Between December 1884 and December 1885, six women and a twelve year old girl were found murdered in the small city of Austin, Texas, their bodies mutilated by axes, knives, bricks and even iron rods that had been driven into their ears. At the time, the concept of a serial killer was unknown. Clueless police officers and bumbling private detectives initially made arrests of uneducated young black men. But as the murders continued, panic-stricken citizens began to speculate that a diabolical but brilliant "Midnight Assassin" was on the loose: a man driven to destroy one woman after another in almost ritualistic fashion. A correspondent for the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's famous newspaper, went so far as to declare that the Midnight Assassin's attacks "may well give to history a new story of crime—the first instance of a man who killed in order to gratify his passion."

Before the violent spree ended, at least a dozen men, among them husbands and boyfriends of the victims, would be arrested in connection with the murders. One of the killings would set off a torrid sex scandal involving several of the city's most prominent leaders, including a candidate for governor. And three years later, after no progress had been made in the Austin investigation, detectives in London would speculate that the Midnight Assassin had traveled to England and become Jack the Ripper.

Who was the Midnight Assassin and why did he go on such a rampage? Esquire is proud to present the first two chapters of Skip Hollandsworth's book , out today. The story begins in the early morning hours of December 31, 1884—New Year's Eve.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE FIRST MURDER, the telegraph lines began buzzing with news about a storm making its way south from the Canadian Rockies. A Western Union operator in Sioux City, Iowa, punched out the words "13 degrees at 2:00 p.m. . . . ice . . . trains slowing."

It was a blue norther, people were saying, the oncoming clouds low and dark blue along the horizon. The storm swooped through the Great Plains, where the cattle turned their rumps against the wind, and then it rushed into Texas, moving so quickly that a cowboy, traveling on horseback across a treeless stretch of land near the town of Archer City, froze to death before he could find shelter. According to a newspaper account, when the cowboy was finally found, he was slumped on the ground, a rim of ice covering his mustache, his eyelids, and the edges of his hat.

Courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

When the norther reached the city of Austin, the capital of Texas, in the early morning hours of December 31, 1884—New Year's Eve—it was still cold enough to drop thermometers there by another thirty degrees. The wind knifed through the cracks in the houses, rattling coffee cups laid out on kitchen tables. Ice bounced off the roofs like dried peas. A young man named Tom Chalmers, who was lying in bed at the home of his brother-in-law on the western edge of the city, heard a knocking sound at the front door. Chalmers then heard the voice of a man.

"Help me."

Chalmers and his wife, who lived outside Austin on a small ranch, had come to the city earlier that week to celebrate the holidays. They were the only ones at the home that evening. Chalmers's brother-in-law William Hall, an insurance agent, was with his wife in the coastal city of Galveston, where they had once lived, visiting friends.

The knocking at the door persisted. "Help me," the man shouted again.

Chalmers was not an easy man to intimidate. A former member of the Texas Rangers, the state's police force, he had once been featured in the Austin Daily Statesman after he had been thrown by his horse, face-first, onto the ground, breaking all of his front teeth. The article had congratulated Chalmers on his fortitude, noting that he had spit out his broken teeth, returned to his horse, and kept riding.

On this frigid evening, however, he was not all that eager to leave his warm bed. Then he heard the front door open.

The home of Chalmers's brother-in-law was one of Austin's nicer residences, more than 2,000 square feet in size, with two chimneys and ten-foot ceilings. The master bedroom was toward the back of the house. Chalmers rose, crept to the bedroom doorway, and peered down the hall. He had no weapon: his gun was sitting in another part of the house. In the deep gloom of the foyer, he saw a man move past the draperies and stagger over the wooden floors. Based on what Chalmers later told police and newspaper reporters, the man said, "Mr. Tom, Mr. Tom, for God's sakes, do something to help me! Somebody has nearly killed me!"

Chalmers lit a match and held it before him. The light flickered across the face of Walter Spencer, a twenty-nine-year-old black man who worked as a laborer at Butler's Brick Yard. Spencer was also the boyfriend of Mollie Smith, who worked as a cook and maid at the Halls' home. Mollie was a pretty young woman, about twenty-three years of age. She was known as a "yellow girl," a phrase used by white people in those years to describe a light-skinned black person. She worked six days a week in return for a monthly salary of ten to twelve dollars and a free place to live, which consisted of a tiny one-room servants' quarters—a shack, really, that was in the backyard.

Courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

Spencer was barefoot, clad only in a nightshirt. Blood was oozing from several gashes in his head. He was wobbling, as if he was having trouble keeping his balance. He told Chalmers that someone must have attacked him while he had been asleep in bed next to Mollie, hitting him over the head and knocking him unconscious. And the person who attacked him, he said, must have done something with Mollie. She was nowhere to be found.

