Hell Broke Loose: The Servant Girl Killer

Before Jack the Ripper, there was the Servant Girl Annihilator. The man who stalked Austin, Texas, in 1885, preying upon the city’s black servant girls. When he targeted two white women in a shocking Christmas Eve attack, all hell broke loose. 

Who was this servant girl killer, and was he the same man that terrorized London in 1888?

Sources:

Galloway, J. R. The Servant Girl Murders: Austin, Texas 1885 (BookLocker, 2010) and the book’s website https://www.servantgirlmurders.com/

History Detectives- HDSI- Texas Servant Girl Murders, 2014. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/video/history-detectives-hdsi-texas-servant-girl-murders/ 

Hollandsworth, Skip. The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer (Henry Holt and Company: New York, 2015) 

and “Capital Murder” Texas Monthly, July 2000. https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/capital-murder/

Psencik, Katey. “The Servant Girl Annihilator: Austin’s oldest unsolved murder case.” KVUE. 7 November, 2014. https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/hidden-austin/the-servant-girl-annihilator-austins-oldest-unsolved-murder-case/269-260196137

Original Sources: 

Burt, Dr. W. J. “Autopsy Report for Susan Hancock, 1885” 29 December 1885. 

Susan Hancock Inquest. 29 December, 1885.

State of Texas v. James O Phillips, 1886.

Newspaper Articles: 

The Fort Worth Daily Gazette, The New York Times, The Austin Weekly Statesman

Music: Credits to Holizna, Fesilyan Studios & Virginia Liston

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