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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Before Jimmy’s trial, word spread through Austin that May Tobin was talking to the DA about the men who had come to see Eula. One of the most shocking names rumored to be on her list was that of William J. Swain, who had been elected state comptroller in 1882 and reelected in 1884 by more than 240,000 votes—then the largest majority ever cast in favor of any candidate for public office in Texas—and was considered a shoo-in for governor. His biggest rival for the Governor’s Mansion was Sul Ross, an Indian fighter with the U.S. Army and a Texas Ranger whose major claim to fame was that he had recovered the captive Cynthia Ann Parker while pursuing a Comanche raiding party. Ross was an ineffective orator—no match for the charismatic Swain. Yet suddenly the front-runner was backpedaling. He angrily claimed he was the victim of a whisper campaign, perhaps started by Ross’s “cohorts,” and vowed he would expose the identity of the author of a telegram sent to newspapers saying he “knew something about the murder of Eula.” But by the time the trial began, Swain was strangely silent. Perhaps, like other men in Austin, he was holding his breath to see what would happen.
Held in the old Travis County courthouse, Phillips’ murder trial (which preceded Hancock’s) was as sensational for nineteenth-century Texans as the O. J. Simpson trial was for twentieth-century Americans. Each day the courtroom was “crowded to suffocation,” according to one reporter, the testimony so riveting that the audience listened in “breathless attention.” DA Robertson had brought in one of his predecessors, E. T. Moore, to assist him in the prosecution. Phillips’ father, meanwhile, hired the Austin version of the Dream Team: William Walton, the F. Lee Bailey of Texas, who had written a book about his successful defense of Ben Thompson, a former Austin city marshall who had been charged with murder in 1882, and the brilliant and droll John Hancock (no relation to Moses Hancock).
The prosecutors came up with a novel scenario about the events of Christmas Eve: Eula, scared because her husband had learned of her infidelity, had brought an ax into their bedroom to protect herself. He assaulted her first, then she wounded him with a blow to the head, which made him even more crazed, and he grabbed the ax and struck her, killing her instantly. To divert suspicion, he became what criminologists today call a copycat killer, carrying Eula into the alley and working over her body to make it look similar to the previous murders of black women. To support their theory, Robertson and Moore brought forward a police sergeant who testified that one of the bloodhounds that sniffed Eula’s body the night of the murder had caught a scent, rushed back to the house, and reared up on the bed where Jimmy still lay. “I wouldn’t hang a dog upon such testimony of a dog!” a furious Hancock replied.
To prove Jimmy’s innocence, Walton asked him to take off his shoes and place his bare foot in ink and then make a footprint on a board for comparison with a bloody footprint left on the Phillips’ porch. In a moment of high drama that presaged Johnnie Cochran’s “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” defense by more than a century, a detective took measurements—and Jimmy’s foot turned out to be smaller! Moore quickly argued that because Jimmy was probably carrying his wife at the time, his feet would have produced flatter prints. Walton had no choice but to ask his client to pick him up and step onto the board once again. Jimmy’s foot still didn’t match.
Then there was the testimony of May Tobin, who said that Eula had come to her house to meet four men, two of whom were rising young politicians (one was the secretary of the committee overseeing the building of the Capitol, and the other was the handsome head of the state public education department, Benjamin Baker). She did not mention Swain. She did say that Eula came to her door on Christmas Eve at about eleven o’clock, but she had no room for her. Tobin added that she could not identify the man waiting for Eula in the carriage in front of the house. The reporters covering the trial had heard rumors that she would have named more men, but she was blackmailing them, demanding money in return for her silence. Clearly, there was some sort of cover-up going on. Jimmy’s sister Delia later admitted that she had been asked by certain prominent Austin men to leave town so that she would not be able to tell the police what she knew about Eula’s affairs.
Still, despite the Phillips family’s insistence that Jimmy seemed peaceful on Christmas Eve, the jury agreed that he probably caught Eula slipping back into their house and could contain himself no longer. They convicted him of “uxoricide” (the murder of one’s wife) and sentenced him to seven years. It all seemed too simple, and perhaps it was. Six months later, the Court of Appeals of Texas overturned Jimmy’s conviction and ordered a new trial, claiming the prosecution had presented insufficient evidence connecting him with the killing and none at all that he knew of his wife’s extramarital conduct. Then came the Hancock trial, which resulted in a hung jury after the defendant’s teenage daughter destroyed the DA’s case by saying that her mother had never worked up the courage to show her father the infamous letter.
