Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from Native Texan: Stories from Deep in the Heart, a collection of former Texas Observer editor Joe Holley’s columns out this July from Trinity University Press. The material is reprinted with permission of TU Press and the Houston Chronicle. This excerpt consists of an abridged version of the book’s introduction followed by one of the columns.
Among my various duties as a staff writer at the Washington Post, I often wrote obituaries. The Post, along with the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, was among the few newspapers that still took obituaries seriously, treating them as legitimate news stories, minibiographies of people whose lives made a difference. During my time there I wrote obits of prominent politicians, artists, entertainers, athletes, and business figures as well as crooks and common folks. I especially enjoyed writing about the latter, whose unsung lives often were just as fascinating as those we were accustomed to seeing in the media. It’s just that no one had thought to ask about them until they had passed on.
Meanwhile, I also carved out an unofficial beat at the Post: writing profiles of eccentric, unusual, or outrageous Texans. “Gee, Mr. Holley, you sure must be busy!” one of my journalism students at George Washington University observed. Youngster that she was, she assumed that every Texan was eccentric, unusual, or outrageous. (I can’t imagine where she got the idea.)
When I wrote about Texas and my fellow Texans, I wrote with more verve and authority. I knew Texas in ways I would never know anywhere else.
I identified with the late Willie Morris, my eminent predecessor by a couple of decades as editor of the Texas Observer. Morris once wrote, “As if in a dream, where every gesture is attenuated, it grew upon me that a man had best be coming back to where his strongest feelings lay. For there, then, after all of it, was the heart.”
For Morris, that place was Mississippi; for me, it was Texas. I liked living in D.C., but when I got the opportunity I headed home to write about the place I couldn’t shake, the place that was in my blood, in my heart.
Texas is the place we know and care about, a place we cannot scrub off our soul (to paraphrase the late Texas writer A. C. Greene), even when we have our differences and disagreements, even when it drives us crazy. Like family.
The Native Texan columns collected here originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle. They are about people, about places, about the past. The ones I like the best are about all three.
I’m not necessarily interested in tourist attractions or the best barbecue joint in town—although, in the tradition of investigative journalism, I’m happy to give the ribs and brisket a try. I’m interested primarily in the people who’ve made Texas home, in their ties to the land and to their neighbors. I’m interested in the personality, the particularity of a place, whether it’s a burgeoning metropolis like Dallas or Houston or a little town like Mexia (pronounced Muh-HAY-Uh) or Tivoli (pronounced Tuh-VO-Li). I’m interested in memory and how the past lives on, continuing to shape and mold the present.
My hope, dear reader, is that you enjoy these stories as much as I enjoyed teasing them out of this wonderfully intriguing place we call Texas. Always and everywhere in Texas, there are stories worth telling.
An Early Serial Killer’s Eternal Moonlight
For Austinites of a historic bent, news that local police and the FBI relied on radio towers tracking cell phone usage to pinpoint the location of Austin’s recent serial bomber brought back memories. They recalled another set of towers and the story of another serial killer—America’s first—who terrorized the city long ago.
Austin’s “moonlight towers” have been a part of the urban fabric for so long that they’re essentially invisible, although you’ve seen a movie version of one if you’re a fan of Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater. You’ll remember the “moon tower” from Dazed and Confused, the 1993 stoner classic set in Austin on the last day of school in 1976. In the movie, little of note happens throughout the day until Wooderson—played by Matthew (“all right, all right, all right”) McConaughey—gathers his buddies together for a nostalgic nighttime keg party at the foot of one of the venerable light towers.
Veteran Texas Monthly writer Skip Hollandsworth makes the connection between the towers dispensing perpetual moonlight and the serial killer who terrorized the city for more than a year, beginning in late 1884 (long before the term “serial killer” was coined). In his award-winning book The Midnight Assassin, Hollandsworth describes Austinites living in fear—“on edge,” to reprise an oft-used term—as a diabolical killer used axes, knives, an ice pick, and long steel rods to rip apart young women while they slept in their beds. Seven women and one man fell victim to the murderous spree.