Spencer seemed terrified, his breaths coming in gasps. He said he had looked for Mollie in the back and front yard, and that he had searched for her up and down the street. Without a lantern, however, he could see nothing: the sky was as black as a skillet. The blood from Spencer's head wound was still flowing down his face and pouring into his mouth, making it difficult to breathe. He had trouble keeping his head up.

"Mr. Tom, please . . . ," Spencer pleaded.

But Chalmers had no intention of walking outside in such weather and looking for a black man's missing girlfriend. That was a matter, of course, that could wait until daylight. What Spencer needed to do, Chalmers said, was wrap a bandage around his head before he bled to death. Chalmers escorted Spencer out of the house, shut the front door, cleaned the blood off the floor, and returned to bed.

• • •

BY THE TIME THE SUN ROSE at 7:28 that morning, the norther had passed on to the south, but there was still a stinging cold. Only a handful of Austin's 17,000 citizens dared to step outside. It was the kind of morning, a newspaper reporter would later write, "when the average Austin man prefers to lie still . . . and let his wife get up and make the fires."

A little after nine o'clock, the telephone began ringing in the Austin Police Department. The department was located in a large room on the second floor of city hall. It contained a few chairs and tables, a potbellied stove, and a couple of tarnished brass cuspidors for the officers to use whenever they needed to spit out their chewing tobacco. On a wall was the telephone: a walnut box with a hole in the middle, a trumpet-like receiver on one side, and a crank on the other. The department's day clerk, Bart Delong, picked up the receiver, turned the crank, and shouted "Police!" into the hole.

There was static over the phone—after a storm, the telephone wires hanging above the streets would usually get tangled, causing heavier static than usual—and then came the voice of a Hello Girl from the downtown telephone exchange. She told Delong that she was patching through a call from the phone box at Ravy's Grocery in the western part of the city.

After some more static, Delong heard the voice of Dr. Ralph Steiner, a surgeon who had been working in Austin for more than twenty years. Steiner kept his remarks brief. All that Delong wrote on the daily police log was the following:

Doctor Steiner reports a woman lying near Ravy's store and wishes an officer sent out to take charge.

Austin policemen. Courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

The Austin Police Department consisted of twelve men. Only a few of them were in the office that morning. Grooms Lee, the city's young marshal (chief of police), was home in bed, suffering from dengue fever, a virulent form of the flu. The number two man in the department, Sergeant John Chenneville, was taking the morning off; he would be working the streets later that evening, keeping watch over the New Year's Eve revelers. Delong pointed to William Howe, a young officer who was in his midtwenties, and ordered him to Ravy's to find out what had happened.

Howe mostly did patrol work, spending his shifts on the downtown streets, handing out tickets to citizens who left horses unhitched in front of businesses or who drove their carriages faster than a "slow trot." He arrested vagrants, gun toters, sneak thieves (shoplifters), and moll buzzers (pickpockets who specialized in robbing women). He collared drunks who urinated in the alleys behind the saloons and prostitutes who wandered outside the boundaries of Guy Town, the city's vice district in the southwest corner of downtown.

One thing Howe did not do was investigate the four or five murders that occurred in Austin every year. Those were left to Sergeant Chenneville, who handled all the major criminal investigations. Nevertheless, because Dr. Steiner had said nothing in his phone call about foul play, there was no reason to think the woman's death was due to anything but an accident. Perhaps she had slipped on some ice during the previous night's storm and succumbed to exposure—the kind of death that would require a minor police investigation, if that. Surely, if the woman had been murdered, Steiner would have mentioned that fact to the police.

Howe put on his department-issued Stetson hat and double-breasted gray overcoat with two vertical rows of buttons and a tin police badge pinned to the lapel. He walked down the iron stairs leading to the first floor and headed for the police department's stable behind the city hall building. He mounted a horse and rode toward Ravy's, which was a half mile from downtown. When he arrived, he was directed across the street to the home of the young insurance man William Hall.

Tom Chalmers and Dr. Steiner, who lived a couple of houses away, were waiting for him. A few other men from the neighborhood were also standing around. Chalmers told Howe about Walter Spencer coming to the house, looking for his girlfriend, Mollie Smith, and begging for help. Steiner mentioned that Spencer had come to his home after leaving the Hall residence, where Steiner bandaged his head and sent him on his way. Chalmers then said that just after daylight, a black man who worked for one of the Halls' neighbors had stepped into the back alley to collect some firewood. The man had looked down the alley and seen a "strange-looking object" lying on the ground behind the Halls' outhouse. At first, he thought it was a dead animal. But after taking a closer look, he had seen the scrap of a nightdress. He realized there were legs coming out of that dress: human legs, grotesquely bent. Then he had started screaming.

