THE AXEMAN'S MYSTERIOUS JAZZ: PART ONE

THE BOOGEYMAN CAME TO NEW ORLEANS

New Orleans is a city that was literally born in sin. From the original charters that were based on fraud to the emptying of the French prisons to provide settlers to the region, widespread government corruption, gaudy social functions, rampant prostitution and frequent lapses in any civilized moral code, New Orleans has a long and very colorful history of crime and vice. Known for many years as America’s “murder capital,” it has seen more than its share of blood over the years.

One of the most mysterious – and still unsolved – crime sprees to grip the city came in the years of 1918 and 1919 with the arrival of the enigmatic “Axeman.” Who was this strange and terrifying creature? Was it a man bent on revenge, a crazed serial killer, or perhaps something worse? The period of death and bloodshed that was reigned over by this allegedly supernatural creature is still remembered as one of the darkest times in city’s history. He arrived in May 1918 and his coming began a period of terror that would last for the next eighteen months. With the fall of darkness, the residents of New Orleans spent each night listening intently for suspicious sounds and nervously shrinking from every shadow. They opened their newspapers with trembling hands each morning. It seemed that no one in the city was safe.

The “boogeyman” had come to New Orleans.

In 1918, the people of New Orleans were not thinking about a murderer in their midst. Like most Americans of the day, they were busy worrying about and waiting for the Great War to end in Europe. In the spring of that year, no one knew that the war would end in November, although there was hope that it would not go on too much longer and, of course, great optimism that the Allies would win. But on the morning of May 24, another kind of headline dominated the morning editions of the newspapers – a headline of blood and savagery.

On the morning of May 23, Joseph Maggio, an Italian grocer, and his wife, were butchered with an axe while sleeping in their apartment behind the Maggio grocery store. According to the police, the killer had entered their home just before dawn. He had chiseled out a panel in the rear door of the apartment, and slipped inside.  He had struck each of his sleeping victims once with an axe and then had slit their throats with a straight razor. Mrs. Maggio was found on the floor with her head nearly severed from her body. Joseph Maggio was sprawled half out of bed. The razor lay on the floor in a pool of blood and the ax, as blood-soaked as the razor, was found on the steps leading out into the backyard.

A small safe in the room was open and empty, yet more than $100 was found beneath Maggio’s blood-soaked pillow, and on the dresser was a small pile of Mrs. Maggio’s jewelry, including several diamond rings. The police stated that they did not believe that robbery was the motive for the crime, although the killer had opened the safe to make it look like it was.

In rooms on the other side of the house lived Joseph’s brothers, Andrew and Jacob. They discovered the bodies after hearing moaning sounds coming from the other side of the wall. They went into the bedroom together and found Joseph half out his bed and still alive. They called the police at once. The police arrested both men after a neighbor reported that he had seen Andrew coming home some time between 2: 00 and 3:00 a.m. Later in the morning, detectives made a curious discovery. Written in chalk on the sidewalk, a block away from the house, were these words: “Mrs. Maggio is going to sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney.”

Investigators began digging into old files, looking for possible cases that matched the Maggio murders, and to their surprise discovered that three murders and a number of attacks against Italian grocers had already taken place in 1911. The murders bore a striking resemblance to the Maggio crime in that an axe had been used in each and access to each home had been gained through a panel in the rear door. These earlier crimes had been thought to be a vendetta of terror organized by the Mafia. Was the vendetta starting again? The Italian residents of the French Quarter began preparing for the worst and many of them demanded protection from the police.  

In the meantime, Andrew and Jake Maggio were in jail swearing their innocence. Andrew admitted that he had been out late, celebrating his call to serve in the military and had come home drunk. Both brothers were respectable, hard-working men and they insisted they had nothing to do with the murders of their brother and sister-in-law. Jake was released the following day and Andrew on May 26. Andrew tearfully told a reporter for the Times-Picayune newspaper that he would never get over his arrest. He was quoted, “It’s a terrible thing to be charged with the murder of your own brother when your heart is already broken by his death. When I’m about to go to war, too. I had been drinking heavily. I was too drunk to have heard any noise next door.” But he and Jake were free and were cleared of any suspicion.

The police continued their investigation and several suspects were questioned and let go because of a lack of evidence. The newspapers returned to covering the war and when nothing else happened, many residents probably forgot about the Maggio case. And then, just over a month after the Maggios were murdered, the killer struck again.

On June 28, a baker named John Zanca, made his morning call to deliver bread and cakes to a grocery store owned by Louis Bossumer. The store was closed when he arrived, so he went around back to where Bossumer lived with the woman that Zanca believed was the grocer’s wife, Annie Harriet Lowe. The baker did not want to take a chance of the bread being stolen if he left it in front of the store. When he reached the back door, he stopped and stared in horror -- a lower panel on the door had been carefully chiseled out. Zanca tried to open the door but it was locked.

Suddenly, the door burst open and Louis Bossumer stumbled into the doorway. Blood was streaming from a wound in his head. He cried out, “My God! My God!”

Zanca rushed past him into the house and found Annie lying on the bed, bleeding from a ghastly head wound. Both victims were badly injured, each having been struck with an axe. Zanca immediately called the police and Charity Hospital.

The police believed that Annie had been attacked on the porch that was located on one side of the living quarters, based on the amount of blood that they found there. She had then dragged herself or had been carried to the bed, possibly by Bossumer. An axe, which belonged to the grocer, was discovered in the bathroom, still dripping with blood. Bossumer, the newspapers stated, was Polish and had lived in New Orleans for only three months. He had come to the city from Jacksonville, Florida and before that, had operated a farm in South America.

Louis Bossumer's grocery with apartment in back. 

The following day, there were further developments. It was stated that letters written to Louis Bossumer in German, Russian and Yiddish had been found in a trunk in his apartment. Rumors flew that his grocery store was actually a front for a German spy ring. The country was in the middle of a war and despite the fact that there was little so suggest he had anything to do with spies, many took the allegations seriously. Finally, on July 1, Bossumer’s own statements were made public. The first thing he is reported to have said was, “That woman is not my wife.” He said that Annie Lowe had come to New Orleans with him from Jacksonville and that they had been living together ever since. His own wife was ill, he said, with relatives in Cincinnati. He swore he did not know what had happened. Someone had struck him while he slept. When he regained consciousness, he found Annie on the floor and carried her to bed. He had been about to summon an ambulance when Zanca knocked at the back door. He was not a German, he was Polish, and he had no use for Germans. He spoke and received mail in a half dozen languages. He was certainly not a spy, he stated. He offered the police his full cooperation.

On July 5, Annie Lowe finally regained consciousness at Charity Hospital. She made her first statement to the police and said, “I’ve long suspected that Mr. Bossumer is a German spy.” Bossumer was arrested at once.

On July 6, she was interviewed again. She told the police, “I am married to Mr. Bossumer. If I am not, I don’t know what I’ll do.” Then she added, “I did not say that Mr. Bossumer is a German spy. That is perfectly ridiculous.” A few days later, Bossumer was freed from custody.

Eventually, Annie spoke of the attacks. She said that Bossumer had been working on his accounts around midnight, sitting at a table with a lot of money in front of him. She always worried about how careless he was with money, she said, and warned him that he should put it in the safe. Then she smelled prunes cooking in the kitchen and went into the kitchen to look at them. Then her memory left her. She guessed it was from the blow to the head. She could not even remember going to bed. Her next memory was of waking up. She said that she had awakened in bed with a man standing over her. She described him as a rather tall white man, heavy-set with dark hair that stood almost on end, wearing a white shirt that was open at the neck. He had an axe in his hands and he stood there, making motions with the axe, but not hitting her. She recalled, “The next thing I remember is lying out in the gallery with my face in a pool of blood.”

