
And there were a few alienists who advocated a theory that had first been formulated by the German alienist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In 1886, he had published a scholarly work titled Psychopathia Sexualis, which was regarded as the first-ever academic study of sexual perversion: page after page of information about pederasts, satyrs, rapists, sadomasochists, masturbators, homosexuals, child molesters, and fetishists (people obsessed with certain parts of the body or with objects like handkerchiefs). After the Jack the Ripper murders, Krafft-Ebing had updated his book to include a section on men who committed what the Germans called Lustmord: lust murder
. Krafft-Ebing was convinced that these men found ultimate physical pleasure—“a state of exaltation, an intense excitation of the entire psycho-motor sphere”—in the murder of women, followed by savage postmortem mutilations on their bodies. For some alienists, the Midnight Assassin was the perfect embodiment of Krafft-Ebing’s “lust murderer.”
At their meetings, the alienists did try to come up with ways to identify and stop a morally insane “monstrosity” like the Midnight Assassin before he wreaked his particular havoc. Dr. Allan McClaine Hamilton, the attending physician at the New York Hospital for Nervous Disease, who was often described in the press as a “famous insanity expert,” advocated for a nationwide sterilization program that he hoped would prevent such men from ever being born in the first place. “The state should have the right to forbid the marriages of habitual criminals, or persons of insane heritage and of consumptives,” he declared. “Further than that, habitual criminals should be prevented from having children altogether.… The least that can be said is that society has the right to protect itself from [the morally insane] just as it has the right to protect itself from mad dogs.”
But Hamilton and the other alienists did not have to be told that they had little chance of protecting innocent citizens from men who were able to conceal their depraved personalities behind masks of normality. In October 1895—five months after Austin’s moonlight towers had been erected—the news broke that Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, a wealthy and well-educated graduate of the University of Michigan’s medical school, had been accused of murdering at least twenty women he had met at a hotel he had built in Chicago to house out-of-town visitors for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Holmes had killed his victims in windowless rooms, usually by asphyxiation, and then had whisked their bodies down a secret chute into the basement, where he had dissected them and later sold their organs and skeletons to medical schools.
What was perhaps most disturbing about Holmes’s murders was that he had carried them out over a period of six months without arousing the slightest suspicion. It wasn’t until he was arrested in Boston for other murders that his scheme in Chicago was discovered.
The ghastly tale was splashed on the front pages of newspapers around the country, including the Daily Statesman. At least, some of Austin’s residents must have said after reading the story, the city of Chicago had been able to find its killer. At least Chicago had some sort of ending.
* * *
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the Midnight Assassin was still being ignored by Texas historians. But people in Austin hadn’t forgotten about him—not completely. Children had devised their own nickname for the Midnight Assassin: they called him the “Axe Man.” They raced for their homes as the sun was setting, shouting to one another that the Axe Man was hiding in the shadows just beyond the light of the moonlight towers, waiting for them to come close so he could grab them.
“We all heard stories that he had never left, that he was walking the streets,” said Mrs. Myrtle Callan, who was born in Austin in 1902 and after college taught history for many years at the city’s Texas School of the Deaf. In the last years of her life, Mrs. Callan compiled forty-six scrapbooks about Austin’s history and she frequently received guests in her little gray-painted home who wanted to know more about the city’s past. “I’d ask my parents what he did to those women, but they wouldn’t talk about it,” she told a visitor in the spring of 2002, a few years before her death at the age of 105. “They didn’t want me to have nightmares. But I did. He was like a ghost.”
He wasn’t the only ghost. Some residents swore that they saw a young woman, dressed in a white gown, her complexion like marble, walking the grounds of the new state capitol late at night. Others said they had seen her at the foot of Congress Avenue, near the spot where Mae Tobin had run her house of assignation. It was the ghost of Eula Phillips, they believed—warning other women to live chaste lives, else they would be killed, too.
And there were days when an elderly black woman would be seen hobbling along the Avenue. But she was no phantom. It was Rebecca Ramey, the mother of young Mary, who had been slaughtered in V. O. Weed’s backyard shed. Rebecca now lived at the home of another daughter, Minnie. Because of the blows she herself had received during the long-ago attack, her brain was damaged and her face still disfigured. Whenever she walked the Avenue with her family, pedestrians passing by turned their heads so they didn’t have to look at her.
