Talk:Servant Girl Annihilator

O. Henry's "Important" Contribution To The Case?
From the sentence (O. Henry) did however make one important contribution to the story: he coined the term "Servant Girl Annihilator" for his friends working at the Austin Daily Statesman I have removed the word "important" because it does not really describe the significance of his "contribution", which might be better characterized by the word "trivial". Hi There 09:26, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * What a trivial edit. I would think the coinage to be fairly important as universal terminology shapes public perception and public memory. Would we recall the Whitechapel Murders half so well now if the killer had not been coined Jack the Ripper? 75.34.152.194 (talk) 00:23, 9 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I think it was a good edit because this killer was never referred to by anyone as the "Servant Girl Annihilator." Only O. Henry, in a private letter to a friend, makes a sarcastic reference to the murders. Steven Saylor, when he wrote his wildly inaccurate historical ficition book about the Austin murders, needed a catchy name for the killer and found it in the O. Henry letters. Trivial at best was Steven Saylor's contribution--it is Saylor who named this killer, not O. Henry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alienistneurologist (talk • contribs) 04:32, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

First Recorded (US) Serial Killer
"... who terrorized Austin, Texas between 1884 and 1885 [...] The crimes represented the first recorded serial killer in the US"

Doesn't the "Bloody Benders" entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Benders) contradict this statement?

"The Bloody Benders were a family of serial killers who owned a small general store and inn in Labette County, Kansas from 1872 to 1873"

Or did I miss something? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 220.239.213.12 (talk) 11:56, 22 January 2007 (UTC).


 * Serial killer is a term reserved not merely for people who kill more than one person spread out through time, but with a whole series of characteristics, including an unusually "internal" motivation.


 * The wikipedia article on serial killers itself acknowledges this, referring to a "motivation for killing [that] is largely based on psychological gratification" and that "there is sometimes a sexual element to the murders. The murders may have been completed/attempted in a similar fashion and the victims may have had something in common, for example occupation, race, or sex."


 * (I believe, also, that the term "sexual serial killer" of the literature has been shortened into the term "serial killer" for ease over time.)


 * This article doesn't refer to motivation, but it seems quite probable that they were merely out for the monetary gain from the victims' belongings. 75.34.152.194 (talk) 23:52, 8 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, the Benders were an example of a family that murdered to rob their victims, they were not psychopaths who killed for the sake of killing, as the term serial killer implies. A serial killer is not just someone who commits a series of murders, or else every multiple murderer would be a serial killer. Walterego (talk) 13:51, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Refs need page numbers
Some of the refs are missing page numbers. Can anyone help with this? ⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 05:16, 4 March 2011 (UTC) from the title of the Victim section. I'm not sure what the ref is supposed to mean...a reiteration of the victim names? ⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 03:41, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
 * ...also, I've moved this ref ...

Mrs. Mollie Eanes, niece of Eula Phillips
First, and as an aside, when I looked at articles from 1885, 1886 and 1887, all indicated that victims were raped. So, I am not sure where the main article's source got the information that the authorities said they hadn't been raped.


 * The sources are the physicians who conducted the autopsies. Even in the articles about Susan Hancock, no attempt at rape is mentioned. The state's opinion was that Mollie Smith wasn't raped--they blamed her boyfriend, Walter Spencer. Eula Phillips, the state claimed, was not raped--they believed that her husband killed her. The state also claimed she had consensual relations with the man who took her to the assignation house the night of her murder. Irene Cross was not raped--she was awoken by a man in her room, who slashed her arm with a knife. Because no doctor could be bothered to hurry up and attend to her, she died from loss of blood. Just showing that these women were not raped defeats the contemporary press reports that all the women were raped. The small-town Texans always looked for a motive for a murder, and were not aware of so-called motiveless murders.

Second, the initial murders were of African American women, and the authorities tried the two white husbands for the murders of the two white women - so the idea of characterization by the authorities being a political matter, intended to foster Jim Crow laws seems ridiculous from the perspective of any article I read from the time. If there were a denial of rape, it was probably intended to in some sense protect the good name of the murdered women - remember the time in which these occurred. Second, characterizing the injuries of the women as mutilations is wrong, if it is intended to imply intentional mutilation for sadistic sexual satisfaction, as with the Jack the Ripper killings. They were brutally beaten to death, some with bricks, some with axes. This created horrible injuries, but not mutilation, in the sense the article suggests.

