Clementine Barnabet: The Voodoo Killer

 

Clementine Barnabet (enhanced picture from the
New Orleans Item. April 2, 1912)

The Midwest ax murderer wasn’t the only fiend causing havoc in the early 1900s. Detectives in Louisiana and Texas found themselves pitted against a repeat murderer closely following the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. Thirteen black families had been slaughtered in their sleep in less than two years.

Several people were questioned but quickly released. Then, in November 1911, Detectives in Lafayette, Louisiana, arrested Clementine Barnabet.

Six months later, the nineteen-year-old housekeeper confessed to killing seventeen of the forty-plus Negroes murdered in and around Lafayette, and for a moment, it seemed as if the case was solved. But unfortunately, the killings continued for nearly a year after her arrest.

For her part, Clementine enjoyed the spotlight. She smoked cigars with the reporters crowded around her cell, cracked jokes, and made light of the killings, blaming her capture on the loss of the “cunjah bag” Joe Thibodaux, a “Voodoo Doctor,” sold her.

The papers described Thibodaux as an old Voodoo priest who sold charms and conjure bags, which he “guaranteed would make the wearers immune from arrest, no matter how atrocious the crime.”

Clementine said they didn’t have any plans when they started. They bought the charms on a whim. And then, when they decided to kill, they drew lots to see who would do the killings. She pulled the short straw, so she performed the kills at Rayne and again at Crowley while the other two women in her band watched her.

The murders were pretty much random. They looked for houses with lights on so they could look inside. Then, when it felt right, they waited for the family to fall asleep.

They stuffed rags in the keyholes so no one outside would see the light as they moved through the house. “We weren’t afraid of being arrested,” said Clementine, “because I carried a Voodoo which protected us from all punishment.”

Reporters lapped up every word Clementine said. What could boost circulation better than a pretty, robust, nineteen-year-old mulatto girl, protected by Voodoo charms and bent on murder?

Clementine proclaimed herself the high priestess of a cult known as the Church of Sacrifice or the Sacred Serpent. She told reporters that all negro families of five or more members needed to be sacrificed “for the good of the African race.” 

Newspapers played up the Voodoo threat, speculating on the church’s services, saying the sermons at the Church of Sacrifice “were nothing short of appeals to passion, frenzied shooting, [and] many people overcome with wild zeal, rolling on the floor naked.”

Many papers used the opportunity to criticize blacks or make fun of their superstitions. The Times-Democrat told readers Clementine was “the lowest type of the negro race. There is nothing about her appearance to distinguish her from the ordinary servant found in country towns, but her conversation betrays her brutal nature the moment she begins to talk. She is a moral pervert and a degenerate, and is devoid of every sense of decency. 

The paper couldn’t get over the fact that “She laughed and grinned when she discussed the shocking details of her crimes.”

Other papers weren’t satisfied with the facts. Bashed-in heads, bloodied beds, and walls mixed with voodoo charms didn’t satisfy their bloodlust. So, they upped the carnage, telling readers the victim’s bodies were torn limb to limb and strewn across the house when that never happened. 

The Murders

William J. Byers, his wife Sylvinia, and his son (6) were murdered in their home in Crowley Coontown on January 28, 1911.

The St. Landry Clarion said all three victims were “slaughtered with an ax, probably while they were asleep.” And when it was done, the killer disappeared without a trace. 

Neighbors last saw Sylvinia at about 6:30 the previous evening. Several days later, a little girl went to the house on an errand. She found the doors locked, noticed a foul smell coming from the place, and alerted the authorities. 

Clementine Barnabet bring the ax down on a family of victims

Officer Bellew was the first police officer on the scene. He found all three bodies piled on one bed. Their heads were split open, the bed was covered in blood and brain matter, and bloody footprints crisscrossed the floor.

The little boy lay at the foot of his parent’s bed, and next to the bed sat the ax used to kill them. A half-filled washbowl on the washstand showed the killer was in no rush and took time to clean his hands before leaving. 

The papers described William Byers as an “industrious and reputable colored man.” He worked at the rice mill and served as the colored Baptist church secretary. 

 

Alexander Andrus (35), his wife, Meme Andrus, and two children, Joachim (3) and Agnes (11 months), were murdered in their home in Lafayette, Louisiana, on February 24, 1911.

Detectives believed the family had been killed in their sleep. “The head of each member of the family was crushed with terrible blows,” reported the Crowley Signal. “Their brains (were) spattered over the room and their bodies horribly tortured.”

