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.
Lauren Nicole Henley is an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin.
"Lauren Nicole Henley has produced an absolute page-turner highlighting the female serial killer armed with an ax. Following the trail of blood that alarmed America in the early twentieth century, this book is a way-shower on true crime, fusing together multiple deaths with a hungry media, protective communities, religion, gender, and the making of a criminal in a powerful way." - Sowande' M. Mustakeem, author of Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage "Inquisition for Blood tells a riveting story. In this deeply researched book, Lauren Henley writes a compelling history about race, gender, and intraracial crime in the American South. Offering readers details about a series of brutal murders in Progressive-era Louisiana, Henley explains how white media accounts, state agents, and individual endeavors constructed gendered Black criminality. Inquisition for Blood is a must-read for those looking to understand the roots of Black female criminality." - LaShawn Harris, author of Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City "In Inquisition for Blood, Lauren Henley investigates a series of ax murders that took the lives of entire Black families in the early Jim Crow period, as well as the life of the Black woman who confessed to several of the killings. Through extensive research that encompasses court and legislative records, regional and national newspapers, as well as archival records, Henley elucidates how crime, religion, the media, injustice, and incarceration were often shaped by white perceptions of race to such an extent that, very often, the truth was lost." - Karen L. Cox, author of Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South "In this beautifully written work, Lauren Henley recovers the forgotten saga of the Ax Man and Clementine Barnabet. As it challenges historical understandings of the 'serial killer,' it asks us to confront our lingering fascination with spectacular acts of violence." - K. Stephen Prince, author of The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900