There is an interesting side light. I am not sure if it belongs in the article or not. In the Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth Texas), for December 27, 1885 at page 1, there is an article entitled "A Female Fiend". I found it with the following newspaper archive search. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064205/1885-12-27/ed-1/seq-1/;words=Doc+Woods  The article is about the arrest of Mollie Eanes - according to the article, the niece of Eula Phillips who was murdered on Christmas Eve, 1885. Mrs. Eanes had disappeared from her home on Christmas Eve Day, the same day her aunt was murdered. Mrs. Eames' husband, Hugh, had died six months earlier in Austin, under circumstances strongly suggestive of poisoning. Mrs. Eanes was arrested because one of her children was discovered, having been murdered with a pick axe and buried in a shallow grave. The child was a seven year old boy, of mixed race.

Mrs. Phillips, one of the white women listed under the servant girl murders, according to testimony in the trial of her husband, was almost certainly a sometimes prostitute who had worked occasionally in a brothel operated by an African-American woman. See Fort Worth Daily Gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) February 14, 1886, Page 1,  "The State Capital:  A Sister of Jame Phillips Give Damaging Testimony Against Eula Phillips' Virtue" which I found with this search http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064205/1886-02-14/ed-1/seq-1/;words=Phillips+Eula

Why are these details important? The article seems to suggest that the idea that the murders were carried out by a gang of African American men was a product of racism. Mrs. Phillips and her family had substantial contacts with a criminal element within the African American community and this makes the idea of her murder by an African American gang more plausible. (The fact that Mrs. Hancock, who was, from what I could find, of impeccable character, was killed at almost the same time, could mean that the murderer or murderers simply made a mistake in killing her, which they corrected shortly thereafter.)


 * The Austin Statesman under John Cardwell, and their City Editors Wm. Bowen and Will Lambert, were racists, evidenced by the racial slurs that appear in that paper throughout 1885. The article asserts that the attitudes of the the reporters (white racists) influenced their reporting about the murders. They seized on any eyewitness evidence that implicated black men, because they believed white men southern men would not commit this sort of murder.

Irene Cross, according to press reports from around the time, identified her killer as being an African American man. Fort Worth Daily Gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) March 09, 1887, Page 6 (at the end of the story entitled "The Blanton Murder.") Lucinda Boddy, too, identified an African American man, Doc Wood, as her attacker. Fort Worth Daily Gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) October 01, 1885, Page 8. The reports of her testimony are vague, but seem to suggest that she either thought there was more than one attacker, or at least thought this possible.

An article about the trial of Moses Hancock, tried for the murder of Sue (or Susan) Hancock says, "In official quarters it has been the general belief that all the servant girl murders committed in this city in 1885 was the work of a half dozen negro desperadoes, of whom Oliver Townsend is one" ... "Sheriff Hornsby testified that since the death of the colored man Elgin, and the sending to the pentitentiary of Oliver Townsend, there had been no mysterious murders in the city. He took a plaster cast of Elgin' foot after his death and one toe was missing.  His foot corresponded with a blood track he examined on the Phillips porch the morning after her murder." Fort Worth Daily Gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, June 03, 1887, Page 5.

The article I quote above "A Female Fiend" about Mollie Eanes, near the very end says "It now transpires that Detective Hennessy of Houston told a citizen here that the three negroes, Glen Drummer, Oliver Townsend and Doc Woods, who were in jail here last summer but released, are, in his opinion, the perpetrators of the series of awful crimes. Lucinday Body, one of the servant girl victims, swore positively that Doc Woods was one of the murderers at the Gracie Vane tragedy last September, but authorities turned these negroes loose.  Hennessy is alo reported as saying that the murder would stop while they were in jail, but would start again a soon a they were out, all of which has been verified."


 * Mollie Eanes was a white woman who married a black man named Eanes. She took his name when she married him, but he was related to the Eanes family as a former slave who was owned by the Eanes, a prominent white family.