Her story changed again on July 15. In another police interview, Annie said that she was not in bed when she was struck. She was on the porch. The police thought this made more sense – and agreed with their thoughts at the crime scene – and Bossumer was once again looked at with suspicion. They questioned neighbors and learned that the Bossumers occasionally had violent quarrels. Annie was thirty years younger than the fifty-nine-year-old grocer and he was often jealous. A check with the authorities in Jacksonville and Cincinnati confirmed that the two were not married and that Bossumer had a living wife. That did not help matters and they were still concerned that he was a German spy. The neighbors gossiped about his odd ways and his ability to speak a number of languages, including German. Could he have tried to kill Annie, and then wounded himself, in an imitation of the Maggio murders, perhaps because the woman knew too much about his clandestine activities?

The police were skeptical about how Bossumer could have fractured his own skull with the ax but were ruling nothing out. On August 3, doctors at Charity Hospital performed surgery on Annie. Two days later, she died but before she did, she again stated that it had been Bossumer who had attacked her. He was arrested and charged with her murder.

The Axeman chose that night, August 5, to strike again.

Edward Schneider, a young married man, was working late that evening and it was after midnight when he arrived home. When he reached his bedroom and turned on the light, he was horrified to find his wife unconscious on the bed, her head and face covered with blood. Mrs. Schneider, who was expecting a baby in a few days, was rushed to Charity Hospital. She remembered seeing a tall, phantom-like form standing over her bed and she remembered screaming when the axe fell, but nothing else. She ended up with a large gash in her head and several missing teeth.

Luckily, she recovered and gave birth to a baby girl less than a week later. She was never able to tell more about what had occurred. The police searched the Schneider home, but there were no clues to be found. To add to the general confusion, the Axeman had entered the house through a window instead of through the back door. As usual, nothing was stolen.

A day after the Schneider attack, a newspaper printed a headline that asked the question that many city residents had been asking each other for months: “Is an Axeman at Large in New Orleans?”

During the early morning hours of August 10, Pauline Bruno, age eighteen, and her younger sister, Mary, age thirteen, were awakened by strange noises coming from the bedroom where their uncle, Joseph Romano, was sleeping. Pauline crept to her uncle’s door and peered into the room. She saw a man standing next to her uncle’s bed. She later described the man as, “dark, tall, heavy-set, wearing a dark suit and a black slouch hat.” Pauline screamed and the man just seemed to vanish. Joseph Romano lurched out of bed, staggered through a door on the other side of the room and collapsed on the floor in the parlor.

Pauline later told of the attack to the newspapers: “I’ve been nervous about the Axeman for weeks and I haven’t been sleeping much. I was dozing when I heard blows and scuffling in Uncle Joe’s room. I say up in bed and my sister woke up too. When I looked into my uncle’s room this big heavy-set man was standing at the foot of his bed. I think he was a white man, but I couldn’t swear to it. I screamed. My little sister screamed too. We were horribly scared. Then he vanished. It was almost as if he had wings!

“We rushed into the parlor, where my uncle had staggered. He had two big cuts on his head. We got him up and propped him in a chair. ‘I’ve been hit,’ he groaned. “I don’t know who did it. Call the Charity Hospital.’ Then he fainted. Later he was able to walk to the ambulance with some help. I don’t know that he had any enemies.”

Romano died two days later in the hospital, without being able to make any further statements. The police found that all of the Axeman’s “signatures” were in place. An axe was found in Romano’s backyard, covered in blood. The panel of the rear door had been cut out. Nothing in the house had been taken, although Romano’s room looked as though it had been ransacked. The only thing that was odd was Romano was a barber, not a grocer like so many of the earlier victims had been.

 

By this time, hysteria was sweeping through the city, especially in the Italian neighborhoods. Families divided into watches and stood guard over their relatives as they slept. People went about with loaded shotguns and waited for news of the latest "Axeman sightings." A few were said to be leaving the city.

The police began to be flooded with reports about the Axeman after the Romano attack. On the morning of August 11, Al Durand, a grocer, reported finding an axe and chisel outside his back door. Joseph LeBeouf, a grocer at Gravier and Miro Streets, only a block from the Romano home, came forward with the story that someone had chiseled out a panel on his back door on July 28, a day when he was not home. Still another grocer, Arthur Recknagel, told of finding a panel in one of his doors removed back in June, and of finding an axe in the grass in his backyard. Recknagel lived only a few blocks from the Romano home. On August 15, several people telephone the police to tell them that the Axeman had been spotted in the neighborhood of Tulane and Broad, masquerading as a woman. A manhunt was organized, but without success. On August 21, a man was seen leaping a back fence at Gravier and South White Streets. A woman reported that she clearly saw an axe in the man’s hands. Immediately, the neighbors organized a search, as other people ran from their houses screaming that the Axeman had just jumped their fence. A young man named Joseph Garry stated that he had fired at the Axeman with his shotgun. Police arrived on the scene, but no one was apprehended. The excitement quieted down around midnight, although it’s doubtful that anyone in the vicinity slept very well that night – or for several nights thereafter.

On August 30, a man named Nick Asunto called the police to tell them that he had been awakened by strange sounds on the lower floor of his home. He went to the top of the stairs and saw a dark, heavy-set man standing below with an axe in his hands. When Asunto yelled at him, the man ran out the front door. On August 31, Pau Lobella, a notions store proprietor on Zimple Street, found an axe in his alley. There were a dozen similar reports around this same time.

Meanwhile, the police were still focused on the Bossumer case, stating that they did not believe that it was of the now ordinary variety. They made public Annie Lowe’s last story that claimed that Bossumer struck her with an axe after she asked him for money. He then chased her down the porch, screaming, “I am going to make fire for you in the bottom of the ocean!” She had reiterated, too, that Bossumer was a German spy. Therefore, the police were sure that this was not the Axeman at work, although they believed that all of the other attacks, including the one on Mrs. Schneider, were the crimes of a single person, perhaps a “homicidal maniac.”

Joseph Dantonio, a retired detective, told a reporter, “The Axeman is a modern ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’ A criminal of this type many be a respectable, law-abiding citizen when his normal self. Compelled by an impulse to kill, he must obey this urge. Some years ago, there were a number of similar cases, all bearing such strong resemblance to this outbreak that the same fiend might be responsible. Like Jack the Ripper, this sadist may go on with his periodic outbreaks until his death. For months, even for years, he may be normal, then go on another rampage.”

On September 15, a grocer named Paul Durel found that someone had attempted to cut through his rear door. A case of tomatoes that had been resting against the inside panel had foiled the attack.

Then, as if he were exactly as Detective Dantonio theorized, the Axeman vanished as mysteriously as he had arrived. After the Romano attack – and the unsubstantiated attacks, scares and hysteria that followed – nothing happened at all happened. Weeks and months passed, the war ended, Christmas came and then the New Year and no more attacks occurred. The people of New Orleans, even the Italians, breathed a little easier. The police, still mystified, were no closer to solving the crimes. From time to time, suspects were arrested, but all of them were eventually released. Only Bossumer remained in jail since he was the only real suspect that they had in connection with any of the crimes.

And then, in March 1919, the Axeman returned with a vengeance.

To be continued….

