Eleven black families were murdered in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in 1911 and 1912, mostly—or entirely—with an axe. We are not going to tell you about all of those crimes in any detail, because the last few are not relevant to our story, but it is a remarkable number. In this era there were about eight families (or substantial portions of families) murdered per year in the United States. Prorate that to three states and two years, it comes out to one expected event.
These murders are known as the Clementine Barnabet Murders or the Church of Sacrifice Murders. We wrote earlier (chapter V) about the New Orleans Axeman—also in Louisiana, also active in 1911 and 1912. But it is easy to see that the murders committed by The Man from the Train and the New Orleans Axeman are different and not related. With the Clementine Barnabet Murders, it is not as easy to dismiss the possibility of some confusion between the two. It is our opinion that at least two and possibly as many as four of the Texas/Louisiana murders were actually committed by The Man from the Train, although most of the crimes were committed by other persons.
November 12, 1909, was a Friday. About 1:00 a.m. on November 13, neighbors heard screams coming from the house of Edna Opelousas in Rayne, Louisiana. Running to her defense, they found Ms. Opelousas dead from a blow by an axe. Her three children (aged four to nine) were still alive, but all had been mortally wounded. The murderer(s) had escaped.
(Edna’s actual name may have been Edmee. Census records show an Edmee Opelousas, born in Louisiana in April 1882, who had three younger sisters. If this is she, then she had probably never been married. We’re going to call her Edmee going forward.)
A man named George Washington was arrested on the morning of the murders on suspicion of having some connection to the crime, and, later on, his wife and daughter were arrested as well. His release was not noted by as many newspapers, although he must have been released. The Rayne city marshal told the press that
• The victims had been stabbed with a knife as well as hit in the head with an axe,
• He (the marshal) was in possession of the knife, and
• He was headed to Crowley, where he believed the knife had come from, to try to identify the knife’s owner.
Ho—Kay. Not sure how you can tell where a knife came from like that. The main point there is the multiple weapons. Multiple weapons almost certainly indicate multiple murderers.
Crowley and Rayne were just a few miles apart, almost walking distance. In the 1880s the towns were about the same size and had been rivals in pursuit of the position of the parish seat of Acadia Parish. Crowley won the battle, and since then had grown to be the larger town. A man named Houston Goodwill was arrested the following week. Goodwill was married to one of Edmee’s younger sisters and had been kicked out of the house a couple of weeks before in a domestic dispute.
A chilling fact for you. The Man from the Train’s previous murder, on Halloween 1909, was in Beckley, West Virginia. His next murder, in March of 1910, was in Houston Heights, Texas. If you go on a mapping service today and ask for directions from Beckley, West Virginia, to Houston Heights, Texas, the route will send you directly through Rayne, Louisiana. Look at it this way: the mapping service will not send you through 99.9 percent of the little towns in America. It will send you through Rayne, Louisiana, as well as Crowley, Lafayette, and Lake Charles. Do the math—and the time frame is about right. The murders in Rayne were committed twelve days after the crime in West Virginia.
In spite of this, the indications that this was not The Man from the Train seem to outweigh the indications that it was. If there are multiple murderers here, then it isn’t him. No one ever heard any of The Man from the Train’s victims scream, in part because he preferred isolated houses, but mostly because he didn’t stab people with knives before he hit them in the head with an axe. If you stab someone with a knife, they will scream; if you hit them in the head with an axe while they are asleep, they won’t. Clementine Barnabet would later claim this crime as her own, but we will get to that later.
A year passes after the murders in Rayne.
On January 27, 1911, the Galveston Daily News reported in a front-page story that Walter Byers, his wife, and their child had been murdered in Crowley, Louisiana, it was believed, on January 24. The bodies were found on January 26, after the odor began to reach the neighbors. The Byerses were well-liked people and are not believed to have had any enemies.
Not a lot is known about this case. However, the facts that are clearly known are:
1. The Byers home was very close to a railroad switchyard used by at least six different railroad lines.
2. Someone broke into the Byers home through a back window,
3. And “brained” the family with an axe, according to the Galveston Daily News. We assume from the use of the term “brained” that (a) they were hit in the head, and (b) the murderer used the blunt side of the axe.
4. The crime occurred while the family was asleep.
Why, then, isn’t this a Man from the Train case?
Actually, it may be, and let me point out a few other things. According to Donna Fricker (“The Louisiana Lumber Boom, c. 1880–1925”), in 1910 Louisiana was the second-largest lumber-producing state in the United States. The lumber business swept through Louisiana at the end of the nineteenth century, cut down millions of acres of old trees, and had pretty much busted out by 1925.
Also, we know that The Man from the Train always went south in the winter, and this is January and thirty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Crowley sets up from the Gulf of Mexico in exactly the same way as Marianna, Florida, and also Cottondale, Florida, and Milton, Florida. And I’m not done. The Man from the Train’s next murder, the Casaway family, occurred two months later and in the next state over—The Man from the Train’s normal time-and-distance gap.
OK, then, why the hell isn’t this a Man from the Train case?
Because people have been writing for a hundred years that it’s a Clementine Barnabet case; Clementine did confess to committing these murders, and we don’t want to argue about it. However, if you back away from the assumption that this is a Clementine Barnabet case and just look logically at the question “Is this more like a Clementine Barnabet case or more like a Man from the Train case?” it is actually more like a Man from the Train case than a Clementine Barnabet case.
But in order for you to see that for yourself, we’ll have to explain about Clementine. The region in which these murders occurred was populated by a mix of African American, creole, and Cajun peoples. All of the victims in this chapter are black except for Elizabeth Casaway. The black community was deeply shaken by the murder of this young family, the Byerses. The Galveston Daily News reported in a February 1 follow-up story that “leading negro citizens have held a mass meeting and adopted resolutions declaring that they will give every assistance in their power to help the officers in finding the guilty persons.” Dozens of people were arrested and questioned by police, but the investigation ultimately went nowhere.
Just one month passes now.
On February 24, 1911, a family of four was murdered in Lafayette, Louisiana. From Crowley to Lafayette is just twenty-five miles. Although Lafayette is no longer in Acadia Parish, it’s basically the same area. The Lafayette victims were Alexandre Andrus, his wife, Meme (or Mimi), and their two children, Joachin and Agnes. Joachin was three years old; Agnes was a baby, sleeping in a crib. The Andrus family lived in a cabin on Doucet Street in Lafayette, “isolated by its proximity to the river” and “just beyond the railroad-track where it crosses Vermilion street,” according to the Lafayette Advertiser.
