Between May 1911 and the summer of 1912 at least fifteen women, and by some counts more than twenty, were killed in Atlanta. Almost all were Black women who worked as cooks, laundresses and domestic servants in white households, and who were attacked walking home at night through the districts around Decatur Street. Their throats were cut, often nearly through, and several bodies were mutilated and left arranged in the open.
The Atlanta Constitution named it the Ripper case after the Whitechapel murders of twenty years earlier. The coverage in the white papers was substantial and largely lurid, and the coverage in the Black press, particularly the Atlanta Independent, was about something else: that the police were not investigating, that the city had offered a reward only after months of pressure, and that a series of killings of Black women in a Southern city in 1911 was not going to be treated as an emergency.
Several men were arrested, all of them Black. Two were tried. One, Henry Huff, was convicted of one killing and the conviction did not stand up. Nobody was convicted of the series.
The killings stopped as abruptly as they began. The case has never been solved and the surviving record is thin, because a good deal of it was never made in the first place.