Early victims were African American maids and housekeepers, often living in servants’ quarters or “alley houses” in the backyards of the city’s wealthiest white families. Some victims were only injured; they were able to make their escape or scream in time to scare off their attacker. None could identify him. Others weren’t so fortunate. In December 1884 an African American cook named Mollie Smith was found sprawled in the snow next to the outhouse behind her employer’s home, a gaping hole in her head. She was the first.
The early incidents were dismissed as “negro murders” until Christmas Eve 1885, when a white woman named Sue Hancock, described by a reporter as “one of the most refined ladies in Austin,” was discovered by her husband in their backyard, close to where the Four Seasons Hotel is today. Her head had been split open by an axe; a sharp, thin object was lodged in her brain. About an hour later, another prominent white woman, Eula Phillips, was found dead in the wealthiest neighborhood in the city, near the old, now-empty Austin Public Library on Guadalupe Street. These two killings, as Hollandsworth tells the story, “brought Austin to the brink of chaos.”
Austin city fathers first saw the moonlight towers at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, a kind of world’s fair held in New Orleans in spring 1885, a few months after the two white women were murdered. At night the exposition grounds were bright as day, thanks to 125-foot-high towers that held giant, newly invented “arc lights,” each light emitting “36,000 candlepower.”
“The Austin visitors were impressed,” Hollandsworth writes, “but for many of them, the lamps appeared to be more like a pointless curiosity than a helpful invention. Why, they asked, would anyone want to go to such expense to light up a city throughout the night? What possible purpose would it serve?”
Those questions were easier to answer a few years later when a newly constructed Colorado River dam and an adjoining power station provided enough low-cost electricity to run electric streetcars and install as many streetlights as the city wanted. Instead of electric streetlights atop twenty-foot-high poles, the choice for almost every other American city, the mayor and city aldermen decided to go with the arc lights atop very tall towers.
The Fort Wayne Electric Company fabricated thirty-one wrought-iron and cast-iron towers, each 165 feet tall and weighing approximately five thousand pounds. They were shipped in pieces to Austin and erected in 1894–95. Tall and stately, supported by slender guy wires, they reminded admirers in decades to come of miniature Eiffel Towers.
Unlike other cities, where the lamps illuminated shopping districts or railroad depots, Austin positioned them all over town so they would cover as much ground as possible. Chicken owners were concerned their hens wouldn’t know when to stop laying eggs in “the city of eternal moonlight,” but the birds turned out to be smarter than that. Even tower opponents had to admit that the lights would make it harder for a person up to no good to hide in alleys or shady lots along hilly residential streets.
When the lights were switched on for a test on May 5, 1895, “there was a sudden blinding flash and the town was in a blaze of white light that hid the rays of the moonlight,” an Austin Daily Statesman reporter observed. “In every nook and corner the brilliant lights sent their shooting rays and the whole face of creation was transcendent.”
In more than a decade of research, Hollandsworth never found any official statements that directly connected the arc lamps to the murders. The Daily Statesman reporter seemed to be alluding to something, though, when he wrote that Austin’s residents had spent years “groping around in that darkness that threatened the life and safety of all.” Hollandsworth believes the allusion is telling.
Fifteen moonlight towers still stand. Although the pale glow of their lamps is barely noticeable among the much brighter electric and mercury lights closer to the streets, they’re not going anywhere. In 1976 they received a National Historic Landmark designation. Hollandsworth notes that the city’s application for landmark status described the towers “as quaint, nostalgic relics of a time gone by, as much a part of Austin as the streetcars are of San Francisco.”
And the killer, the sadistic midnight assassin? Who knows? Despite several arrests and three trials, no one was ever convicted. His identity is a mystery to this day. Some say he ended up in London. Some say he was Jack the Ripper.
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