Back in the 1880s, the city of Austin, Texas was trying really hard to become a respectable modern city. It had politicians, railroads, restaurants, fancy hotels... and apparently a homicidal maniac roaming around at night killing innocent people like some kind of Satanic side quest (unlocked by accident). Yeah, nothing puts a damper on your gentrification efforts like a serial killer roaming loose in town.
This psycho became known as the “Servant Girl Annihilator,” which is a snappy name that sounds less like a serial killer and more like the title of an obscure heavy metal album from 1987. Whoever (or whatever) it was, it murdered at least eight people between 1884 and 1885, mostly servant women who were attacked in their sleep with axes, knives, iron rods, or whatever else happened to be lying around that could be repurposed into an instrument of destruction.
Austin authorities responded to this situation with the efficiency and competence you would expect from 1880s law enforcement, meaning they arrested approximately half the town. At one point more than 400 men were rounded up, which was essentially the police strategy of “The killer must be a male.” narrowing it down further... a human male.
Not surprisingly, the murders terrified the city. Citizens formed armed patrols. People locked themselves indoors at night. Newspapers lost their minds. Witness descriptions were, shall we say, not very helpful, unless your goal was to make every person on Earth a potential suspect simultaneously. The suspect was variously described as white, black, mixed-race, disguised, barefoot, wearing women’s clothing, wearing a slouch hat, accompanied by accomplices, or possibly a shapeshifting wizard capable of turning invisible because apparently neighborhood dogs never barked.
Meanwhile, the city’s wealthy leadership initially treated the murders with the urgency of a DMV employee clocking into work. Most early victims were black servant women, so officials basically reacted with: “What a terrible tragedy. Now, about those paving contracts.” Public panic only truly detonated after two white women were murdered on Christmas Eve 1885, at which point everybody suddenly realized that serial murder was, in fact, a bad thing.
The killings themselves were unbelievably brutal. Victims were attacked in bed, dragged outside, mutilated, and posed in bizarre ways. In several cases, sharp objects were shoved into the victims’ ears, which is the kind of detail that makes modern true crime podcasters sit upright and say things like, “There were serial killers in the old west?”
Naturally, because humanity cannot resist turning horror into fan fiction, people later wondered whether the Servant Girl Annihilator might actually have also been Jack the Ripper. This theory was based largely on the scientific principle of “Hey, both guys killed people.” Serious researchers reject the connection as poppycock because the methods were wildly different, but that has not stopped generations of amateur detectives from squinting at maps and yelling, “The timelines kind of sort of overlap!” on internet forums.
One suspect that rose to the top of the list was a young cook named Nathan Elgin, who reportedly lived near the crime scenes, had a violent history, and was missing a toe that may have matched footprints found near the murders. Conveniently, he was later shot dead by police while allegedly attacking another woman, which in old-timey America apparently qualified as a background check. Coincidentally, or maybe not, the crimes stopped after that.
To this day, the murders remain officially unsolved. Austin’s first famous serial killer continues to hover over Texas history like a ghostly reminder that before the city became known for tacos, tech startups, and pale scraggly, flip-flop wearing men named Bryson (playing "hip" ukulele music), it was briefly victimized by a horrifying reality TV style slasher nobody asked for.
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