THE MULATTO AX MURDERS 1911-1912

Around the same time that the city of Atlanta was dealing with the slayings of at least 20 young African American and mixed-race women (see our post on the Atlanta Ripper), Louisiana and Texas were dealing with murders of another kind. Once again, the victims were African American and of mixed race – and once again, the murders received little newspaper coverage and as the years have gone by, few people remember these bloody cases.

Between January 1911 and April 1912, an unidentified killer (or killers) slaughtered 49 people in Louisiana and Texas, leaving the police baffled. In each case, the murder weapon was an ax, which was not uncommon at the time. In those days, an ax was often used, especially in cases of domestic murder. Nearly every family had one, since wood had to be split for cooking and heating, and it often became a weapon of convenience. But while there were ax murders all over the country, this string of murders was different. In addition to as ax being used as the murder weapon, all of the victims were mulattos or members of families with mixed-race children. The killer was presumed, by blacks and the police alike, to be selecting victims on the basis of their mixed – or “tainted” – blood.

The first attack took place in early January 1911 in Rayne, Louisiana, when a mother and her three children were hacked to death in their beds. In February, the killer struck again, this time in the town of Crowley, about 10 miles from Rayne. Three members of the Byers family were murdered in an identical manner to the earlier victims. Two weeks later, four members of the Andres family in Lafayette were also murdered in their beds. Each of them had been hacked to death with an ax during the early morning hours.

The killer first struck in Texas on March 22, 1911, when the Cassaway family was slaughtered in their home. Louis Cassaway was a black man who was employed at the Grant School for black children in San Antonio. The bodies of Cassaway, his wife, and three children were found in their home on Olive Street after Louis failed to come into work that day. A friend stopped by to check on him, discovered the bloody scene and called the police.

San Antonio, Texas, 1912

In the front room of their small house, Cassaway was lying on a daybed with his daughter, Louise, who was 6 years old. Their heads had been crushed by the blunt side of an ax and then oddly, the killer had covered Louis’ face with a piece of cloth. In the next room, officers found Louis’ wife (a white woman, whose name was not given in newspaper reports) lying dead in bed with the bodies of the other two children. A baby boy, six months old, was clutched in his mother’s arms, his skull crushed by an ax. Josie, the Cassaway’s three-year-old daughter, was lying dead across her mother’s legs. The police surmised that she had awakened during the murders and had tried to escape. She was struck down before she could climb down from the bed. Cassaway’s wife was the most badly disfigured of all of the victims. She had been struck repeatedly with the blunt side of the ax, spraying blood all over the walls of the bedroom.

The police were baffled by the crime (they had not yet been connected to the murders in Louisiana) and found no evidence of a robbery, or any “rational” motive for the murders. Nothing in the house was disturbed and Louis’ trousers were still hanging from the bedpost with several dollars in the pocket. The Cassaway family had no enemies and in fact, Louis, who had moved to the city from New Orleans many years before, was widely known and respected by whites and blacks alike. His wife had lived in San Antonio for about 10 years. She had married Louis in Mexico and by all accounts, their marriage was a happy one.

On November 29, 1911, the murderer traveled back to Lafayette, Louisiana. Six members of the Norbert Randall family were slain in their beds, each killed with the blunt side of an ax, shattering their skulls. The bodies of Randall, his white wife, and their four children (all under the age of 9) were discovered by neighbors. Their home looked like a slaughterhouse, but this time the police managed to track down some clues. A young black woman named Clementine Bernabet was arrested after witnesses claimed to have seen her in the vicinity around the time of the murders. Clementine, age 19, attended a house of worship called the Sacrifice Church with the Randalls. After being questioned by the police, she stated that she had killed the family because Norbert Randall refused to follow “church orders.” After being subjected to the “third degree,” as the newspapers put it, she also confessed to the murders of the Andres family back in February. She claimed that she had committed those murders with help from her father. The two were arrested and held in custody through the spring of 1912 – but their incarceration didn’t stop the carnage.

On January 19, 1912, the killer returned to Crowley, Louisiana, the scene of one of his earlier crimes and killed a mixed-race woman and her three children as they slept. Two days later, at Lake Charles, Felix Broussard, his wife, and three children were also slaughtered with an ax. This time, the killer left a note behind. It read: “When He Maketh the Inquisition for Blood, He forgetteth not the crime of the humble – human five.”

Stirred by what seemed to be religious implications, the police decided to look harder at Clementine Bernabet and the Sacrifice Church. Informants reported links between the church and certain voodoo cults in New Orleans, but try as they might, the police could find no evidence against anyone in the church. Bernabet herself insisted that the murders were related to a voodoo charm that she had purchased from a local witch doctor. The charm reportedly assured Bernabet and her father that “we could do as we pleased and we would never be detected.” She tried to test the magic by committing the murders. Police eventually dismissed the story and Bernabet and her father were never sent to trial.

Meanwhile, the murderers were continuing. On February 19, 1912, a mixed-race woman and her three children were murdered in their beds in Beaumont, Texas. Seven weeks later, on March 27, another mulatto mother, her four children and a male overnight guest were slain at Glidden, Texas.

The detectives who were not sidetracked by the religious confusion in the case took a more practical approach. They began to note a geographical pattern to the crimes. Since November 1911, the killer (or killers) had been striking at stops along the Southern Pacific Railroad line. This made it simple for the ax murderer to anonymously travel from town to town, always out of sight and one step of the authorities. In those days, it was fairly easy to hop a freight train. As detectives looked over the map, it seemed likely the next murders would occur west along the line, in San Antonio, Texas. And they were right – but there was nothing they could do to prevent it.

Southern Pacific Railroad Station in San Antonio, 1912

During the early morning hours of April 12, 1912, five members of the William Burton family were killed in their beds in San Antonio. Two nights later, the axman claimed the lives of three more mixed-race people at Hempstead, Texas – and then vanished. Nothing was heard from him for the next four months.

As the quiet nights dragged on, black residents of Louisiana and East Texas felt no relief from their fear of the mysterious killer. Blacks began arming themselves and even went as far as to post guards around their homes and neighborhoods. People were naturally filled with panic, despite the number of church and public meetings that were held to try and allay their fears. Fear even led to the deaths of two men in Victoria, Texas, shortly after the Burton murders. A young man named Ernest Smothers was guarding his family home when a friend stopped by to check on them. Terrified when he heard someone trying to open the front door, Smothers opened fire and shot his friend dead on the porch. The shot startled the neighborhood and a neighbor, Max Warren, rushed over to see what was going on. When he saw the dead man, he became scared and hurried back toward his own house. As he was running, someone shouted, “There goes the axman!” Another neighbor shot Warren dead in his tracks.

Arrests were made all over the region and every man who had used an ax as a murder weapon was suspected of being the traveling killer who had slain so many families. Suspect after suspect was picked up in small towns and in railroad yards in Louisiana and Texas. But the authorities were unable to find anyone that they could solidly connect to any of the crimes.

The killer’s four-month hiatus came to an end on August 6, 1912. Late that night, the wife of a mixed-race man named James Dashiell woke to the blinding pain of an ax cutting through her arm. The assailant had been aiming for her head, but had somehow missed and struck her arm instead. As Mrs. Dashiell began to scream the attacker fled from the house. The shaken woman was unable to give any sort of coherent description.

And with that, the 15-month murder spree came to an end, leaving the police and the assortment of detectives who delved into the case without a single solid piece of evidence. Defectors from the Sacrifice Church tried to convince the authorities of a connection between the church and the murders for some time, but detectives never managed to identify a valid suspect in the case.

