The Servant Girl Annihilator, also known as the Austin Axe Murderer and the Midnight Assassin, was an unidentified American serial killer who preyed upon the city of Austin, Texas, in 1884 and 1885.[1][2][3] The sobriquet originated with the writer O. Henry.[4] The series of eight axe murders were referred to by contemporary sources as the Servant Girl Murders.[5]
The December 26, 1885, issue of The New York Times reported that the "murders were committed by some cunning madman, who is insane on the subject of killing women."[6] The murders represent an early example of a serial killer operating in the United States, three years before the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel.[1]
According to author Philip Sugden in The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, the conjecture that the Texas killer and Jack the Ripper were one and the same man originated in October 1888, when an editor with the Atlanta Constitution proposed this conjecture, following the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes by Jack the Ripper.[7]
Murders
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2018)
According to Texas Monthly, the killer murdered seven women (five black, two white) and one black man. Additionally, the killer seriously injured six women and two men.[8]
All the victims were attacked indoors while asleep in their beds. Five of the women were dragged, unconscious but still alive, and killed outdoors. Three of the women were severely mutilated while outdoors.
All the victims were posed in a similar manner. Six of the murdered women had a "sharp object" inserted into their ears.[9]
The series of murders ended with the killing of two white women, Eula Phillips, age 17, and Susan Hancock, who was attacked while sleeping in the bed of her 16-year-old daughter on the night of 24 December 1885.[1] Moses Hancock was accused of killing his wife, but was acquitted shortly afterwards.[10]
Only one of those arrested, James Phillips, was convicted. He was found guilty of murdering his wife but the conviction was later overturned.[1]
London authorities questioned several American cowboys, one of whom (according to the authors of Jack the Ripper, A to Z) was possibly Buck Taylor, a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.[11] Taylor was born in Fredericksburg, Texas,[12] about 70 miles west of Austin.
According to a front-page article in The New York Times of December 26, 1885, 400 men were arrested during the course of the year.[6] According to the Texas Monthly, powerful elected officials refused to believe that one man, or one group of men, was responsible for all the murders.
The African-American community and some practitioners of voodoo believed the killer was a white man who had magic powers that enabled him to become invisible, as no dogs outside or in fenced-yards adjacent to locations where murders occurred were heard to bark or raise any alarm.[1]
The series of murders stopped when additional police officers were hired, rewards were offered and citizens formed a vigilance committee to patrol the streets at night.[13] Contemporary newspapers reported that the murderer(s) had apparently fled the area, as no more murders were officially attributed to the killer by the authorities.[1]
Victims
Mollie Smith, 25, was murdered the night of 30 December 1884. Walter Spencer was seriously wounded.[1]
Clara Strand and Christine Martenson, two Swedish servant girls, were seriously wounded the night of 19 March 1885.[1]
Eliza Shelly was murdered the night of 6 May 1885.[1]
Irene Cross was murdered by a man with a knife on the night of 22 May 1885.[1]
Clara Dick was seriously wounded in August 1885.[1][14]
Mary Ramey, 11, was murdered the night of 30 August 1885. Her mother, Rebecca Ramey, was seriously wounded.[1]
Gracie Vance and her boyfriend, Orange Washington, were murdered on the night of 28 September 1885.[15][1]
Susan Hancock was murdered the night of 24 December 1885.[1]
Eula Phillips was murdered the night of 24 December 1885.
Eyewitness accounts
According to a July 2000 article in the Texas Monthly, there was an eyewitness who claimed to have seen the murderer, but reported contradictory information to the police.
The killer was variously reported to have been white or dark-complexioned; or a "yellow man" wearing lampblack to conceal his skin color; or a man wearing a Mother Hubbard style dress; or a man wearing a slouch hat; or a man wearing a hat and a white rag that covered the lower part of his face.
There were also reports that the killer worked with an accomplice, or belonged to a gang of murderers.
Nathan Elgin
On July 15, 2014, the PBS TV show History Detectives aired an episode on the killings. Using a combination of historical research and modern techniques, including psychological and geographic profiling, they identified a suspect: Nathan Elgin, a 19-year-old African-American cook.
Elgin worked in close proximity to the crime scenes and was missing his little toe, which was similar to a footprint believed to have been left by the killer. In February 1886, shortly after the last murder, Elgin was shot and killed by police while he was attempting to assault a girl with a knife.[16]
In popular culture
William Sydney Porter, better known as the short story writer O. Henry, was living in Austin at the time of the murders. Porter coined the term "Servant Girl Annihilators" in a May 10, 1885, letter addressed to his friend Dave Hall and later included in his anthology Rolling Stones: "Town is fearfully dull," wrote Porter, "except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dull hours of the night...." However, no contemporary newspaper or published source referred to the murderer(s) as "The Servant Girl Annihilator".[1]
In 2000, Steven Saylor published the novel A Twist at the End, which closely reconstructed the murders and the ensuing trials, with young William Sydney Porter playing a fictional role. The novel was published in the United Kingdom (as Honour the Dead) and has been translated into Portuguese and Hungarian.
