The Servant Girl Annihilator — Austin's Forgotten Ripper

Between December 1884 and December 1885, an unidentified killer murdered eight people in Austin, Texas, in a series of nighttime attacks that primarily targeted Black female servants but later escalated to white women of higher social status. Victims were dragged from their beds while their partners slept, taken outside, and killed with an axe or other bladed weapon. A cook named Nathan Elgin was arrested but acquitted; no other suspect was conclusively tied to the crimes. The serial killer predated Jack the Ripper by three years and the case remains officially unsolved, with the perpetrator never identified.