Between the fall of 1910 and the spring of 1912, a series of young Black women were killed in Atlanta. Most of them worked as cooks, laundresses or housekeepers, and most died of cut throats, according to the newspapers of the day. In June 1911 the city's white daily papers began to suggest that one man was responsible, and they borrowed a name from London: "Jack the Ripper." By the middle of July, with the deaths coming close to once a week, Black churches were raising reward money, the governor had offered a reward of his own, and city councilmen were calling for the police department to be reorganized.
The killer, or killers, were never identified. Police arrested a number of men. Two were tried for single killings and acquitted, and at least three others were convicted of killing a wife or partner whose death some paper had added to the Ripper list. A city judge, a leading Black minister and, in 1912, a grand jury all said there was no single Ripper at all. More than a century later the count of victims is still not settled: researchers who went back to the newspapers and the death certificates in 2013 found 19 deaths that at least one Atlanta paper had linked to the Ripper, and kept eight of them as a possible series. Other accounts give 20, 21 or 24.
In 1911 Atlanta thought of itself as the capital of the "New South." About a dozen railroads ran through it, its boosters used the slogan "Atlanta Always Ahead," and its population had passed 150,000, Creative Loafing Atlanta recounted in a long feature on the case. Wealthy white residents lived in enclaves such as Inman Park and along Peachtree Street. Auburn Avenue was lined with Black-owned businesses, and the city's Black colleges, among them Spelman, Atlanta Baptist College (now Morehouse), Morris Brown and Atlanta University, were highly regarded. Most Black Atlantans, though, worked at menial jobs and lived in poor neighborhoods.
Segregation was the law. It reached cemeteries, parks, bars, barbershops and baseball games, and Georgia used devices such as the poll tax to keep Black men from voting. In July 1911, while the killings were in the news, white residents of one west side street met at a Baptist church to discuss how to keep Black families from buying homes there, Creative Loafing found.
Five years earlier the city had been through the Atlanta race riot. On September 22, 1906, newspapers reported four alleged assaults on white women by Black men, reports later described as unsubstantiated. White mobs gathered downtown, and over the next days an estimated 25 to 40 Black Atlantans were killed, by the counts reported in the local papers of the time. The historian Jeffery Wells, of Georgia Military College, who wrote a 2011 book on the Ripper case, told Atlanta News First in 2023 that the New South movement had sold the region to Northern investors as a place without racial trouble, and that the riot, then a run of serial killings, then the lynching of Leo Frank, were a disaster for the South's leaders.
The newspapers that covered the killings were the Atlanta Constitution, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Georgian. All three were written for white readers by all-white staffs, and crimes in which both victim and suspect were Black usually got little space, Creative Loafing noted. The Atlanta Police Department was also entirely white.
The earliest death on the newspaper list compiled by the criminologists Vance McLaughlin and Robert L. Bing III was that of Maggie Brook, 23, a cook, who died on October 3, 1910, of a fractured skull. She was identified by the woman she lived with. No arrest was reported.
Rosa Trice, 35, died on January 22, 1911. Her throat had been cut. Her husband was arrested about two hours later and was released that Sunday night for lack of evidence, McLaughlin and Bing found.
Over the following weeks other deaths went onto one paper's list or another. Lucinda McNeal died on February 3, 1911; witnesses followed her husband from the scene, he was arrested quickly, and he was later convicted of her murder and sentenced to life in prison. An unidentified woman of about 25 was found dead in February 1911 from a head injury, with no report of a cut throat. Georgia Brown, a cook, died on April 5, 1911, and Rosa L. Rivers on May 8, 1911; both had been shot. McLaughlin and Bing later set all four of these cases aside, the first because a suspect had been convicted and the other three because the method was different from the one the press associated with the Ripper.
Capital B News Atlanta, which retraced the case in 2025, went further back. It listed several Black women killed in Atlanta in 1909 and 1910, the earliest on April 5, 1909, most of them shot or beaten, and it counted them with the later deaths as women whose killings the city had failed to take seriously. Atlanta News First, in its own 2023 account, said the killer's stalking may have begun "perhaps as early as April 1909." These earlier deaths were not on the 1911 Ripper lists as McLaughlin and Bing reconstructed them.
Mary Walker, known as Belle, was a cook. On a Saturday night at the end of May 1911 she left her job to go home and did not arrive. Her sister went looking for her the next morning and found her body. Her throat had been cut. McLaughlin and Bing give the date of her death as May 27, 1911, in their narrative and May 28 in their table; Creative Loafing gives the Sunday on which she was found.
