Title: Black Servant Girl Murders in Austin

Dates: Late 1800's

Overview: Interesting story of one of America's first serail killers. Dubbed the "Servant Girl Annihilator"

May 6, 1885. William Sydney Porter, a banker in Austin, Texas, writes to his friend: “Dear Dave... Town is fearfully dull, except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively during the dead hours of the night; if it were not for them, items of interest would be very scarce...”

Today, the odds a person in Austin will be murdered in a year are 1 in 32,760. However, from sometime during the night of New Year’s Eve, 1884, to Christmas, 1885, the odds increased by a factor of 10, to about 1 in 3,300. Even at today’s rate, that’s over five times the national average (1 in 18,690). Austin was being terrorized by one of America’s first serial killers, and Porter’s name for the murderer stuck: the Servant Girl Annihilator.

Serial killers, of course, have existed for centuries. Gilles de Rais, a French nobleman, killed at least 140 peasant children in 15th-century France. Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian countess in the late 1500s, was convicted of killing (and, according to legend, bathing in the blood of) 80 peasant girls—though some accounts estimate she may have killed as many as 600. Thug Behram, of the Thugee cult in India (popularized, and oddly misrepresented, by 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), killed somewhere between an admitted 125 men and an estimated 931.

Perhaps the best-known serial killer of all time is Jack the Ripper. But the Austin Annihilator struck three years earlier than Jack, and took more lives.

The first victims were black domestic servants. Each was dragged from her bed, raped, and then brutally hacked or stabbed in the face. The first attack—on Mollie Smith (and her common-law husband Walter Spencer, who survived) occurred just as 1885 was dawning. As the year unfolded, there were more attacks. Two servants were brutalized in May, one killed in August. Austinites started keeping their windows closed at night, despite the broiling heat. And then in September, two more murders. The youngest victim, Mary Ramey—the daughter of a livery stable servant—was 11. She’d been brutalized, and stabbed through both ears.

Austin's city newspaper initially dubbed the killings a “Servant Girl Epidemic,” reporting that “the police and the people have been unable to see one inch into this mystery of mysteries.”

It was the final three murders, all occurring on Christmas Eve, that escalated city-wide alarm into panic. This time the victims were neither black nor servants. The headline in the Daily Statesman roared: “BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD! LAST NIGHT'S HORRIBLE BUTCHERY. THE DEMONS HAVE TRANSFERRED THEIR THIRST FOR BLOOD TO WHITE PEOPLE.”

Over the next two years, multiple men, all black, were tried for the murders, but remarkably—given the racial divisions of the time—all were acquitted. In every case, juries cited either lack of evidence or the existence of a solid alibi.

In 1895, Austin erected its iconic “Moonlight Towers”—165-foot iron lamp-masts intended to illuminate several square blocks, allowing a person to “read the time on his watch without squinting at a distance of 1,500 feet.” According to a persistent popular myth, the towers were erected at least partly in response to the Servant Girl Annihilator’s nighttime attacks. However, no written evidence from the time period suggests this. A Statesman article from 1886 even proposes a link between the brightness of the moon and the timing of the 1885 killings.

As for William Sydney Porter: he went on to spend the years 1898-1901 in prison for embezzlement. However, his true claim to fame lies not in this crime, but in his way with words. He christened Austin’s “Servant Girl Annihilator,” of course. He also coined the phrase “banana republic” while living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

And, most of all, Mr. Porter is known for his hundreds of short stories, written under the pen name “O. Henry.”

Based on an article in Book of Odds