How Police Failed to Find America's First Serial Killer

Between December 1884 and December 1885, six women and a twelve year old girl were found murdered in the small city of Austin, Texas, their bodies mutilated by axes, knives, bricks and even iron rods that had been driven into their ears. At the time, the concept of a serial killer was unknown. Clueless police officers and bumbling private detectives initially made arrests of uneducated young black men. But as the murders continued, panic-stricken citizens began to speculate that a diabolical but brilliant "Midnight Assassin" was on the loose: a man driven to destroy one woman after another in almost ritualistic fashion. A correspondent for the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's famous newspaper, went so far as to declare that the Midnight Assassin's attacks "may well give to history a new story of crime—the first instance of a man who killed in order to gratify his passion."

Before the violent spree ended, at least a dozen men, among them husbands and boyfriends of the victims, would be arrested in connection with the murders. One of the killings would set off a torrid sex scandal involving several of the city's most prominent leaders, including a candidate for governor. And three years later, after no progress had been made in the Austin investigation, detectives in London would speculate that the Midnight Assassin had traveled to England and become Jack the Ripper. Who was the Midnight Assassin and why did he go on such a rampage? Esquire is proud to present the first two chapters of Skip Hollandsworth's book The Midnight Assassin, out today. The story begins in the early morning hours of December 31, 1884—New Year's Eve.

“the number of serial murders has gone through the roof”

The number of documented serial murders has gone through the roof. I don’t think we have any real idea if the actual number is increasing or not.

I mean, we didn’t even know about the phenomenon until the last century or so, so before that they could have been just as common and we just did not realize what was happening. Our capabilities to detect such things have also increased steadily since we started tracking these killers, as we developed fingerprinting, criminal psychology, different kinds of forensic analysis, and DNA testing. So who knows if the increase is actually an increase, or an artifact of our increased ability to detect the patterns in these crimes?

My favorite candidate for the Ripper is one you can find hiding in plain sight in the case files. He was the first person known to be at the scene of the first murder, a man named Charles Cross.

I suspect him because:

* A police constable passed the scene of the crime not 30 minutes before he “found the body” and there was nothing there, so we know Cross was at the scene within a short frame of time as when the Ripper was there.
* He didn’t immediate report the body to police upon finding it. Instead, another man was coming down the street, and Cross called him over and said “look at this, there’s a woman over here”. Had Cross just discovered the body? Or was he the killer who came up with this “discovered the body” story when he was surprised by a passerby?
* This victim was not mutilated much at all compared to the other victims. This could be due to the killer progressively getting more brutal, or it could be because the killer was interrupted, for example, when a passerby turned on to the street and surprised him.
* He left the scene, apparently he “didn’t want to be late for work”. Him and the passerby did report the body to police after they ran into a constable. But I’m not so sure he would have done that if the passerby hadn’t been walking along with him. At that point, if he had been the killer, he had no choice but to go along with the ruse.
* Another constable discovered the body on his own before those two reported it. Because of this, there was confusion about who actually discovered the body, because a lot of newspapers reported that it was first discovered by a constable. Thus, in the confusion, not a lot of attention was paid by researchers to Cross until recently.

There are other interesting points about the guy too if you delve into his background. For example, he regularly walked to and from work late at night or early in the morning through the neighborhoods where the murders happened, right at the times when they were happening. He also wore an apron, and many witnesses who reported seeing the presumed killer said he wore an apron.

I’ve read up on our current crime trends in this century, and although the number of murders fluctuates from slight to nearly steady throughout the years, the number of serial murders has gone through the roof.

If the notion of serial murderer has any validity, there must have been many of them long predating 1884.

It would defy credulity that serial murdering suddenly became possible in 1884.

Interesting. I thought that the first serial killer was in Chicago during the World’s Fair, as detailed in “Devil in the White City”.

What about Vlad Tepes (1431-1477, aka the Impaler, or Count Drakoola)?

Of course, he had the power of the state behind him. So, to be fair, if officially sanctioned, even democratically elected, serial murderers are to get due credit, looking at the 20th century, you'd have to include the wide mustache (Dzhugashvili) and the narrow mustache (Schicklgruber). Between them, they put all other serial murderers in the shade!

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