Clementine Barnabet ( – after 1923) was an American suspected serial killer. She initially confessed to perpetrating at least two mass murders in February and November 1911, and while in custody, Barnabet claimed involvement in a total of 35 killings in the Acadiana region of Louisiana and southeastern Texas, taking responsibility for nineteen of them. Authorities would link her to several more unsolved cases in both states, including some committed during her stay in jail, bringing the upper estimate of connected murders up to 52."The Strange Case of Clementine Barnabet", pp. 32-39; In, Proceedings of the 2012 Homicide Research Working Group Annual Symposium, Chicago, Illinois June 6–9, 2012. Barnabet was charged with nineteen counts of murder, but ultimately convicted of just one. Barnabet was released from custody in 1923, her subsequent activities and whereabouts are completely unknown.
In the 21st century, doubt has since been cast on Barnabet's confession. Historians have characterized the coverage on the murders as sensationalist, playing off of racial stereotypes and overhyping the violence, particularly supposed sexual and hoodoo elements, resulting in a moral panic. Professor Vance McLaughlin wrote: "Between 1911 and 1912, in towns along the Southern Pacific railroad line running through Louisiana and Texas, a minimum of twelve African-American families were murdered in their homes. All the murders occurred at night and an axe was used to fracture the skulls of the victims. Only one person, Clementine Barnabet, was ever punished for any of these homicides".
Early life Barnabet is believed to have been born in 1894, by her own account in or around St. Martinville, Louisiana. Her parents were Dina Porter and Raymond Barnabet, who were not married, with Dina being described as Raymond's companion or live-in girlfriend. Barnabet had at least one brother, named Zepherin, who had a different mother. Three other potential brothers are also mentioned in some articles, "Tatite", "Noah", and "Ferran", though "Ferran" appears to be a corruption or nickname of Zepherin. She also had a half-sister named Pauline, who had moved away to Rayne after marrying. Barnabet's father was a sharecropper and petty criminal who reportedly abused his family. Barnabet has been described as Creole, with contemporary coverage reporting her as a "half-breed", "half-blood", "mulatto", and, inaccurately and apparently by her own account, "only one-eighth negro". The Barnabets moved to Lafayette in 1909. Barnabet was 18 years old during her first trial in November 1911 and 19 years old at the time of her second confession in April 1912.
Murders
Andrus family murder On February 24, 1911, the Andrus family was murdered in their home in Lafayette. The Barnabet family were neighbors to the Andruses and on February 26, Raymond Barnabet was arrested by Lafayette Parish Sheriff Louis Lacoste on suspicion of murder, after a "mistress" implicated him in the crime, but Raymond was released for insufficient evidence within the week.
Raymond was re-arrested in July, after his daughter Clementine and son Ferran both testified against Raymond, claiming he had returned home with bloodied clothes and boasting of the Andrus murders. Dina Porter contradicted her children's testimony, saying she did not see blood or hear her boyfriend confess, but did attest to Raymond's violent tendencies and stated that he had previously threatened to kill her. Two other witnesses, neighbors Adelle Stevens and her mother, also denied seeing Raymond covered in blood the night of the murders. He was convicted of the Andrus murders on October 19, receiving capital punishment by hanging. Raymond didn't react directly to the verdict, but loudly muttered the words "goodbye" and "mo foutou" ("I'm done for" in Louisiana Creole) throughout the trial. Raymond's attorneys successfully filed for an appeal, reasoning that their client could not make a defense plea on account of being drunk from a smuggled bottle of wine, but he was held in jail pending a new trial.
Randall family murder and arrest On November 27, 1911, while Raymond was imprisoned, Norbert and Azema Randall of Lafayette were murdered with their four children in a manner similar to the previous slayings. Barnabet lived a few blocks away as a live-in housekeeper for the Guidry family and was familiar with the Randalls, as she and Azema Randall were deaconesses at the same congregation. She was arrested the same day, after blood was found on a back entry gate of the Guidry residence and further came under suspicion due to a search of Barnabet's bedroom finding more blood on an apron, dress, and some underwear. A physician confirmed the remains to be human, alleged that the sample also contained brain matter, and determined that they were a physical match for those found on a pillow case in the Andrus residence. Barnabet initially denied involvement, admitting to the murders following a "third-degree" examination in New Orleans.
First trial and confession During her trial for both the Andrus and Randall murders, Barnabet acted erratically by rocking back and forth in her chair while laughing. She admitted to her role in both cases and testified that she acted under the orders of the Church of Sacrifice, an alleged offshoot of a Christ's Sanctified Holy Church congregation in Lake Charles, Louisiana, stating that she had committed the ten murders because the families had "refused to obey message from God" and that she was acting alongside an unspecified number of accomplices. She also claimed to have murdered a woman and her children in Rayne while visiting her sister Pauline. Over the course of the following January, several more suspects were arrested, including her brother Zepherin, two men named Edwin Charles and Gregory Porter, who were with Barnabet the night of the Randall murders, and reverend King Harrison (also reported as King Harris), who led the original church branch in Lake Charles. By the end of January 1912, the murders of 26 black Louisiana residents were attributed to the Church of Sacrifices as ritualistic human sacrifices without evidence. While Clementine and Zepherin were both held in custody, the ax murders of families continued. Barnabet briefly recanted her confession after the hearing.
