The Servant Girl Annihilator
The last and oldest unidentified killer on our list goes all the way back to the late 1800 in Austin, Texas and is considered to be the earliest example of a serial killer operating in the United States. Terror would sweep across this state capital between 1884 and 1885 as an individual wielding an axe would strike in the dead of night, taking eight lives into the darkness with him.
Also know as the Austin Axe Murderer, he claimed the lives of seven women and one man, while six more women and two more men were brutally attacked. He would drag most of his victims outside before brutalizing them with an axe. All of this would take place in the space of just under a year before inexplicably stopping.
An 1885 article in The New York Times claimed that upwards of 400 men were interrogated in connection with the attacks, yet no one was ever charged. However, one theory has surfaced in recent years that would try and link him to another more famous and infamous serial killer of the late 19th century, Jack the Ripper.
In her book Jack the Ripper: The American Connection, author Shirley Harrison puts forward the theory that Jack the Ripper was responsible for the Austin axe murders before escaping by boarding a ship to continue his reign of terror in London’s Whitechapel.
Three American suspects were identified in the Ripper investigations, actor Richard Mansfield, Dr Francis J. Tumblety and confirmed serial killer H.H. Holmes who many regard as America’s first ever serial killer after he confessed to murdering over 20 people in his infamous Illinois “hotel” in the late 19th century.
Despite the connections, although tenuous at best, no one has ever been definitively identified as Jack the Ripper just as the Servant Girl Annihilator or Austin Axe Murderer has remained equally as illusive to this day.
