The Servant Girl Annihilator (Austin Axe Murders)

Case background and investigation

Between December 1884 and December 1885, the young state capital of Austin, Texas, was gripped by a series of savage nighttime murders committed by an unknown assailant. The killer struck sleeping victims, often dragging them from their beds and attacking them with an axe and other weapons. The writer O. Henry, then living in Austin, is credited with coining the grim nickname 'Servant Girl Annihilator,' while others called the offender the 'Midnight Assassin.'

The first killing came on December 30, 1884, when Mollie Smith, a Black servant woman, was found dead outside the home where she worked. Over the following year, the attacks continued: Eliza Shelley in May 1885, Irene Cross weeks later, and the 11-year-old Mary Ramey in August. In late September, Gracie Vance and Orange Washington, a man, were killed on the same night. Most of the early victims were young Black women employed as domestic servants, along with people close to them.

The violence reached its climax on the night of December 24, 1885, when two married white women, Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips, were murdered in separate attacks across the city on the same Christmas Eve. In all, eight people were killed and several others gravely wounded during the year-long spree, which spread terror through Austin and drew national newspaper attention.

Authorities rounded up and questioned hundreds of men, and suspicion fell on various individuals, including the husbands of the two women killed on Christmas Eve. James Phillips, husband of Eula Phillips, was initially convicted, but his conviction was overturned on appeal for insufficient evidence, and no one was ever definitively tied to the full series of crimes.

The murders abruptly ceased after the Christmas Eve killings, following an aggressive response that included additional police officers, offered rewards, and citizen vigilance committees. In modern times, a 2014 PBS 'History Detectives' investigation proposed Nathan Elgin, a 19-year-old cook who was shot and killed by police in early 1886 while attacking a woman, as a possible suspect. But the case was never officially solved, and it endures as one of the earliest documented serial murder cases in the United States.