Episode 6 (2015) of the podcast Tanis, a mystery/suspense docudrama, is titled "The Servant Girl Annihilator". It suggests a connection between the killings and the mysteries central to the podcast's ongoing story.
In 2022, The Drag Audio Production House published a four-part podcast, "Devilish Deeds", a nonfiction series about the murders. It explored the victims' deaths and the theories surrounding the killer or killers.
Franscell, Ron (2010). Crime Buff's Guide to Outlaw Texas. Guildford, Connecticut: Guildford Press. ISBN978-0-762-75965-1.
Hollandsworth, Skip (2016). The Midnight Assassin. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co. ISBN9780805097672.
Related Research Articles
A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more persons, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant period of time between them. While most authorities set a threshold of three murders, others extend it to four or lessen it to two.
The Hammersmith nude murders is the name of a series of six murders in West London, England, in 1964 and 1965. The victims, all prostitutes, were found undressed in or near the River Thames, leading the press to nickname the killer Jack the Stripper. Two earlier murders, committed in West London in 1959 and 1963, have also been linked by some investigators to the same perpetrator.
Peter William Sutcliffe, also known as Peter Coonan, was an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. He was dubbed in press reports as the Yorkshire Ripper, an allusion to the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, which were converted to a whole life order in 2010. Two of Sutcliffe's murders took place in Manchester; all the others were in West Yorkshire. Criminal psychologist David Holmes characterised Sutcliffe as being an "extremely callous, sexually sadistic serial killer."
A thrill killing is premeditated or random murder that is motivated by the sheer excitement of the act. While there have been attempts to categorize multiple murders, such as identifying "thrill killing" as a type of "hedonistic mass killing", actual details of events frequently overlap category definitions making attempts at such distinctions problematic.
A series of murders that took place in the East End of London from August to November 1888 was blamed on an unidentified assailant who was nicknamed Jack the Ripper. Since then, the identity of the killer has been widely debated, with over 100 suspects named. Though many theories have been advanced, experts find none widely persuasive, and some are hardly taken seriously at all.
Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski, better known under his pseudonym George Chapman, was a Victorian era Polish serial killer known as the Borough Poisoner.
Jack the Ripper, a notorious serial killer who terrorized Whitechapel in 1888, has been featured in works of fiction ranging from gothic novels published at the time of the murders to modern motion pictures, televised dramas and video games.
Charles Frederick Albright also known as the Eyeball Killer, was an American murderer and suspected serial killer from Texas who was convicted of killing one woman and suspected of killing two others in 1991. He was incarcerated in the John Montford Psychiatric Unit in Lubbock, Texas.
Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer was also called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron.
Bernie is a 2011 American biographical black comedy crime film directed by Richard Linklater, and written by Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth. The film stars Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey. It is based on Hollandsworth's January 1998 article, "Midnight in the Garden of East Texas", published in Texas Monthly magazine. It explores the 1996 murder of 81-year-old millionaire Marjorie Nugent (MacLaine) in Carthage, Texas, by her 39-year-old companion, Bernhardt "Bernie" Tiede (Black).
Walter Ned "Skip" Hollandsworth is an American writer, journalist, screenwriter, and executive editor for Texas Monthly magazine. In 2010, he won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing from the American Society of Magazine Editors, for "Still Life", the story of John McClamrock. His true crime history, The Midnight Assassin, about a series of murders attributed to the Servant Girl Annihilator that took place in Austin, Texas, in 1885, was published in April 2016 by Henry Holt and Company.
The Atlanta Ripper was an unidentified serial killer who is suspected of killing at least fifteen Atlanta women between 1909 and 1914.
An axe murder is a murder in which the victim was struck and killed by an axe or hatchet.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate: Jack the Ripper is a downloadable content (DLC) expansion pack developed and published by Ubisoft for the 2015 action-adventure video game Assassin's Creed Syndicate. Set in London in 1888, Jack the Ripper explores the purported untold circumstances surrounding the brutal murders of several prostitutes who lived and worked in the East End of London between 31 August and 9 November 1888, and the true identity of their murderer. The pack follows two player characters who oppose each other: Evie Frye, a member of the Brotherhood of Assassins and one of the two protagonists of the base game, and a fictionalized version of the titular historical figure, depicted as a mentally disturbed renegade Assassin within series lore. Jack the Ripper's goal is to subvert the legacy of his estranged mentor Jacob Frye, while Evie attempts to find her missing brother and stop the Ripper's reign of terror as well as the criminals he has rallied to his cause.
↑ Hollandsworth, Skip (5 April 2016). The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer. New York City: Henry Holt & Company. p.100. ISBN978-0-805-09767-2.
↑ Cawthorne, Nigel (2011). The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large. United Kingdom: C & R Crime. p.54. ISBN9780786719747.
↑ Begg, Paul; Fido, Martin; Skinner, Keith (2010). Jack the Ripper, A to Z. London, England: John Blake Publishing. ISBN978-1-84454-797-5.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