Could the disenfranchised church members have been right, though? The killer targeted people of mixed race – and notably a number of white women who were either married to or in relationships with black men. According to the church members, the motive for the killings revolved around a verse from the New Testament, Matthew 3:10 --- “And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.”

Was the killer trying to somehow purify the white race from those he saw as “tainting” it in some way? Perhaps, but it’s likely we will never know. Very little documentation remains about these murders and even the newspapers of the day failed to devote much space to crimes that were perpetrated on “negroes.” Leaving more than four dozen victims in his wake, the killer vanished into history.

THE ATLANTA RIPPER: UNSOLVED AMERICAN MURDERS

THE ATLANTA RIPPER

Another Little-Known Unsolved Mystery from American History

As almost any historical crime writer can tell you, it is a sad fact that African American murder victims rarely received the newspaper coverage that white victims received. This was especially true prior to the middle part of the twentieth century, when lynchings and race riots were still a tragic reality in American history. The fact that so many people have never heard of the “Atlanta Ripper” murders that took place in 1911 and 1912 is a perfect example of poor reporting by the newspapers of the day. In many cases, white reporters of the era were quick to point out that the killer’s victims were all attractive, well-dressed mulattoes with no “out and out black women” slain by the murderer.

Racial prejudice was rife in Atlanta in the early 1900s and the African American community was rocked by several tragic happenings. Among them was the notorious 1906 Race Riot, but just a few years later, a crime spree began that ended the lives of at least 20 women – four times the number of victims of the original “Jack the Ripper,” for whom the Atlanta killer was named. The murders committed by that original phantom, who haunted the squalid alleys of Whitechapel in London in 1888 were a recent memory to newspaper readers of the day, so it’s no surprise that his notoriety was revived by this new string of killings.

Throughout 1911, Atlanta became the scene of murder after murder. The Ripper’s victims were all young black or mulatto women in their twenties. While there were no fewer than six men arrested for the crimes, it was never ascertained if the killings were the work of one man or multiple men, including the ones who were arrested and tried for the murders. At least one man was convicted of one of the murders, although it’s uncertain based on the newspaper reports which murder he was said to have committed.

As the days turned to years, the murders continued, although with less frequency. By the time the Ripper was finished, nearly two dozen women were dead – and their murderer vanished into history.

Atlanta, 1911

Less than five decades after the Civil War, the Atlanta of 1911 prided itself as the gateway to the New South. With almost a dozen major railroads passing through the city, business was booming. New buildings and homes were being constructed and Inman Park and Peachtree Street had become enclaves for the wealthy.

For a select few of the city’s African Americans, Atlanta was a model for racial tolerance. Black-owned businesses had sprung up on streets like Auburn Avenue. Local colleges like Atlanta Baptist College, Morris Brown and Atlanta University, were considered among the best black temples of learning in the nation.

But for most of the city’s non-white residents, life was far from idyllic. Most worked menial jobs, installing sewers or loading railroad cars, perhaps, or cooking and cleaning in white households, then trudging home at night to dimly-lit neighborhoods like Reynoldstown and Pittsburg. Abraham Lincoln may have given black Americans the right to vote, but early twentieth-century Georgia did all it could to discourage black voters. Segregation, meanwhile, was not just part of daily life; it was the law. Blacks could not be buried in white cemeteries, could not walk through white parks, could not drink in white bars, eat in white restaurants or even drink from white water fountains. 

Nearly five years earlier, on September 22, 1906, what little racial unity existed was destroyed when a crowd of several thousand white men and boys gathered in downtown Atlanta amid unsubstantiated reports that four attacks had taken place on white women at the hands of black men. The white mob went on a rampage. Three days later, as many as 40 black men were dead.

By 1911, the population of Atlanta had climbed to more than 150,000, and whites actively sought to keep their neighborhoods free from black residents. That July, white citizens living on Ashby Street gathered at the Immanuel Baptist Church "for the purposes of suggesting methods of keeping Negroes out of the vicinity." Four black families had already moved in and there were signs that more were on the way. The committee decided to visit property owners in the neighborhood and ask them not to sell or rent to blacks.

Not surprisingly, when young black and mixed-race women began showing up brutally slain, it wasn’t cause for much concern in the local newspapers. Circulated largely among white readers, and staffed exclusively by white reporters and editors, the three city newspapers were far more concerned about crimes among whites. Crimes against blacks – especially those also committed by blacks – merited little attention. This is evident from a story in the Atlanta Constitution from May 29, 1911, which buried a two-paragraph brief on page seven under the headline "Negro Woman Killed; No Clew to Slayer -- Was Found With Her Throat Cut Near Her Home." The brief went on to say that the mutilated body of Belle Walker was found by her sister on Sunday morning, after Walker failed to return home the night before from her job as a cook at a home on Cooper Street.

But it wasn't until two weeks later, after Addie Watts was killed, that the newspapers began speculating that the murders of the "negresses" were perhaps the work of a solitary killer. The Atlanta Journal ran a headline on June 16 that read, “Black Butcher at Work?” even though the story beneath it ran just four paragraphs. The final lines were the first mention in the local press that compared the Atlanta killings to the work of London's serial killer in 1888. "On account of the number of recent murders of Negro women, policemen advance the theory that Atlanta has an insane criminal, something on the order of the famed 'Jack the Ripper.' "

Ten days later, the Ripper had moved to the front page. For the first time, the newspaper examined the similarities in the crimes that had occurred, noting that five Saturdays in a row had seen the murder of a young black or mixed-race woman. In each case, there was evidence that the woman had been choked unconscious, after which her throat was slit from ear to ear and “the carving of the victim – always in the same area of the body – begins.” None of the women had been raped, but from the nature of the mutilations (tactfully unspecified in the articles), it was apparent that the crimes were sexual in nature. As in the case of London’s Jack the Ripper and nearly all of his imitators, reporters claimed that the killer “seemed to possess some knowledge of anatomy.”

On July 1, 1911, a 20-year-old woman named Emma Lou Sharpe was at home on Hanover Street, waiting for her mother, Lena, to come home. It was a Saturday evening and Emma Lou was worried. Her mother had left an hour before to fetch some groceries and still had not returned. This was a cause for concern after the recent murders. Frantic with worry, Emma Lou set out in search of her mother. At the market, she learned that Lena had never shown up. Emma started back home, and as she walked down the dark street, she was approached by a stranger, whom she later described as "tall, black, broad-shouldered and wearing a broad-brimmed black hat."

The man asked her how she was feeling that evening and Emma Lou replied that she was well and tried to walk past him. But the man blocked her path. "Don't be afraid," he told Emma Lou. "I never hurt girls like you." Then he stabbed her in the back. Bleeding, she ran away, screaming for help. Tragically, her mother was already dead, her head almost severed from her neck. The Atlanta Ripper had struck again.

The newspapers had no choice but to pay attention to this bloody string of murders. The Constitution ran a headline that stated, "Theory of Jack-The-Ripper Is Given Further Substance." The story underneath recounted in detail how Emma Lou Sharpe came face-to-face with the man police believed was the Atlanta Ripper. The story noted, “While the ordinary Negro murder attracts little attention, the police department was upon the alert last night, doubtfully [sic] expecting a repetition of the long series of crimes which have baffled every effort of the detectives.”