The Atlanta Constitution treated her death as a minor item. It ran a two-paragraph brief on page 7 on May 29, 1911, under the headline "Negro Woman Killed; No Clue to Slayer," Creative Loafing found. No one was arrested.
Addie Watts was found early on a Thursday morning in mid-June 1911; McLaughlin and Bing give June 15 in one place and June 16 in another. Capital B News describes her as a 22-year-old laundress. She had been beaten and her throat cut. Police arrested two men, whose names were not reported, and no charge against either over her death was reported.
Her killing was the one that made the papers speak of a pattern. On June 16, 1911, the Atlanta Journal ran a four-paragraph story under the headline "Black Butcher At Work?" and compared the case to the London killings of the 1880s, Creative Loafing found. McLaughlin and Bing also date the Journal's first suggestion of an insane killer "like Jack the Ripper" to that day.
A little more than a week later, on a Sunday morning, Lizzie Watts was found dead in Atlanta; her throat had been cut. McLaughlin and Bing date her death to June 24 or 25, 1911. About ten days after its first story, the Journal moved the case to its front page and noted that a young Black woman had been killed on each of five Saturdays in a row, Creative Loafing reported.
Lena Sharpe was 40. On the evening of Saturday, July 1, 1911, she left her home to buy groceries and did not come back. Her daughter went to look for her and learned at the market that her mother had never arrived. On the way home the daughter was attacked by a stranger and survived. Her mother was found dead; her throat had been cut.
The two papers told the story differently. The Constitution and the Journal gave different orders of events, and McLaughlin and Bing quote both versions without choosing between them. As reported in the Constitution, the daughter described the man as tall, Black and broad-shouldered, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat.
After the Sharpe killing the Constitution said in a headline that the Ripper theory had gained "further substance." The Fulton County coroner, Paul Donehoo, said the killings had been committed by the same man, Creative Loafing reported.
On July 3, 1911, L. L. Lee, a Black undertaker in Atlanta, offered a reward of $25. Wire stories with Atlanta datelines carried the case across the country; the Sandusky Star-Journal, in Ohio, called Lena Sharpe the "eighth" victim. The Journal asked whether the next Saturday would bring another killing, and quoted an unnamed veteran police officer who predicted one before midnight, Creative Loafing found.
On the night of Saturday, July 8, a young woman who worked as a cook heard a whistle in an alley and saw a tall, well-built man. She ran. Her employer came out with a revolver and the man fled, and police searched the area on motorcycles without finding him. She was not hurt.
Within days the Black churches of Atlanta raised the reward. Their resolution described a "reign of terror" over the city's working women, Creative Loafing reported.
Sadie Holley worked at a laundry. On a Tuesday morning in July 1911 workmen in Atlanta found her body. Her skull had been fractured and her throat cut. The date of her death is given variously as July 7 (McLaughlin and Bing's table), July 10 (their narrative) and the night before the Tuesday on which she was found; her surname appears as Holley, Hollie and Hollis in the papers. By the time the coroner arrived at about 9 a.m. the crowd at the scene had grown from more than 100 people to about 500, Creative Loafing found. The papers could not agree whether she was the Ripper's seventh, eighth or ninth victim. The Journal wrote of seven killings on consecutive Saturdays by "an unknown maniac," McLaughlin and Bing found.
Her death brought the first real political pressure. The Constitution wrote in an editorial that the police were either indifferent or incompetent. Mayor Courtland Winn pressed the police chief and the chairman of the police commission, and Councilman Steve Johnston called for the department to be reorganized, Creative Loafing reported.
Within 24 hours of the discovery of Holley's body, detectives arrested H.H., a 27-year-old laborer, at the back of his home. He had been seen with her on the night she died, and blood and dirt were on his clothes; a cab driver gave police a written statement that the two had quarreled in his cab and got out near the place where she was killed. He was at first held only "on suspicion."
Police then arrested T.H., 35, in a saloon after a witness said he had been seen with Holley near a drugstore. Lena Sharpe's daughter was brought to look at him. She identified him, but with reservations, and the papers described her as uncertain. He told police he had not owned a razor in a year; police said they had learned he had left one at a barbershop the morning after the killing. Both men were turned over to the prosecutor, Creative Loafing reported. No later charge against T.H. was found.
Black leaders asked the city to hire Black detectives. Black church leaders petitioned the city council and the governor for a reward, and white supporters of the petition included Asa Candler, the founder of Coca-Cola and a future mayor of Atlanta. Police assigned eight plainclothes officers to night duty, and Chief Henry Jennings said the small size of his force made the work harder. At the end of the week Governor Hoke Smith offered a reward of $250, Creative Loafing found.