A man named “Dillon” wrote a book as a WPA project entitled Conjure Ways: Louisiana Voodoo Outside New Orleans. That book—like many other sources—assumes that these murders were somehow connected to voodoo, although there is basically no evidence for that proposition. Dillon records that the Andrus family was “quiet and respected.” On the night of Thursday, February 23, 1911, the quiet and respected family was tucked in. Alexandre, Mimi, and Joachin shared a bed, with Agnes in a cradle nearby. Sometime well after midnight the family was murdered with the blade of an axe. Mimi’s brother Lezime Felix was first to find the family. He brought the sheriff and coroner to their bodies, which were still warm. The discovery was recounted in court records by Mana Martin, Meme’s mother:
I am the mother of Meme Andrus, and this morning about seven o’clock, I was told by my son, Lezime Felix, that my daughter Meme was murdered. I then came over to their house. I found all doors locked save the kitchen door. I found Alexandre Andrus, my daughter Meme, and their two children, all dead in bed in the positions found by the jury, and a bloody axe lying on the floor at the foot of the bed.
The positions referred to in her statement are surpassingly peculiar, and are the first indication that these murders had religious overtones. According to an article in the Lafayette Advertiser published several days later, “The man and woman were taken up by the murderer and placed on their knees beside the bed, the woman’s arm over the man’s shoulder, as if in the attitude of prayer. The baby was then placed beside the mother on the bed.”
We have here several indications that this crime was not committed by The Man from the Train:
1. The crime occurred late in the night, apparently near morning (based on the fact that the bodies were still warm when they were found).
2. The murders were committed with the blade of the axe, rather than the blunt side of the axe.
3. A door was left open.
4. The bodies were posed as if praying or were murdered while they were actually praying, which is not something The Man from the Train ever did that we know of.
5. There is no other case in which The Man from the Train committed two crimes three weeks and twenty-five miles apart. It’s too close for comfort.
None of that is 100 percent convincing, but it appears to be more of a copycat crime than an act of the same person or persons.
The first person to be held responsible for the murder of the Andrus family was Raymond Barnabet, father of Clementine. Raymond Barnabet was arrested, put on trial, and temporarily convicted of the crime. Raymond Barnabet lived near the Andrus family with his girlfriend, Dina Porter, and two of his children, Clementine, aged eighteen, and Zepherin, a younger teenaged boy who was called Ferran. Raymond had another daughter, Pauline, who was grown up and lived with her own family (actually, she lived in Rayne), and a son named Tatite, who was in jail. We believe, although we are not 100 percent certain of this, that Tatite was in jail for homosexual activity. It is likely that the sheriff focused on the Barnabet family because of his knowledge of them through the prosecution of Tatite.
At Raymond’s trial, Dina, Clementine, and Ferran all told slightly different stories about the night of the crime. Dina said that Raymond left at 7:00 p.m. the night of the murders, saying he was taking the train to nearby Broussard, and returned in the early hours of the morning, complaining because his supper hadn’t been saved for him and he’d lost his pipe on the train. She also told the court that Raymond had previously tried to kill her with an axe in a jealous rage.
Clementine and Ferran agreed that Raymond was gone that evening and came home bitching loudly about his evening meal. According to Clementine, her father arrived home at dawn, smoking a pipe, covered in blood and brains. Clementine said that Raymond was yelling about killing the Andrus family and threatened to do the same to his own family. There are several critical differences here: Dina had Raymond returning home in the early hours of the morning, perhaps before the murders were committed, and insisted that his clothes were clean. Ferran basically supported Clementine but added that Raymond did not have his pipe. We don’t know what all the noise about the pipe is; it seems as if the newspapers failed to mention that a pipe had been found near the scene of the murder or something. We don’t know.
Anyway, the Barnabets shared a dwelling with a family named Stevens; the Stevenses occupied the main part of the building, and the Barnabets a portion of it. Clementine claimed that Raymond had a bloodstained blue shirt, and that she had given Mrs. Stevens this shirt to wash on the morning of the crime.
The WPA account of the case, collected twenty-five years later, describes the Barnabets as “filthy, shifty, degenerate examples of the lowest of the African type.” The Stevenses were people of a much better reputation, and were described by the WPA account as “clean, modest, direct and uncontradictory in their statements.” Let’s hope that by now we all understand that cleanliness and honesty don’t have anything to do with race, and the race should have been left out of that.
Anyway, Mrs. Stevens and her daughter Adelle contradicted all of Clementine’s and Ferran’s inflammatory claims. Mrs. Stevens testified that she rose with the sun and heard no commotion of the kind described by the Barnabets. Adelle testified that their side of the house was all quiet until late in the morning, and that Clementine never brought over any wash, let alone a shirt covered in brains and blood; you would remember a thing like that. Adelle further testified that they knocked on the Barnabets’ door and informed them of the Andrus murder, and that the members of the household responded to the shocking news with appropriate solemnity. Mrs. Stevens volunteered that Clementine and Ferran were persons of bad reputation, implying that their testimony against their father should not be believed.
Perhaps one witness should not testify as to the reliability of another witness, but there is little or no doubt that Clementine was lying. The crucial parts of Clementine’s testimony were contradicted by Dina Porter, who lived with her and had been witness to all of the things Clementine claimed to have seen, as well as by the Stevens family, who lived in another part of the house, and by Raymond Barnabet. Also, a month after the trial, Clementine would begin to say that she herself had committed the crime, or had led those who committed it. Also, Clementine was just a terrible liar, although frankly we kind of like her anyway.
But while Clementine’s story wasn’t true, she was charismatic and a good storyteller, and the jury believed her. Raymond Barnabet denied any involvement in the murder of the Andrus family, but in October 1911, he was convicted of the crime. Temporarily.
