Las Vegas-born author delves into 1867 murder in Virginia City

When Julia Bulette was murdered in 1867, her accused killer was executed before a crowd of thousands.

Journalist and historian Robin Flinchum has uncovered the possibility that the murderer, John Millain, may have left multiple victims from San Francisco to Virginia City.

It’s the subject of her latest book, “The Redemption of Julia Bulette: Murder, Myth and the Hunt for a Serial Killer in Early Virginia City.”

Here are five questions with the author.

Neon: What inspired you to write this?

Robin Flinchum: I came across the story of Julia Bulette while I was writing my first book, “Red Light Women of Death Valley,” which includes a chapter on a woman named Martha Camp. Martha ran a brothel in Death Valley’s Panamint City in the 1870s, but before that, she played an important part in the capture of Julia’s killer.

The more I dug into the murder of Julia Bulette, the more questions I had. I wasn’t convinced that John Millain, the man who was hanged for the crime, was guilty. And there were repeated references to the belief that he had killed before. Who were these other victims that everyone alluded to but no one ever really talked about? Why didn’t anyone remember them? If Millain was guilty, was he actually a serial killer? Why did Julia Bulette, far from the only sex worker ever murdered in the Old West, become a legend?

There were so many unanswered questions that it kind of haunted me, and I became determined to find those answers if I could.

What is your connection to Nevada?

I was born in Las Vegas and went to elementary school there. My paternal great-grandparents settled in Pioche in the late 19th century, though they didn’t stay there for more than about a generation.

I am a desert dweller in my blood and bones. These days I live in California, just below Death Valley, about 30 miles from the Nevada border, and I spend a lot of time in Pahrump. There are no grocery stores or gas stations where I live, so I do all my shopping in town, and I use the Pahrump library. If I want to visit Trader Joe’s or a big bookstore, I go to Las Vegas.

Nevada history is fascinating to me. Because the state was so sparsely populated for so long, it’s easier to find the history in some ways, to access it, to actually still see traces of it on the ground. I’ve spent a lot of time visiting and researching the town of Rhyolite and have a chapter on its red light district in my “Red Light Women” book.

What do you hope readers take away from this?

That Julia was a living, breathing human being, a real, complex person whose real life was more interesting than any of the embellished stories about her. And that the other four victims, Louise Victoire Roton, Mary Boger Johns, Louisa Maria Freschi and Mary Fanny Smith, were real people, getting up every morning and trying to figure out how to get through the day in a rough-and-tumble world.

I hope, as I wrote in the dedication of the book, that people will remember them not because they died, but because they lived.

What is the most surprising thing you learned while writing this?

It’s difficult to come up with only one thing. There were so many surprises for me in the course of writing this book. I learned about the practice of optography, which is cutting out the eyes of someone who has died in order to photograph the retinas. The idea being that this will reproduce the last image seen by the dead person. I also learned that there is a science to hanging someone as a method of execution. There were actual articles and booklets written about it.

Something else that was surprising to me was learning about the structure and organization of the law enforcement agencies in and around Virginia City within just a few years of the town’s establishment. We like to look at the Comstock as an icon of the Wild West, and it truly was in so many ways, but it was also a city trying to take itself seriously. The people in positions of power were working to impose the rule of law and build a government in the wilderness. They wanted it to become a place where miners could bring or start their families and the businesses that supported them could prosper. They wanted it to become a town where people settled down and lived out their lives, rather than just a camp to pass through in search of wealth. It was a tremendous struggle to make that happen.

What’s next for you?

My next book is about the vigilante hanging of a murderer in the mining camp of Skidoo in Death Valley in 1908. It’s the story of how a group of friends, men who are working together to build their own city in the wilderness, respond when one of their own is gunned down by a bad man. Over the course of three days, they waver between law and order and a desire for revenge, and ultimately have to decide for themselves the true meaning of justice.