A prominent white Austin family posing with the Courtesy of Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas

Chalmers told Howe that he, Steiner, and others had come out of their homes, hurried over to the outhouse, and looked at what the black man had found. Steiner had volunteered to walk over to Ravy's to call the police. Perhaps because he didn't want to offend the sensibilities of the Hello Girl, whom he suspected would be listening in on the phone call, he had decided to say very little to Delong, the police clerk, about what he'd seen.

Howe walked into the servants' quarters. He noticed that two or three pieces of furniture in the small room had been upended and a mirror knocked to the floor and broken. On the bed, the sheets and pillows were saturated in blood. Blood had dripped off one side of the bed and formed a puddle on the floor. At the foot of the bed was a bloodstained ax. On the wall by the door leading into the backyard was a bloody handprint showing what the police in those years called "finger marks."

Howe opened the door and followed a trail of blood for more than fifty feet, got to the outhouse, and stopped.

Mollie Smith was on her back. Her head had been nearly split in two and she had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen. Some of the gashes were deep enough to expose her organs. Her legs and arms were also slashed. Blood was everywhere—bright red lung blood and nearly black gut blood. So much blood was around her, filling up the ruts in the alley, that she seemed to be floating in a pool of it.

There is no police record indicating what exactly happened next, but the most probable scenario is that young Howe headed back to Ravy's, called Delong at the police department, and, trying to keep his voice calm, told him he needed help. Soon, other officers arrived at the Halls'. Sergeant Chenneville eventually showed up on his big bay horse. Trotting behind the horse were his bloodhounds, two slobbering dogs of unknown origin that lived in Chenneville's backyard when they weren't tracking criminals on the run.

Chenneville was in his late thirties. He was built like an upright piano through the shoulders, and had a thick mustache that drooped over his upper lip. Whenever he walked into city hall, the employees didn't have to look up from their desks to know he had arrived because of the heavy thud his boots made across the floor. Some of those employees, especially the less muscular men who worked in accounting, had no particular desire to make eye contact with him, perhaps fearing that he might walk over, thrust forward his gun hand, and say hello. According to local gossip, Chenneville's handshake was strong enough to crack corn.

Most citizens fondly called Chenneville "Ronnie O Johnnie." Raised in New Orleans, where he spent his teenage years working as a cabin boy on a Confederate ship that traversed the Mississippi River during the Civil War, Chenneville had come to Austin in the mid-1870s, joined the police department, and quickly became known, in the words of the Daily Statesman, as Austin's "most industrious officer." He was often seen barrel-assing down the dirt streets, chasing after troublemakers, his holstered gun slapping against his thigh, and at night he didn't hesitate to push his way into the saloons to break up the brawls among the cowboys who had ridden into town to "hell around," as the police officers wrote in their reports. Because his voice was so loud and commanding, he even had agreed in those years to be the auctioneer at the city market held on Saturday mornings in front of city hall, selling off everything from dry goods to sides of beef.

Courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

Now, a decade later, there was very little about Ronnie O Johnnie that had changed. To let the city's rogues and riffraff know that he was still in charge, he continued to work the dirt streets, riding through downtown at least once in the morning and once in the afternoon, always keeping his back perfectly straight—"straight as a bull's dick" was the phrase some men used in those days to describe horsemen with good posture. He also maintained a network of "pals" throughout Austin: informers who, in return for a handful of coins, kept him abreast of the activities of the city's more disreputable characters.

Chenneville was so devoted to his job that he had traveled to San Antonio in November, less than two months earlier, just to get a look at all the thieves working the horse races there. He said he had wanted to memorize their faces in case they decided to come up to Austin's annual fair in December. When the fair passed without a single crime taking place, the Daily Statesman had praised Chenneville for his "untiring vigilance" at watching over "the visiting crooks."

Chenneville walked into the Halls' backyard and headed to the outhouse to take a look at Mollie Smith. Unlike young Officer Howe, he had seen his share of dead bodies. He had seen men who had been shot or stabbed. He had watched murderers and horse thieves, black hoods over their heads, hanged from scaffolding behind the county courthouse, their feet continuing to kick even after the rope had snapped their necks. He had come across a lonely prostitute known as Buzzard Liz, named for the smallpox scars across her face, who had "suicided" from a morphine overdose in an alley.

