Servant Girl Annihilator

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The Servant Girl Annihilator was a serial killer in Austin , Texas , who was assigned at least eight murders from December 1884 to December 1885. He was never identified.

Originally the murders were called Servant Girl Murders , but the name Servant Girl Annihilator by the writer O. Henry has prevailed. It was one of the first serial murders in the United States and took place 3 years before the Jack the Ripper murders . Since then, there has been much speculation about whether Jack the Ripper and the Servant Girl Annihilator were the same person.

Victim

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

Investigations

The New York Times headline December 26, 1885 that there were more than 400 arrests in one year, but none of the suspects confessed to the crime. The only one convicted was James Phillips, the husband of the last victim. James Phillips has been charged with murdering his wife. The sentence was later overturned.

One of the suspects was a cook from Malaysia, whose name was Maurice, who worked near the crime scenes. When he left the United States in January 1886, the murders stopped too.

Because dogs were kept near some crime scenes but never responded to the killer, the African community and the voodoo cult believed that the killer was a white man who had the ability to become invisible at night.

According to the Texas Monthly, various people said they saw the killer at the time. Some described the killer as white, others as black. Others claimed the killer had an accomplice. Due to the contradictions, these references were not followed up.

The murders didn't stop until the police offered a reward for clues and vigilante groups secured the streets every night.

Nathan Elgin

On July 15, 2014, PBS aired an episode of History Detectives dealing with the murder case. Using a profiler and an algorithm that calculated where the killer was most likely to live, it was concluded that the killer was 19-year-old African American chef Nathan Elgin. This theory was also supported by the fact that Elgin had a clubfoot and exactly such footprints were found at several crime scenes. In February 1886, Elgin was shot dead by police for attacking a woman with a knife. Then the murders also stopped.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ JR Galloway: The Servant Girl Murders: Austin, Texas 1885. 2010. ISBN 1-60910-123-5 .
  2. ↑ http://www.servantgirlmurders.com
  3. ↑ Nigel Cawthorne: The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large, Hachette UK, 2011 [1]
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Skip Hollandsworth: Capital Murder. In: Texas Monthly. July 2000, archived from the original on February 10, 2005 ; accessed on June 10, 2016 .
  5. ↑ THREE MURDERS IN ONE NIGHT .; TWO WOMEN DRAGGED FROM THEIR BEDS, MALTREATED, AND MURDERED. ( nytimes.com [PDF; accessed January 3, 2018]).
  6. ↑ Orrin Gray: The Servant Girl Annihilator: America's Jack the Ripper. February 5, 2016, accessed January 3, 2018 .
  7. ↑ a b How the 'Servant Girl Annihilator' Terrorized 1880s Austin . April 25, 2017 ( online [accessed January 3, 2018]).
  8. ↑ Creepy Theories About the Servant Girl Annihilator . In: Ranker . ( Online [accessed January 3, 2018]).
  9. ^ The Servant Girl Annihilator | The Servant Girl Murders Austin, Texas 1885. Retrieved January 3, 2018 (American English).