Mary Jane Jackson

Victims: 4 killings attributed - 1 conviction, and that for MANSLAUGHTER rather than murder, over the death of John Miller; the other three were never charged, and about twenty-five men survived assaults by her
Years active: 1856 - 1861
Location: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Method: Stabbing with knife
Status: Tried and convicted of manslaughter in 1861 for the killing of John Miller and sentenced to ten years. She served about nine months and was released in 1862 when General George F. Shepley, military governor of occupied Louisiana, emptied the prisons by blanket pardon. She was accused of stabbing a sailor in November 1862 and afterwards left New Orleans. One later account gives her death in the city on December 20, 1897, aged sixty; several others record only that she disappeared and that her death was never documented.

Jackson was born in 1836 and lived in the New Orleans waterfront district, working as a prostitute in the roughest quarter of a violent city. She was small, red-haired, and by every contemporary account extremely dangerous in a fight; the newspapers called her Bricktop.

Between 1856 and 1861 she killed four men, acquaintances, customers and a lover, with a knife, in brawls and disputes in bars and rooms. She was arrested several times and released, the deaths being treated as the ordinary consequence of fights among people the city did not much value.

In 1861 she killed her lover, John Miller, a man who had himself been a notorious brawler, and was tried and convicted of manslaughter, receiving ten years.

She served about nine months. When Union forces occupied New Orleans in 1862, the military governor issued pardons and reprieves in a number of cases and she was released. Nothing is reliably documented about her afterwards.

The accessible record is New Orleans newspaper reporting of the period and later local history writing, which has treated her as a colourful figure. Four deaths, one conviction for manslaughter, and a release produced by a change of government is the substance of it.