The Serial Killer - Part XXV
An unknown serial killer, popularly known today as the Servant Girl Annihilator, preyed upon the city of Austin, Texas during the years 1884 and 1885. The series of murders was referred to by contemporary sources as "The Servant Girl Murders."
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 female victims was mutilated indoors. 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.
Four hundred men were arrested during the course of that year. The authorities 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, Eula Phillips. 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 Phillip 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, possibly having been Buck Taylor, a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, who was born in Fredricksburg, Texas, about seventy miles southwest of the city of Austin, Texas.
The series of murders ended 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.
Of course now we are slowly approaching the modern era of serial killing, which turn is epitomized in Jack the Ripper, considered to be the first case of serial murder widely spread and covered by the media. The suggestion that the Servant Girl Annihilator could have also been Jack the Ripper across the Atlantic is not altogether farfetched, considering that the police never found any of these two very interesting colleagues.
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