In mid-September 1911, the police charged Raymond Barnabet with the Andrus murders. However, the exact evidence they had against him was never disclosed. Instead, Barnabet was convicted primarily on the testimony of his children.

Clementine and Zepherin Barnabet testified that their father came home in a rage between 2 and 4 a.m. and forced them to help hide the evidence. His hands, face, and clothes were spattered with blood. He forced Clementine to wash his clothes, then threatened to kill them if they breathed a word of what happened.

Zepherin embellished the story saying his father told him, “He killed the whole darn Andrus family.”

The jury convicted Raymond Barnabet of the murders. However, he was granted a new trial after it came out that he was drunk during the proceedings and did not know what had happened.

Another killing followed in San Antonio, Texas, on March 21, 1911. This time the attacker murdered Alfred Casaway (52), his wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie) (37), and their three children—Jose (6), Louise (3), and Alfred (5 months).

Alfred worked as a janitor at the Grant School in San Antonio. The school’s principal phoned R. A. Campbell to find out why Casaway hadn’t opened the doors that morning. Campbell’s wife walked over to the house to check on them. When she went inside, she found five bodies piled on the floor. 

The San Antonio Light played the race card, blaming a racial fanatic for the murders. “The fact that Casaway was a negro and his wife a white woman,” they said, “preyed upon the mind of someone until wholesale murder presented itself as the only solution.”

Sheriff Tobin quickly arrested someone, but he had little to go on. The man had threatened Alfred five or six years before that, and now that he was dead, maybe there was something to it. The only other evidence against the suspect was that his shoes somewhat matched the muddy footprints leading from the house. 

The only other clue the police had to work with was that Alfred had purchased a bucket of beer at the saloon earlier that afternoon. Neither Alfred nor his wife drank, making detectives think the couple was expecting company, so maybe that person killed them.

And then, in August, the police arrested William McWilliams (70), a relative of Lizzie’s who objected to her marrying a black man. However, the case against him went nowhere, and he was released.

On November 27, 1911, Norbert  and Azema Randall and their five children were butchered in their home in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The Randall family lived on Lafayette Street near the cotton mill. Randall’s ten-year-old daughter spent the night at her uncle’s house. She discovered the bodies when she returned home the following morning.

The killer slashed the mosquito netting around the bed before performing his brutal work. 

Norbert, Azema, and the baby were found on one bed. The three boys were piled on another bed, and the bodies were “fearfully mutilated.” Their heads were smashed beyond recognition. Blood and brain matter covered the walls and beds.

In a departure from the previous murders, Norbert had been shot in the face. It was the only time the ax murderer used a gun. And then, when the killer finished, he washed the blood from the ax and leaned it against a bedroom wall. 

 

Arrest of Clementine Barnabet

Sheriff LaCoste arrested Clementine Barnabet, her brother Zepherin, and two other black men on November 27 for the murder of Norbert Randall and his family. Clementine lived just a block away.

Birmingham Post. April 3, 1912

Bloody clothes were found in a locked closet outside Clementine’s room at Mrs. Guidry’s home, where she worked as a housekeeper. In addition, the rope latch leading to Mrs. Guidry’s home was covered in blood.

Sheriff LaCoste sent Clementine’s clothes to a medical lab in New Orleans for testing. Chemist Metz determined that the white and blue shirtwaist and skirt were covered in “pure” human blood and brains. That was as close as forensics went. DNA testing was still decades away.

Zepherin had an alibi. Clementine did not, so the sheriff concentrated his case on her. 

Still, the authorities were at a loss to explain the reason for the murders. They determined, “Clementine and her companions were degenerates, and their weakened brains evidently were affected by the exhortations they had heard in the Church of Sacrifice.” It was easier than admitting there are demons on Earth.

In early April 1912, after nearly six months in jail, Clementine Barnabet confessed to the murders at Rayne, Crowley, and Lafayette.

She said she was part of a group of five—two men and three women (including herself). They met an old negro in New Iberia who sold them “candjas” or hoodoos for $3.00 each. He told them they could do whatever they pleased with no fear of detection by the police.

When they got back to Lafayette, the “question came up as to whether we could kill and be protected by the hoodoos,” said Clementine. Unsure the charms would protect them, the group sent one person back to question the old man. He said, “Our lives would at all times be fully protected by the power of the hoodoos.”

Clementine went to Rayne in the fall of 1910 and visited her sister, who lived near the O. G. Railroad depot. Later that night, she went into town disguised as a man.

She grabbed an ax outside a cabin.

