Cold Case Collective

The Servant Girl Annihilator: Was America’s First Serial Killer the Real Jack the Ripper?. Content Warning.

I. A City Frozen in Fear The humid Texas night of December 30, 1884, carried the metallic scent of blood through Austin’s servant quarters. By dawn, the mutilated body of Mary "Mollie" Smith—a 25-year-old Black cook—would be discovered spiked to her own backyard fence like a butchered animal. Her skull had been crushed with such force that fragments of bone later turned up in the soil ten feet away.