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.

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.

[3] 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.

Barnabet has been described as Creole,[3][8] with contemporary coverage reporting her as a "half-breed",[9] "half-blood",[10][11] "mulatto",[12][13] and, inaccurately and apparently by her own account, "only one-eighth negro".

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.

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.

[5] 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.

[30] Barnabet further claimed that she acquired "conjure bags" (a good luck charm found in Hoodoo) that would grant them supernatural powers and make them undetectable to the authorities.

[15][33] She variously claimed to have received them from the Church of Sacrifice[34] or to have bought them from a "hoodoo doctor" in New Iberia, and that she got them alongside four friends, her alleged future accomplices.

Instead, reasoning was fabricated by newspapers at the time, falsely attributing statements to Barnabet, including that the murders were for worship purposes[43] or committed to perform rituals that would grant the church's followers immortality.

A team of court-hired physicians declared Barnabet sane, stating that she was "morally depraved, unusually ignorant and of a low grade of mentality, but not deficient in such a manner as to constitute her imbecile or idiot".

Her attorney, John L. Kennedy,[46] called his client's confessions unreliable and a result of her abusive childhood while also questioning the reliability of the forensic methods used to match the blood of the Andrus family to that found on Barnabet's clothes days later.

However, on August 28, 1923, Barnabet was released from prison after an unspecified surgical operation was believed to have cured her (not a lobotomy, which was unknown in the United States until a decade later).

[1] The majority of victims were killed in their sleep, but it's believed that during the Dove family murder, daughters Jessie and Ethel fought with the attacker(s) due to turned over furniture and torn fabric at the scene.

[25] At the site of the Broussard murders, a message had been left in pencil, reading "When he maketh the inquisition for blood, he forgetteth not the cry of the humble", an incorrect paraphrase of Psalms 9:12, as written in the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as "Human Five", possibly as a signature.

On August 16, James Dashiell shot at a home invader after he heard his wife Lula (née Fitzgerald)[65] scream when the intruder hit her with an ax as she slept, injuring her arm and foot.

[66] Clementine's father Raymond, as well as her siblings Zepherin and Pauline, were held on suspicion of participating in the murders, but all were released due to lack of evidence.

[69] Also arrested were the Washington family, consisting of husband and wife George and America, and their adult daughter Estelle, as they were the owners of the axe used in the killings.

[72] Directly after the Andrus family murders, 27-year-old Gaston Godfrey, an African-American inmate at Pineville Asylum who had escaped a day earlier, was initially arrested, but later released.

Thibodeaux initially denied knowing anything about hoodoo, but after being identified as the seller by Barnabet, he admitted to "practisising medicine to some extent and curing illness with herbs, roots, and incantations".

[36][77] On June 10, 1912, a man was arrested for selling tablets he dubbed "Paradise Pills" in Lafayette and held on suspicions that he knew of the ax murders.

As a result, there were deaths and attempted lynchings related to suspected "Ax-Man" activity across the state between 1911 and 1912, including the killing of a teenage boy in Smithville when Max Warren, who had a history of sleepwalking, was shot by his neighbor West Duval, who had been standing guard outside the house that night.

In Acadian regions of Louisiana, there was an increased demand for protective "charms" and amid a high of self-proclaimed "hoodoo doctors", Lake Charles Police Department mounted officer Ira E. Barker shot and killed A.E.