Marriage as a norm, but promote emotional and familial stability in whatever forms those families take. So youre asking a question that theres a real fight about. I happen to be on the side that says the kinds of policies i was talking about earlier, the higher minimum courages, expanded welfare programs, more protected pay and reproductive control contributes to stabilizing populations financially that then better enables them to form the kind of bonds and raise the kind of families that are going to be, you know, healthier and more economically stable. Conservatives will tell you that its about repromoting early marriage as the norm. So its a fundamental disagreement. I think were going to have to stop, but thank you all for a great, great discussion. Thank you. [applause] im going to remind you wait. They will be signing books again on the second floor in the gallery . Okay. My instructions are wrong. And dont forget to shop at the book tent and in the gallery. [laughter] youre good. [applause] tell her i did it. [inaudible conversations] the next panel from the san antonio book festival is a discussion on Violent Crime in the 19th century. It starts now. [inaudible conversations] hey, good afternoon. Were all set. Im Robert Rivard with the rivard report. Thank you so much for coming today. Those of you sitting in the back pews might think about moving up closer to these wonderful authors that are with us. Our panel today is called shadow country, its race and crime in 19th century america. It will be part of the san antonio book festival broadcast april 30th on cspan2 if you want to see some of the programs that you miss because youre in here or if because we do such a good job, you just have to go watch it a second time and hear everybody twice. We have two terrific authors from texas with us. To my left is my longtime, longago young reporter colleague at the dallas times herald, Skip Hollandsworth, who today is the editor of Texas Monthly. Hes a National Magazine award winner. Hes written some of the greatest true crime that ive read, and hes got some more for us. His book is the midnight assassin. Hell be signing that right after the presentation, and we didnt even know if these books were going to be here by today, skip. In fact, the hard cover came a few days ago. All we had was the galley. Excuse me. And so skips book takes place in austin, and well talk a little bit about that in a minute. Dr. Kali nicole gross is associate professor of african and African Diaspora studies at the university of texas in austin. But she has made quite a career of writing about crime in philadelphia. And this is actually her second book which is set in philadelphia. And both of these authors have come across remarkable true crime stories that none of us know anything about or that have been completely lost in the public memory. Skips is arguably about the very first serial killer ever to be documented in the united states. And for those of you that have read eric larsons devil in the white city about chicago, and we all thought that must have been the first serial killer, but this occurs in 1885, even earlier, in austin. And two years later in philadelphia, 1400 miles away, is hannah mary tabs and the dismembered torso. So these books are both about nasty, bad things that happened. But since we didnt know any of the people, we can enjoy armchair thrillers [laughter] because thats what true crime is about. We all love to read about terrible things happening to people we dont know. [laughter] so the microphones not out there, but ill just ask a trivia question to get us started. What were the respective populations of austin and philadelphia in 1890 . That would be the closest census year to 1885 when skip is writing in austin and kali in 1887 in philadelphia. So anybody want to hazard a guess about these two cities in. 75,000. Which one . Both. 14,000 in [inaudible] austin had 14,000. 14,000, okay. Does that help you with philadelphia a little bit . 30,000 . Philadelphia had more than a million people. And it has 1. 5 million today, so i think that gives you a little bit better understanding of the country that we lived in back then. The northeast was where the real cities were at the time, and philadelphia was kind of the city that it is today in terms of it being a big metropolis. Those are two very different settings, but both of these books, as you will guess, start out with something very bad happening to somebody. And with that, skip, im going to stop and ask you to set the scene for the crime in austin in 1885. Give us four or five minutes of overview of what you were reporting on and then, kali, well have you do the same thing in philadelphia. Well n1885 austin was actually transforming itself from this frontierera town into an actual gilded age city. Electric lights were arriving, temperatures were arriving telephones were arriving. The driscoll thoal was getting built with flush toilets on its third floor which had never before been seen west of the mississippi. The state legislature decided to build a new State Capitol 30 feet the architects were ordered to make it 30 feet taller than the u. S. Capitol. Already the phrase everything is bigger in texas was working in 1885. [laughter] the university of texas had just opened the year before, and it had a whopping, neverbeforeimagined 230 students attending, being taught by seven chinwhiskered professors who had been recruited away from universities like the university of virginia for 4,000 a year. A staggering sum. Even the state lunatic asylum was being refurbished. All the same people all the insane people in texas were brought here. 550 people were there. And they were, the new superintendent had made the pads curving instead of straight because the medical journals at the