In the winter of 1912, a quiet street in Lake Charles, Louisiana, became the scene of a crime so brutal it sent a wave of terror through communities already on edge. Inside their modest home at 331 Rock Street, just a few feet from the Southern Pacific Line tracks, the entire Broussard family was found slaughtered. The victims were Felix Broussard, his wife, a woman named Matilda, and their three young children: eight-year-old Margaret, six-year-old Louis, and three-year-old Alberta, also
called “Sissie.” The discovery on January 22, 1912, revealed a scene of unimaginable horror.
The family had been bludgeoned to death, their skulls crushed with the blunt side of a pole axe as they lay in their beds. The killer had not brought the weapon, but instead used an axe belonging to the family, a detail that would become a chilling signature. After the attack, the axe was left behind on the premises. The violence that ended the lives of this young family was not an isolated incident but part of a terrifying pattern of killings that had been plaguing towns across Louisiana and East Texas.
This string of murders, which claimed as many as 49 lives between 1911 and 1912, was attributed to a shadowy figure known as the Mulatto Axe Murderer. The victims were often mixed-race or Black families, attacked in the dead of night within their own homes. The killer’s method was consistent: gaining entry through a back door, using a family's own axe to commit the murders, and then quietly disappearing. The crimes were so similar in their execution that law enforcement and the public grew convinced they were the work of a single, methodical predator who traveled by train.
The Broussard case, however, contained a particularly haunting and unusual clue. Scrawled on a door of the family’s home was a handwritten Bible verse from Psalm 9:12: “When He maketh the inquisition for blood, He forgetteth not the cry of the humble.” Below it, some reports say, were the words "human five," a stark acknowledgment of the number of lives taken inside. This message, with its religious overtones, fueled public panic and led to speculation about the killer’s motives, with some believing a warped religious mania was to blame.
The investigation into the Broussard murders and the wider killing spree was fraught with confusion and fear. Authorities arrested several individuals in connection with the series of axe murders. One of the most prominent suspects was a young woman from Lafayette named Clementine Barnabet. She confessed to several of the murders, claiming she was part of a cult-like church that practiced human sacrifice. However, her confessions were inconsistent, and some of the murders, including the Broussard family massacre, occurred while she was already in police custody, casting serious doubt on her guilt. Her father, Raymond Barnabet, was also arrested but later released.
Despite the arrests and the intense investigation that followed the string of brutal slayings, no one was ever definitively convicted for the murder of the Broussard family. The identity of the Mulatto Axe Murderer, the person who crept into the Broussards' home and extinguished five lives with such savagery, remains one of Louisiana's most disturbing and enduring mysteries. The case grew cold, leaving behind only a legacy of terror and the unanswered questions of a community that once lived in fear of the sound of a train in the night.
