On May 28, 1911, the sister of Belle Walker, a cook, went looking for her after she failed to come home from work the night before, and found her body twenty-five yards from her home on Garibaldi Street in Atlanta. Her throat had been cut. The Atlanta Constitution ran the story under the headline "Negro Woman Killed; No Clue to Slayer." Four weeks later Addie Watts was found with her throat slashed.
By July 3, after the eighth killing, The Baltimore Sun reported that few Black women in Atlanta would go out at night and that Black service workers were refusing to work after dark. By the end of 1911 fifteen women had been killed the same way. The papers noted what they had in common: they were Black, most in their early twenties, described as good-looking and neatly dressed, and many had some education, and most worked as cooks, laundresses and domestic servants in white households. They were killed with a knife or other sharp blade, and the killer ripped and mutilated the bodies after death. Lena Sharpe, forty, was found with her head almost cut off. The daughter of one victim, attacked herself and surviving, saw the attacker and described a large, powerfully built, neatly dressed Black man.
The press named the killer the Atlanta Ripper, after the Whitechapel murders in London. Six different suspects were arrested over the course of the investigation, and every one was eventually released; nobody was convicted, and there is no conclusive proof that one person committed all the killings. Some counts run as high as twenty-one.
The case exposed how little the city's policing did for its Black residents. Residents of the affected neighborhoods complained about the pace and coordination of the investigation, and as the toll rose both Black and white newspapers called for a more organized effort, noting that the police lurched from one suspect to another without evidence. The killings also drew far less space in the Atlanta papers than other cases of the time, such as the Daisy Grace case. The killings stopped, and the surviving record is thin.