Capital Murder
Who murdered seven women and one man in Austin in a brutal year-long spree that began in late 1884? I’m haunted by the details of his crimes—and I’m not alone.
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In an extraordinary Christmas Day meeting, more than five hundred city and business leaders, lawyers, doctors, and clergymen met to devise a plan to stop the killings. There were proposals to light the entire city at night with huge lamps. Governor John Ireland suggested that fire alarms be set off whenever the next attack occurred so that everyone could come out of their houses fully armed to hunt the killer down. A bombastic former Confederate general suggested that sentinels be stationed around Austin to prevent anyone from leaving and that all those within the city be strictly questioned as to their whereabouts on the night of the murders.
None of it would be necessary. Just as suddenly and as inexplicably as they had begun, the attacks stopped. The city was left reeling, torn by questions and consumed with suspicions about who the killer was. And many of those questions, it turned out, revolved around the death of Eula Phillips.
The investigation was hampered, in a textbook kind of way, by incompetence and a clash of egos. More than a year before the killings began, Grooms Lee, the confident but lackadaisical young son of a powerful local politician, was chosen as Austin’s police chief. In 1884 a group of aldermen tried unsuccessfully to have Lee impeached because many of the twelve officers on the force spent more time at the saloons and bordellos in Austin’s “Guy Town” area than they did patrolling the streets. After rumors emerged that city money was missing, the chief clerk at the police station skipped town, and there were allegations that a few officers had committed robberies themselves. Not exactly a crack squad capable of corralling a serial killer.
Of course, at that time the phrase “serial killer” had not even been coined. No one had thought of studying crime scenes to help create a psychological profile of a killer. Fingerprinting and blood-typing hadn’t been invented yet. Like other police departments around the country, Austin’s relied on trained bloodhounds to track suspects. Each night that a body was found, the pack, led by a large, snarling bloodhound named Old George, sniffed for scents at the scene of the crime, then raced up and down the unpaved streets of the city, baying at the top of their lungs.
When the murders began, the consensus within white Austin was that no white man would have any reason to mutilate a black servant woman. As a result, Lee focused his attention on black men. Because bloody footprints were often found around the bodies of the victims, some black men were arrested on suspicion of murder simply because they were found not wearing shoes. Others were arrested because they were reputed to be bad characters. One of those jailed off and on during the murders was described in the newspapers as “the great American chicken lifter.”
In contrast to other Southern cities, Austin had been accommodating toward its black population. Former governor E. M. Pease had given his onetime slaves several acres of land in West Austin; those acres were later christened Clarksville, the city’s second black neighborhood. Although racism was a given (a white servant woman in Austin could make $20 a week, three times the amount paid to a black servant woman), Austin’s black community was bustling. By 1885 a few black entrepreneurs even owned businesses along mostly white Pecan Street. The most popular black saloon, the Black Elephant, was located there, as was a black grocery.
The Austin killings, however, upended the city’s race relations. An editorial in the usually progressive Statesman claimed that the perpetrator had to be a Negro afflicted by “idleness and drink.” Some white citizens felt justified in arguing that, deep down, blacks would always be savages. Innocent black men found themselves on the run from Lee’s hound dogs, which they called “nigger hounds,” because they believed the dogs had been trained to attack only blacks. Some resorted to the old slave trick of tying bags of “asofoetidie” (a folk remedy that supposedly threw bloodhounds off a scent) around their ankles.
In time, Mayor Robertson hired a team of private detectives from Houston’s Noble Detective Agency to assist Lee, hoping that the outsiders would sweep into the city and see things no one else could. But if anything, the climate of fear only intensified. One evening Lee walked into the Black Elephant and asked to see a patron named Alex Mack, who had known one of the victims. Mack accompanied Lee down the street, where a group of detectives and officers threw him to the ground, kicked him, tied a rope around his neck, and demanded that he tell what he knew about the murders. In what can only be described as a heroic act, a white man named Press Hopkins came out of his house and witnessed what the police were doing. The potential lynching was stopped, but Mack was taken to jail, where he was regularly beaten over the next nine days.