“I saw the light was burning,” said Clementine, “and by that, I could easily see inside. I saw the mother sleeping in her bed.

“On entering the house, I struck the woman on the right temple and killed her instantly. One of the children was awakened by the noise, and before he could raise his head from the pillow, I struck him a blow somewhere near the left ear. Then I struck the other two.”

Before leaving the house, she switched to women’s clothes and returned to her sister’s house. A few hours later, she boarded the train for Lafayette and arrived home before news of the killings broke.

After that, the gang watched the news, waiting to see if they’d been detected. When they weren’t, they killed another family in Crowley.

“I entered the house [in Crowley] with one of the women,” said Clementine, “while the other kept watch. As I had the ax in my hand, I committed the murders.

“I struck the man first, and just as I did, the woman woke up. I struck her a blow in the face with the butt end of the ax and felled her. I then struck her once or twice to be sure that she was dead. Once this was done, it was an easy matter to get rid of the two small children. We thought it would be better to kill them than to leave orphans, as they would suffer.”

After that, they took a break until February. The next murder was one of opportunity. They knew the police would be busy “politicking” the night before the election, so they went to the refinery to lay their plans. They didn’t have a victim in mind.

“When we reached the railroad crossing, we saw a light burning in a cabin near Ramagosa’s store,” said Clementine. “We decided that was a good place, so went there.”

Clementine and another woman entered the house. “I struck Timi, the man first, then his wife, and afterward his two small children, one of whom was an infant in a cradle near the bed.” They’d overlooked the baby at first, but when it cried, Clementine turned around and struck him in the head, killing him instantly. They placed the man and woman in kneeling positions when it was over, then left.

Clementine stayed close to the house, watching events unfold. The following morning, when Timi’s brother came to the house, she watched him peek through the windows and cry when he saw the dead bodies.

Salt Lake Tribune. April 3, 1912

“I was one of the first to go to him and ask what happened,” said Clementine. “He told me, and I went to notify their parents who lived nearby. I helped to wash them and prepare them for burial.”

The group ran into the police on the way to their fourth kill. Clementine hid the ax in the grass until the police officers left.

A few minutes later, they bumped into King Harris, the minister of the God Sacrifice Church. “We told him there had been two men fighting up the street, and it would be better for him to go by the other street.” Otherwise, the officers would arrest him.

“That left us all alone in the street,” continued Clementine, “so we crawled to the house and entered from behind and killed them. Once we had killed them, I took a pistol which I had hidden under my dress and shot Norbert Randall.”

She returned home at about 2 a.m. Officer Peck arrested her the following day.

That was Clementine’s confession. The question Sheriff LaCoste needed to answer was how much of it was true. Clementine had lied about the Andrus murders and blamed her father. Now, she said she was in it with her father, which made sense because the police found blood on Clementine’s clothes when they first investigated the case. She told detectives her father rubbed it on them to keep her quiet, and since she testified against him, they let it go. Now, they could see their mistake.

There was also the motive for the murders. Although Clementine insisted the killings were entirely random, the truth may have been different. Alexander Andrus’s wife was Norbert Randall’s sister, and the Randalls lived just a block from Mrs. Guidry’s house, where Clementine worked as a maid. So maybe the killings were personal. She might have had a score to settle.

Reverend King Harris, a colored pastor, was arrested shortly after the Randall murders. He held a meeting at a house a half block from the Randall home on the night the family was attacked, and it was believed the Randalls attended the meeting, so perhaps King was involved. Add to that, in her confession, Clementine implied that King was the high priest of the God Sacrifice Church.

Several other women were detained following Clementine’s confession. Chief Charges and Officer Domengeaux picked up Pauline, Clementine’s half-sister who lived in Rayne. Sheriff LaCoste detained Valena Mabry, whom Clementine identified as the Irene who assisted her in the murders. Both women denied any involvement in the crimes.

The biggest problem was that the murders continued after Clementine’s arrest. Sheriff La Coste suggested Clementine’s gang perpetrated them to make her appear innocent. Others suggested the murders were the work of copycats.

On January 18, 1912, Marie Warner (30) and her three children were found dead in their two-room hut in Crowley, Louisiana. The dead included Pearl (9), Garey (7), and Harriet (5).

The Crowley Signal told its readers that “a family of four had been brained with an ax.” They weren’t the only paper that liked that phrase. It appeared in dozens of articles across the country.