The authorities now seemed certain that the murders were the work of a single killer. “It's the work of the same man,” said Coroner Paul Donehoo. And as another Saturday approached, the Journal asked the question that was on everyone's minds: "Will 'Jack the Ripper' Claim Eighth Victim This Saturday?" The story quoted an unnamed veteran policeman. He told the reporter, “It’s coming. The Negro will kill a woman before midnight Saturday.”

And he was right – almost. On Saturday night, July 8, 22-year-old Mary Yeldell left the home of W.M. Selcer on Fourth Street, where she worked as a cook. As she was walking past an alley, she heard a whistle. She stopped, and coming toward her was a "negro man, tall, black and well-built, and moving with a cat-like tread." Mary ran screaming back to the Selcer house. Mr. Selcer met her at the door, and then grabbed his revolver. He ran to the alley and found the man still standing there. But when Selcer told him to raise his hands, the man darted back down the alley. Selcer called the police, but their search turned up nothing.

Within days, black churches in Atlanta put together a reward for the capture and arrest of the killer, stating that the "foul and unpunished murders have placed a reign of terror over the laboring class of women of our race." But the reward turned out to be useless. If it had been the Ripper who approached Mary Yedell in the alley, his streak of Saturday night murders had been broken. It didn’t stop him, though; he just switched his slayings to another night.

On Tuesday morning, July 11, a group of men working on a sewer near the intersection of Atlanta Avenue and Martin Street came upon a large pool of blood in the road. They followed the trail of blood to a small gully about 30 feet away and discovered the lifeless body of Sadie Holley, who worked at a local laundry. Her throat had been cut so savagely that she had almost been decapitated.

The police were summoned, but clues were scarce. Sadie had been found without shoes and while they never turned up, investigators did find combs that had been worn by the victim on both sides of Atlanta Avenue. They also round a fist-sized rock that was smeared with blood.

Within 20 minutes, more than 100 onlookers had gathered at the scene. By 9:00 a.m., when Coroner Donehoo arrived, the crowd had grown to an estimated 500 people. Because so many murders had occurred, and because the police weren’t even sure which murders had been carried out by the Ripper, some newspapers called Holley the Ripper’s seventh victim, while another called the murder his eighth, and another speculated that this was victim nine.

In any event, the effect was the same: hysteria. Since so much of the confusion in the case had been directly caused by the official lack of interest in the murders of black women, police patrols were beefed up.  However, since there was no real pattern as to when and where the killer would strike, the increased patrols were mostly for show. The newspapers were suddenly interested in the case and their accounts decried the deaths, especially since all of the victims, “with one exception,” were “hard workers and generally respected by both races alike. The character of the victims is largely responsible for the indignation at the murders, which has been so evident among the better class of Negroes.”

Residents and newspaper editors alike were chastising the police for not finding the killer. By mid-July, Mayor Courtland Winn began publicly leaning on the police chief and chairman of the police commission. “Why the police are unable to cope with the situation is more than I can understand,” the mayor said.

The police were determined to carry on with the idea that they were doing something and within 24 hours after the discovery of Sadie Holley’s body, they arrested Henry Huff, a 27-year-old laborer. Huff had been seen with Holley the night she was killed, police said, and was wearing bloody clothes and had scratches on his arms when he was arrested. But Huff was only held on "suspicion," and in the same Constitution story that described his arrest, the unnamed reporter seemed exasperated with the situation. “The police department has nothing to say in explanation of its inability thus far to cope with the situation, further than the simple declaration that it is doing its best.” The story went on to say that the white community was "aroused" over the killings as well -- killings that "have served to intensify the servant problem.”

Atlanta’s black community was more than simply “aroused” over the murders. Faced with the lack of results from the police, they called on authorities to hire black detectives. Leaders of black churches urged the city council and the governor to add to the reward they had already established for the capture of the killer. Their petition was endorsed by many prominent white residents of the city, including Asa Candler, founder of Coca-Cola and a future mayor of Atlanta.

Not long after they arrested Huff, the police also picked up Todd Henderson at a saloon on Decatur Street. A man claimed that he had seen Henderson with Holley in a drug store, not far from the murder scene, on the night she was killed. Emma Lou Sharpe, who survived a close encounter with a man thought to be the Ripper, was brought into the station to see if she could identify Henderson. When Henderson spoke, a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution wrote that she “shrank back.” Even though a reporter from the Georgian said that her identification wasn’t solid, Emma Lou said otherwise. She told reporters, “That’s the man… If that’s not the right man, I’m badly mistaken.”

The Georgian, like other papers quoting African Americans, took great pains in spelling out their speech phonetically, in ways that reinforced racist stereotypes. For instance, Henderson was quoted as telling police, “Gee, if I wuz 'Jack the Ripper,' I sho wud hev begun on my wife. Fur she's gibe me lots ob trubble.”

Police grew more suspicious of Henderson after he told detectives that he hadn’t owned a razor or a pocketknife in over a year. Detectives found out that, on the morning after Holley was murdered, Henderson had dropped of a razor at a local barber’s shop to be sharpened.

Although the cases against both Henderson and Huff remained circumstantial, police decided to hand over both men to the prosecutor, in hopes that a grand jury would sift through the evidence and decide which man to indict for the murder of Sadie Holley. But were either of them the right man? Even the police didn’t think so. On Thursday, three days after the Holley murder, eight plainclothes patrolmen were assigned to night duty. Police chief Henry Jennings explained the challenges his department faced in tracking down the killer. “The police department is handicapped, seriously so, by its small size, but even if we had more men, we could not stop crime," Jennings said. The week ended with Governor Hoke Smith offering a $250 reward for the Ripper’s capture.

However, the chances of an additional reward accomplishing anything were slim, especially in light of the racism still being publicly displayed by Atlanta city officials. Nash Broyles, the city recorder, also served as a local magistrate. At the trial of Jim Murphy, a black man charged with threatening to cut his wife’s throat, Broyles said, “There is no such thing in Atlanta as a negro 'Jack the Ripper.’ It is just such cases as these that result in these murders of Negro women. I am satisfied that every one of the several Negro women slain recently in Atlanta were [sic] murdered by a different man. There are least 1,000 negro men in Atlanta today who stand ready to cut the throats of their wives at the slightest provocation.”

When asked to explain why so many murders took place on Saturday nights, Broyles had a clever answer.  Saturday night, he said, is the black man's "big night" -- the time when he "tanks up."

Over the weeks that followed, the murders stopped. But police, under intense political pressure, continued making arrests. In virtually each case, the accused was nabbed based on accounts of witnesses who had put them at the scene of the crime. On August 9, the grand jury indicted two men -- Henry Huff, and a new suspect named John Daniel. Huff was indicted in the Holley murder, but the papers offered little information on Daniel, other than to say that his was also a Ripper case.

The absence of murders soon came to an end. On August 31, more than six weeks since the last killing, Mary Ann Duncan was found dead in an area called Blantown, west of Atlanta, lying between a tangle of railroad tracks. It had all of the earmarks of another Ripper murder. The 20-year-old victim was found without her shoes and her throat had been cut from ear to ear.

Despite the indictments of Huff and Daniel, both the media and police were certain they hadn't arrested the true Ripper. That fall, the murders of young women resumed. The body of Minnie Wise, described by the newspapers as a "comely mulatto girl," was found in an alleyway on November 10. Her throat had been cut, her shoes were removed, and the index finger on her right hand was severed at the middle joint.

