Between December 1884 and December 1885 someone entered servants' quarters in Austin at night, attacked the women asleep in them with an axe, dragged them outside and mutilated them. Eight people died and several more were badly injured.
Mollie Smith was the first, in December 1884. Eliza Shelley, Irene Cross, Mary Ramey, who was eleven, Gracie Vance and others followed through 1885. Almost all were Black women employed as domestic servants, and the killings drew the level of official attention that implies in Texas in the 1880s, which is to say very little at first. On Christmas Eve 1885 two white women, Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips, were killed in the same manner within an hour of each other, and the city's response changed completely.
The name came from the writer William Sydney Porter, later O. Henry, who was living in Austin and used it in a letter. Contemporary papers preferred the Austin Axe Murderer.
Several men were arrested, almost all of them Black, and two, including Eula Phillips's husband, were tried; the convictions were overturned or the cases collapsed. Nobody was ever convicted. A theory that the killer moved on to become Jack the Ripper has circulated since 1888 and has nothing behind it. The killings simply stopped.