Episode 578: Clementine Barnabet & The Church of the Sacrifice & The Louisiana Axe Murders

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I think the fact that it was full families that were being axe murdered was one thing. Um, so most notably, the timing of the victims were the things that really connected these things. Um, and they have. There's many that speculate that this is one singular killer, or one singular group of killers, because there's too many similarities. It just doesn't feel like this many would have happened in this span of time and that they'd be so similar. Um, with a body count of more than 50 people across 12 families, all the victims were Black.

Oh, that's another similarity. And they lived near the train line and all were killed that night, and all had been killed with their skulls fractured with an axe.

Really, it's really difficult to say when the murders even began, to be honest, uh. Some identify the first murder as that of Edna Opelousas and her three children, who were aged four to nine years old.

Oh, other than the bloody axe that was left at the scene, that's the other thing the bloody axe gets left at a lot of these scenes, really.

But we're in the early 1900s here. It's not like we can just be like, boop, boop, who's this?

This time, though, the police discovered a wash basin filled halfway with bloody water. Which made them think that the killer had at least tried to clean themselves up before leaving the scene. But unfortunately, there was very little additional evidence. Once again, and a week later, police arrested Walter Jackson, who was a local barber, and his brother for the murder of the Byers family. But it's unclear what led to them being the two men that were caught as suspects.

There's really nothing to indicate that either was prosecuted for the murders and that so the deaths remain unsolved.

That's so fucking creepy. The killer then placed the baby on the bed besides Memme.

Um. Raymond claimed that on the night of the murders he had been about 30 miles away in Broussard. And without evidence to the contrary, investigators really had no choice but to let him go. Almost exactly one month later, a family in San Antonio, Texas, living near the Southern Pacific Railroad line, were again murdered. In the middle of the night, their skulls were caved in with an ax that the killer left behind. Now it feels like that third one, it was probably left behind, but I don't want to say it was because I couldn't find it.

I apologize, but it means I am gone. And he would say it loud enough so that the jury could hear, um, after months of months of investigation, local authorities really didn't come up with any new evidence that implicated him. But what they did have were his children, one of whom would become crucial to the prosecution's case.

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At nine years old, walked into that scene of everyone killed with an Ax.

When officers arrived at the Randall house, they found Norbert, his wife and their niece, Agnes, dead in their bed, with the bodies of the three children lying dead in another bed. A child's bloody footprint was found next to one of the beds, which led investigators to speculate that one of the children had woken up during the attack and that the victim was thrown back on the bed before being killed. Unlike the Andrus murders, in which all had been killed with the bladed end of.

Interestingly, Norbert Randall had also been shot in the head and the bullet entered his forehead. This would be the only victim in the Louisiana AX murders to be killed by a weapon other than an Ax, huh now? Police immediately fanned out all across the neighborhood, looking for anything, any evidence of the killer or killers, and soon found blood. On the rear gate of the Guidry home, about a block away, where Clementine Barnabet was living and working as a maid.

Bitch, what? During their search of the Guidry home, police found bloody clothes hidden in Clementine's room, and she was immediately arrested on suspicion of having killed the Randall family.

The evidence was immediately taken to the New Orleans Um uh State Chemist to be examined. And the chemist, Dr. Metz went on, went on to confirm that the blood and biological material on the apron was.

Oh, wow, beginning of blood typing, and this was 1911 or 1912, so cool, yeah.

So they at least had blood typing happening. Um, while the in either way, it's like, this is human brain matter. On her apron, yeah, like, how did that get there? how?

Now, while the sheriff waited for the results of the lab tests from the chemist, Clementine and the other sat in jail. But the murders didn't stop. Okay. In early January, all six members of the Wexford family, including a baby supposedly born just a day earlier, were murdered in their home. And that was in Crowley. With their prime axe murder suspects already in jail, the sheriff's office needed to find a new suspect now for their Wexford murders.

And they found one. They found King Harris, who was a preacher at Sacrifice Sect Church, which was a fringe religious sect with churches in Crowley, Lafayette and Lake Charles, Louisiana. Okay, all all towns along the Southern Pacific railroad line, uh-huh.

