In the late hours of Sunday, November 26, 1911, a horrific act of violence extinguished the life of 2-year-old Agnes Randall, a young female child, along with her entire family in their Lafayette, Louisiana, home. The brutal slayings were part of a string of terrifying axe murders that plagued communities in Louisiana and Texas between 1911 and 1912, leaving a trail of dozens of victims and a legacy of fear.
The perpetrator, or perpetrators, became known as the Mulatto Axe Murderer.
The Randall family resided in a small, three-room house in a part of town known as Mills addition. The family consisted of Agnes; her father, Norbert; her mother, Azema; and her older brothers, Rene, 6, and Norbert Jr., 5. Also staying with them that night was their 8-year-old nephew, Albert Scyth. The family was well-known in their community, and Azema was a deaconess at a local congregation. Their lives were violently cut short as they slept in their beds.
The dreadful discovery was made the following morning by the family's eldest child, a 10-year-old daughter who had fortunately spent the night at an uncle's house. When she returned home, she found the kitchen door ajar. Entering the home, she was met with a scene of unimaginable horror. Her parents and the four children lay murdered in their beds. Police would later describe the house as a "slaughterhouse." The victims had been bludgeoned with the blunt side of an axe, their skulls crushed. In a deviation from the killer's typical method, Norbert Randall had also been shot in the head.
The investigation quickly led authorities to a 19-year-old woman named Clementine Barnabet, who lived just a few blocks away as a housekeeper. Barnabet was acquainted with the Randalls, as she and Azema attended the same church. Suspicion fell on her after a trail of blood was found leading from the Randall home to the gate of the property where she lived. A search of her room uncovered an apron, a dress, and underwear stained with what was later determined to be human blood and brain matter.
Following her arrest on November 27, Barnabet initially claimed innocence but soon confessed to the Randall family murders while on the witness stand. Her confession was chilling and bizarre; she claimed to be part of a religious cult called the "Church of Sacrifice" or "The Human Five." She told authorities that the murders were ritualistic sacrifices and that other families had been marked for death. She implicated her father, Raymond Barnabet, in other killings and eventually confessed to a total of 35 murders across the region.
Despite her detailed confessions, there were significant inconsistencies. Some of the murders she claimed responsibility for occurred while she was already in jail. For instance, she confessed to the killing of the Broussard family in Lake Charles, which happened while she was incarcerated. She also gave conflicting details about the Randall crime scene, stating she shot Norbert Randall in the chest or body when he had been shot in the forehead. Many believed her confession was coerced through brutal police interrogation methods.
Nevertheless, in October 1912, Clementine Barnabet was convicted for the murder of Azema Randall and sentenced to life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The axe murders continued for a time even after her imprisonment, lending credence to the theory that she did not act alone or was not the sole person responsible. The case of the Mulatto Axe Murderer was never officially solved, and the identity of anyone else involved remains a mystery.
Clementine Barnabet's story took another strange turn when, after serving about ten years of her life sentence, she was released from prison in 1923. The official reason given was that an unspecified surgical operation had "cured" her of her homicidal tendencies. After her release, she vanished from public record, leaving the full truth of what happened to Agnes Randall and her family forever shrouded in doubt and speculation.
