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in the country in 1990 and 1991. According to the Criminal Justice Policy Council, six Texas cities—Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, and Fort Worth—were among the top fourteen most dangerous cities in the United States.
    Austin scored the fourth-worst crime ranking in Texas in 1990. The major reason was due to property crimes, where it ranked fourth overall. Its violent-crime ranking was seventh with only forty-six homicides committed that year. There were 280 reported rapes, 1,461 robberies, and 1,539 assaults. Not too bad for a city with nearly half a million residents.
    These lower violent-crime totals, however, do not mask the fact that Austin has a very spectacular history of violence.
    Many people are familiar with the 1966 University of Texas Tower massacre perpetrated by former college student Charles Whitman. The sniper has been immortalized in several media, including a book, A Sniper in the Tower , by Gary M. Lavergne, a television movie entitled The Deadly Tower , an independent film entitled The Delicate Art of the Rifle , and in song with Kinky Friedman’s “The Ballad of Charles Whitman.” He is even admired for his handiwork in the Stanley Kubrick 1987 film Full Metal Jacket by Gunny Sergeant Hartman who talks about “what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do.”
    There are several cases, however, that have not been splashed all over the headlines, but they did spill blood on the Austin concrete.
    One of the most notorious cases took place in downtown Austin from 1884 and 1885. A serial killer known as the “Servant Girl Annihilator” hacked up eight women, most of them black servants, with an ax. The murders predated the more infamous “Jack the Ripper” killings by three years. In both cases, no killer has ever been found.
    Eighty years later, on July 18, 1965—one year before Charles Whitman went ballistic—James Cross Jr. committed a multiple murder in an apartment on Manor Road. Cross raped and strangled two University of Texas Chi Omega sorority members, Shirley Stark and Susan Rigsby. When he was finished, he stuffed their bodies into a closet and invited his girlfriend over for a dinner rendezvous.
    In 1974, two young Mormon missionaries, Mark Fischer and Gary Darley, were dismembered with a band saw in a taxidermy shop. The killer, Robert Kleasen, was convicted, but he was then released from prison three years later after it was determined that evidence against him was seized by police illegally.
    In 1984, Henry Lee Lucas, drifter and alleged serial killer of more than three hundred people, was convicted in the “Orange Socks” case of a girl whose body was found in Georgetown, just north of Austin, in 1979. The classic independent horror film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is loosely based on Lucas and his buddy Ottis Toole’s murderous misdeeds. Most of Lucas’s confessions turned out to be bunk. Apparently, several police organizations used Lucas to clear out a bevy of unsolved murders.
    On October 4, 1983, another unsolved quadruple arson murder occurred. Jesus Gomez, sixty-nine, Louise Nash, sixty-seven, Frances Reyes, forty-five, and Natalio Rodriguez, sixty, were killed while they slept inside a boarding house East Second Street in East Austin. Some unknown killer or killers tossed a flammable accelerant into two rooms and lit them on fire. Many people believed the case went unsolved because no one in the Austin Police Department cared about the victims, who were low-income Hispanics.
    In 1989, twenty-one-year-old University of Texas premed student Mark Kilroy disappeared while on a spring break trip to Matamoros, Mexico. One month later, his body, along with thirteen others, was unearthed from a shallow grave on a ranch called Rancho Santa Elena. Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a charismatic religious fanatic, sacrificed young people as an occult offering for protection during his drug-smuggling escapades. Kilroy was one of his victims. The case was also