Country Roads Magazine "Myths & Legends Issue" October 2022

Oh My Darling, Clementine

Nineteen murders, a death cult, and a wild confession

By Chris Turner-Neal

From 1910 to 1912, a strange statistical anomaly popped up in American death records: suddenly, there were axe murders all over the place. Colorado Springs. Paola, Kansas. Villisca, Iowa. In these towns—and in Rayne, Crowley, Lafayette, and Lake Charles— concerned relatives and neighbors peeked through a window or jimmied open a door to find scenes of unimaginable carnage, entire families wiped out in a burst of malicious rage. Many of these murders are credited to “The Man From the Train,” a theoretical rail-riding slayer reaching the apogee of his bloodlust; a cluster in New Orleans is blamed on another killer, an axe man if not the Axe Man. And the murders of five or so Black southwest Louisiana families, depending on which are counted as part of a pattern, are often laid at the feet of an African-American teenager named Clementine Barnabet.

The story is deeply confusing—the records are iffy, incomplete, overwrought, racist, and credulous to varying degrees. Names are absent for several victims. A woman named Opelousas is murdered in Rayne, and the Broussard family dies in Lake Charles—but one of the main suspects has an alibi in Broussard. Reputable published accounts conflate murders in Beaumont and San Antonio—a four-hour drive on modern roads. Clementine herself changed her story more than once, which is not surprising for a young Black girl who may have been mentally ill and found herself caught up in the white justice system. The whole morass of murder and myth has yet to find an obsessive, detail-oriented champion to write a definitive text. Add wild claims of “Voodoo,” rumors of a blood-and-thunder-cult, the very real community trauma of several unsolved mass murders, and the morbid fascination a horrible, gory story inspires in the human mind—all we can do is our best.

On November 13, 1909, the Opelousas family was murdered in Rayne: a mother named Edna or Edmee and three children. A little over a year later, on January 24, 1911, the Byers family in Crowley was slain, followed in short order by the Andruses in Lafayette the night of February 24. All had been attacked with axes; in each case the whole household was killed, adults and children.

A Black man who lived near the Andrus family, Raymond Barnabet, was indicted and convicted—in part because his teenage children, Clementine and Zepherin, testified that he’d come home that night covered in blood and brains. Despite the contradictory testimony of the elder Barnabet’s common-law wife, Dina Porter; the Stevens family who shared the home with the Barnabets; and Raymond himself, who claimed he’d gone to Broussard the night of the Andrus murders—he was found guilty. Subsequently, the court almost immediately granted Raymond a new trial, partly on the grounds that he’d been drunk during the first one. (No one tell the Senate that’s all it takes.)

Fortunately only for Raymond, another family was murdered while he awaited his new trial—the Randalls, also in Lafayette, the night of November 26. Clementine worked as a domestic nearby, close enough to have heard the screams when the bodies were discovered. This proximity made authorities suspicious of Clementine, and they searched her room, where they found a gore-soaked apron, dress, and undergarment. They arrested her, along with other suspects. She firmly denied the charges.

Then, on January 19, 1912, while Barnabet was still in jail, the corpses of Marie Warner and her three children were found in Crowley—murdered, of course, with an axe. Despite his alibi, police arrested Zepherin Barnabet, assuming he was carrying out his father and/or sister’s wishes.

That very same night, Felix Broussard, his three children, and his wife Matilda (described as pretty) were killed with an axe in Lake Charles. Someone had written on the wall in pencil, “HUMAN FIVE” and a verse from the ninth psalm as misquoted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “When he maketh inquisition for blood, he forgetteth not the cry of the humble.” (King James has “When he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he forgetteth not the cry of the humble.”)

In April, though, on the day that her grand jury convened, Clementine either confessed or cracked (or both), announcing that she’d killed the Randalls, the Byerses, and the Andruses—as well as many others. She claimed to lead a sect called the Church of the Sacrifice—an offshoot of a local holiness church, but one she’d fortified through the purchase of Hoodoo charms. She was swiftly indicted for the murders of the Randall family.

Zepherin was released. Clementine, possibly confused about the timeline, confessed to the Broussard murders, despite having the peerless alibi of having been in jail. Newspapers across the Anglophone world reported on the murders with a casual disregard for the facts; the El Paso Herald reported on a murdered Wexford family that does not seem to have existed, and many reports commented on a pattern of five families of five, which no accounting of the victims makes possible. Black communities in southwestern Louisiana pulled back from their previous cooperation with authorities, justifiably unreassured by the investigations so far. As Clementine awaited her October trial date, 1912 marched on. Serious floods hit the Deep South. Axe murders continued to take place in Texas and Mississippi, never to be solved. But the crimes in Louisiana ceased.

