Three years before Jack the Ripper terrorized London, the young city of Austin, Texas, lived through a year of horror. Beginning in late 1884, a killer crept into homes at night and attacked people in their beds — most of them women, most of them Black servants — dragging victims outside before vanishing into the dark. Eight people were dead by Christmas Eve 1885. The newspapers, and later the writer O. Henry, called him the Servant Girl Annihilator. He was never caught.

A New City in the Dark

Austin in the 1880s was a raw, growing capital, its streets barely lit and its police force small. On December 30, 1884, the body of a young cook named Mollie Smith was found near her employer’s home, killed with an axe and dragged out into the cold. It was the first in a series of attacks that would, over the next year, turn the city’s nights into something to be feared.

A Year of Terror

The pattern was distinct and brutal. Victims were attacked while they slept, struck with an axe or other heavy blade, and frequently dragged from their beds out into yards and alleys. Most of those killed were Black women who worked as domestic servants, along with one Black man; many more people were gravely wounded and survived. Across 1885, the attacks continued, and yet — because of who the victims were — the wider city was slow to treat them as the work of a single, organized killer.

Christmas Eve 1885

That changed in a single night. On Christmas Eve 1885, the killer struck twice in different parts of Austin, and this time the victims were white women: Susan Hancock and 17-year-old Eula Phillips, both attacked in their own homes. The crossing of that line turned simmering unease into open panic. A city that had tolerated a year of terror against its Black servants was suddenly, fully afraid.

The Investigation

The response was sweeping but useless. Around four hundred men were rounded up and questioned over the course of the case; suspicion fell on husbands, on other servants, on strangers passing through. With no fingerprinting, no forensic science, and no central detective force, the police had little to work with but rumor. Every suspect was eventually released. Citizens armed themselves and formed vigilance committees to patrol the streets at night, and after Christmas of 1885, the killings simply stopped.

The Ripper Question

The abrupt end of the murders, and their savagery, later drew comparisons to the Whitechapel killings that began in London just three years afterward. Some have speculated that the Austin killer left Texas and carried his crimes across the Atlantic to become Jack the Ripper. It is an irresistible theory and an entirely unproven one — there is no evidence linking the two — but it speaks to how singular and frightening the Austin case was for its time.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Servant Girl Annihilator is often cited as one of the earliest documented serial killers in American history. But its deepest lesson is about whose lives a society chooses to protect. For most of a year, the victims were Black domestic workers, and the city’s slow, half-hearted response almost certainly let the killer continue.

Their names — Mollie Smith and the others — deserve to be remembered alongside the more famous victims of Christmas Eve. They were the first to die, and the last to be mourned by the wider public.

For a year, Austin barely stirred while servant women were killed in their beds; it took the deaths of two white women on one December night to turn fear into fury. The killer was never named. So how many of his victims might have lived if the city had been as afraid in January as it finally was in December?