Second confession On April 2, Barnabet confessed to involvement in 35 murders, claiming to have committed seventeen of them "with her own hands", later revising the number to twenty. She also claimed to have "caressed" the bodies of the victims by cradling their heads to her chest, even though only one case had the corpses moved post-mortem. The motive had changed with Barnabet stating that she and her accomplices "started out not knowing who the victims would be", but then picked out families with infants, even though none of the later targeted victims had newborns. The interrogations were led by Acadia Parish Sheriff Louis Fontenot, Chief Detective Peck, and Deputy Saul Broussard. On April 4, she repeated her confession to the press, after smoking cigars provided by journalists and singing Christian hymns such as "Nearer My God to Thee" and "Lead Kindly Light". Barnabet was reportedly excited about having her photo appear in the newspaper. On April 6, Barnabet claimed that her accomplice were targeting three families "near Lafayette", totalling 13 people, for "sacrifice". Her father Raymond, who had been rearrested due to his daughter's confession, again pleaded his innocence and supported the theory that Barnabet killed the Andrus family, claiming she went out the night of the murders and that he found bloodied clothes in her room.
Barnabet further claimed that she acquired "conjure bags" (a good luck charm found in Hoodoo), described as "two crossed needles, bound in thread and wrapped in red flannel and a few old rags", that would grant them supernatural powers and make them undetectable to the authorities. This spurred Barnabet into committing her first murder in Rayne, Louisiana in 1910 to test whether or not the claim of magical protection was true. She variously claimed to have received them from the Church of Sacrifice or to have bought them from a "hoodoo doctor" in New Iberia, and that she got them alongside four friends, her alleged future accomplices, who then drew lots to decide who would test the effectiveness of the charms. The Times-Democrat stated that other voodoo practitioners identified the "conjure bags" as a charm meant to heal back pain from rheumatism.
Barnabet's second confession contained lurid detail, but was not consistent with crime scene records. Barnabet would nearly always claim to have entered through the front door, when there were cases where a back window had been used for entry and describing the murder of the Randall family, Barnabet claimed to have shot Norbert Randall "somewhere in the breast or body" with a gun from her brother, after "braining him", when he had actually been shot in the forehead and mutilated after death. Her confessions were described in contemporary reports as "very self-contradictory" and would frequently change in details, whether due to her own revision or misreporting by newspapers. After remaining vague about the previously mentioned co-participants in the murders, Barnabet claimed a minimum of four alleged accomplices, two men and two women, but would only give the names of the other women, "Mary Conchon" and "Irene". One woman arrested as "Irene", Valena Mabry, was positively identified by Barnabet, but let go for having an alibi for the murders. Barnabet also first claimed only five people were part of the Church of Sacrifice, increasing the number of alleged followers to 105 before her first trial. During her second confession, Barnabet stated that she had been the sole perpetrator of the confessed murders, but still talked about having killed with others. Initially she still implicated her father in the Andrus murders, as well as two murders in Crowley and Rayne, but later protested his innocence. It was also reported that Barnabet had been the one to distribute the "conjure bags" to her accomplices rather than received the charms alongside them. She would also claim to have committed the Broussard family murders, despite the killings occurring during a time where she was verifiably in jail, and falsely claimed to have helped prepare the murdered Andrus family for their funeral.
Media also began to invent details about the case, such as referring to Barnabet as "the high priestress" or even leader of the Church of Sacrifice, which became characterized as a cult openly "founded on Voodooism", using Voodoo and Hoodoo interchangeably and reporting on the case as a display of "negro barbarity and religious superstition in the south". The Church of Sacrifice was connected without evidence to the Council of God church in New Orleans, infamous at the time for the 1907 killing of a white police officer. Newspapers invented descriptions of mysticism surrounding the number 5, falsely claiming that families of five were being targeted, buckets of blood were collected and that specific "rituals" were performed with the dead bodies, with details changing from account to account. Barnabet's given motive also fluctuated, initially presented as eliminating disobedient members of her church, a claims she did not repeat in her second confession. Instead, reasoning was fabricated by newspapers at the time, falsely attributing statements to Barnabet, including that the murders were for worship purposes or committed to perform rituals that would grant the church's followers immortality.
Media continued to connect ax murders of African-American families to the "Church of Sacrifice" in the months following Barnabet's arrest. One of the last such reports was on November 23, 1912, when William Esley, his wife and their four-year-old son were found murdered in their home in Philadelphia, Mississippi.