In 1998, when I first heard about the murders, I had trouble believing the story was true. A lone man called the Midnight Assassin was wandering the streets of Austin with an ax, a knife, and an icepick, slaughtering women at will? And the famous moonlight towers had supposedly been built to keep him away? I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The whole tale seemed like something straight out of bad fiction. Besides, I said, if these murders had taken place, shouldn’t I have read about them in the history books?
Still, I was intrigued enough to head to the Austin Public Library and to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas to read the tiny, faded newsprint of nineteenth-century Texas newspapers preserved on microfilm. And it wasn’t long before I discovered that the Midnight Assassin was not only very real, he was unlike any killer in history—a sadistic but remarkably cunning monster who on some nights only wanted to scare women, who on other nights only wanted to assault them, and who, on seven nights between December 1884 and December 1885, decided to unleash all of his rage, tearing apart his victims so quickly that they didn’t have a chance to scream.
I actually found myself marveling at the audacity and the execution of his Christmas Eve killings: axing Susan Hancock just before midnight in the southern end of downtown, dragging her out to her backyard, and immediately racing to the northern end of downtown, only a couple of blocks from the police department, where he axed Eula Phillips and dragged her into her backyard.
What I found most astonishing about the Christmas Eve rampage was that the killer allowed Susan’s and Eula’s husbands, as well as Eula’s infant son, to live, just as he had allowed someone to live at the scenes of all of his other murders. He seemed utterly confident that he would not be seen—or, at least, identified. In that regard, he was absolutely correct. Of the eight people who were left alive at his various murder scenes, only two got a fleeting glimpse of him, and both of them were children: the seven-year-old son of Eliza Shelley, who thought the man was white, and the twelve-year-old nephew of Irene Cross, who thought the man was black.
The more I read, the more I was determined to get to the bottom of what Mayor Robertson had described as “the mystery of the murders.” I began digging through barely legible city records and police files, pored over more newspaper articles, and tried to decipher handwritten transcripts of inquests and examining trials. I held magnifying glasses over sepia-toned photographs, the edges of the photos disintegrating, the albumen in some places completed absorbed by the paper, and I looked for victim’s tombstones at the former city cemetery.
I also hunted down grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Austin residents who were affected by the murders, asking if any family stories had been passed down over the years about the Midnight Assassin. Almost everyone I contacted—including descendants of Grooms Lee, James Lucy, Sergeant Chenneville, Mayor Robertson, District Attorney Robertson, and Alexander P. Wooldridge—knew next to nothing about the murders. I placed a call to Dorothy Larson in California. Mrs. Larson is the granddaughter of Eula Phillips’s sister Alma. I told her that I was investigating the Austin murders of 1884 and 1885. There was a silence. Mrs. Larson said, “What murders?”
I asked Mrs. Larson if she knew how her great-aunt Eula had died. There was another silence, this one even longer. She finally said, “Eula? You know about Eula?”
She told me that her grandmother had rarely mentioned Eula during her lifetime, saying only that she had been found dead in an alley. “And now you are telling me she was murdered?” she asked.
I recounted what I knew of Eula: her marriage to the abusive Jimmy, her trips to Mrs. Tobin’s house of assignation, and her mutilated body discovered in the backyard. When I was finished, Mrs. Larson seemed to be holding back tears. She said, “So that explains why my grandmother would always say to me, ‘Honey, don’t ever do anything that would make you ashamed to see your name in the newspaper.’ It was her favorite phrase.”
We ended our conversation. A few days later, the phone rang. It was Mrs. Larson. She told me had searched through her garage and found a tattered photo album that her grandmother had kept throughout her life. Next to a photo taken of Alma as a young woman was a photo of another young woman. “I always wondered who the other girl was and why my grandmother had her photo,” Mrs. Larson said. “Now I realize it was a photo of Eula. All these years, Alma kept these memories of her sister—her beautiful, doomed sister.” She asked me to talk about Eula some more—what she looked like and how she had acted. “She must have been so lonely,” Mrs. Larson said when I finished. And then there was another very long silence.
* * *
As the months passed, I searched through even more Texas newspapers looking for details about the murders, and I traveled to the New York Public Library to read the New York World’s stories. I wrote an article about the Midnight Assassin for Texas Monthly magazine, hoping other descendants would read it and contact me with more clues. I did speak to Peyton Abbott, the grandson of V. O. Weed, who had been the employer of Rebecca and Mary Ramey. A resident of Colorado, Abbott told me that his grandfather had bought a police whistle in late 1885 to blow in case the killer came around a second time. “I’ve got the whistle in a little box if you want to come up here and look at it,” Abbott said. “But that’s about all I know.”
Months passed. On a map of Austin made in the 1880s, I marked where every murder had taken place. I tried to guess what escape route the killer would have taken and where he would have hidden. On a sheet of paper I wrote down the names of all the homeowners whose servant women were murdered, and I attempted to find out if there was any connection among them. Maybe they attended the same church. Maybe they went to Turner Hall on Tuesdays for its roller-skating night. On another sheet of paper I wrote down all the possible links between Mrs. Hancock and Eula, thinking there had to be some particular reason the Midnight Assassin targeted those two women.
