Servant Girl Annihilator


The Servant Girl Annihilator, also known as the Austin Axe Murderer, was an unidentified American serial killer who preyed upon the city of Austin, Texas between 1884 and 1885. The sobriquet originated with the writer O. Henry.
The series of eight axe murders were 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".
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.
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 Stride and Eddowes by Jack the Ripper.

Murders

According to Texas Monthly, seven women and one black man were murdered. Additionally, six women and two men were seriously injured.
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.
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.
Only one of those arrested, James Phillips, was convicted. He was found guilty of murdering his wife but the conviction was later overturned.
London authorities questioned several American cowboys, one of whom was possibly Buck Taylor, a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Taylor was born in Fredricksburg, Texas, 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. 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.
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 had apparently fled the area, as no more murders were officially attributed to the killer by the authorities.

Victims

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.

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:
In London on the 13th of August 1888, a sailor named George M. Dodge was interviewed by Scotland Yard. Dodge claimed to have met a Malay cook named ‘Alaska’ at the Queen's Musical Hall at Poplar, London. He claimed that Alaska was about 35 years old, 5 feet 7 inches, weighed 10-11 stone, and sometimes carried a double-edged knife, which he showed George. The following is what George claimed Alaska told him "he had been robbed by a woman of bad character, and that unless he found the woman and recovered his money he would murder and mutilate every Whitechapel woman he met."
Similar to the murders in Austin, all five of the Ripper’s victims would follow a similar pattern of lower-class women within the radius of Whitechapel, deep throat cuts, severe body mutilations and organs removed, except in the case of Elizabeth Stride. Several witness testimonies of sightings of the alleged Ripper talking to Elizabeth Stride right before she was found dead have provided description of him. One William Marshall claimed the Ripper was "a stout man of about 5 feet 6 inches tall wearing a black cut-away coat, dark trousers, and a cap that was “like something a sailor would wear." A police constable named William Smith claimed, "the man had a dark complexion and a dark moustache, wearing a cutaway coat and dark trousers and carrying a parcel wrapped in newspaper." A recent immigrant named Israel Schwarts claimed "he shouted ‘Lipski’ to a second man… he had a full face, was broad-shouldered, and wearing a dark jacket and trousers with a peaked cap."
Back in Texas, the author of the Statesman followed up on that same lead and tried to contact the Malay cook in London. Before he could reach him, however, he discovered that the cook had left London. After that, just like with the Austin killings, the Whitechapel killings stopped too.

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.

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 as "The Servant Girl Annihilator".
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 and has been translated into Portuguese and Hungarian.
Episode 6 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.

Cited works and further reading

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