Despite the name and the church's occasional non-western practices, Harris denied the church preached quote anything that would incite criminal acts. And assured the sheriff that neither he nor anyone from the church had anything to do with these murders. Um, also, Harris insisted his only contact with Clementine Barnabas was when, on the night of the Randall murders, he had been walking down the street and encountered Clementine, who told him quote, to leave the area because a street corner fight had taken place and the police were on the way. Regardless of all the denials, King Harris was arrested on January 20th, 1912 and held on suspicion of involvement in the Axe murders. Okay, it seemed that even the arrest of the Barnabas and Harris weren't enough to stop it, though.

On January 21st, just one day after Harris's arrest, Felix Broussard, his wife Matilda and their three children were all murdered by what the press described as a.

Like this, five members of the family, what? Yeah, isn't that like chilling, yeah?

I'm just like.

Wait, say that last part again, sorry. So it's basically like he's seeking justice, It's basically God trying to dole out justice upon those who shed innocent blood, okay?

That's what it is, um, interpreted as.

Like, and it will like, you're going to have to deal with the wrath of God. If you shed innocent blood kind of thing, okay, but then it's like the killer wrote, When he maketh inquisition for blood, he forget. It's not the cry of the humble, so it's almost like he's it, cause it. I the idea of that quote, I think it comes from, like revenge and justice, and like avenging people.

And so then when he writes Human Five, I wonder if this feels very, I mean, this particular one, whether it's meant to sound this way or not. Obviously, it's very religious, some religious, I don't. I'm not saying this is any like religion that we can even identify, but it seems like this is they're trying to make it religious. This person that did this and is almost feels like they're like tallying like Human five, and it's like like they're tallying what they're going to have to answer for.

Almost, maybe, yeah, I'm trying to figure out the logic behind this.

Right, you know, it's so weird to write human, yeah, cause I'm like, is there somewhere where animals were killed that you could find somewhere?

Sounds like it, which it definitely could be. There's a a big difference, yeah. So it could absolutely be like a copycat or someone using it to, you know, who knows if all of these are connected?

Right, interesting.

Raymond Barnabas is black, his family is black, King Harris is Black. So we're seeing this, and now we're seeing this mention of religious fanaticism. That's enough to send white Southerners into a gosh darn panic.

At this point, within one day of the Broussard murders, the press had put together the pieces of various stories, the Barnabas arrest, King Harris and the Sacrifice Sect. And all those into one very sensational and highly questionable story. That they just knew was going to sell papers, goodie. On the morning of January 23rd, 1912, the headlines on papers like The Monroe News star said Sacrifice, Sect slaughter. 26. Basically implying that not only had they been all victims of the same killer, but also that the murders are now being directed by. Quote a preacher who teaches fanaticism, meanwhile. So now we're just making shit up.

Duh, a little bit of an outlier, yeah, you know. There was the idea that there was the people that were placed into praying positions, so there's that as well.

Yeah, but nothing really about all of the murders. It wasn't like they were all ritualistic, you know what I mean? There were ritualistic elements, for sure, that you could see in a couple.

Aggressive, frantic murder scene. You know what I mean? especially with an axe? Yeah, an axe is a very chaotic way to kill people.

It's not a ritualistic way to kill people. But, you know, they wanted to sell a lot of papers. So the press leaned hard into that sacrifice angle. Claiming, among other things, that the Broussard family's killer had quote set a bucket below their heads in which to catch the dripping blood for use in rituals later, which was not true at all.

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So, like, every time, what's going on, um? A family of five in Rain were killed in December 1911, and a family of four were killed in Crowley, just a few days before the Broussard family was killed. So clearly, these murders could not have been committed by Clementine Barnabas or her brother and father, or. But they and King Harris, who was still sitting in jail at certain moments, wasn't they were. He wasn't even in the area at the time. They were all being accused of being behind all this, every single one of these. You could also look at this and say, Okay, maybe there's some big organization type thing that is being led by someone. That pieces of this cult are being put in jail, but there's other ones out here, absolutely.

But the fervor that the problem here was the fervor over non-white and non-Christian religious practices that came out of this. Through communities across Louisiana into a panic, with white residents demanding action and Black residents fearing for their safety at this point. Because now they're pointing to, like, oh, it must be voodoo, that's what it must be. If it's not Christians, that's for sure. Never. And several white Southerners exploited the opportunity to exploit public fear for personal gain, sending extortion letters to Black churches. Like going way, like leaning into this, totally.

And she was arrested with brain matter and blood on her apron.