Marie’s mother, Harriet Crane, stopped by the house the following morning. When no one answered the door, she walked across the street to Dorsey Berdsong’s. The two women walked back to Marie’s place but were afraid to go inside. Finally, they got a neighbor, Ben Robinson, to go inside. He found four mangled bodies lying on a bed in the front room. A bloodstained ax rested against a nearby wall. 

The police found several tracks in the backyard, leading them to believe more than one person was involved in the slayings. But unfortunately, no suspects emerged in the investigation.

 

The killer crept into Felix Broussard’s house in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on January 21, 1912. 

The El Paso Herald said Felix Broussard “was a good type of negro. He was industrious and intelligent, and lived happily with his wife and three children.”

Felix and his “pretty” wife had their heads bashed in. And then, after he finished his gruesome work, the killer wiped the ax clean and placed it under the bed. 

The killer placed a giant bucket in the children’s room to catch the blood dripping off the bed. That fueled speculation that Sacrifice Church planned to use the blood in some ritualistic ceremony.

The El Paso Herald also talked about the children’s fingers being stretched apart—wedged open with paper and held in place by pins. And above the door, the killer scrawled “Human Five,” leading the paper to believe the killings were a sacrifice to the strange sect. Or maybe a band of five fanatics handled the killings.

The finger mutilations weren’t mentioned in the original reports, so the paper might have invented them to liven the story up.

Finally, one of Felix’s friends told reporters that Felix said: “they were all going home to glory and going mighty soon.” That made him think Felix had a premonition that he would die soon.

Hattie Dove (30) and her three children Ernest (14), Ethel (16), and Jessie Quirk (18) were slaughtered in their home in Beaumont, Texas, on February 19, 1912.

A neighbor found the bodies early Monday morning. The Beaumont Enterprise painted a gruesome picture of the crime scene. The victim’s “almost nude” bodies were piled on the beds, “with their brains oozing from large rents in the head, made by an ax.”

Detectives believed Hattie and Ernest died first because they lay in natural sleep positions. Jessie and Ethel likely struggled with the attacker. The furniture in their room was knocked over, the bedclothes were torn from the bed, and there was “blood everywhere.”

The ax used to commit the murders was left in the room. Next to it was a cloth the killer used to wipe his bloody hands. Strangely, the ax belonged to a negro who lived two blocks away. The killer had left a different ax when he grabbed it.

One thing everyone was sure of was that the attacks created panic in the negro sections of many towns. “Negros have forgotten what it is to sleep,” reported The Crowley Post-Signal. Instead, they “keep vigil all night.

“The position of the Negroes is serious,” continued the paper. ”Naturally superstitious, and having nothing else to attribute the outrages to, many of them are assigning supernatural causes, while all are so wrought up that it is difficult to get an intelligent word out of them.”

Many blacks had accidentally shot and killed friends or relatives, thinking a stray sound was the killer coming for them. For example, Adam Babineaux and Horace Alexander took turns watching their house in the days after Hattie Dove’s murder. While on his watch, Babineaux heard a strange noise and fired a load of buckshot into his friend’s side, killing him.

The ax murderer claimed six more victims in Glidden, Texas, on March 27, 1912. The victims included Lyle Finucane (37), Ellen Monroe (46), Alberta Monroe (8), Jessie Monroe (11), Dewey Lee Monroe (12), and Willie Monroe (16).

Each of the victims had their head beaten in with the blunt end of an ax. Lyle Finucane’s head was “beaten and crushed from the nose to the crown.” And everyone’s pillows were covered in blood and brain matter.

Police figured the attacker grabbed an ax from the woodpile and entered the home through the rear door. Lyle Finucane died first. Ellen Monroe tried to escape, but the axman felled her midway through the room.

He crossed the hall and crushed the skulls of Alberta, Jessie, and Dewey Lee. Then crept over to the southwest corner of the room where Willie Monroe was sleeping on a cot. One chop, and he was dead.

When he finished, the killer washed his hands in a tin pail and disappeared into the night.

The Waxahachie Daily Light said Lyle Finucane was an “octoroon of considerable intelligence.” He worked as a caller for the Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad Company. Ellen Monroe had fourteen children and was separated from her husband, John Monroe, who lived in Yoakum.

Sheriff E. B. Mayes brought in two hounds and followed the tracks of a man and woman to the backyard of a house about a mile away. He arrested Jim Fields, his wife, “Uncle Fink” Washington, and an unnamed boy, but they were quickly released.

The evidence against them wasn’t very strong. Fields and his wife, Ida Fields, tried to buy a train ticket out of Glidden on the night of the murders. The train didn’t stop, so they returned home. And then, a blood-spattered ten-dollar bill and jumper were found near his home, which somehow tied him to the murders.

