The Hockley Horror.

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The Houston Telegram give the details of the assassination of the Lynch family near Hockley.  The family consisted of eight children ranging from the age of two to seventeen years, the eldest being a girl. — On the night of the murder the family all retired as usual and slept in the same apartment.  It was an old fashioned country log house with an L containing kitchen, servant's room and dining room.  Lynch himself slept on a pallet in the middle of the room, with his young child beside him.  Three other children slept on a bed in the corner, three more on a couch alongside the wall.  Miss Lynch slept on a lounge in a corner near the brick chimney.  It was past midnight and Lynch himself was asleep.  He was awakened by a pistol shot and a ball piercing him in the breast.  He dropped the child from his arms.  Jumping up he seen a white man masked.  The murderer fired a second time, he fell unconscious and remembers no more till he found himself out in a lane a few yards from the house and seeing his home in flames.  The house was totally consumed and Lynch's eight children.  their charred bodies were dug out of the debris before the inquest.  After the inquest all were buried.  The theory of this dark and dreadful crime, is the murderer went in to kill Lynch, and after the second shot left him for dead.  Then to cover up the crime and prevent evidence, he seized the hatchet and brained Miss Lynch and the other innocent sleepers, and then set the house on fire the more completely to cover up the murder.  Sometime ago Lynch had had a difficulty with a young man namek (sic) Boulware, son of a neighbor residing within 250 yards of him.  He had had him arrested for drawing a gun on him (Lynch.)  It is but recording a fact to state that suspicion among the citizen of the neighborhood and Hockley openly points to this man.

(This is the family of George Lynch, b. ca. 1840 TX.)

"The Hockley Horror." Brenham Weekly Banner, (Brenham, TX), Friday, September 20, 1878, p. 1, col. 3.

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