Not everyone in authority accepted the idea of a single killer. On Sunday, July 16, 1911, the Rev. Henry Hugh Proctor, pastor of the Black First Congregational Church, preached a sermon titled "Hand of God as seen in work of the Ripper." "But this bloody hand points to the sins of the colored people themselves," he said, as quoted by McLaughlin and Bing. He blamed the killings on sin and on ways of living that departed from the church's teaching, and he urged the city to close the saloons and gambling houses of Decatur Street, which he called a reproach to the churches, Creative Loafing reported.
Judge Nash R. Broyles, the city recorder, who heard police court cases, put it more bluntly. Presiding over the case of a man accused of threatening to cut his wife's throat, whom he fined $25.75, Broyles said there was no such thing as a Black "Jack the Ripper," that each woman had been killed by a different man, and that at least 1,000 Black men in Atlanta were ready to cut their wives' throats. He said most of the killings happened on Saturday nights, when men had been drinking. Capital B News, in 2025, described such statements as part of a pattern in which officials dismissed the deaths as "Saturday night violence" in Black neighborhoods and blamed alcohol, domestic quarrels and the women themselves.
For some weeks after mid-July the killings seemed to stop, though police went on arresting men on the word of witnesses. On August 9, 1911, a Fulton County grand jury indicted H.H. for the murder of Sadie Holley. It also indicted J.D., a new suspect about whom the papers gave little information, Creative Loafing found. The outcome of the charge against J.D. was not reported.
On August 31, 1911, Mary Ann Duncan, 20, was found dead near Atlanta; her throat had been cut.
Eva Florence died on October 21 or 22, 1911, according to McLaughlin and Bing; Creative Loafing, describing a later arrest, placed her death in November 1911. She had been beaten and stabbed. Her brother, a waiter, posted a reward of $100 with the police.
Minnie Wise was killed on November 10, 1911; her throat had been cut. Her husband was arrested; the papers reported that he had been jealous and had threatened her. What became of that arrest does not appear in the reporting. At his commitment hearing Judge Broyles said again that he had never believed one man was the Ripper. The chief of police, by contrast, spoke of a "murder-maniac," Creative Loafing reported.
The mayor's office, meanwhile, defended the department. In a letter to an outside detective agency it said Atlanta had 200 police officers and 15 detectives, Creative Loafing found.
Mary Putnam, described as a middle-aged woman, had moved into a house to keep it for an elderly man. She was found dead early on the morning of November 21, 1911; her skull had been broken and her throat cut. A bloodhound followed a scent as far as the streetcar line and lost it. Her stepson recognized her but was afraid to tell the authorities, McLaughlin and Bing found. On November 23 the Constitution printed an interview with an unnamed detective who made racist remarks about the victims and said the investigation needed money to pay informants, Creative Loafing reported.
On November 28, 1911, at the courthouse during the trial of H.H., the Fulton County sheriff, Plennie Minor, offered the theory that jealous Black women, not men, were committing the killings. Police and detectives laughed at the idea, and some said the sheriff was drunk, McLaughlin and Bing found.
The Black churches kept up their own efforts. At Big Bethel, the Rev. C. M. Tanner told women not to go out at night, and a collection taken in baskets at the church raised $1,200 toward a reward. In December 1911 Proctor was still calling for Black detectives. The jury in H.H.'s case, a Fulton County jury, found him not guilty of the murder of Sadie Holley, Creative Loafing reported.
The killings went on into 1912, more slowly. Ida Ferguson died on January 12, 1912. A man she had been seeing, Lucky Elliott, was convicted of her murder on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to life in prison. He appealed to the Supreme Court of Georgia over parts of the judge's charge to the jury, and a new trial was denied; the newspaper dates McLaughlin and Bing cite for the conviction and the denial are January 25 and April 9, 1912.
Pearl Williams died on January 19, 1912. The next morning police arrested a man who had been seen with her and who had a long knife and small bloodstains on his shirt, and that evening they arrested a 17-year-old. McLaughlin and Bing do not report the outcome for either, and treat the case as one with a probable suspect.
Alacy Owens was killed on February 15, 1912. Her husband was tried for her murder. His first trial ended with a hung jury; at a second he was convicted, on wholly circumstantial evidence, and sentenced to life, McLaughlin and Bing found. Creative Loafing, separately, reported that a man named Charlie Owens was sentenced to life in prison in late April 1912 for one of the "so-called" Ripper killings of the previous 18 months; the Constitution's report did not say which killing it was.
In March 1912 a grand jury reportedly concluded that the Ripper was a myth and that each killing had grown out of jealousy over "immoral conduct." The four-paragraph newspaper story that reported the finding did not explain how the grand jury reached it, Creative Loafing noted.