By this time, newspapers nationwide were running stories about the "Atlanta Ripper." Detectives from other cities offered their services. Mayor Winn was getting embarrassed. In a letter to one of those outside detective agencies, he struck a defensive tone: "Atlanta is known throughout the country as one of the most law-abiding cities of its size in the United States, and its police and detective departments are second to none. ... It is true that in some instances criminals escape arrest for a time, but even escapes of this kind occur in all cities.” Things were looking bad for Atlanta, and they were about to get worse.

Just one week after the mayor’s office sent out the letter, Atlanta saw one of the grisliest murders yet. This time the victim’s head was cut almost completely off, her heart cut out and left lying by her side, and her body disemboweled. The newspapers attributed the crime to the Ripper and on November 23, the Constitution ran an interview with an unnamed detective. Fed up, embarrassed and looking to blame someone, the detective struck out at every black person in the city. He said, “We won't get to the bottom of this thing until we get some help from the Negroes. These murders are being committed among the lower class of Negroes, ignorant, brutal beasts that know nothing else. Their acquaintances are afraid to talk, but if there was a little money slipped them we could find out invaluable clues, and I wager we would land the murderers. ... But we haven't got the expenses.”

At the black churches, pastors warned their female congregants about going out at night. At Big Bethel Church, a basket was passed and $1,200 was raised to add to the reward for the Ripper's capture. The pastors were still clamoring for black detectives to be retained to help track down the murderer.

Meanwhile, Henry Huff, who'd been accused of one of the Ripper murders, was found not guilty by a Fulton County jury. The Georgian noted, “This means that the police department and the county authorities are as far as ever from a solution to the 'Jack the Ripper' murders."

Throughout the winter of 1912, more young women were found with their throats cut, but the pace never again reached the early summer of the year before. In March 1912, the Constitution blandly reported that a grand jury had concluded that an Atlanta Ripper was a myth. "Each murder was committed by a different man. ... In each case, it was the result of jealousy following immoral conduct.” But the story -- which ran just four paragraphs -- didn't explain how the grand jury reached its conclusion. A month later, the same newspaper ran a story with the headline “Jack the Ripper Turns Up Again.”  In this case, the body of a 19-year-old "octoroon" girl was found in a clump of bushes at the end of Pryor Street. She'd been stabbed in the throat.

By the spring of 1912, the daily papers were writing about the Ripper's 20th victim, a 15-year-old "pretty octoroon" found floating in the Chattahoochee River, her throat cut, her body mutilated.

The police kept on arresting black men for the murders. In late April 1912, a man named Charlie Owens was sentenced to life in prison for one of the “so-called Ripper murders committed in Atlanta during the last 18 months.” The newspaper story didn’t say which murder he was convicted for. In a few weeks, the papers were attributing yet another murder to the Ripper. Was this just a ruse to sell papers? Or were the Ripper murders the work of more than one man, committed over a one-year period?

On August 10, 1912, more than a year after the first Ripper murders occurred, Henry Brown (also known as Lawton Brown) was arrested for killing Eva Florence, who had been murdered the previous November. Brown's wife told police that he had come home on successive Saturdays -- the same Saturdays that many of the killings had taken place -- with his clothes bloody, and would sit before the fire to dry them out. Under questioning, Brown revealed intimate details of the other crimes. Detectives believed they'd found their man.

But had they? That October, Brown went to trial for the Eva Florence murder, but a black man named John Rutherford testified that the police had put Brown through the “third degree” during questioning. Rutherford said that detectives had chained Brown’s arms to a chair and then struck him in the head until he confessed. For his part, Brown said he often suffered “hallucinations” and it was clear to the jury that he would admit to just about anything if he was pressured. They acquitted him on October 18 and he became another failure in the Atlanta authorities’ quest to convince someone of the Ripper murders.

Even though the official tally of Ripper Murders ended at 20 – with the murder of a 19-year-old “comely yellow girl” on May 10, 1912 – the Atlanta newspapers did not forget about him and invoked his name several times in the years that followed. In March 1913, Laura Smith was found with her throat cut. Like the other victims, Smith was young, of mixed race, and worked as a servant. Then, in March 1914, three full years after the Ripper murders had begun, firefighters found notes pinned to fireboxes around the city. The author of the notes promised to "cut the throats of all Negro women" who were found on the streets after a certain hour of the night. The newspaper attributed the notes to "Jack the Ripper."

Over time, though, as memories of the murders faded, most of Atlanta forgot about the Ripper. He has since become a distant figure in the annals of American crimes. No reward was ever collected for his capture, no real suspect was ever punished and to this day, the murders remain unsolved.

THE SERVANT GIRL ANNIHILATOR: UNSOLVED AMERICAN MYSTERY

THE “SERVANT GIRL ANNIHILATOR”

An Unsolved – and Mostly Unknown – American Mystery

Just a handful of years before Jack the Ripper waged his campaign against the prostitutes of London’s Whitechapel district, becoming the first world-renowned serial killer, an equally mysterious and vicious murderer set to work ridding the Texas town of Austin of its servant girls. Within a year, the killer had claimed the lives of five black women, one black man and two white women. Thanks to his murderous methods, there was no question, even to an unprepared police force, that they were dealing with one man.

In the beginning, the killer’s taste in victims ran to female domestic servants, hence the name that was given to him by reporters: the Servant Girl Annihilator. The press, as they often did (and still do) had created a faceless monster living in the midst of an otherwise quiet city. Interesting, the case of this maniacal killer who raped and slaughtered women after dragging them from their beds in the middle of the night provides a fascinating glimpse at the bewildered reaction of one of the first American cities to be terrorized by a serial killer, long before anyone had an idea what a “serial killer” was.

Possibly because of the lack of knowledge and understanding about what the police force was facing, this string of murders has never been solved.

Austin’s nightmare began at the end of 1884 at the home of William K. Hall, an insurance salesman who lived at 901 W. Pecan Street (now Sixth Street). The family’s cook, a young mulatto woman named Mollie Smith, lived in a small apartment behind the Halls’ kitchen. Mollie’s boyfriend, Walter Spencer, occupied the apartment with her.

Around 3:00 a.m. on the morning of December 31, Mrs. Hall’s brother, Thomas Chalmers, was awakened by a figure lurching into his bedroom. It was Walter Spencer, bleeding badly from five deep wounds to his head. He cried out to Chalmers, “Mr. Tom, for God’s sake do something to help me! Somebody has nearly killed me.” Spencer was unable to say who had struck him, but he had apparently been hit by an ax. Mollie was missing.

The police were called and they investigated the apartment behind the kitchen. The room was soaked with blood, furniture was knocked over, a mirror was shattered and bloody handprints were all over the walls and door.

Mollie was still missing at dawn, but at 9:00 a.m., a neighbor found her by following a trail of blood leading away from the house. Like Spencer, Mollie had been struck with a sharp object. The attacker had dragged her outside. She was lying in the backyard near the outhouse, about 100 feet from the Hall house, almost nude and chopped into pieces. It seemed likely, from the way she was posed, that she had been “outraged,” or raped. Oddly, the murder weapon had been left at the foot of her bed, which meant the killer had taken her outside, attacked her and then went back into the house and left the ax where it would be easily found. The newspapers noted that Mollie was so badly hacked apart that her body would not hold together in her coffin. 

A reporter from the Austin Daily Statesman called it “one of the most horrible murders that ever a reporter was called on to chronicle – a deed almost unparalleled in the atrocity of its execution.”