So this is part of the article, it said. At Lafayette, it was five members of the Andrus family who were sacrificed at the same place. A few months later. Five members of the Randall family had evidently been marked for slaughter. But a sixth, appearing upon the scene, unexpectedly met the fate of his kingsman at Crowley. So they think that that family, um, the Randall family cause, was that there was five of them and that, but there was one extra, right?

And they said that was just unexpected at Crowley last June. Four members of the Warner family had undoubtedly been doomed to perish, but one, a child, escaped, and only four went to their death. Two months ago, six members of the Wexford family perished at the hands of fanatics. But one was an infant that had been born a day before the tragedy. And, in all probability, had not been taken into consideration when the plans for the human sacrifice were consummated. Now comes the Broussard family tragedy, with the five victims, thus completing a series of sacrifices of five separate families, each evidently intended to involve five victims.

Right, that that's what this must be like. That's fucked. And when they put it this way, of course, it was going to make any reader reading these things seem not that not too shocked and didn't seem too farfetched. That the teenage Clementine and her accomplices might've been involved in a conspiracy, and that they might've been involved in this whole some kind of culty, religious thing.

To commit ritualistic murder in the service of what they were saying was one or more, either voodoo or what they got wrong, hoodoo gods. Cause they would conflate those two practices, they conflated them a lot. This theory should have been undermined by the fact that the murders continued, even as the five supposed members of the murderous cult sat in jail, right?

Um, one month after the Broussard murders, three families were brutally murdered with an Ax along the Southern Pacific Line in Texas. All spaced roughly one month apart, and all looking exactly like each other, same hallmarks of each case five family members, three. Um, yeah, like, same kind of situation.

All had the same hallmarks, everything.

Out of nowhere. According to Clementine, she had accomplices who had carried had continued to carry out the work of extermination all along the Southern Pacific Railroad while she was in jail.

Clementine went on to tell authorities that two years earlier, she and the other members of the group had traveled to New Iberia. And obtained from a hoodoo doctor. A conjure. That would protect them from all harm and absolutely protect them from discovery in the commission of any crime or deed.

Not bothering to find out that there's a difference, or if there was a difference. So this made the whole voodoo real, ritualistic angle of the newspaper reporting a lot more prevalent, and in the end, it was wrong. From what I could gather, there are many differences between hoodoo and voodoo from the main, and the main one is probably. The most distinctive difference is that voodoo is technically like an organized religion, it's practiced with rituals, and there's a structure to the practice.

There's leaders in the practice. Hoodoo, from what I could gather, is mostly an independent, magic leaning practice that individuals take part in, and I believe it has most of its roots in the U..S, while voodoo does not. So there are differences.

At least look up some a little bit of the differences. But and remember, we're very, we're in the early 1900s, we're in the South. Here racism is prevalent.

It's just part of it's, it's here, it is even now. So to the white authorities and press. The confession of her quote. Most violent, repulsive acts seemed to confirm what everyone had already suspected. Even though many within law enforcement acknowledged that much of what she had told them wasn't true, it didn't line up.

Huh? One article stated While the officers know some of the confession is true, they discarded much of Clementine's story. As mere fiction as she has given any number of clues that have been run down and proved only will-o'-the-wisps. So just just fictional, okay, now? Clementine's confession included a number of actually true statements about the murders, but the information could have been easily learned through newspaper articles or just town gossip.

Everyone was talking about this more often than not. Her statements were, like, way over the top, outlandish, and she would contradict herself a lot. So she wasn't telling a clear, concise story of, like, here's what happened. It's exactly what you all think, Here you go.

It was like they made it sound like that. But when you really look at it, all of the shit was contradicting. And a lot of it, like I said, was things you could have seen in the paper, okay?

And I honestly can't put my finger on which one it is, or if it's a mixture of two, you know, like it's. It's very hard to figure out, but one of the things was, she claimed quote. She had assistance in the murders, but then she would often boast about having committed them herself, especially the Lafayette crimes. Like said she did it alone. Despite the inaccuracies and inconsistencies, Sheriff Lacoste told reporters. Quote Clementine Barnabas is rational and I believe it is true, except as to details given with the purpose of confusing others as to her accomplices.

Okay, so now they're claiming that all the contradictions are just to confuse you about who was her accomplice, which, again, absolutely could be true. You could see that no idea, though. In the days after her confession, Clementine's story also grew and grew, and grew, and became increasingly bizarre.

