Servant Girl Annihilator

Servant Girl Annihilator
December 1885 newspaper headline relating to the Servant Girl Annihilator
Born	unidentified
Other names	The Austin Axe Murderer
Details
Victims	8 known victims
Span of crimes	December 30, 1884 – December 24, 1885
Country	USA
State(s)	Texas

A serial killer, popularly known as the Servant Girl Annihilator, preyed upon the city of Austin, Texas (1885 population approximately 17,000) during the years 1884 and 1885. The series of murders was referred to by contemporary sources as "The Servant Girl Murders." 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."

Murders

According to Texas Monthly, seven females (five black, two white), and one black male were murdered. Additionally, six women and two men were seriously injured. All of the victims were attacked indoors while asleep in their beds. Five of the female victims were then dragged, unconscious but still alive, and killed outdoors. Three of the female victims were severely mutilated while outdoors. Only one of the murdered male victims was mutilated indoors. All of the victims were posed in a similar manner. Six of the murdered female victims had a "sharp object" inserted into their ears. 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 sixteen-year-old daughter, on the night of 24 December 1885.

According to a page one article in the New York Times of December 26, 1885, four hundred men were arrested during the course of the year. According to Texas Monthly, powerful elected officials refused to believe that one man or one group of men was responsible for all of the murders. Only one of those arrested, James Phillips, was convicted of the murder of his wife. The conviction was later overturned.

The serial murders represent an early example of a serial killer operating in the United States, three years before the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel. In her book, Jack the Ripper: The American Connection author Shirley Harrison asserted that the Texas killer and Jack the Ripper were one and the same man, namely, James Maybrick. According to author Philip Sugden in The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, the conjecture that the murders were committed by the same hand originated in October, 1888, when an editor with the Atlanta Constitution proposed the conjecture following the murders of Stride and Eddowes by Jack the Ripper. 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, who was born in Fredricksburg, Texas, about seventy miles west of the city of Austin, Texas.

The Malay cook suspect

According to the Atchison Daily Globe of November 19, 1888, the Austin American-Statesman reported that a Malay cook "running on ocean vessels" was a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders. The newspaper reported that "a Malay cook had been employed at a small hotel in Austin in 1885. Furthermore, the newspaper reported that the Austin reporter:

...investigated the matter, calling on Mrs. Schmidt, who kept the Pearl House, near the foot of Congress Avenue opposite the Union depot, 3 years ago. It was ascertained that a Malay cook calling himself Maurice had been employed at the house in 1885 and that he left some time in January 1886. It will be remembered that the last of the series of Austin women murders was the killing of Mrs. Hancock and Mrs. Eula Phillips, the former occurring on Christmas eve 1885, just before the Malay departed, and that the series then ended. A strong presumption that the Malay was the murderer of the Austin women was created by the fact that all of them except two or three resided in the immediate neighborhood of the Pearl House.

Victims

• Mollie Smith, 25, was murdered the night of 30 December 1884. Walter Spencer was seriously injured.
• Clara Strand and Christine Martenson, two Swedish servant girls, were seriously wounded the night of 19 March 1885.
• Eliza Shelly was murdered the night of 6 May 1885.
• Irene Cross bled to death after being attacked by a man with a knife on the night of 22 May 1885.
• Clara Dick was seriously injured in August, 1885.
• Mary Ramey, 11, was murdered the night of 30 August 1885. Her mother, Rebecca Ramey was seriously injured.
• Gracie Vance, was murdered on the night of 28 September 1885. Orange Washington was also killed during the attack upon Vance. Lucinda Boddy and Patsey Gibson were seriously injured.
• Susan Hancock was murdered the night of 24 December 1885
• Eula Phillips was murdered the night of 24 December 1885. Her husband, James Phillips, was seriously injured.

Eyewitness accounts

According to a June 2000 article appearing in the Texas Monthly about the murders, there was an eyewitness who claimed to have seen the murderer(s) but reported contradictory information to police and detectives. The killer(s) was reported to be white, or "dark" complexioned; to be a "yellow man" wearing lampblack to conceal his skin color; a man wearing a Mother Hubbard style dress; a man wearing a slouch hat; or a man wearing a hat and also a white rag that covered the lower portion of his face. There were also reports that the killer worked with an accomplice, or was part of a "gang" of murderers. The African-American community and some practitioners of voodoo believed the killer was a white man who had magic powers that enabled him to appear invisible, as no dogs outside or in fenced-yards adjacent to locations where murders occurred were heard to bark or raise any alarm.

Response

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. 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. Rumors say the existing Austin Moon Towers were installed for safety ten years after the murder spree.

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 potential suspect: Nathan Elgin, a 19-year-old African-American cook. Elgin worked in close proximity to the original crime scenes and had a club foot 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.

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."

In 2000, Steven Saylor published the novel A Twist at the End, which closely reconstructs the murders and the ensuing trials, with young William Sydney Porter playing a fictional role. The novel was published in the U.K. (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," and suggests a connection between the killings and the mysteries central to the podcast's ongoing story.