But nothing turned up. Maybe, I said, completely reversing myself, it was pure coincidence that the Christmas Eve double murders ever took place at all. Maybe, after killing Mrs. Hancock, the Midnight Assassin had raced away on horseback, headed toward downtown, seen Eula leaving Mrs. Tobin’s house of assignation, and followed her home to kill her, too.
I decided to look through state prison records for information on the original black suspects who had been arrested in 1885 to try to find out if any of them had committed murder later in their lives. I came up empty. I did learn that Oliver Townsend, the chicken thief who had been sent to prison on a burglary charge in 1886, reportedly escaped from a prison chain gang in 1895, when he was in his midthirties. Yet there were no records indicating where he went or what he did.
I filed an open records request with the state attorney general’s office to review patient records from 1884 and 1885 at the State Lunatic Asylum, my goal being to find some notation that suggested one of the patients had been slipping out of the asylum at night. When the records were made available a year later, I read about a man who was obsessed with drinking his own urine and another man who was so convinced he was Napoleon Bonaparte that he wore a bicorne and an epaulet on his shoulder. I read about a teenager who believed that he had swallowed a stick of dynamite and was afraid he was about to explode, and I read about Lombard Stephens, the deranged patient in the Cross Pits who had sent Governor Ireland several letters vowing that he would eat the governor’s brains if he was not paid $500,000.
But there was no indication that any patient had been under suspicion for making his way to Austin to assault women. Nor was there any hint that a staffer, such as Dr. Given, the asylum’s assistant superintendent, had engaged in such behavior. I was so obsessed with Given that I contacted the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he had been a medical student in the 1870s. During those years, one of his classmates was Robert Louis Stevenson, who later would write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I wondered if Given exhibited any behavior during his years in Edinburgh that would
have inspired Stevenson to start formulating a story about a doctor whose mind seemed to be occupied by two seemingly opposite personalities, each striving for the upper hand. But once again, I came across nothing.
Like so many of Austin’s citizens back in the 1880s, I kept saying there was no way that the Midnight Assassin could have gone for an entire year killing women in such a small city and remaining unnoticed. He had to have done or said something that would have drawn at least a little suspicion. Nevertheless, my list of suspects was narrowing. At one point, I learned that Grooms Lee, the young man who had been named Austin’s marshal in December 1884, had never married and rarely associated with women. I came up with a theory that he harbored a secret but unrepentant hatred of women, which led him to become the Midnight Assassin. When I actually said this out loud to one of Lee’s descendants, a sweet, elderly woman named Lois Douglas who lived outside of Austin, she gave me a confused look and said, “I was always told that Grooms was a nice boy, a very nice boy with a good smile.” She pointed out that Lee had lived out the rest of his days in Austin, never causing a bit of trouble before he died in 1923. “He never wanted to hurt people,” Mrs. Douglas said politely. “I think you are very mistaken.”
* * *
Eventually, some friends and family members suggested that the time had come for me to move on. They seemed to be worried that I was following one too many rabbit trails. A man I knew pulled me aside at a party and said that I reminded him of one of those amateur researchers who had become obsessed with solving the mystery of President Kennedy’s assassination.
For a few years, I did stop researching the murders. I tried not to think about them. But one afternoon, when I was in San Antonio, I found myself visiting its public library to see what reports were available on the January 1886 killing of the San Antonio servant woman Patti Scott. I drove to the library in the north Texas town of Gainesville to see what information it had on the 1887 ax attacks on the two white teenagers, Mamie Bostwick and Genie Watkins.
Was the Midnight Assassin involved in those two incidents? I could not say for certain. But just like that, I was back on the hunt again, convinced that there was no way he simply could have stopped killing.
I looked into a rumor that Henry Holmes, who had carried out the grisly 1893 World’s Fair killings in Chicago, had spent time in Texas in the 1880s. It wasn’t true. (Holmes had come to Texas for a brief period after the Chicago killings.) I investigated another rumor that Eugene Burt, the son of Dr. William Burt, the staff physician of the City-County Hospital, was the Midnight Assassin. In 1896, at the age of twenty-six, Eugene had murdered his wife and two children with a hatchet and thrown their bodies down a cistern in the basement of their home. He was soon arrested, found guilty at trial, and executed. His relatives described him as a young man who had lost his mind.
Was it possible, I wondered, that Eugene’s desire to kill had started back in 1885, when he was only fifteen years old? I remembered that he had been one of the townspeople who had come to the Hancocks’ on Christmas Eve and that he had found the ax in the backyard that had been used to kill Mrs. Hancock. Did Eugene know all along where the ax was because he had put it there?
But at Eugene’s trial, his relatives said he was a mostly normal teenager until his father died in 1886, nearly a year after the Austin murders had come to an end. At that point, Eugene began to show “marked depravity.” Surely, I thought, if that depravity had emerged at a much younger age, someone would have noticed. And surely, if he had killed the Austin women, he would not have been able to wait a decade before killing again.
