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days later. The victim, Irene Cross, was yet another black female servant. This time, it seemed, there had been no axe; it appeared that she had been stabbed in the head. One arm was almost severed from the rest of her body. In this case, the authorities arrested no one.
    In August, the murderer entered the cottage of Rebecca Ramey, just one block south of where Eliza Shelley had been murdered three months earlier. Approaching her bed, he knocked her out, and then abducted her daughter Mary. The 11-year-old was taken outside, raped and murdered. Again, there was no axe; the girl was stabbed through both ears with an iron rod. When she regained consciousness, Rebecca Ramey, a black servant of a man named Valentine Weed, remembered nothing of use.
    The following month, the killer gained entrance to a servants’ cabin behind the house of Major W. D. Dunham by climbing through a window. Stories about the night in question are varied and confused, but all agree that the first to be attacked was a man named Orange Washington, whose skull was caved in by a blow from an axe. Washington’s common-law wife, Gracie Vance, was dragged out of the cabin and raped outside. Her friend, a visiting servant named Lucinda Boddy, received an axe blow to her head and was also raped.
    The assaults ended when Major Dunham realized the noises were something much more than a domestic dispute, as he’d initially thought. Gun in hand, the major rushed outside, and the murderer fled. Gracie’s body was found in the stables; her head had been beaten in with a brick. In one hand she clutched a gold watch, presumably torn from the killer during the struggle. Also present was an unidentified horse, saddled and tied. Both appeared to be excellent clues as to the identity of the assailant, and yet they proved to be of no use.
    After detectives were brought in from Houston to assist in the investigation, two black men, Oliver Townsend and Dock Woods, were arrested. The evidence used against the two was less than compelling: a comment someone had overheard in which Townsend had told Woods he wanted to kill Gracie Vance.
    In attempting to extract a confession from another suspect, a private detective agency resorted to torture and was discredited. Grasping at straws, the marshal arrested Walter Spencer, the husband of Mollie Smith. His trial, based on the most improbable of theories, took just three days and resulted in an acquittal.
    There can be little doubt that in the midst of all this horror, some residents of Austin took comfort in the knowledge that all the Annihilator’s victims had been black and were either servants or their close relatives. All this changed on Christmas Eve when a middle-class white man, Moses Hancock, awoke to find that his wife, Sue, was missing. He soon found her lying behind their house. An axe had been used to split open her head, and a thin rod had been pushed into her brain. She had also been raped.
    That same night, the body of another white woman, Eula Phillips, was found pinned under lumber in the alleyway of one of the city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. Her husband was found unconscious, having been hit on the back of the head with an axe.
    The next day, hundreds of Austin residents left their Christmas festivities to attend an emergency meeting. A variety of initiatives – from increased lighting to early closure of taverns – were undertaken in the hopes of preventing further attacks. While the effect these moves had can be debated, the fact remains that the Servant Girl Annihilator never struck again.
    Among the great mysteries surrounding the Annihilator is his change in victim type. What might have caused him to switch from poor, black female servants to comfortably-off white women? In 1885, some thought the answer obvious: Sue Hancock and Eula Phillips weren’t victims of the Annihilator, but had been killed by their own husbands. Though it would appear unlikely that two men who did not know one another would