Inquisition for Blood: The making of a black female serial killer in the Jim Crow South
Clementine Barnabet, the purported ax-wielding serial killer, is a local legend—but just local, and that’s part of the problem. For notoriety among American serial killers, this Black teenage girl lags far behind her white male peers and is outshone even by white women like fellow chopaholic Belle Gunness. Dr. Lauren Henley’s new book, Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South, is a welcome scholarly attempt to give Barnabet her “rightful place” in the annals of American crime. Her work goes further to show how race affected every aspect of the serial ax murders in Louisiana and Texas credited to Barnabet, a shadowy “ax-man,” a cult, or a concatenation of all three, and contextualizes the crimes and Barnabet’s trial—painting a compelling picture of a distinct moment in the region’s history. The result is an excellent and compelling book that anyone interested in the ax-man/Barnabet case, crime in Louisiana, or the less obvious manifestations of Jim Crow governance, will rip right through.
One of Henley’s most provocative points is that to fully accept Black humanity and equality, we need to accept the fact that Black people kill like everyone else. Black people can be spree killers and serial killers, even if the “canonical” examples of these types of criminal are white. In an interview, she pointed toward prolific Black serial killer Samuel Little as an example: highly “successful” by the grim metric of body count and with the nightmarish flourish of recounting his murders by drawing pictures, he lacks the weird cultural poster-boy status of better-known offenders like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. If Black people are fully human, they can be fully inhuman.
Crime under Jim Crow is often thought of as white victimization of Black people, and while violence was certainly used to control and terrorize Black people and populations, Henley notes that the racialized system of the time also affected how murders assumed to be Black-on-Black violence were investigated. White authorities looked at the first murders, those that took place before the phenomenon of “the ax-man” had truly blossomed into the public consciousness, as individual crimes in the context of how they expected Black people to kill and die. Individual Black suspects were questioned and investigated, sometimes held, and in one instance tried, but they were assumed to have acted relatively impulsively and for petty, mundane motives, grudges, and greed. Admittedly, limitations on inter-jurisdictional communication and modern investigative techniques delayed early connection of the first murders—the concept of the “serial killer” was still decades away—and so it’s anachronistic to expect an Acadia Parish sheriff in 1909 to realize immediately what was going on. Nevertheless, we can still note attempts to fit these first attacks into a cultural idea of how crimes worked in the Black part of town.
One of the classic questions about the Clementine Barnabet-ax-man case is “who really did it?” Henley simply posits that we should consider believing Barnabet herself. Many accounts (including my own Country Roads piece from a few years ago) look at Barnabet’s youth, powerlessness, and almost certain torture intended to elicit a confession, and assume that she broke under the colossal pressure, as many innocent suspects have. And of course, on the other side, some people cast Barnabet as magnificent in her capabilities, steering events and directing murders even from behind bars. Henley offers a straightforward third option: Try believing a Black woman. One of the above approaches assigns her power and the other cuts her slack, but neither takes her at her word. Henley pointed out that no one doubted Israel Keyes when, after intense questioning, this white man gave a giggly confession of some eleven murders across a number of states. He was horrifying, he was repellent—but he was credible. Maybe Barnabet broke under questioning and then told the truth about her involvement in the murders that she was free and in the area for. Notably, she does not, in available records, confess to anything we know she could not have done.
True crime journalism is sometimes accused of callousness, of profiting off blood and guts at the expense of the dignity of real victims. Henley acquits herself of this potential charge by the acuity of the scholarship but also because, especially as a central part of her project is accepting the full agency of Black actors, she does not skim over the human costs. In vivid but unsensational writing, she tells the stories of each set of victims (to the extent surviving sources allow) and, even more compellingly, describes the tightening anxiety Black populations felt as the death toll mounted over three nerve-racking years. People crammed into houses, slept in shifts, bought guns (to the consternation of white authorities), set up watches, and inevitably shot each other by mistake. All this shows just how rattled people across a vast area were by the murders—and how little comfort Clementine’s arrest gave them.
I could go on, and if word count permitted, I would. Inquisition for Blood is a scholarly work, not a breezy read, but if it demands attention from its readers, it also earns it. Henley writes with the zest of someone interested in crime but the compassion of someone able to appreciate the humanity of victims and those who feared they were in danger. A natural investigator, she walked the distances from the railroads to every accessible murder scene and even swung an ax herself to gauge the strength it would need. (Her verdict: Henley is the same height and slightly leaner than Barnabet is reported to have been, and thinks if she were angry she could wield an ax without trouble. Barnabet, strengthened by the punishing work of a domestic servant—including chopping firewood—would have been physically capable of the crimes.) Inquisition for Blood changed not only how I think about these crimes, but about crime and race more broadly. The best news? Henley is at the beginning of her career; Inquisition for Blood is an expansion of work she did for her dissertation. We’ve got a whole career of work to look forward to from a scholar whose insights are as sharp as a blade.
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Find Inquisition for Blood for sale at lsupress.org.