In April and May 1912 two more bodies were found near Atlanta: on April 15 a girl of about 15, whose throat had been cut, and on May 11 a woman who had been stabbed in the throat. Neither was named in the reports. By that spring the city's dailies were calling the girl the Ripper's 20th victim, Creative Loafing reported. Creative Loafing also describes a 19-year-old woman found stabbed in the throat about a month after the grand jury's March finding; it is not clear whether she is the same woman McLaughlin and Bing list for May 11.
On August 10, 1912, Atlanta police arrested H.B., who was also known by a second first name, for the killing of Eva Florence the year before. His wife had told police that he came home bloody on successive Saturdays and dried his clothes by the fire, and under questioning he was reported to have given details of other killings as well. A newspaper headline of that day, listed by McLaughlin and Bing, read "Jack the Ripper caught at last, say detectives."
His trial in October 1912 turned on how that statement had been obtained. A defense witness testified that police had used "third-degree" methods, chaining H.B. to a chair and striking him about the ears. H.B. testified that he had hallucinations and would confess to almost anything under pressure. On October 18, 1912, the jury acquitted him, Creative Loafing reported.
Creative Loafing traced the name a few years further. In March 1913 the Constitution reported the killing of Laura Smith, a young servant whose throat had been cut, and called it the third such killing that year. In March 1914 firefighters found notes on fire alarm boxes threatening to cut the throats of Black women found on the streets after a certain hour, and the papers attributed them to the Ripper.
By then Atlanta was absorbed by the case of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman convicted of the 1913 murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan and later lynched. In April 1914 W. J. Burns, an out-of-town private detective working in that case, claimed that another suspect in the Phagan killing, a Black man, had killed her and was also responsible for the Ripper killings. Nothing came of the claim, Creative Loafing found. Atlanta News First, in its 2023 series, gave the period of the killings as 1911 to 1915 and "possibly longer," with at least 20 young Black women killed.
There has never been an agreed count. The papers of 1911 numbered the victims as they went, and they did not agree with each other: Sadie Holley was called the seventh, eighth or ninth, and by the spring of 1912 the dailies spoke of a 20th. Vance McLaughlin told Creative Loafing that one paper gave a total of 20 and another 21.
In their 2013 research note, McLaughlin, a criminal justice professor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and a former Savannah police officer, and Bing worked from the Journal, the Georgian and the Constitution, and from death certificates. Access to the certificates was limited by the Fulton County Probate Court, and a genealogist had to request them one at a time for a fee. They began with 19 Black women whom at least one Atlanta paper had linked to the Ripper from October 1910 on. They removed five cases in which the method was different, among them two shootings, and four in which, by their account, a suspect had been identified and convicted. That left ten. They then removed two more, Pearl Williams and Minnie Wise, in which a probable suspect had been arrested, saying they preferred to "err on the side of exclusion." Eight cases remained: Maggie Brook, Rosa Trice, Belle Walker, Addie Watts, Lizzie Watts, Lena Sharpe, Sadie Holley and Mary Putnam.
Their own lists contain inconsistencies. Eva Florence is placed among the cases ended by a conviction, but their narrative of her case describes no conviction, and the man later tried for her death was acquitted. Their tables and text give different dates for several of the deaths.
Atlanta News First's 2023 series counted at least 20 women from 1911 to 1915. Capital B News, in 2025, wrote of "at least 19" women killed in similar ways from 1910 to 1912, but its headline and conclusion speak of 24, and it included shootings and earlier deaths from 1909 and 1910 that McLaughlin and Bing did not count.
Whether there was an Atlanta Ripper at all is the central open question, and the record does not settle it.
The case for a single killer rested, in 1911, on the timing and the method. The Journal noted the run of Saturday killings, and the coroner, Paul Donehoo, said the same man was responsible. McLaughlin and Bing found that most of their eight remaining cases shared a method, that most fell on the weekend, and that the places where the women were found lay close together on their map. Investigations intensified, they wrote, once the authorities began to suspect one man.
The case against it was made at the time by Judge Broyles, by Proctor, by the sheriff and by the March 1912 grand jury, each in different terms. Several of the deaths first placed on the lists were later tied to husbands or partners, and three of those men were convicted. McLaughlin told Creative Loafing that a copycat might have been involved, or that someone might have used the method the papers had made public to hide a killing of his own; anyone who wanted a Black woman's death to be blamed on the Ripper would have used the same method, he said.
