Three Years Before Jack the Ripper, Austin Had Its Own Nightmare
Between December 30, 1884, and December 24, 1885, someone walked into the backyards and bedrooms of Austin, Texas, at night and killed eight people with an axe. Seven of the dead were women and girls, one just 11 years old; the eighth was a man killed alongside his girlfriend. Several victims were also sexually assaulted. At more than one scene, police found the bloody axe left behind, along with bare footprints missing a toe. No one was ever caught. Three years later, a killer across the ocean would take on a far more famous name: Jack the Ripper.
Hundreds of Arrests, Zero Convictions
Austin wasn’t a big city, but police still arrested roughly 400 men trying to find whoever was responsible. Only one was ever indicted for murder, and that conviction didn’t hold. No one was ever proven to be the killer.
What keeps this case alive more than a century later is how it ended: not with an arrest, but with silence. After the final killings on December 24, 1885, the murders simply stopped and never started again. Serial killings usually end because the killer is caught, dies, goes to prison for something else, or moves away. Historians still argue over which, if any, applies here. An investigation that produced 400 suspects and zero answers isn’t just a cold case, it’s one that never got a final chapter.
The One Case That Almost Explains Everything
The closest thing to a resolution involves a husband. Eula Phillips was killed on the night of December 24, 1885, the same night as Susan Hancock, and her husband, James Phillips, was also found attacked that night. At first he looked like a second victim. Investigators came to think otherwise: that he had staged his own injuries, used a year of citywide terror as cover, and killed his wife himself, a copycat crime hiding inside a serial one, in modern terms.
Phillips became the one man ever indicted and convicted in connection with these murders. Then the conviction was overturned, leaving even the one piece of this case historians can discuss with confidence unresolved. Other names have come up over the decades too, including a man called Nathan Elgin, but even the historians who know this case best won’t commit to any one identification.
Why the Nickname Didn’t Fit the Crime
The case’s nickname, the “Servant Girl Annihilator,” came from writer O. Henry, who coined it in Austin in mid-1885. Before that, local papers called it the “Servant Girl Murders,” since the earliest known victims were Black women working as domestic servants. Eliza Shelley, killed in May 1885, was a cook attacked in the cabin behind her employer’s house.
The name stuck, but the pattern behind it didn’t last. By the time the killings ended, the dead also included an 11-year-old girl, a man, and two white women, Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips, none of them servants. Names coined early in a case tend to outlive the facts, and this one is a clean example.
The London Connection: Coincidence or Clue?
Here the evidence thins, so caution is warranted. After the Austin murders stopped, suspicion eventually fell on men who had left town around that time, including a Malaysian cook named Maurice, who worked at the Pearl House hotel and had told acquaintances he planned to sail to London. He left Austin in January 1886, weeks after the last killing. In October 1888, an editor at the Atlanta Constitution floated a theory in print: what if whoever had killed in Austin was now killing in London? The idea surfaced right after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.
It’s a striking coincidence of timing and nothing more, no record ties any Austin suspect to the London murders. A separate theory names Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick as both killers, based on a diary that surfaced generations later, in which he claims to have been in Austin during the Annihilator killings and signs off as Jack the Ripper. The man who said he found the diary later signed a statement calling it a forgery, and forensic testing has never settled the question either way. One detail argues against any link at all: most of the Austin victims were Black women, while every victim of Jack the Ripper was white. Coincidentally or not, that’s the most honest way to leave it.