Okay, the longer she went, the more murders she confessed to. Uh, huh? It was kind of one of those things which we have seen instances where that has happened with other supposed murders, or, um, confessed murders. Where, you know, like a Henry Lee Lucas. That's what I was just going to say.

They admit to like a billion, zillion murders and then they would pull it back, and then they admit to more, and then they pull it back. Some people do do that.

Okay, she said. It was an easy matter. That's what she said of killing the Randall children. Oh, it was an easy matter. We thought it was better to kill them than to leave orphans as they would suffer.

Okay, as for why she had done it, Clementine told the sheriff. That quote moral perversion was responsible for a passion to shed human blood and take human life that she could not control. Okay, so again, these statements are chilling and scary.

The idea of an AX gang like very scary, absolutely, and could be true, and we don't know. According to Clementine, when this impulse came upon her, she said she could not rest until she had killed an infant and pressed its form to her breast.

What the fuck? And an infant was killed and babies were killed. Yeah, multiple now.

Initially, Clementine had refused to identify her accomplices by April 4th. And this is where it gets, this is where it gets funky, okay, this is where you're going to go, okay.

Maybe she is just lying. But by April 4th, she finally named Reverend Joseph Thibodeau as the aforementioned hoodoo doctor who had provided her them with protection spells. Okay. Thibodeau was a Black fortune teller living in New Iberia, who also portrayed himself as a practitioner of herbal medicine. He didn't traffic in charms.

He said he didn't deal with charms as Clementine had indicated, but he was known to prescribe a remedy. That included giving a patient a piece of paper with 25 letters in five lines. The paper was instructed, when they felt bad, to tear off one of the letters, roll it in a ball and swallow it. Okay, and it's likely just a coincidence, but the emphasis on vibes and Thibodeau's remedies fit the ritualistic sacrifice narrative perfectly. And he was soon roped right into the crimes.

Joseph Thibodeau was arrested a day or two later, but police had literally nothing on him, except for Clementine's statement. So, following his arrest, the local press pointed out that while Thibodeau was a well-known figure in the city, no one knew him to associate with Clementine. Much less willfully advising the woman or of knowing of her intention of starting her career of crime, yeah. A few days after her confession, six indictments were returned by the grand jury, charging Clementine with the murderers of the Randall family. Okay?

A date was set for the arraignment soon after, but nobody, I don't. I couldn't figure out why the arraignment was like, continuously, put off, like, continuously. And in the meantime, Clementine, Clementine continued, continued just naming co-conspirators, feeding the press that for that insatiable hunger they had for more gruesome, awful details, right? But each time investigators tracked down or arrested anyone named by Clementine. Nearly every single one of them were able to account for their whereabouts on the nights of the murders. Or just had the alibis themselves like they were, they had alibis and people could account for them.

Right, so she would name someone. They'd go to them and be like, nope, they were states away, like, or they this person can account for where they were, huh?

So it's like they kept being like, No, that's not someone, and she'd be like, Oh, this person, like, So. After several delays, Clementine was a finally arraigned on the murder charges, and a trial was scheduled for late October. In the meantime, her defense attorneys found her to be very difficult and an uncooperative client. But eventually, they convinced her to enter a plea of religious insanity. Which is described as the idea that stress could exhaust a constitutionally weak nervous system.

Were the stress great enough, even the strongest mind would succumb. The sources of stress and exhaustion were many, but could be grouped under the headings physical and moral.

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Ever since her incarceration, she has successfully foiled the officers and their attempts to get at the true facts of the case. And when she deceives the officers by giving them some false clue, she smiles with devilish delight and chuckles over her victory. Ooh, and again, if this is true, fucking terrifying. Yeah, very much so.

But but again, they haven't, like, charged her. They don't have any real evidence here. Like, it's an. And I still go back to that apron, which I, I'm like, someone explained that away for me. Yeah, I don't know about that.

That's the biggest thing for me, unless she's hiding it for someone else, but why would her apron be? That's the thing, it was hers.

Yeah, I don't get it now. Although initially a source of fear, now that she had been indicted and seemed bound for prison, the public developed feelings of disgust and moral outrage towards Clementine. Which who wouldn't at this point, if you think that she did all this? Of course, yeah, um, but this also probably contributed to her very defiant attitude that she had to make matters worse.