McLaughlin and Bing do not claim to have proved a serial killer. They wrote that they had provided "cogent evidence that many Black women were murdered in Atlanta during 1910 to 1912," and that the doubts of judges and officials did not settle the question: "it does not mean that a serial murder did not exist." They pointed to the weaknesses of the investigation and of the record. The coroner was legally blind; he had studied medicine without taking a degree and graduated from Atlanta Law School in 1911. Indictments, death records and police reports are hard to find, and many may no longer exist, McLaughlin told Creative Loafing.
The 1911 press also described many of the victims as "mulatto," and some people at the time believed the killer chose women of mixed race. McLaughlin and Bing allow that the women may have been of mixed race, but suggest the label may also have been used because it made "a more titillating story in the newspapers."
No man was ever proved to be the Ripper. The two men tried for Ripper killings, H.H. and H.B., were acquitted, and the April 1914 claim against a suspect in the Phagan case came to nothing.
McLaughlin and Bing argue that the Atlanta killings faded from memory because no one was ever identified, while the London case kept its hold through more lurid detail and better preserved records. They also argue that serial killers who are Black, and their Black victims, have been understudied, in part because the media focus on white killers.
Capital B News, in 2025, laid the neglect at the feet of the city. It argued that the victims' race, their poverty and their work as domestic servants all made it easier for officials to ignore them, and that the investigation was stepped up only after Mayor James G. Woodward faced complaints from businessmen worried about Atlanta's reputation. (Courtland Winn, not Woodward, was mayor in the summer of 1911, according to Creative Loafing; Capital B does not give a year for the pressure on Woodward.) The article retraced the places where the women died through neighborhoods that are now gentrifying, and noted that no marker or memorial to the women exists.
Jeffery Wells's 2011 book, The Atlanta Ripper, is described by Atlanta News First as the definitive account. Creative Loafing compared the case with the Atlanta killings of young Black people about 70 years later, for two of which Wayne Williams was convicted; doubts persist about whether he was the killer.
October 3, 1910: Maggie Brook, 23, a cook, dies of a fractured skull; the first case on the newspaper list compiled by McLaughlin and Bing.
January 22, 1911: Rosa Trice, 35, killed; her husband is arrested and released for lack of evidence.
February 3, 1911: Lucinda McNeal killed; her husband is later convicted of her murder and sentenced to life.
April 5 and May 8, 1911: Georgia Brown and Rosa L. Rivers shot dead; both later placed on a paper's Ripper list.
May 27 or 28, 1911: Belle Walker, a cook, killed; the Constitution gives her death two paragraphs on page 7 on May 29.
June 15 or 16, 1911: Addie Watts killed; on June 16 the Journal asks "Black Butcher At Work?"
June 24 or 25, 1911: Lizzie Watts killed.
Late June 1911: the Journal notes five Saturday killings in a row.
July 1, 1911: Lena Sharpe, 40, killed; her daughter is attacked and survives.
July 3, 1911: L. L. Lee offers a $25 reward; wire stories spread the case nationally.
July 1911: Sadie Holley killed; H.H. arrested within 24 hours, then T.H.; Governor Hoke Smith offers $250.
July 16, 1911: Proctor's sermon "Hand of God as seen in work of the Ripper."
August 9, 1911: grand jury indicts H.H. for Holley's murder, and J.D.
August 31, 1911: Mary Ann Duncan, 20, killed.
October 21 or 22, 1911: Eva Florence killed.
November 10, 1911: Minnie Wise killed; her husband arrested.
November 21, 1911: Mary Putnam killed.
November 28, 1911: Sheriff Minor offers his theory at the courthouse during H.H.'s trial; H.H. is later acquitted.
January 12, 1912: Ida Ferguson killed; Lucky Elliott later convicted and sentenced to life.
January 19, 1912: Pearl Williams killed; two men arrested.
February 15, 1912: Alacy Owens killed; her husband convicted after a hung jury, and sentenced to life.
March 1912: a grand jury reportedly calls the Ripper a myth.
April 15 and May 11, 1912: a girl of about 15 and a woman, neither identified, found dead near Atlanta.
Late April 1912: a Charlie Owens is sentenced to life for one "so-called" Ripper killing.
August 10, 1912: H.B. arrested for the killing of Eva Florence.
October 18, 1912: H.B. acquitted after testimony that his statement was coerced.
March 1913: Laura Smith killed; the Constitution calls it the third such killing that year.
March and April 1914: threatening notes attributed to the Ripper; W. J. Burns ties the series to the Phagan case, without result.
2011: Jeffery Wells publishes The Atlanta Ripper.
2013: McLaughlin and Bing publish their research note, keeping eight cases.
2023 and 2025: Atlanta News First and Capital B News revisit the case; it remains unsolved.