What happens in many of these cases is that, in the absence of evidence, the crime is pinned on a person of low social standing who is known to be in the vicinity of the crime. We have seen this repeatedly. There was no evidence at all that Henry Lambert murdered the Allen family, but he was a person of low social status who was near the scene of the crime, and the state of Maine convicted him and locked him up for twenty years before admitting they had made a mistake. There is no real reason to believe that George Wilson murdered Archie and Nettie Coble in Rainier, Washington, but he was a person of low social standing who lived near the scene of the crime. He was bullied into a probably bogus confession and convicted of the crime. There is no evidence, really, that Reed and Cato murdered the Hodges family, but one of the two was bullied into a false confession, and then they were killed by a lynch mob.
There are others like that in this book, but you get my point. The murder of the Andrus family was probably not a Man from the Train case, but Raymond Barnabet is that kind of ancillary victim: he was a person of low social standing who lived near the scene of the crime. Police and prosecutors, not knowing who had committed the crime, succeeded (for a time) in pinning it on him. But just weeks later, Raymond was granted a new trial because he was drunk at his first trial. It seems that the second day of his first trial, he convinced another prisoner to get him some cheap port called “spartan wine,” which he drank all of on an empty stomach.
This is a fairly unique reason to get a new trial. Sometimes the lawyers are drunk on the job, and that leads to a new trial, but an intoxicated defendant? The court’s eagerness to grant him a new trial (which occurred before Clementine’s confession to the crimes) is a sign that, despite the racism of the time and place, someone in the justice system was trying to give Raymond something resembling due process.
We have hardly begun the story of Clementine Barnabet, but other events are running forward, and we’re going to put the Barnabets aside for a moment and catch up.
On March 21, 1911, the Casaway family was murdered in San Antonio. We told you their story in chapter VIII of this book. At the time, no one or very few people connected this to the events in Louisiana, although later on many people did. Some sources—many sources, actually—have made the Casaways an after-the-fact part of the Clementine Barnabet story. From our standpoint there is no doubt that the Casaways were murdered by The Man from the Train. There is a lot of information about the Casaways, and it is clear that that crime was committed by the same murderer who went on to commit the crimes in Ardenwald, Oregon, Colorado Springs, and Villisca.
So the March murder is unconnected, but there had been murders in January and February 1911, and there are three if you count the Casaways. In October 1911, Raymond Barnabet was convicted of the crime from February, but in November 1911, with Raymond still in jail, there was a fourth crime, oddly enough with another baby named Agnes.
There is an area in Lafayette known as the Mills Addition. The family of Norbert and Azema Randall lived on Madison Street in Mills Addition, less than a quarter-mile from the railroad tracks. The Randalls were young people of good standing in their community. On the evening of November 26, 1911, Norbert and Azema were at home with three of their children: Rene, aged six, Norbert Junior, aged five, and Agnes, aged two. Their oldest daughter was staying with a relative that evening, but they had a little neighbor boy named Albert Scyth (sometimes written Sise) with them. It was a Sunday night, and it rained that night.
Before seven the next morning the other daughter arrived home. We know she was about ten and had been at her uncle’s, but we don’t know her name or if she had a key to unlock the back door, or if the murderer had left it open. The view into the home was lit by an arc lamp behind her. Once she saw what was inside, she ran down the street screaming.
Watching her run away, from the porch of a neighbor’s house, was Clementine Barnabet.
* * *
The police arrived, according to the newspapers, a half hour after sunrise. A half hour after sunrise on November 11 in Louisiana would be 6:52 a.m., or eight minutes before the bodies were reported discovered, so that was a really good police response time. Norbert, Azema, and Agnes lay in the bed near the door, covered by a mosquito net torn in half from the blows of the axe. Norbert was shot once in the head, and then he, his wife, and his baby had all been bludgeoned with the blunt side of the axe. Not far away were the three other children, tangled in a lifeless pile in the bed where they had slept. One of them had woken for a moment before death, judging from the single, tiny, bloody footprint on the floor. Of the murder weapon, the Biloxi Daily Herald wrote:
Sheriff Lacoste found the axe with which the crime had been committed leaning against the wall near the foot of the bed, and it had been carefully washed of all bloodstains, showing the remarkable coolness and deliberation of the fiend.
Let’s take a moment to make the argument that this is the work of The Man from the Train. The Randalls lived a very short distance from the train, not far from Houston Heights and San Antonio, not long after the death of the Casaways. Their murder was sudden and without apparent motive. The murder weapon was the blunt side of the axe, left in the room. The victim’s heads were covered—with a mosquito net rather than bedclothes, but covered nonetheless. There was a guest in the home that night, and a young girl was among the victims. There wasn’t a lamp without its chimney, the windows weren’t covered, and the door wasn’t locked—as far as we know—but these are still too many of the key elements for it to be a random cluster, in my view. This looks like the work of a cool, deliberate, and above all experienced fiend—not an eighteen-year-old woman.
Clementine Barnabet was now employed as a domestic by a family named Guidry. (Ron Guidry, the greatest Cajun baseball player of all time, was born in Lafayette forty years after these events.) The Guidrys lived just down the block from the Randalls. Clementine watched from the Guidrys’ porch as the little girl ran screaming from the Randall house, and she laughed.
Police turned their attention to Clementine. A latch to the Guidrys’ home was caked in blood, and inside Clementine’s room police found a dress, apron, and underwear covered in blood and brains. At first, Clementine denied it, but soon after she was bragging. Hours after her arrest, she laughed at a judge on the witness stand, laughed and laughed and laughed at all of them, and told everyone that she had killed the Randalls, the Andruses, and the family in Rayne, whose name she did not know.
Clementine was eighteen years old at the time of these murders, probably fifteen or sixteen when the Opelousas family was murdered in 1909. She had large doe eyes, a slender figure, and smooth skin. Clementine had what one could describe as a pixie face. The lower half of her face was round but small and delicate. The word to describe her, honestly, is cute—cute being usually nonthreatening, like a child or a puppy. Many of the drawings that are attached to articles about her make her look mature and exotic, but that isn’t at all what she looked like. If, in fact, she had done everything she said she had done, she would be a figure without equal in the history of crime.
Also present near the scene was King Harrison. Clementine Barnabet and Azema Randall were members of King Harrison’s church. He was the Johnny Appleseed of the Christ Sanctified Holy Church, having established several branches of the church along the Southern Pacific Railroad. Clementine was supposed to be a “deaconess” in the Christ Sanctified Holy Church, whatever that means; the term “deaconess” is not commonly used by religious denominations, and when it is used, it almost always applies to more mature women.