Rebecca died in 1910. As far as can be determined, she was the last female survivor of the attacks—at least the last one who was in Austin. It is not clear what happened to Lucinda Boddy and Patsy Gibson, the two young servant women who had suffered severe head injuries after being assaulted in Gracie Vance’s servants’ quarters. Because Lucinda and Patsy had been unable to work or care for themselves, they were most likely taken to the County Poor Farm, where many infirm and elderly blacks were sent to live out the rest of their lives. Without medical treatment, it’s hard to imagine they lived for very long. They would have been buried in unmarked graves at the back of the farm—two more victims of the killings.
For years, the murders had a long, lingering effect on Austin’s black population. Jim Crow policies came early to Austin because of the white residents’ fear—and distrust—of the “bad blacks.” Just after the turn of the century, the city aldermen passed an ordinance that required the separation of blacks and whites on streetcars. There were also proposals to move all the black residents to East Austin. If kept in one place, said many whites, the police would have less trouble keeping tabs on all the city’s worst black characters.
The city’s black leaders were routinely ignored by the white establishment. In truth, for a long time, there were no black leaders at all. After Albert Carrington’s loss to a white man in the aldermen’s race in 1885, during the height of the murders, it would not be until 1971 that a black man was again elected to the city council.
* * *
By the 1930s, all of the homes and servants’ quarters where the attacks had occurred were gone, demolished in the name of progress, replaced by bigger homes, office buildings, a bank, a restaurant, and, at one point, a parking lot for automobiles. New residents arrived and the city grew far beyond the light of the arc lamps. A couple of towers were dismantled because they were considered unstable, and others were taken down to make way for construction projects. One was knocked over by an errant vehicle. During World War II, city officials ordered that a central switch be installed at the city’s electric department that could be used to immediately turn off all the lamps in case there was a Nazi or Japanese air raid. But the switch was never used. The lamps on top of the towers kept burning, night after night, still symbolically protecting Austin’s citizens from the dark.
Of course, even with the lamps, Austin wasn’t spared from evil—at times, unimaginable evil. On a sunny morning in August 1966, a twenty-five-year-old architectural engineering major named Charles Whitman, who had been complaining of searing headaches and depression, took an elevator to the observation deck of the 307-f00t-high University of Texas Tower, which had been built in 1937. According to one newspaper’s description, Whitman was “a good son, a top Boy Scout, an excellent Marine, an honor student, a hard worker, a loving husband, a fine scout master, a handsome man, a wonderful friend to all who knew him—and an expert sniper.” He pulled out an M-1 carbine rifle, aimed at the pedestrians below, and in the space of ninety-six minutes shot forty-three people, killing thirteen, before he himself was gunned down by an Austin police officer. One reporter later wrote that the tower killings “introduced the nation to the idea of mass murder in a public space.”
Whitman, of course, was chronicled in an array of history books. He was analyzed by psychiatrists, the new name for alienists, who used such modern terms as “psychopath” instead of “morally insane” to explain his behavior. Numerous journalists studied his childhood, his years in the military, and even his brain chemistry. They noted the impact Whitman
’s shootings had made on Austin’s ordinary citizens, leaving them trembling with terror, haunted for the rest of their lives.
And what about the Midnight Assassin, who eighty-one years earlier had introduced the nation to the idea of serial murder?
Incredibly, he remained forgotten by historians. It was as if he had walked out of history altogether. It was as if he had never existed.
EPILOGUE
“If no one could catch the killer back when he was alive, what makes you think you can catch him now?”
Austin in the 1890s, seemingly a city at peace
Today, Austin is 271 square miles in size with a population of nearly one million residents. More than 55,000 students attend the University of Texas and another 50,000 citizens work for the state government. The city has become renowned as a haven for technology companies, research consortiums, advertising agencies, and filmmakers. Because there are nearly a hundred bars and nightclubs that feature musical groups, Austin’s official nickname has now become “the Live Music Capital of the World.”
A few landmarks remain from 1885: the granite-pink state capitol, of course, as well as the governor’s mansion; the Driskill Hotel; the Corinthian-columned administrative building of the State Lunatic Asylum, which is now known as the Austin State Hospital; Millett’s Opera House, which has become a private dining club; a few other downtown buildings; and a handful of private homes that had been built for the city’s wealthiest residents.
And scattered around the city are fifteen moonlight towers. They are essentially useless, the pale glow of the lamps barely visible above the harsher glare coming from hundreds of electric and mercury lights closer to the streets. But they are not going anywhere. In the 1970s, city officials were able to get the towers designated as state and national historical landmarks. In their written applications to obtain such designations, the officials never mentioned the murders. They didn’t explain that Austin residents in the late 1880s had wanted the towers erected because they were still very anxious about what lurked in the dark. The towers were simply described as quaint, nostalgic relics of a time gone by, as much a part of Austin as the streetcars are of San Francisco.
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 24