There is an awful coincidence in the niece of Eula Phillips fleeing on the same day that Eula Phillips was killed, and her son having been murdered with an ax. I don't think they ever found her eleven year old daughter. It is an awful coincidence that her huband would also have been murdered by poisoning in the midst of the servant girl murders.


 * It was determined that Mollie Eanes poisoned her husband. She was convicted for the murders and died at Huntsville years later.

Such a series of improbably coincidences suggests that they were not merely chance, but instead she was involved in something which tied them together. I ran out of material to research, so could find no further connections or potential connections to prostitution. But if a prostitution ring were involved, it would make murder of several young women by a gang more comprehensible. It would explain the rapes which the newspapers reported to have occurred as acts intended to instill terror, rather than merely manifestations of sexual sadism. There was some discussion in various places of some sort of relationship between Grace Vance and Oliver Townsend, and authorities found a watch on Grace Vance's wrist which had been stolen in a burglary earlier that night. This too would sort of fit with pimp mentality, perhaps. I think that the possiblility that these were the acts of a prostitution gang are at least as plausible as the malay cook theory. Hypercallipygian (talk) 05:00, 19 April 2011 (UTC)


 * The Malay Cook theory belongs to the newspapermen who were trying to link Jack the Ripper to the Austin murder.

Victim List Doesn't Check Out
When looking at the footnotes on the victims, I see that Clara Strand, Christine Martenson and Clara Dick do not appear in the footnoted reference. None of the contemporaneous newspaper reports which I was able to find through the Library of Congress Chronicling America search engine mentioned the three victims above by name, though I did read a mention of two Swedish servant girls who had been injured. see - Fort Worth daily gazette September 29, 1885,  http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064205/1885-09-29/ed-1/seq-1/


 * Strand and Martenson are named as victims by the newspapers, but because they survived the attack, they were not listed as victims of the murderer when the reward was offered for the murderer of the other victims listed.

The Servant Girl Murders (Austin, Texas 1885) by J. R. Galloway, does not list Clara Dick in its index.


 * That would be a mistake on the part of Galloway. Clara Dick was blinded by a blow from a hatchet by a white man who then tried to drag her out her bedroom window. Her mother rescued her and recieved a blow from the hatchet by the man, who she testified was white. Clara and her mother blamed her husband, a hack-driver named Charlie Dick, but Dick was exonerated by Waco authorities and eyewitnesses who placed him in Waco at the time of the attack on Clara.

The two Swedish girls are mentioned, p. 15, et. seq., but the attack is of a different sort than the others mentioned in the wiki article. The attack involved gunshots, and was part of a wave of attacks that night, including at least three other attacks on servant quarters. The Galloway book doesn't include the Swedish girls' last names.


 * That would be Galloway's omission--the names are found online in the 1885 directory for the city of Austin.