time said that curving pads led to sanity. And anybody could get in. There were women who were brought in for too much menstrual flow and women brought in for too much menstrual flow. Several men were brought in because of masturbation. That led to insanity. So here was this city emerging into this kind of golden era as the mayor kept tell everybody in every speech. And on december 30th actually, on new years day, 1885, there was a headline in in the newspaper called bloody work. And a young black servant woman who lived in a little servants quarters behind a house and almost every upper middle class and wealthy home in austin had servant quarters had been found out by the back outhouse and axed to death, an axe blow in her head, fived, cut up into pieces so that when the undertaker lifted her up, her body fell apart. And thus began the story. All right was that in five minutes, robert . Were ahead of schedule, and were going to come back to that body and more than that body, but, kali, why dont you set the scene in philadelphia for us. Okay. So i want to apologize in advance. I dont want to try not to go into academic egghead speech, but skips a tough act to follow. Ill do my best. So my crime takes place in philadelphia in 1887, and it starts when a headless, limbless, raciallyambiguous torso discovered in a pond just outside of the city. Now, philadelphia at this time, as bob as robert sort of introduced this to us already a fairly large city, but its undergone a number of substantial demographic changes. So, for example, the black population in philadelphia almost doubles. It goes from 20,000 to 40,000. The population of italian immigrants in the city goes from 300 to 18,000. So you have this influx of newlyfreed black folks entering the city at the same time that you have a lot of white european immigrants coming from abroad. But theyre not really certain if these folks are white just yet, right . So when the irish immigrants come and some of the italian immigrants or sort of like russian jews, Eastern European jews, theyre not sure where they fit in. The torso itself is disturbing, right . Its a man, they know this much. But they didnt discertain his race. They dont know discern his race. They dont know is it a white man whos been killed . This would take a huge priority, right . Is it a spaniard . You know, is it a mull last toe . Some people suggested he might be of he brayic origin. So theres in whole hysteria about what to do and it kind of paralyzes the investigation at first. Guilty as charged. But it also is profoundly and deeply divided by race and ethnic differences. And so the investigators arent certain which world even to search. And so the sort of project to discern his race becomes of paramount importance for a bunch of reasons. Well, let me just say that its impossible to read both of these books without propelling yourself forward into the 21st century and constantly in the back of your mind thinking about Law Enforcement attitudes towards him from people and black people and how race and class still divide the country in terms of our approach to crime and Law Enforcement. But lets go back to those late 19th century years. How does Law Enforcement in each instance react to news of a black murder . Skip, do you want to go first . Well, obviously, the austin cops immediately looked for a black suspect. We were only 20 years removed from the civil war. Austin is still very much a confederate state like it was. And theres this thierry that was going on that theory that was going on that young black men, because they had not experienced the, quote, paternallizing benefits of slavery, had a tendency to deconstruct and return to their, quote, primordial state. And so this is exactly what the police believed had happened in this case of the first murder. An exboyfriend who was upset that molly, the servant woman, had moved on to another man, decided to take his vengeance. And he did it only in the way that a black man would do it, that this would only be a crime committed by a savage man. And it was a savage crime. And when the second murder happened a few months later, a young black servant woman was found with her head chopped in and wrapped in blankets and cut to pieces and an iron pick driven new her ear. Again, the theory was, well, it had to be another black lover who got the idea from the first exblack lover, so this arrest this guy too, and they arrested a mentally slow, barefoot black man who was considered to be who had tried to become a lover of the second woman and had failed and tried to get money from her. So he was, obviously, clearly the culprit. And this went on time and time again. There was no such thing in our era that were writing about as csi units. There were no behavioral scientists working serial killing cases out at quantico. There was no fingerprint evidence. You could distinguish between blood, blood between humans and animals, be i there was no but there was no blood typing. There was no hair evidence, this was no fiber evidence. What the cops had were bloodhounds that tried to sniff for a scent and chase whatever scent they could find. Well, the bloodhounds could find nothing. So without any eyewitness to say who the killer was, then all they had to go with was their sort of alreadydetermined belief that it had to be a black man. If we just keep arresting them, surely one of them will confess. All right. Now, kali, your corpse is found neatly wrapped right. With a little handwritten sign on it that says handle with care. [laughter] this is true. And its actually not found in philadelphia. Its found in bucks county right. Which even now is rural but back then was pure farm country, and a farmer or carpenter, i think it was, found it and saw the handle with care and opened it up and