truepenny | UBC: Hollandsworth, The Midnight Assassin

The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer by Skip Hollandsworth

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

[library]

This book is excellent.

I'd seen mentions of the ax murders in Austin in 1884-85 in books about Jack the Ripper, due to the understandable but implausible theory that the dude from Austin had made his way to Whitechapel, so I was delighted when I realized that this book is about those ax murders. I listened to it for that reason, but it gave me a great deal more than that.

This is a loving reconstruction of the life of Austin, Texas, in the 1880s, brimming over with the tiny details that make history recognizable as real life. Hollandsworth talks about the murder victims and the police (and bloodhounds) and private detectives who failed to find the murderer, but he also talks about the reporters, and he talks about the mayor of Austin (who hired the wrong Pinkerton Detective Agency) and the governor of Texas and the director of the State Lunatic Asylum and the ordinary residents of Austin, both white and black, and how their lives were changed by these terrible crimes.

Hollandsworth faces the horrific racism of 1880s Texas straight on and deals with it very matter-of-factly, laying it out without any kind of either apology or apologia. It's a part of the story, and he treats it as such. Most of the "midnight assassin"'s victims were black servants; only the last two women murdered in Austin were white. The difference in reactions from the white citizenry of Austin is about what you'd expect, and of course the prevailing theory about the murders was that they were committed by a gang of young black men, even though evidence of such a gang was never produced.

The "midnight assassin" (as one reporter called him--once again, we see the power of good PR; Jack the Ripper is assured of immortality because of his catchy name) murdered poor black women and middle- to upper-class white women. He murdered a girl as young as 12. He beat one victim to death with a brick. He shoved some sort of rod into the ears of more than one victim, so hard that it punctured the brain. And of course, he used his axe. He also left potential witnesses alive with apparent unconcern. And yet nobody ever got a good look at him. The two witnesses, both children, who saw him couldn't even agree on whether he was white or black. (Which also raises the question of copy-cat killings, which Hollandsworth doesn't go into to any great degree, but a copy-cat seems unlikely to me, unless maybe Eula Phillips' cuckolded husband decided to use the axe murders as a cover . . . on the same night that the serial killer was murdering another white woman? That's actually even weirder than the Occam's Razor answer of the serial killer choosing two white women on the same night, Christmas Eve 1885.) None of his victims ever made a sound. (In that way he is like Jack.) These are very peculiar murders, and there's not really much you can do to reduce their peculiarity.

Hollandsworth didn't do as much meta as I would have liked (but almost no true-crime writer ever does), and (the only part of the book where I could fact-check him) his grasp of the Whitechapel murders is decidedly sketchy. (But, then, the only Jack-the-Ripper "expert" he mentions by name is Shirley Harrison, who of course has a theory that James Maybrick came over to Texas to murder women in Austin in 1885 before going back to Britain to murder women in London in 1888 before being murdered by his own wife in Liverpool (if Florence Maybrick killed him, which isn't 100% certain) in 1889.) So, yeah, he's not super strong on his Ripperology, but that's only a minor defect in an otherwise splendid book.

I highly recommend this book, especially but not exclusively if you are interested in the history of Austin, in the details of small-city life in America in the 1880s, or in nineteenth-century serial killers.

(The reader was excellent, too. He shouldn't have tried for the German accent for that one quote from a German language newspaper, and he had a couple of weird mispronunciations, but I loved him first to last.)

View all my reviews