It does have newspaper articles detailing many, many more attacks, though they were not fatal, and some were definitely carried out by a gang or gang of ruffians/criminals. There was a series of attacks March 13, 1885, another series of attacks on March 18, including the Swedish girls, more attacks on April 29, more on May 1, then the murder of Eliza Shelley on May 7, then May 22 the murder of Irene Cross. There had been another attack by someone on the same night, then three attacks on servant girls on June 2, including one in which an African American servant named Jane Coleman was shot and wounded. Several of the contemporaneou newspaper articles compiled in the Galloway book mention "dozens" of night-time or early morning attacks aimed at quarters of "servant girls." ("Girl" in the parlance of the time seemed to mean female servant, and often the attacks were on mature women. Hypercallipygian (talk) 21:47, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Suspect Nathan Elgin
See The Servant Girl Murdersby J.R.Galloway. Sheriff Hornsby, in testifying at the trial of Moses Hancock (husband of Susan Hancock, who was found not guilty) said since the death of the colored man Elgin and the sending to the penitentary of OLiver Townsend,there had been no mysterious murders in Austin. See Galloway at 311. Oliver Townsend was sentenced to ten years in prison for burglary. See Galloway footnote 97. "Elgin" was Nathan Elgin, who was shot by a policeman during an altercation on February 8, 1886. He subequently died of the wound. The altercation entailed Elgin siezing, beating and dragging away a young woman. The incident commenced at a saloon, where a large number of drunk people were congregated. Elgin "knocked down and beat a colored girl named Julia, whom he dragged away two blocks to a house where he continued beat her." (Galloway at 312, quoting an account in The San Antonio Express, 10 Feb. 1886. The policeman was called to the house and discovered Elgin beating the girl there.  The (white) policeman seems to have been working with two other men, whom I infer to have been African American, and whom he directed to handcuff Elgin. Elgin fought them, using a knife. Someone in a crowd which was gathered shot, probably at the policeman, who perceived the shot to have come from Elgin.  He returned fire, hitting Elgin in the spine.  Elgin died a couple of days later from the wound.  The girl said Elgin was trying to rape her, and intended to kill her fror resisting.   A plaster cast was taken of Elgin's foot.  The plaster cast matched bare foot tracks found at the Ramey murder scene, including missing a toe and it also matched bare foot tracks found at the Phillips murder scene.  (See Galloway at 311-313). Elgin was about nineteen in 1885. He had had previous run-ins with the law. The woman he was beating said he had intended to "outrage" her. See Galloway at 315-315. Galloway discusses Elgin as a possible perpetrator, though he comes to no definite conclusion. Certainly, with the evidence of the tracks, he seems a very likely candidate for the Ramey murder. A silver watch, taken in a burglary the same night, was found on the person of Ms. Vance. See Galloway at 279. (She was dragged out of bed to be murdered, and could not possibly have stolen the watch herself that night, so the watch was left by the murderer.) Sheriff Hornsby's idea that Townsend (a known burglar) and Elgin were involved in a series of break-ins, buglaries and rapes is quite plausible.72.35.120.145 (talk) 18:56, 4 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Sheriff Matt Hornsby's testimony was that the bloody barefoot print on the floor at Phillips' was a match with that of Nathan Elgin's foot, which was missing a little toe. Hornsby does not testify that Elgin was the murderer, only that there were no more murders after Elgin's death. Hornsby was called by the defense to cast doubt on the state's theory that James Phillips left the bloody print. The defense also tried to show that Phillips' mother left the bloody print, and showed that her little toe did not touch the ground when she walked in her bare feet. The State's theory was that Phillips' left the bloody print. Elgin was married, and the woman he was dragging from a dance hall (referred to as a "house" in the article) was his wife. The officer was surrounded by people trying to protect Elgin from the cop, who shot Elgin in the back anyway. Elgin was paralyzed and died a few days later. His family believed a great wrong had been done to their son, and that the police cooked up the story about him that made it to the newspaper. There is a later article where the reporter for the Statesman wrote that he determined there was no evidence he could find that Elgin was involved in the murder of Phillips, or that he died the way the police claimed.

Eh? How was this accomplished?
" Five of the women were dragged, unconscious but still alive, ... " - did he chloroform the victims? 104.169.39.45 (talk) 06:12, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Citation, Rewrite, and Expansion
This article is poorly developed, sourced, and written and requires significant attention. Some information in the article is unsourced and either needs to be given proper citations from reliable sources or removed if none can be found. Most of the sections in the article are poorly written/developed and need to be rewritten entirely. Information and sections can be moved and distilled into the following sections The article is also missing important information on the Background of the area before and during the murders which needs to be added with proper citations from reliable sources. The article is also missing information on the killer's Modus Operandi which needs to be added to the article with proper citations from reliable sources. Cleanup and reorganization of the article is also necessary as there are pieces of information that can be moved into different sections: Background, Murders, Modus Operandi, Investigation (Includes sub-section on Suspects), and Popular culture. All of these section should be properly formatted and each piece of information given proper citations from reliable sources. This article has potential to become GA and FA if enough attention is given to it. Hopefully someone comes along and gives it and other articles on Unidentified serial killers the attention they need to fulfill their full potential.--Paleface Jack 16:51, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Not sure if this is the right way to contribute but: I totally agree with Paleface Jack. This is just an entire mess. I was planning to pick up Hollandsworth's The Midnight Assassin, so I'm happy to come back to this and do a little work with clarity and citations, but I'm a novice at best and this whole entry is a disaster. Tyrnill (talk) 21:11, 30 March 2023 (UTC)