Both men were released from custody and never tried again. For months there was still talk about various suspects, both black and white. Some people continued to believe that Swain was somehow involved. A few years after the killings, a young Austin socialite got into an argument with Swain’s son Walter, who pulled out a pistol and fired a shot in her direction. According to trial testimony, the woman provoked him when she said, “Your whole family is just as low as can be. Your father before you was a midnight murderer, and you are no better.”
Yet there were no more investigations. Most people were exhausted by the whole affair and ready to forget it, especially since the murders had come to a halt. The city did do its best to ensure that no such crimes could ever happen again. Huge arc lights were installed over various neighborhoods, casting a glow over a radius of three thousand feet (Those moonlight towers are still in operation today). To keep criminals from congregating, saloons and gambling dens were ordered closed at midnight. To prevent other innocent women from traversing the same path that Eula did, a campaign was begun to shut down the city’s bordellos and houses of assignations. In February 1888 the Goddess of Liberty, a symbol of virtue, was placed on top of the new state capitol, followed by a week-long celebration in May. Austin was restored.
By then, all the characters tarnished by the killings had left the city or public life. In a shocking defeat, Swain lost to Ross in his bid to be governor and never again ran for office. Baker, the young head of state education accused of having a fling with Eula, moved with his family to Canadian, a new railroad town in the faraway Panhandle, where he lived quietly as a lawyer and later as a judge. Moses Hancock left Austin, as did Jimmy Phillips, who moved to the nearby town of Georgetown, got a job at a chair factory, fell in love with a young girl who lived across the street, and started a new family. (One of Jimmy’s sisters took in Jimmy and Eula’s little boy, who stayed around Austin until he was a young man, working as a plumber’s apprentice and a bartender, then left and was never heard from again.) I tracked down some of the descendants of Jimmy’s second family, who told me that he rarely mentioned the events of 1885 except to complain about his recurring headaches from the ax wound. He kept drinking—“He could be a scary old man when he was drunk,” one relative recalled—but toward the end of his life, after his second wife died, he would spend much of his time alone in his room, playing his violin, staring out the window. He died in 1929 at age 68.
And what of the enigmatic Eula, the achingly pretty young woman who felt the need to go against the conventions of the day? For more than a year, as I tried to track down information about her, I felt as if I were moving in a shadowland, looking for someone hidden by history. I learned that Alma had lived out her last years in the town of Buda, seventeen miles south of Austin, where she was renowned for her stories about the early days of Texas life. But when I started contacting people there, they could not remember Alma telling any stories about her little sister. One of Alma’s two surviving granddaughters, Dorothy Larson of Los Angeles, said that she did remember Alma talking years ago about having a sister who was found dead in an alley. “But I don’t think she ever mentioned her name or why she died,” Larson said.
A few days later, Larson called back. She had searched through her garage and found a tattered photo album that her grandmother had kept throughout her life. “There had always been something about that photo album that had bothered me,” she said. Next to a photo taken of Alma when she was a little girl, she explained, was a photo of another little girl. Next to a photo taken of Alma as a young woman was a photo of another young woman. “I always wondered who the other girl was and why my grandmother had her photos,” Larson said. “Now I realize they were photos of Eula. All these years, Alma kept these memories of her sister—her beautiful, doomed sister.”
It would be easy to describe the story of the murdered Austin women as a period piece, a tale about a forgotten time. Yet the same questions that haunted Austin 115 years ago haunt it today. One afternoon I went with Jeanine Plumer, my fellow Austin killer buff, to the ancient Oakwood Cemetery, just east of downtown, where townspeople were buried in the late nineteenth century. In those days whites were buried on top of a sloping, grassy hill in an area called Old Green, and blacks were buried at the bottom of the hill, across a dirt road, in Colored Green. Almost all of the grave markers in Colored Green were gone, broken apart by time, but Jeanine did show me one cracked little headstone in the back of the cemetery. The name Ramey was barely visible. “That’s where the youngest victim, Mary Ramey, the eleven-year-old, was buried,” she said. “The other murdered black women must have been buried right around here too.”
Then she pointed toward the crest of the hill, in an area between some trees. “There is the plot of the Phillips’ family, where Eula is. It’s as if she can see the other women down here at Colored Green, and they can see her.” Jeanine paused, and I realized she was holding back tears. “Think of these women, from such different walks of life, dying the same way, their eyes full of terror,” she finally said. “And now here they are, joined together forever.”
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