Certainly neither King Harrison nor Christ Sanctified Holy Church approved of murder, but Clementine claimed she was the leader of a group within the Christ Sanctified Holy Church known as the Church of Sacrifice. She said she had murdered the Randalls because they disobeyed the church’s orders. She also claimed she had a charm from a local voodoo doctor that would prevent her from being punished.
Well, that’s a hell of a story, and as you can imagine, the newspapers had a field day. Her race was always noted, usually in the headline, often alongside the claim that she was light-skinned. Usually the observation of how white she might be was followed by a tribute to her beauty and cunning. Many stories about her claim that she was only one-eighth black, which cannot be true. The reports reached newspapers on both coasts, and like a story retold by a six-year-old, the basic facts of the case were retained while the details were embellished or made up. Stories featured dialogue written in insulting dialect and tales of voodoo churches and unsubstantiated sacrifices. These accounts, as far as we know, were carried only in white newspapers. All accounts agree that Clementine was “being examined for her sanity.”
For two months, Clementine sat in jail while the authorities figured out what to do. According to the WPA account, she curtailed her confessions and spoke to no one, “like a sphinx,” but occasionally she asked for her mother.
On Saturday, January 20, 1912, Harriet Crane stopped by her daughter Merle Warner’s house, a small home near the railroad tracks on the west side of Crowley. She stopped by to see Merle and her three children, Pearl (aged nine), Harriet (eight) and Garry (seven). Mrs. Crane found the house to be eerily silent, sensed that something was wrong, and could not stand to go inside. The Galveston Daily News doesn’t record whether the door was locked or the windows covered. What it does say is that she was “afraid to enter and willed a colored man to go for her.”
You can probably guess what had happened to the Warners, and this will save me the awkwardness of putting it in words. The bodies had been moved to lie together in bed after death, and the axe was dropped at the scene, though it was bloody and not cleaned.
Well, Raymond Barnabet was in jail, and Clementine was in jail, so what now? Sheriff Lacoste arrested Zepherin (Ferran) Barnabet. He had an alibi, but Lacoste figured he was acting on the orders of his incarcerated father and sister.
But on the very night that Ferran was arrested, January 20, there was another crime about fifty miles from Crowley (seventy-five miles from Lafayette) in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In 1912 the city was still recovering from a huge fire that had wiped out most of downtown in 1910. The Broussards lived not far from downtown at 331 Rock Street, “the last one on the street towards the river and within a few rods of the Kansas City Southern switch track,” according to the Galveston Daily News. Felix Broussard was an older man, around the age of fifty. He worked at the rice mill, where he got along well with his coworkers and employers, and lived with his wife, who we believe was his second wife. We are told that she was pretty but know nothing else about her, not even a name. They had three children: Margaret, aged eight, Alberta, aged six, and Louis, aged three. Felix also had two adult children living in Texas.
In the newspapers, Felix Broussard got the same “good sort of negro” treatment that Walter Byers, Alexandre Andrus, Louis Casaway, and Norbert Russell had received after their deaths. Acknowledging the humanity of these victims provided some journalists an excuse to bite off a little more racism and take liberties with the details of their life and death, especially the superstitious gossip such as that published in a special report on the crimes by the Los Angeles Times on January 30, 1912:
The day before the tragedies, [Felix] told some friends he was “going home to glory and going mighty soon.” Although Saturday is not the usual negro wash day, his wife washed all the clothes for every member of the family. From this it has been argued that the victims must have knew, in advance, their fate.
This is gossip, or possibly just straight-up fiction. You have to understand: newspapers in this era would just make stuff up—not all of them, but some of them. This article was reprinted in the El Paso Herald on March 14, 1912. In its different iterations, it is the most colorfully and emphatically racist article that we have come across in researching this book.
If you’re counting murdered families in this chapter we are now up to seven—the Opelousas, Byers, Casaway, Andrus, Randall, Warner, and Broussard families; however, we said that there were eleven in 1911 and 1912, and the Opelousas family doesn’t count in that total because that crime happened in 1909.
The Broussards’ murderer had broken into the house through a back window. An excellent account of the crime published in the Galveston Daily News of January 22 speculated as to whether the killer had cased the home beforehand:
The belief is that the murderer doubtless spotted out the place some time in advance, and thus learned of the family’s size and the arrangement of things in the house, as no bungling was done by the fiend. The negro woman who lived next door was up at 1:30 o’clock Sunday morning cooking for the next day, and said that she heard nothing at that time.
At ten o’clock the next morning, a neighbor found them. The parents were alone in bed, heads crushed by the blunt end of an axe, but not Felix’s axe, which was still in the kitchen. In the next room were the children, still in the positions of sleep, apparently unmoved. The axe was beneath their bed, the blood patterns showing that only the blunt side of the axe had been used. A bucket was placed under their heads to catch the blood.
This crime shows the competence of The Man from the Train—which few crimes do that aren’t his—but this one clearly isn’t. Putting the axe under the bed and using a bucket to catch the blood would be departures from pattern for him, but moderate ones. But someone had written on the inside of the kitchen door the following words:
“When he maketh inquisition for blood, he forgetteth not the cry of the humble.”
And then, to the side, the words “HUMAN FIVE,” sometimes written as “HUMAN, FIVE.” We believe that these words were written with a pencil, although we can’t be certain of that.
The quote, repeated in papers from the Galveston Daily News to the Washington Post, is always described as a biblical quotation, although it actually isn’t. It’s actually a quotation from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, misquoted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin from Psalm 9:12. The actual quotation from the King James Bible reads:
“When he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he forgetteth not the cry of the humble.” [emphasis added]
This was not an obvious reference to that most “cussed and discussed” novel, as Langston Hughes described Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Every newspaper account from the time took the phrase to be direct from the Bible. This was not a commonly written version of the psalm, which appeared in many publications of the day. So far as we know, Rachel McCarthy James was the first person to realize that the quotation did not actually come from the Bible, but from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Clementine confessed to murdering the Broussards, although she had been in jail at the time. (Probably Clementine was confused about the calendar of events, and did not realize that the Broussards had been murdered after her arrest.) Newspapers from as far away as India were enthralled with the religious and racial aspects of Clementine’s confession. Many newspapers claimed that she targeted families with five people because of the magic number five, which they claimed to have had some significance in voodoo. This is simply not true. The Opelousas family contained four people, the Byerses were only three, and the Andrus family four, while the Randall family numbered six.