was horrified. How do you bring that back into philadelphiasome. Okay. So as i said, theres this quandary about how to figure out who the victim is, let alone the culprits until they discern this guys race. So they actually bring in the coroners physician to try to do a series of tests to figure out his race, and he sort of does, you know, some chemical tests, and he also does microscopic tests. And he basically says based on his examination, he believes that the corpse belongs to someone who is threefourths negro. And so even though he was pretty certain this is this moment where science is still not really trusted by investigators. As skip said, its not the csi moment. So, you know, the police chief, you know, the states attorney kind of look at him and theyre like, no, we dont buy this. So they actually call in some black people from the community to the come and compare their skin with that of the torso. Now, shockingly when this doesnt yield a result [laughter] they ask the women sort of outright, you know, youre black, you know . Is this a black man . And one of the women says, you know, white folks and colored folks look so much alike now nowadays, its hard to tell the difference. [laughter] so this is and thats the crux of the fear for them. But to make a long story short its probably too late for that [laughter] theyre, you know, combing the river. News of this sort of to have coe makes it torso makes it into the papers, and its wrapped in a piece of calico. And theres a conductor who reads it who remembers a black woman on the train the same evening carrying two packages that match this description. And so then they say, aha, now we have an actual lead, definitive proof this probably is the body of a colored man. And so this sort of getting them on to philadelphia because she took this train from philadelphia out to bucks county. This is a good time to just pause and ask what prompted both of you to take on 130yearold murder cases [laughter] and how do you reconstruct those even in the age of Google Search . Skip, did you well, there was nothing to google. [laughter] i mean, you dont, you cant google old 19th Century Newspapers that are on microfilm at the austin history certain or at the briscoe centered for american studies. You basically hire researchers to look for stuff with you, and you sit in front of a microfilm machine day after day going through these articles, 19th Century Newspapers where the print is even smaller than Texas Monthly print is today [laughter] yeah, it is. And just hope you come across a story. I mean, i am haunted by what i missed in the newspaper because, you know, you never knew which page the local news would be on. There would be some just long notes columns, and then at the bottom of the notes column would be one sentence about someone getting arrested. And the reason im scared about even doing this session is because im afraid one of you is about to stand up and go [laughter] you dumb ass, if you had just looked in this library, the killer is right here. [laughter] right. So its just needle in the haystack stuff. Its oldfashioned research of which i was totally unprepared for because im a journalist. Im used to calling up people who are alive, not dead by a century. But, you know, Something Else triggered your interest, and it was reading about another serial killer. Jack. Right, jack. Well, i first heard about this when a schoolteacher in austin told me she was working on a novel that jack the ripper came from austin. And i said, well, where would that have come from . And she said theres a she showed me this report that had been made in a quickie pamphlet that was being printed during the 1888 white chapel killings that Scotland Yard thought the killer could have come from a smallty in city in texas where a series of murders had occurred three years earlier. And i go, what murders . And the late 1930s, early 20th century. Is this where you heard about this . I was doing my first book about black women in philadelphia and this is where the penitentiary system was born. Looking at records for eastern state penitentiary which was the premier confinement, i dont know if anyone here has been to philadelphia but if you have been to the prison. Sure. Sure you didnt. It was a massive fortress. I was going through the archives and this is the painstaking work of it but the remark of the administrator maintained the scrapbook and cut out newspaper clippings of their famous or infamous. And this case, headlines, murder most foul and disembodied trunk and torso. I dont know if that is the kind of thing you want to confess to a room full of folks you dont know but once i found out there was this black woman at the heart of the story, this is not the kind of history i am used to encountering. I could not put it down, those newspaper clippings gave me names and dates and roster numbers and could look them up in prison records and gave me a little background and i work the fences data, when i started researching the project i dont know how long it took me, but it is built up as it is today, during the research when my process shifted, the data and materials, painstakingly put it together, read through the coverage and find bills of indictment in Philadelphia City archives, but some random goose chases too, the woman at the center of the story is one of these folks who lied about their origins and used different aliases, i spent time on a Research Fellowship in virginia looking for her roots because that is where she said she was from and then i realized she was from maryland. That set me back a little bit, had to recalibrate, they had to go to maryland state archives and dig through there but slowly and surely needle in a haystack, found her marriage certificate, had a better idea about her age and