Annihilation In Austin: The Servant Girl Annihilator Murders of 1885
Murder. Chaos. Outrage.
This was the mode in Texas' capital city, Austin from 1884 to 1885. The city had been haunted by a string of bloody murders. Women were not just killed--they were dragged alive from their beds, taken outside where they were often tortured and then murdered.
Six of the victims, all women, were found dead with sharp objects inserted in their ears.
As horrifying as the murders were, what's more, horrifying is that the person who committed these heinous acts of violence was never found. To this day it remains one of the most famous unsolved crimes. It has long been suspected by several noted historians that the real killer may have been none other than Jack the Ripper.
Written with gripping, page-turning suspense, this book brings you back in time to Austin, Texas, so you can experience the horror and panic for yourself. Faint at heart turn away!
This was the mode in Texas' capital city, Austin from 1884 to 1885. The city had been haunted by a string of bloody murders. Women were not just killed--they were dragged alive from their beds, taken outside where they were often tortured and then murdered.
Six of the victims, all women, were found dead with sharp objects inserted in their ears.
As horrifying as the murders were, what's more, horrifying is that the person who committed these heinous acts of violence was never found. To this day it remains one of the most famous unsolved crimes. It has long been suspected by several noted historians that the real killer may have been none other than Jack the Ripper.
Written with gripping, page-turning suspense, this book brings you back in time to Austin, Texas, so you can experience the horror and panic for yourself. Faint at heart turn away!
Buy Now!
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Excerpt
Chapter 1: Bloody Work
December 31st, 1884
“Mr. Tom, for God’s sake do something to help me! Somebody has nearly killed me!”
It was three o’clock in the morning and Walter Spencer had staggered into Tom Chalmers’ bedroom, waking the seventeen-year-old from a deep sleep and scaring him half to death. Tom lit the kerosene lamp on the table next to his bed and was horrified by what the dim light revealed. Spencer had spoken true; by the look of him, he had taken the beating of his life. He had five or six deep gashes to his head, his face was swollen and disfigured as if pieces of his skull had been knocked out of place, and he was absolutely covered in blood.
Spencer was the boyfriend of Mollie Smith, the servant girl who had been working for Tom’s sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. William K. Hall, for the past month or so. The two of them lived together as common-law man and wife in a small apartment behind the kitchen, and neither one of them had ever been in the least bit of trouble. Tom jumped out of bed and asked Spencer what had happened to him, but the injured man was only able to mutter a stream of semi-coherent thoughts. All he claimed to know for certain was that he had woken up in his present condition and Mollie was nowhere to be found.
Tom knew Spencer to be an honest and honorable man, but he suspected that he wasn’t telling the full truth. He had heard from the Halls’ other servants that Mollie had a fiery spirit and a ferocious temper. Before she had come to Austin, her previous employer in Waco had walked in on her threatening to kill her former lover with a broken bottle. Tom wasn’t aware of any tension between the couple, but Spencer was something of a meek man, and he had seen Mollie boss him around from time to time. He must have done something to anger the girl and she had lost control of herself and beaten him to the brink of death. Now, he was most likely lying in an effort to keep Mollie out of jail.
Tom decided that a lovers’ quarrel between Negroes was none of his concern, so he told Spencer to leave his room and go to the doctor’s house to get himself fixed up. Spencer asked Tom to help him get there; he was so weak that he was afraid he might not make it on his own. But Tom refused. His sister was very ill and he said he didn’t feel right leaving the house in the middle of the night in case she might need him. Of course, there were other people at home, including Mr. Hall himself and Mrs. Hall’s nurse, Nancy, but Walter Spencer was no fool and he knew better than to argue with a white man. He did as he was told and shuffled out of the room and out the back door of the house while Tom put out the lamp and went back to bed.
In the morning, William Hall came downstairs and found that the fires weren’t lit and breakfast wasn’t on the table, which was very odd indeed. As long as Mollie had been working for him she had never once been delinquent in her duties. But after learning of Tom’s late-night encounter with Spencer, Mr. Hall assumed that Mollie must have left town to avoid trouble with the law, just as she had done in Waco. Apparently, the willful young woman was leaving a string of spurned lovers across the entire great state of Texas. Well, servant girls were easy enough to find. New people were arriving in Austin looking for work every day; he would have no trouble replacing her.
