Murders
According to Texas Monthly, seven females (five black, two white), and one black male were murdered. Additionally, six women and two men were seriously injured. All of the victims were attacked indoors while asleep in their beds. Five of the female victims were then dragged, unconscious but still alive, and killed outdoors. Three of the female victims were severely mutilated while outdoors. Only one of the murdered male victims was mutilated indoors. According to Texas Monthly, all of the victims were posed in a similar manner. Six of the murdered female victims had a "sharp object" inserted into their ears. The series of murders ended with the killing of two white women, Eula Phillips, age 17, and Susan Hancock, who was attacked while sleeping in the bed of her sixteen year-old daughter, on the night of 24 December 1885.
According to a page one article in the New York Times of December 26, 1885, four hundred men were arrested during the course of the year. According to Texas Monthly, powerful elected officials refused to believe that one man or one group of men was responsible for all of the murders. Only one of those arrested, James Phillips, was convicted of the murder of his wife, Eula Phillips. The conviction was later overturned.
The serial-murders represent an early example of a serial killer operating in the United States, three years before the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel. In her book, Jack the Ripper: The American Connection author Shirley Harrison asserted that the Texas killer and Jack the Ripper were one and the same man, namely, James Maybrick. According to author Phillip Sugden in The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, the conjecture that the murders were committed by the same hand originated in October, 1888, when an editor with the Atlanta Constitution proposed the conjecture following the murders of Stride and Eddowes by Jack the Ripper. London authorities questioned several American cowboys, one of whom, according to the authors of Jack the Ripper, A to Z, possibly having been Buck Taylor, a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, who was born in Fredricksburg, Texas, about seventy miles southwest of the city of Austin, Texas.
Read more about this topic: Servant Girl Annihilator
Famous quotes containing the word murders:
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)