On the night of December 30, 1884, a young woman named Mollie Smith, twenty-five, was attacked in her bed in Austin, Texas, dragged outside and killed; Walter Spencer, who was with her, was badly wounded. It was the first of eight killings in a year. Every victim was attacked indoors, asleep. Five of the women were dragged out of the house unconscious but still alive and killed in the open, three of them severely mutilated there. The bodies were left posed in a similar way, and six of the murdered women had a sharp object pushed into their ears. According to Texas Monthly the killer murdered seven women, five of them Black and two white, and one Black man, and seriously injured six more women and two men.
The dead, as recorded, were Mollie Smith; Eliza Shelley, whose name also appears as Shelly, on the night of May 6, 1885; Irene Cross, killed by a man with a knife on May 22; eleven-year-old Mary Ramey on August 30, whose mother Rebecca was badly hurt in the same attack; and Gracie Vance and her companion Orange Washington, murdered together on the night of September 28. Between them the attacker had wounded two Swedish servants, Clara Strand and Christine Martenson, on March 19, and Clara Dick in August. Almost all the people in the first part of the series were Black women working as domestic servants.
On Christmas Eve 1885 the pattern crossed into white Austin. Susan Hancock was attacked while she slept in her sixteen-year-old daughter's bed, and on the same night seventeen-year-old Eula Phillips was killed. Two days later the front page of The New York Times said the murders had been "committed by some cunning madman, who is insane on the subject of killing women" and reported that 400 men had been arrested in the course of the year. Texas Monthly later described powerful elected officials who refused to believe that one man, or one group of men, could be responsible for all of it.
Two husbands were put on trial. Moses Hancock was accused of killing his wife and acquitted. James Phillips was convicted of murdering Eula, after witnesses said he had repeatedly threatened to kill her if she was ever unfaithful and was given to violent outbursts, but the conviction was overturned for insufficient evidence. No one else was convicted of any of the killings. The only eyewitness who claimed to have seen the murderer gave the police contradictory accounts, and the descriptions that circulated disagreed about almost everything: a white man, a dark-skinned man, a light-skinned Black man blacking his face with lampblack, a man in a Mother Hubbard dress, a man in a slouch hat, a man with a white rag over the lower half of his face, a man with an accomplice, a gang. Among Black residents, and some practitioners of voodoo, it was said the killer was a white man who could make himself invisible, because the dogs in the yards never barked.
The killings stopped after Austin hired more police officers, rewards were posted and citizens formed a vigilance committee to patrol the streets at night. The newspapers of the day decided the murderer had left the area, and the authorities attributed no more deaths to him. The papers called the crimes the Servant Girl Murders and the killer the Midnight Assassin. The name that stuck came from William Sydney Porter, not yet O. Henry, who was living in Austin and wrote to his friend Dave Hall on May 10, 1885: "Town is fearfully dull, except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dull hours of the night." No newspaper or other published source of the time used the phrase.
When Jack the Ripper began killing in Whitechapel three years later, an editor at the Atlanta Constitution suggested in October 1888, after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, that the Austin killer and the London one might be the same man. London police did question several American cowboys, one of whom may have been Buck Taylor, a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show who had been born in Fredericksburg, Texas, about seventy miles from Austin, but no link was ever established.
In 2014 the PBS program History Detectives, working from historical records and psychological and geographic profiling, put forward a suspect, Nathan Elgin, a nineteen-year-old Black cook who worked near the crime scenes. Elgin was missing a little toe, and a footprint believed to be the killer's showed the same. In February 1886, shortly after the Christmas Eve murders, he was shot dead by police while attacking a girl with a knife. He was never charged with the Austin killings, and the case remains unsolved. Skip Hollandsworth told the whole story in The Midnight Assassin in 2016.