the name she was going by at that time. Her husband as part of the colored troops during the civil war, found his records and the pension file she applied after his death, and going everywhere, this is exciting for me, looking at the microfilm in the archive this had me going far and wide, the midatlantic coast. You mentioned annamarie taps, let me introduce her to the audience. How did the police get onto her . She is a bit of a slippery character to study. The conductor gives them this disruption of a black woman, they are able to trace her steps from when she gets off this train and it turns out she is stopped in a number of houses and it is clear she worked as a servant in one of the folks in the area. Once they determine that and her name starts to circulate in a newspaper she actually goes to the town and gives an interview in the newspaper at the same time the authorities are looking for her. Pretty interesting. At the same time that is happening, the victims sister once she sees hannah marie tafts name in the paper actually goes to the chief of detectives in philadelphia because she is terrified that torso might belong to her brother, the young man who seemed to be having an extramarital affair with Hannah Mary Taft. These elements converge and return when she is back on the train to philadelphia. In austin we are up to a couple murders, there is more coming, police are looking to point fingers at people, where we left it they made arrest in the second one and not the first one. How are they treating their respective investigations and suspects . Are they trying to close cases with people they can pin it on, or an africanamerican crime victim in 1885 deserves justice and against the bottom of it . There was still something hard for us to understand, it never occurred to the police and then the private investigators who were later hired that one man would be responsible for all this. The concept of a serial killer did not exist in 1885. There were serial killers, they were called maniacs who would go on psychotic killing sprees and there were outlaws, the greatest one of all in texas was John Wesley Hardin who shot 40 people, but he was very open about who he shot and for what reasons, they owed him money or he wanted their money where they had a gambling problem and he said they deserved to die. There had never been a concept of a man sneaking out of his home for his own lascivious motives to want to ritualistically slaughter one woman after another, wait for a period of time and come back and do it again and leave their bodies out like works of art and disappear. The police were constantly under the assumption that there had to be some black involvement. At one point as the murders continued everyone began to come up with the theory that a black gang was on the loose in austin. It wasnt just one person doing it but a group of black blue blue trying to wreak havoc on the city on servant women for reasons of their own. That is an important snapshot, such a small city, the element of fear. People filling a vacuum, what they think is going on and what could happen to them. There were calls for linking lynchings, marches through the neighborhood, to clean out the city of any black men who committed a crime, none of this, i am sure it happened and wasnt getting reported in the papers and then came Christmas Eve which was exactly one month or almost exactly one year after the first murder and the whole story changed when two prominent white women were similarly slaughtered within the space of an hour in two different parts of boston and that is when the panic really hit. This was considered a negro matter and then suddenly everybodys world changed. That is the good time to introduce the subject of sex and the role it played in each investigation or in the eyes of Law Enforcement and the role relationships might have had in it. They got their eye on hannah, she is the guilty party. She points a finger at someone else. She does. Once Hannah Mary Taft is arrested and apprehended i should talk a little bit about policing in philadelphia at this moment. This woman right now . This historical moment, thank you. In the late 19th century violence is a completely acceptable part of policing. In many respects as his racial profiling. You actually have patrol manuals that instruct Philadelphia Police officers to detain anyone who is poor or looking like they come from outside the state. Imagine the variety of constituencies in a perilous position. When Hannah Mary Taft is in custody she is kept in a cell off of the chief of detectivess office by herself and interrogated for a period of time, first she maintains the idea that she doesnt know anything about this case, she doesnt know any of the victims, she is kept in custody overnight and the next day she is reported as having a very pronounced blackeye, her coat is torn and she makes a confession. At that time she says this young man George Wilson, and another young man got into an argument in my house and they committed this horrible crime and forced me to help him destroy this evidence. And so the issue about her testimony is problematic. On the one hand she herself was a pretty dubious character, but there are a lot of accounts of this time of womens treatment especially in custody and being vulnerable to certain things particularly sexual assault. There are accounts of other women who were interrogated by folks wearing masks. Even though their face are colored, looking her all over. In another instance there is a white woman who was arrested for prostitution charge who in her memoirs testifies she submitted to sexual advances of the guard in order to escape the wrath herself. To be imprisoned at this time is dangerous and dubious, once she makes this confession they get George