A headline on the cover of the Austin Daily Statesman after the first murder. Courtesy of Skip Hollandsworth.

But he had never seen anything like this. Mollie Smith had been ripped open like a calf at a slaughterhouse.

Despite all the years Chenneville had spent chasing criminals, the truth was that he was not exactly an experienced homicide detective. Almost all the murders he had investigated had taken place in Austin's saloons and poorer neighborhoods, where small, drunken insults had escalated into deadly brawls and personal scores had been settled with knives or guns. None of the killings had been carefully planned out, and more often than not they were carried out in front of at least one eyewitness. Rarely did a killer even try to flee. All Chenneville had to do was ride up on his horse, remove the smoking gun or bloody knife from the killer's hand, and drag him to the calaboose—the local jail, which was just down the hall from the police department.

But on this morning, Chenneville had no killer waiting to be arrested. Nor did he have any eyewitnesses or "pals" to tell him who the killer was. What's more, he had no forensic tools to help him study the murder scene. In 1884, the science of criminology had not yet been invented. Police officers had no idea that the way blood dripped across the floor or spattered against the wall could help them decipher how a murder took place. They didn't know that hairs or fibers found on a victim could possibly help identify a killer. Through a microscope, they could distinguish the blood of human beings from that of other animals, but so far, no system of blood typing had been created to distinguish one human being's blood from another's. Although a scientist, Dr. Henry Faulks, had published a paper in 1880 suggesting that finger marks were so unique to a person that they could be used for identification, no procedure had been devised so that police could accurately record or store those prints.

Courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

As part of their standard murder investigations, police officers did look for footprints or shoeprints around a body. Sometimes they would have those prints measured and replicated on a sheet of paper or a piece of wood, or even dug out of the earth and preserved with plaster of Paris, hoping they could later be matched with the prints of a murder suspect. But if there were any prints close to Mollie's body, they had already been obliterated by the boots of Chalmers, Steiner, and other men from the neighborhood who had come into the backyard to look at her.

The only real investigative tools Chenneville had at his disposal this New Year's Eve morning were his two bloodhounds. Baying at the top of their lungs, their strange harmonic chorus as complex as part singing, they were led to Mollie's body and then to Mollie's room, where they dropped their heads, their nostrils flaring as they smelled the floor, the bed covers, the wall with the finger marks, and the ax.

Like their owner, however, the dogs had never before encountered such a scene. All that they seemed to be able to smell was Mollie's blood. They didn't pick up any other scent, nor did they take a single trail.

• • •

FROM THE ROAD CAME THE CLATTER OF HOOFBEATS and the squeak of carriage wheels. The newspaper reporters were arriving: one from the Daily Statesman, another from the Austin Daily Sun (a poorly funded newspaper that had opened earlier that year and was already preparing to close), and a few more from the Galveston, Dallas, Houston, and Fort Worth papers, all of which maintained bureaus in Austin to report the political news coming out of the state's government offices. One of the Hello Girls most likely had let the newspapermen know that there had been a call to the police department about a dead woman, and because there was little else going on that New Year's Eve day, they had decided to check out the story for themselves.

The reporters were a cocky, jabbery bunch. They wore their hats at jaunty angles and chewed on cigars. A few of them drank too much, tipping from pocket flasks throughout the day. They ate their lunches at one of the cheap chili con carne stands on the downtown streets, and they spent much of their free time at the shabby Austin Press Club, above the Horseshoe Saloon, where they played heated games of penny ante poker, argued over the merits of their own prose, and debated the literary talent of the former western newspaperman Mark Twain, whose newest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was being excerpted that very month in Century magazine.

Courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

For once, however, they were silent. To keep his stomach from buckling, one of the reporters moved to another part of the Halls' yard. ("A brief glance at the sickening sight was sufficient," he would later write.) The reporters knew all about the way the Comanche Indians had once attacked Texas's frontier settlers. Articles about the old "Indian depredations," as they were called, were still being published in the state's newspapers: horrifying (but highly read) accounts of settlers in the 1830s and 1840s being tortured and mutilated, stabbed over and over, their scalps ruthlessly torn from their bleeding heads. Standing in the Halls' yard, their hands buried deep in the pockets of their coats and their breaths making jets of smoke in the frozen morning air, the reporters must have wondered: was it possible that this was some sort of Indian killing?

But there hadn't been a report of any kind of Indian attack anywhere in Texas in more than a decade. The last of the Comanches were now huddled away on a reservation in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, their food and blankets doled out by federal employees. The idea that some rogue Indian would have slipped off the reservation and come to Austin to commit this gruesome attack was preposterous.