The rest of the morning proceeded as normal, until around nine o’clock when Mr. Hall heard shouts coming from the backyard. He rushed outside to see what was going on and found a neighbor’s servant boy standing by the outhouse. The boy had seen something strange lying on the ground and had walked over to investigate. What he found had stricken him with horror.
It was Mollie Smith. The pretty, young, mixed-race girl was lying dead on the ground, her head cleaved nearly in two. Her blood had soaked into the snow around her, staining it dark red, her nightgown had been ripped to shreds, no longer covering much of anything, and her legs were spread wide. A trail led to the back door of the house, indicating that Mollie had been dragged to where she now lay, half-hidden in the tall grass behind the outhouse. Mr. Hall followed the trail to Mollie’s living quarters and what he found inside the room was nearly as frightening as the sight of the dead girl herself.
The apartment had practically been repainted with Mollie’s blood. It seemed as if there was more blood in the room than could have possibly fit in the human body. There was blood on the bed, soaking the pillows, linens and mattress, there was blood on the floor, seeping into the boards, there was blood spattered all across the walls, and worst of all…there was a bloody axe at the foot of the bed. Mr. Hall wasted no time in sending for Austin’s marshal, Grooms Lee.
Marshal Lee was not the most popular lawman in the state of Texas. In fact, earlier that year, he had nearly been impeached when it became known that he and the twelve officers who made up Austin’s police force seemed to spend most of their time “investigating” saloons, brothels and gambling dens whether there had been any crimes reported in the area or not. At best, Lee could be described as unfit, and many suspected that he was utterly corrupt, but he was the son of a powerful local politician, so ousting him from his position had proven impossible. When it came to law enforcement, he was all the city of Austin had.
Lee had seen a murder or two in his time as marshal, but never anything like what had occurred at the Halls’ residence. The brutality with which this poor colored girl had been attacked seemed inhuman. The condition of her room indicated that there had been a desperate struggle; it was clear Mollie had not gone down without a fight. Furniture had been overturned, a looking glass had been shattered and there were bloody handprints smeared across the doorframe. It seemed as though she had sustained her injuries inside the room, and was then dragged outside behind the outhouse where she was raped while dying or possibly already dead.
While examining the ruin of Mollie’s body, Lee found a set of wide, bare footprints in the snow. He followed them about a block away, to the shore of Shoal Creek, where they seemed to simply disappear. He sent for the tracker, who brought his pack of bloodhounds led by the surly but trusty Old George. If there were a scent to be found, Old George would almost certainly find it. Or at least, that was all Marshal Lee could hope for. In the late nineteenth century, law enforcement had yet to develop much of anything in the way of investigative tactics. There were no blood-spatter analysts or DNA tests, and even the science of fingerprinting was still a few years from becoming common practice. Unless a crime had been witnessed or confessed to, there was little that could be done to find the culprit. The bloodhounds were essentially the only tools at Lee’s disposal, and in this case, the dogs had come up empty. That left Lee with no other option but to discern motive and means.
Lee believed that the most obvious scenario was a variation of what Tom Chalmers had thought when Walter Spencer had awakened him in the small hours of the morning. Perhaps he and Mollie had gotten into an argument that had gotten out of hand. After all, Mollie’s temper was well documented; maybe she hit Spencer and he had fought back and killed her. But that seemed unlikely for many reasons. First of all, by most accounts, the couple was very happy and no one had ever seen them exchange any angry words. And Walter was such a relaxed, easy-going young man, it was doubtful that he had it in him to commit such a violent act as to strike his common-law wife with an axe, much less drag her out behind the outhouse and have his way with her body before going back inside to seek help from Tom Chalmers. And where would he have gotten the axe? It didn’t belong to the Halls and Walter wouldn’t have had the money to buy it himself. Lee supposed it could have been stolen, but that suggested premeditation, and if Spencer were the murderer, it would surely have been a crime of passion. Furthermore, Dr. Bart, the man who treated Spencer’s wounds, said that his injuries didn’t come from an axe, but seemed to have been inflicted by a rod of iron or steel, and that weapon had not been found. Why would Spencer have disposed of the tool he had been attacked with, yet leave the murder weapon behind for all to see? It simply didn’t add up.