Wilson and George Wilson is a light complexion, they used the term mulatto at this time, the sum of all fears, who can actually pass for white. In spite of the evidence of her having a romantic affair with the victim and a number of other salacious details that emerge, they lock on to him, being infinitely more suspicious, folks are worried about being infiltrated. If he is potentially white he could infiltrate the white race in some way. That didnt get us to the sex piece the way i thought it would. Robert would be happy to ask about it. I will bring us back. What happens in austin as they start to look at people who know the two white murder victims . Seven women are murdered in the space of a year. Reporters are finally writing that it might be one person, may be a lunatic escaping from the asylum, someone who under the full moon turned into a werewolf. One reporter said it could be frankenstein returned. They were trying to grapple with the idea that one kind of brilliant mania, a midnight assassin was at work. A reporter came down from Joseph Pulitzers paper to write about the killings and he said this is a different killer than we have ever seen before in civilization. This is someone who kills out of a need to gratify his desire and we have never seen him before. It was a prescient report. The city leaders did not want to read this kind of reporting, they didnt want to be known as the Stomping Ground for midnight assassin that was untouchable so they came up with the idea that two white husbands had murdered their wives one of whom was going to leave, the first wife was going to leave her husband, the second wife was slipping off and been discovered, a young socialite who was happily married and very few divorces were given so she was slipping off to what was called a house of assignation on congress and third street where a woman, and innkeeper would rent out rooms for the hour to wealthy austin men who wanted to have little affairs with their women and she was meeting someone there so the second husband killed her because according to the authorities he had found out she was sneaking around, then it wasnt the husband doing it but the leading candidate for governor who was meeting her. You will never know the name, William Swain, a giant man, the most popular politician in texas at the time, the state comptroller running for governor and his opponent, a weaselly exconfederate war hero named saul ross, in the newspaper poll he was losing. It was a very wiley Campaign Manager who begins perhaps not quite the evidence to say definitely, begin leaking a story was William Swain who was with the young socialite at the house of assignation on Christmas Eve and he is the one who killed her and the story stuck. So he became governor of texas. Any truth to it . Here is the problem i have. As a professional historian you might not have this problem but because you cant completely disprove the story or prove it, you have to leave it hanging like a curveball. Good to write about it though. What happened to all the black suspects we have forgotten about. It has been half an hour, there have been some arrests early on now that the police turned their attention elsewhere and trying defensively to suggest there is not a serial killer, what about the people they rounded up, any number of suspects over that year . They would arrest them, interrogate them, beat them, hemp rope is what they use, chain them to an iron chain in the middle of the floor of the calipers, what was called the jail back there in a western term, let them go and there would be another murder and they would arrest them all. I dont know why these guys didnt get out of town. Eventually they hired private detectives beginning with evidence, one of which was a black chicken thief, one of the beloved characters, stealing chickens from white people, and black neighbors, and several of these guys were convicted of trumped up charges of burglary and so on and sent to the penitentiary and he escaped and became a bigger folk hero. I didnt write enough about that in the book and i feel sort of bad about it. This with any are also you talked about Joseph Pulitzer sending reporter for good murder story but there were rewards being offered and that would attract private detectives coming and on the train and they knew police were inefficient and were going to solve it themselves. They would dress up in suits. The mayor send a letter to the Pinkerton Agency which was the greatest detective agency, the letter got diverted to a different Pinkerton Agency that existed, the pinkerton us detective agency, National Detective agency and down came for 3000 a group of detectives who had no idea what they were doing. You are going to these newspapers thinking this is a dark story and here comes this bit of comity to light not the case. It was luck that such a thing could happen. In philadelphia, are we moving toward a trial here . What has george told the police . We are moving toward a trial and george also has a pretty rough time in police custody. Certainly beaten and coerced into making a confession but the trial initially is stymied as you try to figure out the primary killer in this case. Hannah married tubbs is good at playing white people and deferring to White Authority at this time so she did yours, doesnt look white people in the eye, she cries, she turns on the southern accent and there is nostalgia at this moment where philadelphians think that white people in the south know how to deal with black people. In some respects she becomes this more trustworthy sort of black person, she is visibly black, demure into White Authority, wilson is this northern negro, sort of look white, becomes a suspicious character in spite of the fact that even though tabs puts on this persona for