The gruesome murders of the Broussard family set off a flurry of police activity. Clementine’s brother Ferran was released from jail. King Harrison, the preacher of the Sanctification Church, which had branches in each of the towns mentioned here, was arrested not long after the bodies were found, and released shortly after that. Eliza Richards, a friend of Clementine’s, was arrested and released, as were other people.
By early 1912 the police had lost the trust of the black community. Many black lodges, churches, and organizations volunteered information, help, and funding to catch the killers of the Byerses and the Casaways, but after the Broussard murders they were focused on protecting themselves or packing up and leaving. The Los Angeles Times noted the shift in sentiment, but attributed it to the popularity of voodoo.
The El Paso Herald report based on the racist Los Angeles Times piece recorded the death of a family named Wexford in the early months of the year 1912. This report spends a lot of time trying to explain why the killer would be satisfied now that they had killed five families of five, despite the fact that of the families they cite, only the Broussards actually numbered five. During their summary of the murders, they wrote the following:
Two months ago six members of the Wexford family perished at the hand of the fanatics but one was an infant born only the day before the tragedy and in all probability had not been taken into consideration when the plans for the human sacrifice were consummated.
We can’t find any other evidence of a “Wexford” family being murdered in this area and are not inclined to believe that this ever happened. Perhaps by “Wexford” they meant “Warner,” but since the Warners didn’t have a day-old baby, either, that wouldn’t help all that much. But we could be missing something.
In any case, the murderous rampage was not over, but was crossing state lines and entering a new phase. If you get on the train in Lafayette, Louisiana, and head west, in eighteen miles you will hit Rayne. Get back on the train and go another seven miles, and you come to Crowley. Get back on the train and go another fifty miles west, you’re in Lake Charles. Get back on the train in Lake Charles and go another sixty miles, you’re in Beaumont, Texas.
The family of Hattie Dove lived at 1428 Cable Street in Beaumont, Texas, right next to a Baptist church and a third of a mile from the railroad track. Hattie and her family are going to meet an unfortunate end in just a moment here, but at some point these crimes cease to be part of the original series and become copycat crimes. The authors of this book believe that someone or someones, perhaps motivated by racism and perhaps by some other sickness, took the template of the Louisiana/Acadia Parish murders, which were all over the newspapers at that time, and used it as the basis for a series of unrelated crimes, committed not by Clementine or her friends or by The Man from the Train, but by some third actor, probably two men acting together. We don’t believe that any of the Texas crimes in this series were actually committed by the same people who committed the Louisiana crimes, except that The Man from the Train probably committed crimes in both states. Other people who have written about these crimes have put them together as one series, and you can believe what you want to believe.
But let’s go back and tie up the story of Clementine a little bit, before we go on into Texas and Mississippi. Clementine is in jail by this time, and her conviction is beginning to look ever more certain, because by now she is filling up notebooks with her confessions. The Lafayette prosecutor, District Attorney Bruner, began preparing a grand jury investigation. In January 1912, a chemist named Metz had tested the bloody skirt and shirtwaist found in Clementine’s closet to see if the blood was menstrual or not; he found it was blood “which flowed from wounds of a living body,” as the Thibodaux Sentinel of January 27, 1912, put it. There is certainly a difference between period blood and regular old circulating blood; period blood is partially the shedding of the uterine lining. We’d like to know more about his 1912 methodology, but OK.
Metz also tested and found that some blood on a pillow in the Randall house matched the blood on Clementine’s clothes. This is clearly BS designed to help the prosecution. Blood typing had just been developed a few years earlier by Karl Landsteiner in Austria. There was little knowledge or understanding of it, even in the scientific community, at that time. The public in 1912 knew that blood typing was possible, because it had been used in some high-profile paternity cases, but knew almost nothing about it. Metz took advantage of this to make a claim which seems to the authors to be well beyond the scientific envelope of 1912. Since there were six victims from three unrelated genetic backgrounds in the Randall murders, all of whom had shed blood, there would almost certainly be blood from multiple blood types (A, B, O, and AB). It is likely that Clementine had the same blood type as at least one of the six victims, which would render this “match” meaningless by any methods available into the 1970s. It is our opinion that Dr. Metz was taking advantage of the gullibility of the public to make a claim that would have seemed reasonable at the time but which lacks credibility in retrospect.
But Clementine was also helping the prosecution. Clementine now claimed that her first murders had occurred in Rayne. Her sister Pauline lived in Rayne, and she now claimed that she had traveled to Rayne to visit her sister and, while there, had murdered a woman and her four children:
I went to my sister, who lived at Rayne, near the O. G. railroad depot, and later during the night went up town, disguised as a man, and securing an ax in a yard near the cabin where I killed the mother and four children. . . .
Upon entering the house, I struck the woman on the right temple and killed her instantly. One of the children was awakened by the noise, and before he could raise his head from the pillow I struck him a blow somewhere near the left ear, then I struck the other two. I left the man’s clothes which I wore in the house and left the house in woman’s clothes, returned to my sister’s house and later during the same night I boarded a night train for Lafayette arriving here about midnight. It was about nine when I killed them.
The police in Rayne now arrested Pauline, alleging that she was acting “suspicious.” Back in Lafayette, Sheriff Lacoste arrested Valena Mabry, whom Clementine called Irene and claimed had been her assistant in the murder of the Randalls. Mabry vigorously denied any connection to the crime, and was eventually released without being prosecuted.
When Clementine met the grand jury in April 1912, she had more than just laughter for them. She made a full confession not just to the officers of the court but to a reporter named RH Broussard from the New Orleans Item (and yes, there are a lot of Broussards in this story). RH Broussard’s version of her story began in New Iberia, a town south of Lafayette. Clementine and four friends met an “old negro who told us that he could sell us ‘candjas.’ ” (The spelling of that last word seems to be unique, to the best of Google’s ability, at least. In the WPA account, this item was referred to as a “conjure bag.”) In her confession, Clementine stated that the conjure bag was promised to allow her and her friends to “do as we pleased and we would never be detected and would be protected from the hands of the law by the mere fact of these ‘candjas’ being in our possession.”