The good news for Austin’s black residents during this awful period came in early December 1885, when district attorney James H. Robertson, the mayor’s brother, decided to try Walter Spence, the boyfriend of the first victim, for murder. After a two-day trial, Spence was acquitted. Yet the victory didn’t last long: After the Christmas Eve massacres of the two white women, many of the same black suspects from a year earlier were rounded up once again, along with a mentally ill Mexican American man and two suspicious-looking white brothers found with blood on their clothes in a town north of Austin. By then, Lee had been succeeded as the police chief by James Lucy, a brusque and fearless former Texas Ranger. Lucy had added extra officers to the force, putting about fifty men at his disposal, all of whom were under orders to stop strangers and to ask them what their business was in town. If the answers were not satisfactory, the strangers were given 24 hours to leave town. Spurred on by a $3,000 reward being offered by a citizen’s committee of Austin’s most prominent businessmen, who desperately wanted their city’s image restored, as well as a $300 reward by the Texas governor, private detectives and police officers from other cities arrived in Austin in droves to begin their own investigations. The city was turning into a police state.
Still, the killer remained at large, and the panic reached a fever pitch. Women rarely left their homes at night. Some homeowners purchased a newfangled piece of equipment called an “electric burglar alarm.” Others packed their belongings and moved elsewhere. Among the only people who came to Austin were reporters, from as far away as New York and St. Louis.
To their surprise, and everyone else’s, they would soon have a trial to cover—and the two men charged were white.
In early January 1886, 23-year-old Jimmy Phillips was arrested for the murder of his wife. A few weeks later 50-year-old Moses Hancock was arrested for the murder of his wife. The two husbands did it? They just happened to come up with the same plan—murder their wives with an ax and make it look like the work of the serial killer terrifying black servants—on the same night? As one skeptical Statesman reporter wrote, the police were asking Austin to believe that Hancock and Phillips had “transformed themselves from men into infernal fiends.”
But district attorney Robertson, presumably under pressure from the citizens committee and anxious to redeem himself after his embarrassing loss in the Spence trial, was undeterred. His biggest piece of evidence in the Hancock case was a letter written by Sue to Moses months before she was murdered. In the letter, which was found in their house at the bottom of a box of fake flowers, she explained that although she loved him, she could no longer live with his drinking. Despite having no eyewitnesses, the DA believed that on the night of the crime, Moses visited the Iron Front saloon, returned home, and attacked Sue in a drunken rage, convinced she was going to leave him.
The evidence against Jimmy Phillips was far more intriguing. He was a young rake, a handsome and talented musician who played the violin. The young women of Austin back then must have adored him the way the young women of Austin love musicians today. But by all accounts, he could be a raucous drunk, and he could be abusive to Eula. Various family members and friends later testified in court that Jimmy had once thrown a cup at Eula and that he once chased her with a knife. After one evening of drinking, Jimmy became so enraged at Eula and his sister Delia that they ran out of the house, crying for the police. After another of Jimmy’s angry, drunken binges, Eula hid at the home of her older sister, Alma, for several days. Yet another time, she had Delia take her to the shabby East Austin home of a sympathetic black prostitute, Fannie Whipple, who perhaps understood what life could be like for a woman abused by a man.
Eula had married Jimmy in 1883. Her mother, a member of the Eanes family (for whom the school district in West Austin is named), had died when Eula and Alma were little. Their father, hotelier Thomas Burditt, essentially gave them up, asking one of their aunts, a member of the Slaughter family (for whom Slaughter Creek, south of Austin, is named), to raise them. Reading between the lines of testimony later given at Jimmy’s trial, it is clear that Eula was a desperately unhappy person. When she became pregnant with their second child, she asked a family friend to go to a drug store on Congress Avenue and purchase chamomile flowers, extract of cottonwood, and ergot—which, if mixed properly, could induce an abortion.
Then, in late 1885, when Eula was seventeen, her life took a dramatic turn: She began slipping away to May Tobin’s “house of assignation,” which was located at the southern end of Congress Avenue. It was a kind of discreet hotel where a man and a woman could secretly meet for an hour or two, and it attracted Austin’s highest-priced prostitutes, who would go there to rendezvous with their customers, as well as men and women cheating on their spouses. Apparently, Eula had visited the place nearly half a dozen times in the late fall of 1885—and, Tobin told the police, she had been there briefly on Christmas Eve, the night she was murdered.
Among today’s Austin killer buffs, one of the hottest debates revolves around Eula’s romantic life: What was she after? Had she fallen in love with someone else? It would have been impossible for another man not to have been attracted by her exquisite, wistful beauty. Or was she a sexual temptress, slipping away from Jimmy to seduce other men—which eventually led him to seek murderous revenge? Or had she turned to prostitution, the one certain way a woman could make money in those days, so she could afford to start a new life with her son?
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