them, black people in the community break rakes and cooperate in mass with the investigation and offer testimony about her various crimes in the community. She threatened to kill people and done bodily harm, her husband was the folks who gave the statement. And personal items are found in the home, ever everything going on there, what singes it for them is wilson had criminalized him. Not only is he the sum of all fears in terms of his racial phenotype, the house of refuge, a home for wayward ruth, he was placed there because his mother died, really poor, but it serves as a way to criminalize and adding insult to injury he had experience because he worked in a slaughterhouse before. He is probably the one who did this dismembering, he goes on trial for murder and she is charged with murder and viewed as accessory to the crime. His unknown father, different treatment and mixed race person, in philadelphia, then someone who is clearly black . Mulatto gets you still a lot of ways. In some respects it describes someone who has a parent who is black and apparent who is white but also to describe someones complexion or this sort of thing but historically they tend to have better access to education, better kinds of jobs and because of their proximity in some respects it could be viewed favorably but at this particular historical moment it works against him because he becomes a suspect of real suspicion, fears about infiltration, the language of miscegenation is born, a lot of rhetoric around this idea that mulattos are more degraded even biologically rather than, quote, for blacks or full white. He existed in a weird moment in time it is also not savvy in the same way she is. There are rumors he might be a little bit slow. He is fascinated by the notoriety of the case. I thought the case would fade out of the newspapers because once it became clear it from i was primarily africanamerican this is not the case. There was coverage on this case from philadelphia to missouri to ohio. The New York Times had written about it. He himself seemed pretty impressed by the notoriety and that worked against him, being unrepentant. Dont you think what made it such a news story of the day was the bad guy was a woman . At least in the eyes of the public, this is a rare opportunity, to put a female who had the worst characteristics of a bad man. I would but the fact that she was playing him really well. They had some sort of open arrangement going on, that titillated the 19thcentury readers for sure. Also the gruesome nature of crime, salacious ins and outs and being involved, certainly played a role but at this time period most people considered black women to be of low character so it would not necessarily be a shock that they would be involved in a Violent Crime. That is the stereotype and rhetoric of the time but i think it is a combination of events. The two of them together cut this odd sort of image of who killed this man, it is something they were fascinated by. Im not giving anything away by telling the outcome to the readers in terms of the justice. Oh you will be change do you agree with how they apportioned blame and punishment . No. I think for someone who has studied black womens experiences in the criminal Justice System i am pretty amazed at the way hannah married tabs was able to manipulate the judge and the jury. Most black women in philadelphia were convicted at a higher rate than any other constituency. In the early part of the 19th century 72 of black women in philadelphia end up convicted so the idea that she would be recognized as a woman and even remotely considered, primary murder and this is in and of itself a feed that i was amazed she was able to accomplish. How you view history in austin, how many dead people. How do you start to believe yourself that these were killed by the same person and some have nothing to do with the other. Someone has to know, 14 to 17,000 people, someone has to know who the killer is, and when they started working on the case i went surely i am going to figure it out, who killed them. Skip hollands work will solve this crime and wasted years researching peoples lives, looking for some arrest record, that would give it all up. If you havent read the book it is anybodys guess whether Skip Hollandsworth solved the crime or not. I will leave it to those who get it signed later but before we get to a question and answer period, 15 minutes left, you spend years on this book literally. That makes it look different, there are years i would give up on. This is not a book without knowing who the killer is but then it occurred to me this is a book precisely because no one knows who the killer is. There would be years i would forget about it but unlike any other story what about you . How long were you at this . About ten years. My first book was published in 2006. For ten years. Is that an object lesson for people who have a fulltime job . In both your cases, the magazine, at the university, driven to write books on the side even if it takes ten years . I became a mom in the middle of that and it slowed me down also. I realize there has been a moment for my daughter because she has been living with this thing too for her whole life, to present even to my 6yearold this is what it was, it is done. All right feeling closer to home. Enough already. Lets go play. Do you always have a book going or a book idea . After the exhaustion and the pain of writing this when i am not sure i want to do another one. We have a gentleman with a microphone, since we are recording this for cspan and you have a question raise your hand and give him a second to get over there so we can pick the question as well as the answer. Cspan, it is your legacy involved here. My question for both of you, in writing these books did you get any