Maybe, said someone in the backyard, Mollie's boyfriend—this Walter Spencer fellow—had invented the entire story about waking up to find her missing. Maybe the two had gotten into an argument and he had taken after her with his knife and ax—and then afterward he had hit himself in the head and face with the back of the ax to make people think that he too had been attacked.

Courtesy of Skip Hollandsworth.

Yet those who knew Spencer couldn't imagine him carrying out such an act. Except for an arrest back in 1881 for disturbing the peace at a black saloon, he had no criminal record whatsoever, and at Butler's Brick Yard he was considered an excellent worker, carrying five hundred bricks a day to the wagons waiting outside. It was an excruciating job: if a black laborer didn't get his five hundred bricks loaded on the wagons for any reason whatsoever, including illness or injury, he did not receive his daily pay of seventy-five cents. Rarely, however, did Spencer not make his quota.

The case for Spencer's innocence was bolstered when Nancy Anderson, a black woman who worked part-time as a nurse in the Hall home, told the police and reporters that Spencer had maintained a "peaceful relationship" with Mollie. She said that Spencer "generally did everything Mollie requested." The couple was on "the best of terms," the nurse insisted.

And, Chalmers had to admit, Spencer certainly hadn't acted the previous evening like a man who had just committed a murder. He had to have known the risk he was taking when he walked unannounced into the Hall home. If Chalmers had shot him between the eyes, there would have been no arrest and no questions asked. "Protection of home from Negro burglar," a judge would have declared without a second thought. Yet instead of fleeing like any normal killer would have, Spencer had seemed genuinely concerned about Mollie's fate.

Courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

Then a story circulated through the Halls' yard about an ex-boyfriend of Mollie's named William "Lem" Brooks. He worked behind the bar at one of the city's downtown saloons, washing and drying glasses, and on his nights off he was the "prompter" at the city's black dances, calling "the figures" for the Peacock, the Chicken Wing, and the Cakewalk. Brooks had first gotten to know Mollie in Waco, a town about a hundred miles north of Austin, where they were both born. As a teenager, Mollie had been romantically involved with another black man and given birth to a son. At some point after her son's birth she had broken up with that man and taken up with Brooks. But when Mollie's son died at the age of six from an untreated disease, she had decided the time had come to start a new life, and she had moved to Austin. Brooks later followed her there, hoping to rekindle the romance. By then, however, Mollie was already involved with Walter Spencer. Brooks was supposedly so upset that he had tried to start a fight with Spencer when the two of them had recently run across each other.

When Chenneville and his officers heard that story, they jumped on their horses and headed downtown, looking for Brooks. They found him asleep in the shanty of his new girlfriend, Rosa Brown.

Courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

Brooks stammered out his alibi—he had spent the evening prompting a dance at Sand Hill, a black meeting hall on the city's east side, a full two miles from the Hall residence.

For Chenneville, however, Brooks was the only decent suspect he had: a jealous ex-lover, someone who at least had some motive to harm Spencer and do away with Mollie. He decided to arrest Brooks for "suspicion of murder," which under the criminal code of that era was not the same as being arrested for murder. It only meant that the police wanted to keep a suspect in custody while the investigation continued. Brooks was escorted to the calaboose and thrown into the main holding tank with the other prisoners.

• • •

BY THEN, IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON, the temperature still below freezing. Ice-lined branches in the trees made cracking noises. Smoke from the chimneys of the nearby homes rose into the air, black against the iron-colored sky. A black man who volunteered as the undertaker for the city's black community arrived at the Halls' in his wagon to collect Mollie and take her to the "dead room" of the City-County Hospital for an autopsy.

Courtesy of Skip Hollandsworth.

In those days, black undertakers used certain hopeful phrases whenever they lifted a dead person from the spot where he or she died. "Here you come, my child," the undertakers would sometimes say, "coming to Jesus." But it is doubtful those were the words this undertaker used. According to one newspaperman's account, when the undertaker tried to place her into a crude wooden casket, the body did not "hold together."

Eventually, after regaining his composure, the undertaker tried again. He scooped up all of Mollie and her body parts, placed them in the casket, and loaded the casket back onto the wagon. The undertaker called out to his horse and the horse trudged forward, disappearing into the distance, the clip-clop of the horse's hooves like a metronome's ticks on the frozen streets.

Meanwhile, Tom Chalmers began cleaning the blood off the walls and the floor of Mollie's quarters. He threw out her clothes and discarded the broken mirror on her wall. Chalmers wanted everything to be perfectly spotless by the time his brother-in-law returned to Austin. He wanted everything to look as if nothing at all had happened there—absolutely nothing at all.

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