Although I seriously doubted that there was any connection between the Midnight Assassin and Jack the Ripper, I figured I had nothing to lose by traveling one weekend to Galveston’s library to see if the name of Maurice, the Malaysian cook, was listed on any of the ships that had left Galveston’s port for England between 1886 to 1888. His name was nowhere to be found. On another day, I called the senior curator of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Wyoming to ask if he had any information on the “three American cowboys” from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show who had stayed in London after the show ended and who had been questioned during the Jack the Ripper murders by London police detectives. Was it possible, I asked, to find out the names of those cowboys in hopes of learning if any of them had been living in Austin from 1884 to 1885? The curator lightly coughed and told me he would call me back. Needless to say, he did not.
I was able to trace the life of the Lakota Indian Black Elk, the other Buffalo Bill cast member who had been interrogated by the London police after he had accidentally been left behind by the show. When Black Elk returned to the United States in 1889, he went straight to his homeland: the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he was named one of the tribe’s medicine men. In December 1890, the U.S. Calvary attacked the Lakotas in what would become known as the Battle of Wounded Knee. Black Elk rode out to the battlefield, hoping to take of care of survivors and end the bloodshed, and he was grazed in the side by a soldier’s bullet. Black Elk lived until the age of eighty-seven, trying until the end of his life to promote harmony between white men and Native Americans. He published a famous autobiography, Black Elk Speaks, which is now considered a classic of Native American literature. In his book, he wrote that he had joined Cody’s show and come to England because “I wanted to see the great water, the great world and the ways of the white men.” But the legendary medicine man never wrote about those strange days when he was taken to Scotland Yard, suspected of having carried out savage attacks on women in Whitechapel.
Finally, I spent an hour talking to Shirley Harrison, a London “Ripperologist”—an amateur researcher obsessed with the Jack the Ripper killings—who believed that James Maybrick, a well-to-do English cotton merchant, had come to New Orleans in late 1884 for the beginning of the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, slipped over to Austin to do the killings, and then returned to London to become Jack the Ripper. Although Harrison admitted to me that she had little proof whatsoever to back up her claims—and I could find no evidence Maybrick ever came to Texas—she chuckled and said that her theory “makes as much sense as anything you’ve come up with.”
In all fairness, I couldn’t argue with her. Because there are so many unanswered questions about what exactly had happened on those dark Austin streets in 1884 and 1885—so little in the way of physical evidence, or police records—no suspect can be dismissed entirely. Even the most sober scenario regarding the identity of the Midnight Assassin holds no more water than the most hare-brained.
And maybe that is why, all these years later, the story remains so haunting. We are as fascinated by what we do not know as by what we do know. Indeed, in many ways, the rampage of the Midnight Assassin is the perfect crime story—a rip-roaring whodunit of murder, madness, and scandal, replete with the sorts of twists and shocks that give a page-turner its good name.
Except there is one catch. There is no dramatic last-act revelation, no drum-roll finale. Everything ends up precisely where it started, in a gray limbo of unknowing. The trail of clues just stops, like bewildered bloodhounds baying in the night.
* * *
I’ve often been asked what would happen if the Midnight Assassin were operating today. The answer is that he most likely would have been caught after the first murder, of Mollie Smith. Police detectives would have at their disposal an array of forensic tools—DNA tests, fingerprints, and blood typing—to find their man. They would be able to study security footage from cameras along city streets, and they would have dozens of patrol officers following up on citizens’ tips. If they got stuck, they would be able to call the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask for a team of agents trained in behavioral science to fly in from Quantico.
But then, who knows for sure? As that New York World reporter wrote in 1886, the Midnight Assassin did indeed “give to history a new story of crime.” He was a performance artist with a signature style, a
pparently operating without any apparent motive, destroying his victims for nothing more than the pure pleasure it brought him. He sent a city spiraling into chaos—and then, improbably, he disappeared forever, faceless and elusive, without even taking a bow.
And more than a century later, we still do not know his name.
Was the Midnight Assassin a barefoot black man from an impoverished neighborhood? Was he a lunatic from the asylum? Was he some sort of itinerant madman who spent a year in Austin before moving on? Or was he a gentleman who wore a Stetson and a fine suit and whose daily demeanor gave no indication that he possessed any talent for crime?
I remain convinced—or perhaps it’s better to say that I remain full of hope—that the answer is still out there, locked up inside some musty filing cabinet in the Austin police archives or buried in someone’s attic among long-forgotten letters that have grown moldy with age. I continue to beg anyone who has any information about the killings—any theory at all—to contact me. But, I have to admit, I have never forgotten a conversation that I had with Peyton Abbott, the grandson of V. O. Weed, who had bought the police whistle to blow whenever the Midnight Assassin returned.
“The old man kept that whistle with him for the rest of his life, waiting to blow it, knowing the killer was out there,” Abbott told me. “But he never blew that whistle—not once.”
After a pause, Abbott asked me a question. “If no one could catch the killer back when he was alive, what makes you think you can catch him now?”
When I wasn’t sure what to say, he chuckled softly. “Sometimes, you just have to accept the fact that some mysteries are never solved,” he said, and chuckled again. “That’s why they are mysteries, you know.”
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer Page 25
