Hi everyone! I'm Lauren Henley, assistant professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond. I'm a historian by training and I study violent crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the American South. I spend a lot of time thinking about Black women as both the perpetrators and victims of criminal acts, including serial murder. I'm here to answer your questions about my new book, Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press). Here's the overview:
>For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the technology nor the vocabulary to identify the serial killer in their midst. Instead, regional authorities worked the cases as individual homicides.
>This approach led to seemingly contradictory realities: the unknown killer was dubbed “the axman,” and a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet was arrested as a suspect. She offered questionable confessions and swiftly gained international recognition, as the press reimagined Clementine as a cult-leading, ax-wielding, sacrifice-driven serial killer. But there was a problem: Clementine was already in jail by the time more than half of the murders occurred.
>In Inquisition for Blood, Lauren Nicole Henley examines this conundrum as she describes how axman madness consumed an entire region for years. She unpacks these crimes and their aftermaths to show how Black communities responded to incomprehensible violence, how the state criminalized Blackness, and how a young Black woman ultimately came to be understood as a serial killer. Drawing on more than three thousand newspaper articles, hundreds of pages of court records, prison ledgers, death certificates, censuses, city directories, and more, Henley tells a historical narrative that is as intriguing as any true crime novel, challenging our assumptions about who has the ability to get away with murder.
I'll be back around 10am Eastern to start answering questions, so ask away!
EDIT: Taking a little break now, but I'll check back in later this afternoon to see what other questions have emerged!
EDIT #2: I've so enjoyed all of the questions I've received today, but I'm signing off for now and will check back in periodically throughout the week to follow up on any burning queries!