Later in the afternoon, after Spencer had more or less regained his senses, Marshal Lee and the crime reporter from the Austin Daily Statesman, the local newspaper, interviewed the injured man, hoping to gain some new insight. Spencer, still in terrible pain, stated that he and Mollie had gone to bed around nine or ten in the evening. He mentioned that Mollie didn’t feel well and that she had asked him to wake her early in the morning. The next thing he claimed to remember was waking up injured and finding Mollie gone, just as he had told Tom Chalmers. When asked if he knew of anyone who may have wished him and Mollie harm, the only name Spencer could come up with was William “Lem” Brooks.
Lem was Mollie’s old boyfriend, the man she had nearly killed with a broken bottle back in Waco. When she had moved to Austin, he had followed her and not long ago, he had challenged Spencer to a fight. Mollie’s vicious murder and rape certainly seemed as if it could be attributed to jealousy, so Marshal Lee had Brooks arrested.
Brooks may have had a solid motive, but once he was questioned, his guilt became doubtful. Lem admitted to the incident in Waco, but claimed to have no further quarrel with Mollie and denied Spencer’s claims that he had wanted to fight him. He swore he was innocent and even had an alibi to back it up. Lem said he had been at a dance on Sand Hill, nearly two miles from the Halls’ house on West Pecan Street, and several witnesses had seen him there as late as four o’clock in the morning, an hour after Walter Spencer had woken Tom Chalmers. But every last one of Lem’s witnesses were Negroes, which made their credibility suspect at best, as far as Marshal Lee was concerned.
On New Years’ Day, 1885, an inquest was held to decide if there was enough evidence to bring Brooks to trial. The six white men who made up the coroner’s jury listened to witness testimony behind closed doors for four straight days. Each day, the press was denied access to the proceedings and each day, they complained about it in the papers. Clearly, the secrecy that surrounded the inquest meant that there were details of the crime that were being kept from the public at large. But wouldn’t it benefit the investigation if everyone knew exactly what had occurred that horrible night? Wouldn’t the perpetrator be found more easily if the whole town knew the exact truth of every clue found at the scene?
When the inquest was called to an end, no new information was presented to the public, but it was announced that William “Lem” Brooks would indeed stand trial for the murder of Mollie Smith. By the time the preliminary trial was scheduled, however, Brooks was freed due to lack of evidence. No other suspect was charged.
* * *
The final day of 1884 had brought with it one of the most horrible crimes Austin, Texas had ever seen. But the murder of Mollie Smith was only the beginning. Before 1885 was over, the people of Austin would find themselves in the center of a violent and terrifying mystery that would reach from the lowest of the city’s lower class all the way up to its highest of high society. The capital of Texas had become the hunting ground of a terrifying new type of criminal. And although everyone who lived through the events of that year would remember them for the rest of their lives, they would be all but lost in the annals of history for over a hundred years.
December 31st, 1884
“Mr. Tom, for God’s sake do something to help me! Somebody has nearly killed me!”
It was three o’clock in the morning and Walter Spencer had staggered into Tom Chalmers’ bedroom, waking the seventeen-year-old from a deep sleep and scaring him half to death. Tom lit the kerosene lamp on the table next to his bed and was horrified by what the dim light revealed. Spencer had spoken true; by the look of him, he had taken the beating of his life. He had five or six deep gashes to his head, his face was swollen and disfigured as if pieces of his skull had been knocked out of place, and he was absolutely covered in blood.
Spencer was the boyfriend of Mollie Smith, the servant girl who had been working for Tom’s sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. William K. Hall, for the past month or so. The two of them lived together as common-law man and wife in a small apartment behind the kitchen, and neither one of them had ever been in the least bit of trouble. Tom jumped out of bed and asked Spencer what had happened to him, but the injured man was only able to mutter a stream of semi-coherent thoughts. All he claimed to know for certain was that he had woken up in his present condition and Mollie was nowhere to be found.
Tom knew Spencer to be an honest and honorable man, but he suspected that he wasn’t telling the full truth. He had heard from the Halls’ other servants that Mollie had a fiery spirit and a ferocious temper. Before she had come to Austin, her previous employer in Waco had walked in on her threatening to kill her former lover with a broken bottle. Tom wasn’t aware of any tension between the couple, but Spencer was something of a meek man, and he had seen Mollie boss him around from time to time. He must have done something to anger the girl and she had lost control of herself and beaten him to the brink of death. Now, he was most likely lying in an effort to keep Mollie out of jail.