insight into the mentality of the perpetrator of these crimes . The newspapers were any sources coming beneath suggestions of psychological nature as to what these perpetrators might be about. Except for the new york world article and a couple heads from the san antonio reporter who is the one that invented the midnight assassin that this was a brilliant killer. There was no analysis of what psychologically would drive someone to massacre one woman after another in this ritualistic fashion. There were lots of blanks in my story, lots i wanted to interview people back then and say who did you think it was because it just didnt come out of the papers and without that i was stuck. You both talked about newspaper clippings. Our police file still around from back then or any archival or original materials, investigative notes . Yes. I definitely use police records, bills of indictments, to answer your question, a really great question, i struggled with what to make of hannah married have to. One thing i wanted to do was to make her a black woman at the heart of the story. How to do that when i have these sources that dont give you folks actual voice. A lot of times the record, perspective of her, newspaper accounts recorded how she behaves, there are statements about what she did or said, so i was trying to research her background to figure out, didnt think all these folks were lying, when was it born, i dont believe in the ability to beat up all these people do this stuff or commit the kinds of crimes she was able to do in the community before this actually surfaced so all this research into whether she had been enslaved in maryland and i came across the county where she was born, actually was known with avirulent clan of slaveowners who were brutal, and points i speculated, and even being on the precipice of womanhood during the civil war maryland was occupied territory. A number of bloodied battles took place, i imagine the trauma in some way affected her. Any of the principal characters in either book, where their accounts of what those people were really like based on descendents, where their family members, either of you were able to find who had their own version of history in the family conversation . I found a lot of family members and details but knew nothing about the murders. And the victims, the great aunt was murdered and she gasped because the family story she had been told, different than what happened, there are a lot of missing records. Do we have a question here . Would the authors have an opinion on the new podcast, a flash in the pan and the type of reporting and brick and mortar with authors like yourselves. I think the Second Season hasnt grabbed hold of the public, but they will constantly be trying another serial, there will be one season after another for that. It was riveting journalism and entertainment at the same time, and a new trial for the guy. That gives us a good conversation about journalists hundred years from now writing about how much we were informed or misinformed by our own bias and social status class, wealth, race, look at the tremendous disagreement, principally white police men, black people, unarmed black blue blue and divisive conversation we are having about culpability on that and what needs to be done. Are we just as divided over whether or not justice is something shared equally by the two races as it was back then . I would say so. One of the things, the tragedy for me of the case, there were many tragedies but one of the things for me as a historian that was really hard was to see how much of what i was studying and looking at for the way the black community and Police Community interacted, resonated with the same crisis moments we are at today. Once they decide this is a black suspect and most Violent Crime is intraracial, black people mostly kill black people and white people mostly kill white people. They go into the black community charged with the task of, quote, hunting negroes so they basically scoop up the block and intimidate and interrogate folks but it was not uncommon for black people to be stopped or detained by police, but they believed they didnt belong, there is an example in the book of a black man who is stopped and detained because he was, quote, big, black, and had a record. There are all these ways in which so much of that racial profiling and violence and beating people and getting coerced, held true, but in certain respects even the ways wilson in particular was taken advantage of during his interrogation by the authorities, both described him as slow, barely 18 years old and at one point gave him alcohol during his interrogation. His confession is what stands up and holds against him and reminded me of the recent documentary that got a big splash on netflix, how to make a murderer or Something Like that, juvenile in there who clearly challenges getting embroiled in this case in a way that is incarcerated. The amount of injustice in the criminal Justice System related to race and class that it. Change. Time for one more question in the audience. Bring the microphone over. Following your research, did you determine when the insane asylum and legislature emerged . You cant write a book about texas without someone doing a political joke. I completely lost my train of thought. We still have time for a question. We have one over here. Help me out. What are you reading right now and is there anything you always go back to to reread . I am a reader and there are too many books to read. There are more here. That is a good question. Was it a question . I didnt hear it. What are we reading now . I like a lot of attica lock, i read her and im looking forward to summer, there are books im really excited about, one is by sean harris, literally called Something Like sex