Austin, Texas in 1885

The police fumbled badly during the entire case and their willingness to arrest almost anyone who might be a suspect began after the first murder. The first man arrested was William Brooks, a black bartender who was a former suitor of Mollie Smith. He said that he was at a dance until 4:00 a.m. on the night of the murder and had a number of witnesses to back up his story. Three attendees at the party testified that they had accompanied him home after it was over, so he could not have been the killer. In spite of this, jurors at the inquest that followed stated that Brooks was the most likely suspect. However, in March 1885, a grand jury found the evidence against him too weak to justify charging him with murder. The authorities quietly released him.

Five months later, on May 7, 1885, the killer struck again. Dr. Lucien B. Johnson lived on the corner of San Jacinto and Cypress streets. Behind his home was a cabin where his black cook, 30-year-old Eliza Shelly, lived with her three children. At 6:00 a.m. that morning, Dr. Johnson went to the market. While he was away, his wife heard screams coming from Eliza’s cabin. She sent her niece to see what was going on but after the girl peered into the window, she dared not go inside. Dr. Johnson was apprised of the situation when he returned and realized that he had better look for himself.

Steeping into the cabin, he found Eliza lying on the floor. She had a deep cut over her right eye that had been made by an ax. The wound had gone deep into her brain, nearly splitting her skull in two. She likely died instantly, but the killer had gone on to inflict other mutilations on her body. Eliza had a deep, round hole over her ear and another between her eyes, where it was speculated that the killer had stabbed her with an iron bar. He had also broken open a couple of trunks and scattered their contents around the room. Eliza’s bloody body had been wrapped in a blanket from the bed and she had been placed on a quilt taken from one of the trunks. From the way her body was posed and her nightgown was pulled up, the police thought it was likely that she had been sexually assaulted. Unlike Mollie Smith, Eliza had not been taken outside nor was the murder weapon left behind. Dr. Johnson found bare footprints in the dirt outside the cabin.

There was an eyewitness to the murder. All three of Eliza’s little boys were present during the attack, and the oldest, an eight year old, was able to tell a reporter what he had seen. He was still in a state of shock when he told of a man coming into the house and asking him where his mother kept her money. The man said that he was going to St. Louis the next morning. The boy could not see if the intruder was black or white because he wore a rag over his face. He said the man shoved him into a corner, placed a blanket over his head, and told him to be quiet or he would be killed. The next thing he knew, it was daylight and his mother was dead. It was his screaming that attracted the attention of Mrs. Johnson and led to the discovery of his mother’s body.

Once again, the police theorized that the murder was the result of a domestic dispute, but it turned out that Eliza Shelly’s husband was in prison. Almost entirely without clues, the police arrested a “half-witted” black teenager named Andrew Williams – simply because he was barefoot. He was released once it was realized that his feet were not the same size as the prints left at the scene.

Meanwhile, both the black and white communities in Austin were in an uproar over the murders. Shortly after Eliza Shelly’s murder, the Statesman noted, “It is not putting it too strong to say that the dissatisfaction [with the police] is wide-spread and confined to no particular class of citizen.” The paper called for Governor John Ireland to offer a reward for the killer’s capture, declaring: “It does not matter that the victim is an obscure colored woman. Her life was as dear to her, and should have been held as sacred, as that of the proudest lady in the land.”

More arrests followed. Once again, the suspects were black men with only a slight connection to the victims. None of the arrests ever amounted to anything because the authorities were still trying to link the killings to arguments and domestic disputes. They had no idea a sadistic killer was stalking their streets.

The killer claimed his next victim on May 23. Irene Cross lived in an apartment on San Jacinto Boulevard, across the street from Scholtz’s beer garden. The apartment was behind the home of a Mrs. Whittman. Irene worked as a servant for Mrs. Whittman and she lived with her adult son and young nephew. Irene’s son had the habit of leaving the front door unlocked when he came home late, which is how the killer got in. Shortly after midnight, Irene’s nephew was awakened by a large, barefooted black man, with his pants rolled up and wearing a brown hat and ragged coat. When the boy started to cry out, the man said he had no intention of harming him and ordered him to keep quiet. He then went into Irene’s room. A few minutes later, he came back out, knife in his hand. Irene stumbled out after him, crashing through the front door and into the yard. She was screaming and her cries alerted Mrs. Whittman, who telephoned for a doctor. A reporter from the Statesman arrived at the scene even before the doctor did. He was frightened and repulsed by the woman’s injuries, which he described for the newspaper. Her right arm had been nearly cut in two and a gaping wound had been opened halfway around her head, starting just above her right eye. “It looked as if the intention had been to scalp her,” he wrote.

Irene had no idea who had attacked her and, after considerable suffering, she died on the morning of May 25. It was now obvious to everyone that her slayer had been the same man who killed Mollie Smith and Eliza Shelly. A wave of fear swept through the city and some demanded that “every loafer and vagabond, white and black” be run out of the city.

Austin resident William Sydney Porter -- later to be better known as O. Henry -- gave the murderous serial killer the name by which he became famous. 

It was at this same time that the killer acquired his infamous name. Austin resident William Sydney Porter – better known as the short story writer O. Henry – coined the slayer’s nickname in a letter in which he wrote: “Town in fearfully dull, except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dull hours of the night.” While Porter spoke in the plural, the Austin police finally realized that they were looking for a single killer. Sadly, reaching this conclusion brought them no closer to making a real arrest.

Two months of relative quiet came and went – “Austin is once more serene,” a reporter noted on June 11. But it would not stay that way for long. The Servant Girl Annihilator returned with a vengeance in August 1885.

When he returned, he claimed the life of 11-year-old Mary Ramey. Ramey lived with her mother, Rebecca, in a cabin behind the home of Valentine Weed, a livery stable owner, on East Cedar Street. The crime scene was only three blocks away from that of earlier victim Eliza Shelly. Around 5:00 a.m. on August 30, Weed heard agonized groans coming from the cabin. He went inside and found Rebecca unconscious. She had been struck in the head by an ax and her skull had been fractured. Mary had been hit in the head with a sandbag and dragged outside into the wash house. She had been raped and then hacked with an ax. As in the case of Eliza Shelly, her attacker had driven an iron pin through her ears.

Weed called for two physicians to help the girl, but it was too late. Mary died a little more than an hour later. Rebecca Ramey could not remember any of the details of the assault and in fact, did not even know that she had been hurt until she woke up and found that she was in a doctor’s care. Her recovery was slow and painful, but by September 15, she was reported to be “almost well,” though unable to tell who had attacked her and her daughter.

 

As if the Austin police had not been embarrassed enough by their failure to catch the killer, City Marshal Grooms Lee did not show up at the scene until seven hours after the crime had occurred. The police brought in bloodhounds to follow the trail left by the barefooted killer, but the dogs only led the authorities to a neighbor’s stable, where they found a barefooted youth named Tom Allen. His feet perfectly fit prints that had been found in the yard, but it turned out that he had simply walked past that morning, not realizing anything out of the ordinary had happened. He was examined by a doctor who stated that the boy had nothing to do with the murder. Once again, no clues were found and the crime went unsolved.

In the wake of the latest murder, local African Americans organized at the courthouse and formed a committee to help the authorities find the killer. The committee asked the mayor, city council and Governor Ireland to offer a reward for Mary Ramey’s murder, but the authorities declined to do so. After a blistering article about their failure in the newspaper, the citizens of Austin took the initiative and raised the reward money on their own. But it seemed that no amount of money was going to lead the police to the killer.

