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 porti
on 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 eve
nts.) 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.