Before a judge and jury in October, Clementine told her wild story: she and some friends had bought “Hoodoo charms” in New Iberia, which would let them get away with whatever they wanted. To test them, they killed a family in Rayne. And they got away with it. So, they went on ahead killing. “With whom” and “why” are fluid—Clementine inconsistently names her co-conspirators, who successfully alibi themselves; she cites “Voodoo” rites as well as sexual perversion as motives. She confessed to seventeen murders, all told. Despite her attorney’s argument that the confessions were unreliable, she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. She stayed in prison (excepting one shortlived escape attempt) until 1923, when she was released.

So … did Clementine kill them? Throughout her trial, she insistently maintained her guilt, prophesying more deaths and stating: “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.”

It sounds damning to those of us with limited involvement in the justice system, but the fact is : false confessions happen all the time. All we know about Clementine’s personality and character comes from this strange and frightening period of her life—we don’t know if she was anxious or fragile or a precocious drinker or anything else that might have predisposed her to crack under strain, but you don’t need to break easily to break under the tension of becoming, as a teenager, a central suspect in a series of brutal murders.

Her attorney attempted to explain the bloody clothing by alleging that the policemen gathering evidence had thrown everything together, allowing blood to be transferred to her clothing from items from the crime scene. In the absence of clearer details, the blood might also be explained by menstruation; slightly built and living in an age when puberty arrived later, Clementine may not have fully understood her own cycle yet.

Bill and Rachel McCarthy James, authors of The Man from the Train, posit that if the authorities really thought she was guilty, they wouldn’t have let her go after a mere decade—in her late twenties, Clementine would still have been young enough to commit many more crimes, if she wished. An additional argument for her innocence is that no Black serial axe murderess born in about 1895 ever turned up anywhere else in the country after her release. If she is guilty, she must also have died young, suddenly become unusually adept at covering her tracks, or have gotten it out of her system. We all go through phases

Newspaper coverage of the Clementine Barnabet case and associated murders was charateristically sensationalized nationwide. This article, published in the El Paso Herald, was one of the most extreme and prejudiced, proliferating many misunderstandings about Voodooism—which Barnabet claimed in her confusing confession was part of her murderous motives.

But if we rule out Clementine as the hatchetwoman, who did kill all these people? Probably not her father, probably not her brother—for much the same reasons of motive and availability that make Clementine’s guilt unlikely.

The Jameses mark one of the Louisiana murders, the Byerses’, as potentially the work of their subject, along with the similar killing of the Casaway family on the outskirts of San Antonio (not Beaumont!), which occasionally gets rolled into the murders Barnabet was blamed for. The other “Barnabet” murders, though, do not match the Man from the Train’s modus operandi: an organized serial killer with a sexual motive, as they posit the Man from the Train to have been, doesn’t become a disorganized killer with a religious motive. Additionally, the Man from the Train always attacked with the dull side of the axe—bludgeoning, not chopping—and essentially never with a secondary weapon: the “Barnabet” murders vary between the blade and butt, the Opelousases were also attacked with a knife, and Norbert Randall was shot.

The Jameses posit a bleak appeal to human nature to explain the 1910- 1912 spike in murders in general: “The period from 1910 to 1912 was the era of the axe murderer … Murder leaves the idea of murder hanging in the air.”

As mass shooters “inspire” one another and as suicides will sometimes cluster among acquaintances, the sudden appearance of the terrible possibility of solving a grievance through violence, with a tool everyone had, may have inspired copycats—with people running around yelling about a “Voodoo cult,” a commonplace motive like a bad debt or a stolen love could fly comfortably under the radar. It’s an unsatisfying answer, like all the answers in this case, but the other options are “human sacrifice cult,” “serial killer passes through and changes M.O.,” and “string of terrible coincidences.” You pays your money and you takes your choice. For what it’s worth, I usually have opinions about old crimes I read about—Lizzie Borden, guilty; William Herbert Wallace, not guilty. But I can’t make anything useful of these facts as I understand them.

No one knows what happened to Clementine Barnabet. Like a good legend, she vanishes from the record after her release from prison; like anyone with any sense would have, she certainly changed her name, an easy feat in those pre-Social Security number days. If she was indeed innocent, one hopes she led a happy life, perhaps winning an occasional argument by saying quietly, calmly, “now, don’t push me— you know what they said I did.”