This fact about the candjas is the entire basis for the belief that these crimes are related to voodoo. Thousands and thousands of newspaper articles and many subsequent books and articles link these crimes to voodoo, but as far as we know the only actual link to voodoo is just this one fact—that Clementine and a couple of her goofy teenaged friends had once bought a couple of conjure bags. The man who sold them the charms was named Joseph Thibodeaux. Thibodeaux was arrested by Sheriff Lacoste, who hoped that Thibodeaux could lead them to the killers of the rest of the victims—those who had been murdered after Clementine was already in custody. The forty-five-year-old Thibodeaux admitted to selling people papers “for various things” but denied selling charms. Sheriff Lacoste brought him in front of Clementine, and she identified him as the man who sold her the charms and described his house. “Yes, you said I wouldn’t be arrested,” she told him, “but look here I am in jail.”
After buying the charms for three dollars, Clementine said that she and her friends returned to Lafayette and began making plans for what to get away with. She claimed that before the conjure bags, they had never thought to commit murder. They drew straws to see who would kill first, and she drew the short straw. She then went to Rayne, to visit her sister, and murdered a family while she was there. She said she chose the family because they had left a light burning inside while they slept, and she could see them sleeping. She said. Clementine returned to Lafayette and her friends, and, in her telling, they waited to see whether they would be arrested. When they were not arrested, she said they figured that the charm had worked and they were free to murder at will.
She next confessed to the murder of the Byers family in Crowley, Louisiana:
In Crowley I entered the house with one of the women, while the other kept watch, and as I had the ax in my hand I committed the murders. I struck the man first and just as I did so the woman woke up, I struck her a blow in the face with the butt end of the ax and felled her. I then struck her once or twice to be sure that she was dead. Once this was done it was an easy matter to get rid of the two small children. We thought it was better to kill them than to leave orphans, as they would suffer.
As stated earlier, we believe it is more likely that this crime was committed by The Man from the Train, but there is no point in arguing about that now.
Back in Lafayette, Clementine claimed that she and her friends sat back and enjoyed the furor they had created. There was a semblance of a logical plan to the strategy to commit the next murder, that of the Andrus family in their hometown; she claimed to plan the event on the evening of an election, when all the police officers were busy campaigning. She said she and her friends did not preselect their victims, but again a home near the railroad was targeted. From her confession:
When we reached the railroad crossing we saw a light burning in a cabin near Ramagosa’s store. We decided that that was a good place so we went there; myself and one of the women entered the house and I struck [Alexandre Andrus] first, then his wife, and afterwards his two small children, one of whom was an infant in the cradle near the bed. We had overlooked him until he woke up and began to cry. I turned around and struck him in the forehead, killing him instantly.
Clementine then recounted watching Alexandre’s brother find the bodies, and then claimed that she helped to wash and prepare them for burial, a claim that is clearly untrue.
Clementine outlined the murder of the Randalls in less detail, skimping on the bloody details. She picked up an axe from a neighbor that Sunday night after a church celebration. On the way to the Randalls, she saw cops and the preacher of the church, King Harrison; she told the latter to avoid the area that night. Taking her brother Tatite’s gun, Clementine said she broke into the Randall home and shot the father in the chest. She claimed to have “caressed” all of her victims, adults and children and babies, for sexual stimulation.
She gave the names of her alleged accomplices, who appeared in her story as randomly as dropped stitches on a home-knit blanket, sometimes entering the house with her to commit a crime and then welcoming her back to safety after committing the crime. The accomplices were found, sometimes arrested, and then released once they were able to put the lie to Clementine, whose confessions always seemed to unravel at the slightest tug.
Clementine confessed to murdering eighteen people, but the grand jury charged her with only one murder, that of Azema Randall. Standard practice at that time; prosecutors are always looking for a loophole in the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. Her trial began on October 21, 1912. The previous week she was examined by a team of medical professionals, who said in a court document reproduced by the WPA effort that she was “morally depraved, unusually ignorant and of a low grade of mentality, but not deficient in such a manner as to constitute her imbecile or idiot.” She was eligible to stand trial.
The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, covered her trial and heaped praise upon her lawyer, a man by the name of Kennedy, saying that he gave “one of the most magnificent presentations ever heard in court.” He argued that her confessions were unreliable and the product of a bad childhood, that the clothes with Randall’s blood on it were bundled with clothes that came from Clementine’s room, and that Metz, the chemist who tested the clothes, was unreliable. Clementine was convicted of the murder of Azema Randall at 10:30 p.m. on October 25. She was sentenced the next day to life in prison.
* * *
Clementine confessed to murdering eighteen people, but it would seem to be impossible to believe that she actually did exactly what she said that she did. This leaves two possibilities: that Clementine was involved with a cult or sect of murderers, who continued to commit crimes after she was arrested, or that Clementine had no actual connection to the murders, but has become in history the fall guy for the crimes of others.
While either of these is certainly possible, the authors are both inclined to believe that the latter option is the more likely. We don’t think Clementine actually had any involvement in the Acadia Parish murders.
The evidence for Clementine’s involvement in the crimes can be summarized in five points:
1. Clementine was very close to two of the crimes at the time that they occurred,
2. She acted inappropriately,
3. She gave detailed and elaborate confessions to the crimes,
4. Blood was found on her clothing after one of the crimes, and
5. Clementine was the first person to offer an explanation of the religious symbolism which is found at a couple of the murder scenes.
Number 1 isn’t anything. The coincidence of her being near two of the crime scenes triggered her arrest, but really, what does it amount to? When the Boston Strangler was murdering women in the early 1960s, police noticed a crew painting apartments near the scene of the first crime, and then noticed that a crew was painting apartments near the scene of the second crime. When they checked, it turned out to be the same painting crew. It was an odd coincidence, but it was just a coincidence. That was in a big city. The two murder scenes that Clementine was definitely known to be near were both in a small town, in the part of town near where she lived. It isn’t strange that she happened to be near both scenes.
Her behavior was certainly inappropriate, but (1) she was young, superstitious, and high-strung, and (2) she had been through an extraordinary series of gut-wrenching events:
1. A family living near to her, and known to her, was murdered in a grotesque and gruesome manner.
2. Her father was accused of that crime.
3. (This is speculation, and I’ll deal with that in a moment.) She was put through the wringer by police who were investigating that crime.
