When the house of the Wise family was seen on fire in the predawn hours of September 22, 1905, the neighbors assumed that Lula was burning rubbish. We will start there, because this is one of the few instructive facts we have about the crime. If the neighbors mistook a house fire for someone burning rubbish, then we may say with confidence that the house was isolated, that the neighbors were not ten feet away or a hundred feet away, but at some distance measured in portions of a mile.
Lula Wise and her four children had all been murdered in their beds, their skulls crushed by an unknown intruder before the house was set on fire. An axe was found among the charred remains. She had three daughters, Maggie, Ida, and Sister, and a son who is known to us only as “Son.” The children ranged in age from three to thirteen.
Two or three years before the murders, Mrs. Wise had had her husband, Sam Wise, arrested for beating her. Sam had either (a) served a short prison sentence, or (b) escaped from prison, but in either case he had left the area with no forwarding address. It was easy for reporters to speculate that he had returned to the area to murder his family, and a few of them did, but of course there is no evidence for that.
This is all we know about the case; even the location of the house is missing from the record. The newspapers say that it was “near” Jacksonville, Florida, and that is all that they say; whether it was west of Jacksonville or north of it, whether it was a mile from Jacksonville or five . . . we don’t know. It is one of two cases in the book in which we are unable to determine fairly precisely where the house was located; the other will be along shortly. Jacksonville in 1905 was a city of about 25,000 people, but some of those were seasonal residents who came south to escape the cold. The newspapers tell us the race of the victims; they were black.
This is one of two family murders in the series that occurred during the night of September 21 to the morning of September 22; the Meadows family was also murdered on September 21, 1909. The Double Event in Colorado was on September 17, and other crimes occurred on September 27 and September 30, making late September the busiest time period for the murders, as this region is also the busiest place. The Zoos family, which was possibly a part of the series, was murdered on September 20. Sawmills in this era often shut down or cut back in early September. Home building was a seasonal activity, focused in the summer months, so the busiest time of the year for the sawmills was March through May. It is possible that our offender often committed an atrocity at the time that he was laid off from a job, as he was preparing to move on and find work somewhere else. There are several other dates that repeat themselves in the series of murders. The next crime in the series will be on the first anniversary of the last one.
We are all heirs to the racism of the past, and unable to decline the legacy. The harsh reality is that contemporary authorities did not treat the murder of a black family as seriously as they would a white family, nor half as seriously, nor a third as seriously. The newspapers didn’t care much about the crime or the victims; they ran a note, then let it go. In fairness to the police, the investigation of a crime of this nature was immensely difficult, and a serious, intense, well-funded investigation of the crime would likely have failed—just as it did in all of these other cases.
A serious investigation would not have found the culprit, probably, but it would have documented the facts, which would have been a step toward identifying the culprit. We would like to take the murders of the Wise family as seriously as we have taken, let us say, the murders of the Moore family in Villisca, but since the case was not documented at the time, we can only tell you what we know and move on.