When detectives questioned Ida Fields, she told an interesting tale that made it sound like her husband was the murderer. After they learned the train wouldn’t stop, they caught a ride with Charlie Fields and his wife and stopped just outside Lyle Finucane’s home. 

“After we were out of the wagon,” she said, “I asked Jim what he was going to do, and he asked: ‘Will you stand by me in anything?’ I told him I would, so long as it was right. Jim said, ‘Come on then.’

“We went in the front gate. I stood by a post, and Jim went around the back of the house. From where I was, I could not see Jim go in the back door. 

“He was gone about twenty minutes, and during that time, I heard something that sounded like licks. When Jim came out of the house, I asked him what he had been doing, and he said that I wanted to know everything.

“We then went over to a house nearby to leave our grips. After we left the house, Jim asked me again if I would stand by him in everything, and I told him that I would as long as it was right.”

Fortunately for Fields, his wife’s testimony couldn’t be used against him, so the police were left to find what clues they could.

Jim Fields went to trial in Columbus, Texas, on May 27 and was found not guilty.

On April 11, 1912, the ax murderer claimed the lives of William Burton and his family in San Antonio, Texas. Neighbors found the bodies of Burton, his wife, two children, and Leon Evers. Their murders brought the axman’s death toll to forty.

Their heads were crushed with an ax, and knives were thrust through the bodies of Burton and Evers. Although the murder methods differed somewhat from the others, investigators were sure the killings were the work of the Sacrifice Church.

The Lafayette Advertiser said Burton was a hard worker, had an excellent reputation, and had no known enemies. They believed the motive was “evidently a desire to kill, either for the pleasure of committing a crime or to carry out some tenets of the faith attributed to the Sacrifice Church.

The victims were killed after midnight. The bodies were discovered at 7:15 the following morning.

Callie Burse discovered the bodies at 7:15 a.m. A negro preacher had given her five cents and an oil can the previous evening. He told her to buy five cents’ worth of oil and bring it to the Burton home. When no one answered the door, she peeked in a side window and saw Evers’s body.

Burton was lying on the bed in the front room, his feet extending to the floor, and a butcher knife plunged into his back. Carrie lay on the floor with the side of her face torn off. Some sources said she had a knife thrust into her back, but most say just the men were stabbed.

Leon Evers was in another room. His head was crushed, and a pocketknife was plunged into his back.

Leona (3) lay on the floor near a heating stove. Her head was smashed. The infant, Sonny, lay at the foot of the bed.

The only theory the police had to work on was that the killing might have been racially motivated. William Burton was a “black negro,” and his wife was “a light mulatto, sometimes mistaken for a white woman.”

Detectives believed the killer entered the house through a kitchen window, then killed Louis Evers and the children who slept in the back room. The position of Carrie Burton’s body suggests that she heard the attackers and tried to get to the children’s room. 

The ax man struck again, in San Antonio, in August 1912. The Caucasian reported it was the second attempt the killer had made on James Dashiel’s family in the past three months.

Lulu Dashiel rolled out of the ax’s way just as it crashed on her head. The paper reported her screams threw the ax man off his mark. The ax “missed crushing her head and struck her left arm.”

James grabbed his gun and opened fire into the darkness, but the attacker was already gone.

The ax murders stopped after the attempt on Dashiel, but the memory of him lingered for years in the poor black neighborhoods of Louisiana and Texas.

Clementine was brought to trial on April 24, 1912, for the killing of Azema Randall.

When put on the stand, she stunned the jury, saying: “I am the woman of the sacrifice sect. I killed them all, men, women, and babies, and I hugged the dead bodies to my heart. But I’m not guilty of murder.” 

No one knew what to say after that.

Four days later, Clementine was sentenced to life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. She escaped for a few hours in July 1913 but was quickly recaptured. 

Clementine was released from prison on April 28, 1923, after an unknown surgery restored her to normalcy. After that, she disappeared from the historical timeline. None of the newspapers thought to follow the trail of the Voodoo killer.

At about the same time, Zepherin Barnabet confessed to Sheriff LaCoste that he helped his father kill the Andrus family. But he never went to trial for his part in the killings. Zepherin Barnabet was arrested again in November for horse theft and assaulting Walter Caffery.

That was the last mention of the Barnabets until Clementine was released from the Angola State Prison in 1923. The fate of Raymond and Zepherin Barnabet was left hanging. Perhaps the papers thought it was better to move on and leave the Voodoo killer behind.

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