Halloween 2015 marks the 165th birthday of
Samantha Olds, one of the victims of an axe-wielding frenzy at a
dilapidated Texas farmhouse in 1925.
Violence had a strange, lifelong grip on her.
Beautiful and vivacious, Samantha had a penchant for
dangerous men, and they were equally drawn to her. Her teenage marriage to Amos
Smith ended when he was gunned down in a hit orchestrated by a couple of his
gambling partners in Iredell, Texas, in 1875. One of the men, according to The
Austin Statesman, “was exceedingly intimate with Smith’s wife.” However,
Samantha was never implicated in the crime, whereas the two gamblers and their
triggerman were lynched. While awaiting execution, one of the men reportedly
said, “This will make seven men who have been killed in quarrels about Mrs.
Smith.”
Soon Amos Smith’s widow was on the prowl for a new
husband. She found Bill Olds, who was later arrested for theft, forgery, and
murder. The daughters from the first marriage despised Olds for mistreating
their mother. Samantha, however, used a gun to keep her husband at bay. She
finally abandoned him in Iredell and moved to Waco with family members. “That
old lady could shoot better than any man I know,” recalled a longtime Wacoan. “She
lived down by the wagon yards and used to shoot up the place right regular—just
for the hell of it.”
Samantha’s legacy as a beacon of brutality passed to her
daughter by Bill Olds, Maggie, who was twice widowed with the murders of her
second and fourth husbands. Her choice for a fifth husband, F. M. Snow, led to the
1925 gruesome tragedy. She married the woodchopper shortly after the family
moved to Erath County from Waco. Samantha’s new son-in-law, whom she called a “no-account,”
was a violent ex-convict. Weeks after this unholy union, Samantha, Maggie, and
Maggie’s son were butchered by Snow in an uncontrollable fit of rage.
No pictures are known to exist of Samantha or Maggie.
Curiously, photographs of the fireplace where Snow burned her body show what
some say is a woman’s face outlined on the chimney’s bricks.
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