Tom decided that a lovers’ quarrel between Negroes was none of his concern, so he told Spencer to leave his room and go to the doctor’s house to get himself fixed up. Spencer asked Tom to help him get there; he was so weak that he was afraid he might not make it on his own. But Tom refused. His sister was very ill and he said he didn’t feel right leaving the house in the middle of the night in case she might need him. Of course, there were other people at home, including Mr. Hall himself and Mrs. Hall’s nurse, Nancy, but Walter Spencer was no fool and he knew better than to argue with a white man. He did as he was told and shuffled out of the room and out the back door of the house while Tom put out the lamp and went back to bed.
In the morning, William Hall came downstairs and found that the fires weren’t lit and breakfast wasn’t on the table, which was very odd indeed. As long as Mollie had been working for him she had never once been delinquent in her duties. But after learning of Tom’s late-night encounter with Spencer, Mr. Hall assumed that Mollie must have left town to avoid trouble with the law, just as she had done in Waco. Apparently, the willful young woman was leaving a string of spurned lovers across the entire great state of Texas. Well, servant girls were easy enough to find. New people were arriving in Austin looking for work every day; he would have no trouble replacing her.
The rest of the morning proceeded as normal, until around nine o’clock when Mr. Hall heard shouts coming from the backyard. He rushed outside to see what was going on and found a neighbor’s servant boy standing by the outhouse. The boy had seen something strange lying on the ground and had walked over to investigate. What he found had stricken him with horror.
It was Mollie Smith. The pretty, young, mixed-race girl was lying dead on the ground, her head cleaved nearly in two. Her blood had soaked into the snow around her, staining it dark red, her nightgown had been ripped to shreds, no longer covering much of anything, and her legs were spread wide. A trail led to the back door of the house, indicating that Mollie had been dragged to where she now lay, half-hidden in the tall grass behind the outhouse. Mr. Hall followed the trail to Mollie’s living quarters and what he found inside the room was nearly as frightening as the sight of the dead girl herself.
The apartment had practically been repainted with Mollie’s blood. It seemed as if there was more blood in the room than could have possibly fit in the human body. There was blood on the bed, soaking the pillows, linens and mattress, there was blood on the floor, seeping into the boards, there was blood spattered all across the walls, and worst of all…there was a bloody axe at the foot of the bed. Mr. Hall wasted no time in sending for Austin’s marshal, Grooms Lee.
Marshal Lee was not the most popular lawman in the state of Texas. In fact, earlier that year, he had nearly been impeached when it became known that he and the twelve officers who made up Austin’s police force seemed to spend most of their time “investigating” saloons, brothels and gambling dens whether there had been any crimes reported in the area or not. At best, Lee could be described as unfit, and many suspected that he was utterly corrupt, but he was the son of a powerful local politician, so ousting him from his position had proven impossible. When it came to law enforcement, he was all the city of Austin had.
Lee had seen a murder or two in his time as marshal, but never anything like what had occurred at the Halls’ residence. The brutality with which this poor colored girl had been attacked seemed inhuman. The condition of her room indicated that there had been a desperate struggle; it was clear Mollie had not gone down without a fight. Furniture had been overturned, a looking glass had been shattered and there were bloody handprints smeared across the doorframe. It seemed as though she had sustained her injuries inside the room, and was then dragged outside behind the outhouse where she was raped while dying or possibly already dead.
While examining the ruin of Mollie’s body, Lee found a set of wide, bare footprints in the snow. He followed them about a block away, to the shore of Shoal Creek, where they seemed to simply disappear. He sent for the tracker, who brought his pack of bloodhounds led by the surly but trusty Old George. If there were a scent to be found, Old George would almost certainly find it. Or at least, that was all Marshal Lee could hope for. In the late nineteenth century, law enforcement had yet to develop much of anything in the way of investigative tactics. There were no blood-spatter analysts or DNA tests, and even the science of fingerprinting was still a few years from becoming common practice. Unless a crime had been witnessed or confessed to, there was little that could be done to find the culprit. The bloodhounds were essentially the only tools at Lee’s disposal, and in this case, the dogs had come up empty. That left Lee with no other option but to discern motive and means.
