The Servant Girl

The Servant Girl

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Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Before Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of London, another midnight murderer was prowling halfway across the world. Attacking victims in their beds and then dragging them outside to mutilate their bodies, the killer eluded police, private investigators, and mobs of civilians who took to the unpaved streets of newly settled Austin in anger and panic.

The killer's first victim was Mollie Smith, a young black cook discovered in the snow near her employer's home on December 30, with a gaping ax wound in her head. Smith had also been stabbed in the chest, abdomen, legs, and arms, creating such a large pool of blood she appeared to almost be floating in it.

After that was another black cook—Eliza Shelly, found on May 7, Irene Cross, a servant and the third black woman targeted by the Annihilator, was attacked on May 23; she was stabbed multiple times with a knife and practically scalped. It was around this time that short story author O. Henry gave the killer his nickname. The spine-tingling moniker was perhaps a bit of a stretch, however: Only the first few to die were servant girls. The next victim, year-old Mary Ramey, was dragged outside and into a washhouse, raped, and stabbed through the ear on August The following two victims were a pair, sweethearts Gracie Vance and Orange Washington.

The Annihilator was escalating. On Christmas Eve , he committed two separate crimes in entirely different locations—and unlike all of the previous victims, they were white: Once again, her head had been crushed by an ax. Absent in every other killing, the wood pieces brought up a terrifying possibility. True, the lumber could be attributed to an opportunist Annihilator operating in a booming city filled with construction sites.

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Still, people wondered … What if another killer was at work? Did Austin perhaps have multiple serial killers on the loose? Until that point, no one had considered there could be more than one maniac involved.

Though around men were arrested in under suspicion of being the Annihilator, none were ever successfully tried. The Annihilator was still out there, but what was he—or they—doing? Several theories exist about the real identity of the murderer, and the abrupt end to his killing spree.

One possibility is that he was a Malaysian cook named Maurice, working at the Pearl House hotel in Austin. Maurice told acquaintances that he planned to travel by ship to London and left town in January —several weeks after the Servant Girl murders ended. Is it possible that Maurice, responsible for the eight deaths in Austin, had traveled across the world to avoid captivity and continue his depraved midnight escapades? Author Shirley Harrison also believes that the Annihilator and the Ripper are one and the same, though she names Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick instead of Malaysian chef Maurice.

Another detail that could point to an English Annihilator? Maybrick died, likely of arsenic and strychnine poisoning possibly administered by his wife, in May —after both series of murders ended or perhaps why they ended. Yet another theory, laid out in a episode of History Detectives , accuses a young black man working in downtown Austin. Nathan Elgin, a cook and only 19 years old at the time of the Annihilator killings, was shot by police when he dragged a girl out of the saloon where he was drinking in February He died from his wounds, right around the time the murders—coincidentally or not—stopped.

Devotees of the case like to tie the Servant Girl murders to subsequent crimes along the Eastern Seaboard and then in Galveston, or to the reportedly similar murders of women in port cities the world over. That a man escaped over and over, continuing to maim and kill in multiple cities? Or that the modern era has given birth to countless such monsters, each uniquely capable of depraved crimes? One day at the end of May, , William Trailor hopped into a one-horse buggy and began the long journey to Springfield, Illinois, where he planned to reunite with his brothers Henry and Archibald.

Joining him was his friend and housemate, a handyman named Archibald Fisher. In Springfield, the men decided to go for a walk after lunch. But as the afternoon wore on, the brothers somehow lost sight of Fisher. When they returned to Archibald's Springfield home for supper, Fisher wasn't there.

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