By late October, Clementine had been evaluated by three psychiatrists, and all of them found her.

Later, you'll hear something that happens that you're like, what happened here? Okay, like, something's awry, you know? And just the way she talks about it, the way she's sitting there, saying, like, Well, she just. She felt like she had to just kill an infant and hold it to her breast, like, I don't know about that.

Like, I, I don't know, who knows, that's the thing. She's, she's young, She's like a teenager at this point.

So it's just, I think it's almost too much for me to, like, believe that she's fully sane. Saying these things like, maybe it's just because it's so gruesome and awful, and the thought of her killing entire families, that's. The other thing is like, you did this all yourself, cause you're naming accomplices and they're getting cleared.

So, like, who are your accomplices?

Why to fuck with them? People do that all the time, you're going down, yeah.

But maybe she knew that, maybe she's like, I'm going down, maybe I'll might as well have fun on the way out, maybe that was fun for her.

So if she's caught, it makes sense that she would want it to continue, right, like you said. Like, she's going to have them chase down false leads because she wants the other real co-conspirators to be able to continue this grand plan that they have. Exactly. So there is a way of looking at it like that that you go, okay.

Okay, now. Clementine's trial began October 24th, 1912, and the prosecution was relying very heavily on her confession. Obviously, um, she had formally confessed to 17 murders and implied having committed many more. Um, but she, uh, she was also being prosecuted for the murders of, uh, Azima Randall.

And throughout the trial, Clementine continued to exhibit very strange behavior and was frequently disruptive. Okay, um, at one point she screamed from the stand. I am the axe woman of the sacrifice sect. I killed them all, men, women and babies, and I hugged the dead babies to my breast, but I am not guilty of murder.

Okay, so I see why.

It would be very disturbing, uh? Despite their repeated attempts to control Clementine and discourage these outbursts, Clementine's defense attorneys were unable to dissuade her from demanding that her confession be entered into the trial record. So she didn't want it entered in, like that confession that she just screamed out in the middle of court. And they were trying to get it taken off the record, they were like, that's an outburst, blah, blah, blah, but she wanted it entered into the record.

Okay, which can point both ways. It can point to mental illness where she didn't do this, but she's just going along with it. It can point to mental illness where she did do this. And she's not realizing what's happening here. Or it can point to she's part of this wild cult, that, and she wants it on the record that she did this.

Right, it can go any of those ways, and I could see it going any of those ways, which is so frustrating.

And you could again look at that two ways. So the prosecution rested their case just after just one day, followed soon again by the defense, who really didn't have any, uh, defense of their client. After a brief deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and was, um. And Clementine was sentenced to life in Angola prison for the murder of Azima Randall. Now, following her conviction, Clementine kind of just disappears from the record, really.

Like, just got convicted, went to prison. But then when she does pop up, you're like, what cause? She popped up again in the news nearly a year after this, okay?

And, according to the article, and like, and after that, she really disappeared, it's like, she really just pops in every once in a while. But according to the article, it says that the prisoner, meaning Clementine, underwent what is described as an operation of the most delicate sort, Oh no, performed by prison physician Dr.

Sterling, which left her, quote, one of the mildest prisoners in the penitentiary. Did she have a lobotomy? Lobotomies were not really over here at this time.

What did they do? This was before lobotomies were really a thing. I think it was a forced hysterectomy, that's.

The cure is as complete as it is. Wonderful. That's chilling shit.

And that this woman, like, told her stories about, like, they never caught that. You know, the axe murder, you know of New Orleans, not the other one that we talked about before. But, um, and kind of, like, gave these stories that made it seem like, you know, I don't know, like.

That just made it seem like they knew a little more. And this is like older woman. And I guess, like at one point, she said something like that. She was, you know, like that. She showed like a picture of her when she was younger.

And when they saw it, it was the picture of Clementine Barnabas.

Clementine Barnabas was the only person punished for the familial axe murders in Louisiana.

Okay, you know what I mean, but it seems like that's the thing. There's so many weird things here.

Yeah, but also you can be like, Huh, you know what I mean? Like, there's so many ways to look at it.

It's like, Okay, well, it's not your dad now, yeah, see.

Very interested, very interesting one. Uh, next episode, yeah.

I think I'm ready.

Sometimes I'll just be singing.

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