4. She testified against her father, probably under great pressure from the police.
5. Another family was murdered, again close to her.
This series of traumatic events would destabilize a good many people. Another young lady in our book, about the same age (Lydia Howell in Houston Heights, chapter III) had a complete nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for months following just one of these stressors, the murder of a family that was well known to her. It seems not the least bit odd, to us, that Clementine went completely around the bend after these five events, and began to behave in a grossly inappropriate manner. For that matter, simply to be living in that area while all of these terrible murders were occurring was no doubt very stressful. It was a bizarre situation.
The Andrus family was murdered near her home in February 1911, and her father was accused of the crime. It is likely that she was examined by the police about this crime in a vigorous manner. It is likely that she (and her brother, separately) was taken into a small room with two large police officers who probably said to her something like: “We know what happened here and we know that you know what happened here. You are not leaving this room until you come clean.”
There are many cases now, in the twenty-first century, in which, when a murder occurs, the teenaged family members are “shaken” by the police in exactly this way, to see what they know about the crimes. With white police officers dealing with black teenagers in the South a hundred years ago with no cameras rolling, it is likely that those examinations were rougher and more intense than they would be now. But the problem with this practice is that a vulnerable teenager, “interviewed” in this manner, will often give a false confession or offer false testimony in an effort to bring the terrifying and traumatic police interview to an end.
We believe that Clementine (and her brother) did in fact tell the police what they wanted to hear. Her relationship with her father was rocky anyway. Her parents had split up, and her father was alcoholic and abusive.
Clementine certainly gave false testimony against her father in his murder trial, and we assume that she did so under great pressure from the police, and we assume that this was a terrible emotional burden for her. When there was another horrible murder near to her, Clementine began to act in completely inappropriate ways and told stories that were not true. She was not in her right mind, which, under the circumstances, is quite understandable. But are those confessions true?
* * *
Clementine in her confessions told one fact that could be checked out to a certain degree. She gave information leading to the arrest of the man who had sold her the “candjas,” Joseph Thibodeaux of New Iberia. Other than this one fact, nothing that Clementine said about the murders (a) can be confirmed by any other party, or (b) has the ring of truth about it. A great deal of what she said is demonstrably false.
In a modern police investigation, if Clementine told police that she had traveled to Crowley in January 1911 to murder the Byers family, the police, interviewing her just weeks later, would have asked about two hundred follow-up questions, like: Which train did you take over there? What time was it? Who sold you the ticket? Do you remember what the ticket agent looked like? Did you see anyone that you knew on the train? Was the train crowded or empty? What clothes were you wearing that day, do you remember? Did you get blood on your clothes? Who was the conductor who punched your ticket, do you remember him? When you got to Crowley, what time was it? Where was the Byers house, from the train? What do you remember about the Byers house? Did it have a porch? Did it have a porch swing? Was there anything on the porch that you remember? Did the house have a big yard? Where was the house that you took the axe from? Was the axe sticking up out of the woodpile, or was it just leaning against the woodpile? When you went in the house, what do you remember about the inside of the house? What room were you in when you broke in? Was it the kitchen or a bedroom? Did it have wallpaper? What color were the walls?
You make the person who is giving a confession answer questions like that so you can tell whether they are lying or telling the truth. If they’re lying, they’ll give a long string of “I don’t remembers” and wrong answers, and they will fail to correct deliberate mistakes made by the interviewer. If things check out, they’re telling the truth.
This was never done with Clementine; there was never any effort to check out her confessions and see whether she was telling the truth. It is unlikely that the police had any training at all, and it is unlikely that they had significant experience in murder investigation. But also, we believe that they let her confession stand because they wanted it to be true. And they wanted it to be true because they desperately wanted for this thing to be over with.
So these three points against Clementine are not convincing:
1. Clementine was very close to two of the crimes at the time they occurred,
2. She acted inappropriately,
3. She gave detailed and elaborate confessions to the crimes.
And that leaves us with these two:
1. Blood was found on her clothing after one of the crimes, and
2. Clementine was the first person to offer an explanation of the religious symbolism which is found at a couple of the murder scenes.
The blood is the best evidence against her. But Clementine’s lawyer argued, at her trial, that the police had seized items from Clementine’s room at the Guidrys’, and had thrown them into a bundle with things taken from the crime scene. It is possible that this is true, and it is also possible (though less likely) that the police, believing Clementine to be guilty, had planted evidence to ensure her conviction.
On the religious symbolism:
1. There actually isn’t all that much religious symbolism in the murders. One family was “posed” postmortem in a manner that some people thought looked as if they were praying, and a biblical passage taken actually from Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written on the door of one house. These are the only facts we are aware of that support the theory that a religious cult was behind the murders.
2. Clementine’s explanation that she had murdered the Randall family to punish them for disobeying her church appears only in her first confession. In her later and much more detailed confessions, she dropped that and told an entirely different story of why and how she and her never-identified friends committed the crimes.
Clementine knew Azema Randall through her church. When accused of murdering Azema, her first confused, crazy thought was that it had something to do with the church, because the church was the only thing that connected her to Azema.
We are not arguing absolutely that Clementine was not involved in the murders. We are arguing that, on balance, the theory that Clementine was not involved is (a) easier to believe than the arguments against her, and (b) much, much easier to believe than the theory that Clementine was the leader of a murderous religious cult.
Clementine, sentenced to life in prison, escaped for a few hours on July 31, 1913, but was recaptured the same day. She was in prison for ten years, was released on April 28, 1923, and disappeared. Presumably she left the area and assumed a different name, but no one knows where she went or what name she began using. You may have known her years ago; she could plausibly have lived into the 1970s. She would have been seventy-seven years old in 1970.
We think that, if authorities had actually believed that she was behind these terrible murders, it is unlikely that she would have been released after a few years in jail. She was turned loose so soon because the authorities didn’t believe her story, either.