September 1885 brought another double murder and added a male victim to the Annihilator’s body count. In the dark morning hours of September 28, he found his victims on San Marcos Street. They were the black servants who lived in a small cabin in the backyard of Major W.B. Dunham, an attorney and editor of the Texas Court Reporter. Just before 1:00 a.m., the killer slipped into the cabin through an open window. Four people were sleeping in a single room – Patsy Gibson, Lucinda Boddy, Gracie Vance and Vance’s common-law husband, Orange Washington. Gibson and Boddy did not work for the Dunham family; they were visitors who had chosen a very bad night to call on their friends. The Annihilator struck Gibson and Boddy on their heads with a sandbag, fracturing both women’s skulls. For the other two, he used an ax, which was later found under the blankets of the bed. Within moments, all four of them were unconscious and Vance and Washington were dying.

The killer picked up the battered Gracie Vance, but rather than leave the house through the door, he shoved her out of the open window, leaving a trail of blood on the sill. He then threw the young woman over a fence and dragged her through a weed-filled vacant lot to a stable owned by a neighbor, W.H. Hotchkiss. Investigators came to believe that Gracie must have revived at this point because there were signs of a fierce struggle. The killer had finished his work by battering her head with a brick. As in two earlier incidents, the victim had been wounded above or near both ears and in the temple. She had been raped while she was either dead or dying.

As the Annihilator was finishing off Gracie Vance, Lucinda Boddy had regained consciousness. She stumbled about in the darkness until she found a kerosene lamp. The killer, seeing the glow of the lamp, was concerned enough to leave the stable, run to the cabin window, and angrily demand that the woman put out the lamp. Lucinda screamed and ran out of the house. The killer – for whatever reason – climbed through the window and put out the light. Then he ran after Lucinda, catching up with her at the front gate. Things might have gotten worse for her at this point, but Major Dunham had been awakened by the sounds outside. When he came out of the house with a gun, Lucinda threw her arms around him and screamed, “We’re all dead!” Within moments, Major Dunham sounded the alarm. Mrs. Hotchkiss shouted that she had just seen a man running out of her stable. A crowd of neighbors pursued the killer in vain through a nearby thicket. The group included a former alderman named Duff and a police officer, both of whom fired several shots at the retreating figure.

Orange Washington died from his injuries a few hours later. Patsy Gibson and Lucinda Boddy were taken to the hospital. Doctors were certain that Gibson would die, but she recovered. Lucinda claimed that she recognized the man who struck her and who told her to put out the lamp. Within minutes of the attack, she had told both Major Dunham and Mr. Duff that her attacker was a black man named Doc Woods. Woods was arrested as soon as the police could find him. It was later claimed that he was taken to jail and forced to remove his bloody clothing. Woods insisted that he was innocent and that his bloody clothes were the result of a venereal disease and not murder, but Lucinda Boddy continued to claim that he had attacked her that night. Even after he came up with an alibi, Woods was allowed to languish in jail for weeks. It was finally proven that the blood on his clothing was his own but it took months for him to gain his release.

The Servant Girl Annihilator’s last known victims, both affluent white women, were found within hours of each other on December 24, 1885. Moses H. Hancock was a middle-aged carpenter who lived on East Water Street with his two teenage daughters and his wife, Susan, who was described in a contemporary report as “A beautiful woman, about forty years of age. She was born and educated in the Eastern states and had much literary ability.”

Around midnight, Hancock was awakened by the sounds of groans. Alarmed, he hurried to his wife’s room to find an empty, blood-spattered bed. He followed the trail of blood out the front door, around the side of the house and into the backyard – where he thought he saw a figure jumping over the fence. He found Susan barely alive and lying in a pool of blood. She had been smashed in the face and head with an ax, which the killer had left behind. Her left ear was cut through, she had a wound above her left eye, her cheekbone was cut and her skull was fractured in two places. The Annihilator had again used a long sharp instrument to stab her in the ear with such force that the weapon sank two inches into her brain. Doctors refused to tell a reporter who arrived at the scene whether or not she had been sexually assaulted.

Perhaps frustrated by Hancock’s sudden appearance, the killer struck again an hour later. James Phillips, a well-known architect, lived with his parents about 12 blocks away on West Hickory Street. At 1:00 a.m., Phillips’ mother woke up to hear her infant grandson crying. When she entered the bedroom, she found her son, James, lying unconscious with ax wounds to the head and neck, including a deep cut over the ear. The baby, unharmed but upset, was standing in his parent’s blood-soaked bed. Mrs. Phillips fainted, but soon revived. When she did, she realized that James’ wife, Eula, was missing.

A neighbor heard the commotion and came to investigate. Just as Hancock had done just an hour before, he followed a bloody trail outside. At the end of the trail, he found Eula Phillips lying dead and naked in another neighbor’s backyard. She had been killed by a blow to the forehead from the blunt edge of an ax that had crushed her skull. She appeared to have been raped. A bloody handprint had been left on a nearby fence, indicating that the killer had climbed over it. The ax had been left on the bed – which meant that the killer either had two axes that night or, after raping and killing Eula, he had gone back into the house and left the ax there.

On Christmas morning, the lead headline of the Austin Daily Statesman screamed “BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD!” Police brought the bloodhounds back in again. The dogs followed a westward trail up Blanco Street until they had traveled about two miles outside of the city. After that, they lost the trail and could go no farther.

Susan Hancock lingered for a few days after the attack. She died at home on the night of December 28. The reaction to these latest murders was pure and absolute terror. Mayor Robert Johnson called an emergency meeting at the state capitol building that was attended by more than 1,000 citizens. A citizen’s committee on safety was formed and one of their first items of business was to figure out a way to prevent a lynching if the perpetrator was ever captured. Private citizens and businesses raised several thousand dollars to aid police investigations. The committee also raised a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. Detectives were imported from other states and a strict curfew was enforced. Much too late, an additional 30 policemen were hired to patrol the city streets. Governor Ireland finally saw the wisdom in offering a $300 reward for information leading to the murderer’s arrest. By January 3, 1886, the reward had grown tenfold.

To show how hard they were trying, the police made two more arrests. This time, the dirty laundry of two prominent white citizens would be aired in public. As James Phillips slowly recuperated from his wounds, salacious rumors spread that he had killed his wife after discovering that she was working as a prostitute. He was arrested on January 1, in spite of the fact that he would have had to have hacked his own face and head with an ax to pull off the ruse that another attacker had been involved. Phillips was tried and convicted but the conviction was overturned on appeal due to lack of evidence. The second arrest was that of Moses Hancock. He was accused of killing his wife because she had allegedly been about to leave him due to his drinking. Hancock was tried and a hung jury eventually freed him.

The Annihilator was never found. After the double slaying on Christmas Eve, he seemingly retired, died, or more likely, left Austin altogether. There have been a number of candidates named as the possible killer over the years, but no obvious suspects have ever stood out. In 1888, some theorists tried to link Austin’s unsolved murders to the crimes committed by Jack the Ripper in London. Many wondered if the Ripper and the Servant Girl Annihilator could be the same man. Several newspapers pondered whether the killer might have traveled to London when he found that things were too risky for him to stay in Texas. This fanciful solution fails on several points, most notably in that the murders committed in Austin and those committed in London were not even remotely similar in method.

Today, we have much more experience with serial killers than detectives of the Victorian era did. What seemed similar to people in 1888, having seen so few murders of this type, seems quite different to us now. The only real comparison that we can make between Jack the Ripper and the Annihilator is that neither killer was ever identified – and likely never will be.

There’s a great blog online about the case, http://www.servantgirlmurders.com/ and its creator, author J.R. Galloway has a highly recommended book on the subject. Take some time to check it out!