Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South
Lauren Nicole Henley
LSU Press
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 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.