* * *
The family of Hattie Dove lived at 1428 Cable Street in Beaumont, Texas, right next to a Baptist church and a third of a mile from the railroad track. Beaumont, as I mentioned earlier, is sixty miles west of Lake Charles, Louisiana. Hattie, still a young woman in her thirties, was separated from her children’s father, who lived in Nagadoches. She lived in Beaumont with her three teenaged children, Ernest, Ethel, and Jesse. Jesse, eighteen, was married but had separated from her husband and come back home. A man named John Smith, who worked nights, boarded at the house. The Dove family had lived in Beaumont only about a year, and had not made many friends or any enemies in Beaumont.
The house on Cable Street was still active at 9:30 on the night of February 19, 1912. Around midnight, an axe was removed from the woodpile in a yard about two blocks over, and replaced with another. Probably the assailant had picked up an axe, then saw the other axe and decided it was better for his purposes. The assailant or assailants broke into the Dove home through a kitchen window. The blunt end of the axe was used to bash the head of Hattie and the sharp end to destroy Ernest, who shared a bed in the back room.
Most reports said that the victims appeared to be killed in their sleep with the back of an axe, but the Beaumont Enterprise described the scene of the daughter’s bodies to be one of struggle, with bedclothes and blood everywhere. The axe was dropped at the scene along with the cloth that wiped it clean. With no better explanation, the Dove family murders were added to the list of the Church of Sacrifice Murders, what might better be called the Acadia Parish crimes.
At this point we need to go into quick-summary mode, although (a) some of these murders we are rushing past are actually very interesting stories, (b) I can’t absolutely guarantee you that they are all unconnected to our series, and (c) many people have concluded that these other crimes are connected to the Acadia Parish murders, although they probably are not.
• The family of Ellen Monroe (five people) was murdered in Glidden, Texas, on March 27, 1912.
• The family of William Burton (four people) was murdered at 724 Center Street in San Antonio on April 11, 1912. The house at 724 Center Street is two blocks from where the Casaway family was murdered in March 1911.
• The family of Alice Marshall (three people) was murdered in Hempstead, Texas, on April 15, 1912. Several other people also survived that attack.
The last murder to be commonly tied to the Church of Sacrifice series . . .
Let’s back off of that. There is no “Church of Sacrifice,” OK? There never was. Clementine made it up while she was confused and panicked and out of her mind, and it gained credibility because of racist stereotypes. Some of the cops in the later cases tried to solve their crimes by chasing down rumors about the Church of Sacrifice, rather than by doing normal police work, not that that was going to work, either. But there wasn’t any Church of Sacrifice.
The last murders to be commonly tied to what had begun in Acadia Parish in 1909 were the murders of the Walmsley family near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in November 1912. Philadelphia, of course, would be made famous by another three murders a half-century later, the three civil rights workers murdered in 1964. In 1912 the murdered three were William Walmsley, his wife, Sallie, and their four-year-old daughter. Their bodies were discovered on November 23.
In the spring of 1912 the Mississippi River flooded, killing hundreds of people—two hundred in Mississippi alone. Memphis was flooded, Arkansas, Louisiana; eastern Texas was flooded, although not directly by the Mississippi. In Acadia Parish, the murders became the parish’s second-biggest problem, starting their long march toward the dark attic of history, where they would rest hidden behind wars, scandals, and assassinations.
Do you know what an aneurism is? An aneurism is like a balloon effect in a vein or an artery. A portion of the vein weakens so that, under pressure, it suddenly swells up much larger than it is supposed to be.
In the history of axe murderers the years 1911 and 1912 are like an aneurism. In the course of researching this book, we looked at hundreds, perhaps thousands, of murders committed between 1890 and 1920. We did not attempt to count every single murder, but we did try to record every instance in which most of a family was murdered at once, whether with an axe or by some other method. We surely missed a few, because this is not an encyclopedia, but we identified 248 familicides, comprising a thousand people. It’s about eight families murdered per year. More than half of those crimes had obvious solutions, such as a murder committed by a family member or a jealous neighbor. There is usually in there one or two murders a year which have some of the earmarks of The Man from the Train—the use of an axe, the proximity to the railroad, the town too small to have a police force, the attack within an hour of midnight and utterly without warning, the use of the blunt side of the axe, etc. etc. etc.
For most of this era it is actually fewer than eight families murdered per year (with an axe or by any other method). And then you come to the 1910 to 1912 era, and . . . Jesus H. Christ, what is happening here? Axe murders start appearing like dandelions. Murdering your neighbors with an axe became the nation’s fourth-largest sport. In part this is because The Man from the Train was hyperactive in that era, and in part it is because of the Acadia Parish murders, and in part it is because of the New Orleans Axeman, but there is more to it than that. There are things happening here, in these two years, that we cannot and do not understand.
Those who investigated the crimes in Villisca and other places in 1911 and 1912 frequently attributed them to religious cults. The sheriff of Montgomery County, Iowa, thought that the Villisca crime had been committed by a negro religious cult (using his terminology). This explanation makes no sense to people who don’t know the story of Clementine Barnabet. If you know the story the explanation is still wrong, but at least it makes sense.
Ideas spread from one person to another. It would be nice if only good ideas spread, but unfortunately bad ideas get spread around, too—really, really horrible ideas. There are trends and fashions in crime as much as in any other area. In the 1870s there were gunfights and gunfighters. In the 1880s there were train robbers. In the 1930s there were a bunch of roving criminal gangs like the Dillinger gang, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and her boys, and Pretty Boy Floyd. You didn’t have those gangs in 1923 and you didn’t have them in 1943, but in 1933 they were all over the nation. There was an era when kidnapping was the crime du jour. For many years no one ever heard of a drive-by shooting, and then, all of sudden, there were drive-by shootings every night. The 1960s were the era of the political assassination. In 1975 nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, and then there were school shootings.
The period from 1910 to 1912 was the era of the axe murderer. It is not a silly argument to say that this era came about because of The Man from the Train, that he was the man who spread the idea across the country. He was the Typhoid Mary of the Axe Murder Epidemic.
Violence follows violence. One murder leads to another, even when there is no apparent connection. In this book we have seen small town after small town in which, after The Man from the Train was there, there was another murder the next month—and we didn’t always tell you when that happened. These were in small towns where there should have been one murder every fifty years or something. Murder leaves the idea of murder hanging in the air.
So what happened in this era, and who killed all of those families in Texas in 1912? We don’t know. We’re not sociologists or psychologists or criminologists or detectives. We’re not even real historians. We’re just writers. These are just the facts as best we can tell.