Lee believed that the most obvious scenario was a variation of what Tom Chalmers had thought when Walter Spencer had awakened him in the small hours of the morning. Perhaps he and Mollie had gotten into an argument that had gotten out of hand. After all, Mollie’s temper was well documented; maybe she hit Spencer and he had fought back and killed her. But that seemed unlikely for many reasons. First of all, by most accounts, the couple was very happy and no one had ever seen them exchange any angry words. And Walter was such a relaxed, easy-going young man, it was doubtful that he had it in him to commit such a violent act as to strike his common-law wife with an axe, much less drag her out behind the outhouse and have his way with her body before going back inside to seek help from Tom Chalmers. And where would he have gotten the axe? It didn’t belong to the Halls and Walter wouldn’t have had the money to buy it himself. Lee supposed it could have been stolen, but that suggested premeditation, and if Spencer were the murderer, it would surely have been a crime of passion. Furthermore, Dr. Bart, the man who treated Spencer’s wounds, said that his injuries didn’t come from an axe, but seemed to have been inflicted by a rod of iron or steel, and that weapon had not been found. Why would Spencer have disposed of the tool he had been attacked with, yet leave the murder weapon behind for all to see? It simply didn’t add up.
Later in the afternoon, after Spencer had more or less regained his senses, Marshal Lee and the crime reporter from the Austin Daily Statesman, the local newspaper, interviewed the injured man, hoping to gain some new insight. Spencer, still in terrible pain, stated that he and Mollie had gone to bed around nine or ten in the evening. He mentioned that Mollie didn’t feel well and that she had asked him to wake her early in the morning. The next thing he claimed to remember was waking up injured and finding Mollie gone, just as he had told Tom Chalmers. When asked if he knew of anyone who may have wished him and Mollie harm, the only name Spencer could come up with was William “Lem” Brooks.
Lem was Mollie’s old boyfriend, the man she had nearly killed with a broken bottle back in Waco. When she had moved to Austin, he had followed her and not long ago, he had challenged Spencer to a fight. Mollie’s vicious murder and rape certainly seemed as if it could be attributed to jealousy, so Marshal Lee had Brooks arrested.
Brooks may have had a solid motive, but once he was questioned, his guilt became doubtful. Lem admitted to the incident in Waco, but claimed to have no further quarrel with Mollie and denied Spencer’s claims that he had wanted to fight him. He swore he was innocent and even had an alibi to back it up. Lem said he had been at a dance on Sand Hill, nearly two miles from the Halls’ house on West Pecan Street, and several witnesses had seen him there as late as four o’clock in the morning, an hour after Walter Spencer had woken Tom Chalmers. But every last one of Lem’s witnesses were Negroes, which made their credibility suspect at best, as far as Marshal Lee was concerned.
On New Years’ Day, 1885, an inquest was held to decide if there was enough evidence to bring Brooks to trial. The six white men who made up the coroner’s jury listened to witness testimony behind closed doors for four straight days. Each day, the press was denied access to the proceedings and each day, they complained about it in the papers. Clearly, the secrecy that surrounded the inquest meant that there were details of the crime that were being kept from the public at large. But wouldn’t it benefit the investigation if everyone knew exactly what had occurred that horrible night? Wouldn’t the perpetrator be found more easily if the whole town knew the exact truth of every clue found at the scene?
When the inquest was called to an end, no new information was presented to the public, but it was announced that William “Lem” Brooks would indeed stand trial for the murder of Mollie Smith. By the time the preliminary trial was scheduled, however, Brooks was freed due to lack of evidence. No other suspect was charged.
* * *
The final day of 1884 had brought with it one of the most horrible crimes Austin, Texas had ever seen. But the murder of Mollie Smith was only the beginning. Before 1885 was over, the people of Austin would find themselves in the center of a violent and terrifying mystery that would reach from the lowest of the city’s lower class all the way up to its highest of high society. The capital of Texas had become the hunting ground of a terrifying new type of criminal. And although everyone who lived through the events of that year would remember them for the rest of their lives, they would be all but lost in the annals of history for over a hundred years.
