Then in 1977, Atlanta got its own “Son of Sam”—the killer who was blithely killing youngsters at random in New York at the time. The Atlanta shootings began on 16 January 1977, when the “Lovers’ Lane Killer” shot 26- year-old LaBrian Lovett and 20-year-old Veronica Hill.
The police were alerted when they were called accident. A vehicle had veered across an intersection, coming to a halt when it collided with a traffic sign. Inside, a naked man lay slumped behind the steering wheel, his face and body streaked with blood. He had been shot four times in the head, stomach, left arm and right leg. On the back seat was a naked woman covered by a coat. She had been shot twice in the abdomen and the left leg. Both died of their wounds in the hospital, but detectives determined they were shot while making love in nearby Adams Park. Somehow Lovett had survived long enough to drive from the scene.
The killer struck again this time on 12 February. At 2.45 a.m., he approached a teenage couple who were necking in their car in West Manor Park, three miles north-west of Adams Park. He fired six shots into the car before trying to open the doors. Finding them locked, he fled on foot, leaving both victims seriously injured with chest wounds. They survived to describe the attacker as a large black man. Ballistics tests showed that the same .38- caliber pistol had been used in the murder of LaBrian Lovett and Veronica Hill. As with the Son of Sam killings, there was a bewildering lack of motive. The gunman seemed to have no interest in robbing or raping his victims, who appeared to be unknown to him.
The third attack occurred on 12 March when 20-year-old Diane Collins was canoodling with her fiance in Adams Park. They had announced their engagement just a few days before. That evening they had been to the movies before stopping for a little intimacy in the park. Intent on what they were doing, neither noticed the lethal stalker as he approached their car and unloaded his .38 through the passenger window. Diane died instantly, but her fiance, though wounded badly in the head, survived. With blood nearly blinding him, he managed to drive home and then telephone an ambulance.
With only the vaguest of descriptions, the police had little to go on. However, they did notice that there had been 27 days between the first two attacks and 28 between the second and third. The gunman seemed to be working on a four-week cycle.
The following month, they staked out the local parks, but the phantom gunman did not appear. He did not strike again. On 10 August 1977, David Berkowitz was arrested for the Son of Sam killings. He had been terrorizing New York for two years. Two years after the Atlanta Lovers’ Lane killings the police admitted that they had no suspects and no leads in the case. Like the Atlanta Ripper of 1911, he remained at large.
Austin’s Servant Girl Annihilator
Over three years before headlines presented Jack the Ripper as the “world’s first serial killer”, another mad slayer was stalking the streets of Austin, Texas. Known as the “Texas Servant Girl Annihilator”, like his counterpart in London, he was never caught or identified with any certainty. It is plain that he was overshadowed in the historical record because most of his victims were poor and black.
The first killing took place on New Year’s Eve 1884, when the remains of 25-year-old servant girl Mollie Smith were found outside the two-storey home of her employer William Hall in West Pecan Street. She cooked and kept house for the Halls, and lived in a room in the back with her common-law husband Walter Spencer, who had also been attacked. He awoke in agony with a deep gash across his face to find Mollie had gone. The bedroom was covered with blood and there were bloody handprints on the threshold. He went for help and aroused Mr Hall, who followed the trail of blood and found Mollie lying in the snow by the outhouse. The wounds to her face and head indicated that she had been killed with an axe. Her nightdress was torn to shreds and, from the way she had been left, it was clear that she had been raped. The local marshal Grooms Lee brought in bloodhounds to track the killer, but the trail soon went cold. Later a bloody axe was found inside, which the killer had apparently brought with him.
William Sydney Porter, better known as the short-story writer O. Henry, was living in Austin at the time and coined the sobriquet “Servant Girl Annihilator” for his friends working at the
Marshal Lee had a more obvious suspect, William “Lem” Brooks, whom Mollie had previously been involved with. The rape and murder had been motivated by jealousy, Lee reasoned. Brooks was arrested, but he protested his innocence and produced an alibi that would have made it hard, though not impossible, for him to have committed the murder. Nevertheless, a coroner’s jury comprising six white male citizens, sitting on New Year’s Day, concluded that Brooks had both the means and motive—and had, consequently, done it. He was later freed for lack of solid evidence.
On 6 May 1885, another African-American servant girl, Eliza Shelley, was murdered in the same blood-thirty fashion. The newspapers immediately connected her murder with the slaughter of Mollie Smith. The
Lem Brooks had no connection to 30-year-old Shelley and was not a suspect. In those pre-Ripper times, this was a new kind of crime. A predatory killer was on the loose—a maniac who attacked at random without any discernible motive.
Eliza Shelley had been attacked on the property of Dr L. B. Johnson, a former state congressman who lived at the corner of Cypress and Jacinto Streets near the railroad track with his wife and niece. Hired as a cook the previous month, Shelley lived in a cabin behind the house with her three children. On the night of the attack, Mrs Johnson had heard screams emanating from Eliza’s cabin, and sent her niece to find out what was happening. Seeing something was terribly wrong, she summoned Dr Johnson, who went to investigate.
He found Eliza Shelley lying on the floor, dead. She had sustained numerous grievous head wounds. One gash that appeared to have been made by an axe nearly cleaved her head in two and there were puncture wounds made by a sharp, pointed instrument. This time the killer had taken the murder weapons with him.
The pillows were covered in blood, indicating that she had been asleep in bed when she was attacked. Then she had been dragged to the floor and her nightdress pulled up. Her naked midriff was raised on a pile of blankets and her genitals exposed, so it was thought that she had been raped by her attacker.
Her eight-year-old son said that a man had come into the cabin in the middle of the night. The boy had woken up, but the man pushed him into a corner and told him to be quiet. He had placed a blanket over him and the child had passed out, possibly as the result of chloroform that had recently been stolen from a dentist’s home in Austin. The boy had no recollection of what had happened to his mother. His younger brothers, who slept in the same bed as their mother, knew nothing.
Marshal Lee’s bloodhounds failed once again. A set of shoeless footprints led to the cabin. At the time, Eliza’s husband was in prison and it was not thought she had any other boyfriends, so it seemed clear that the shoeless person was to blame. Marshal Lee quickly arrested a 19-year-old, slightly backward black youth who walked around barefoot. But when the tracks were compared against his, it was clear that he had not made them. Another African-American male who had once lived with Eliza was arrested. He had no alibi and had recently quarrelled with her. But he, too, was released when there was a third murder just over two weeks later.
On 23 May, another black servant girl was attacked in the middle of the night in her cabin, across the road from a beer garden. Her name was Irene Cross. This time the attacker had used a knife. But the attack was just as ferocious. Her arm had been practically severed from her body and the perpetrator had stabbed her so viciously in the head that she appeared to have been scalped. This time there was no suspect at all and no arrest was made.
The newspapers blamed the influx of migrant workers. Austin was then a city of just 23,000 people. But Texas was just recovering from the Civil War and the Reconstruction era and the attacker could have been any one of the thousands of strangers who had come to town, attracted by the prospect of work. There were even gangs of convicts employed in public building works. The newspapers were also unanimous that a black man was to blame —again, perhaps, a hangover from the Civil War.
