One thing that has always bothered me about people who study cases of serial murder, specifically in America, is that far too often H. H. Holmes will be 'credited' with being the first American serial killer. It's wrong and one person who kept at it a while back is delusional and only out for a buck. Franklin Evans and Jesse Pomeroy, for instance, were in operation 17 years before Holmes' career began.
https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/american-experience/601475-franklin-b-evans-american-serial-killer-whose-career-began-in-1850These were the first documented serial killers in the good old US of A : The Harpe Brothers
I should also mention the Harpe Brothers career fizzled out over
8 decades before Holmes' career began.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpe_brothersMoving on....
This is a
7,000 word article on the Servant Girl Annihilator, named as such by short story author, O. Henry
I have left it in PDF format. The story was front page and second page of the the New Year's Day
WorldI have it on good authority ( Skip Hollandsworth, author of the book, The Midnight Assassin) that it was not what the civic leaders of Austin wanted to see written about their city.
The coverage of these murders should have dwarfed the coverage afforded to other crimes...one being the murder of Carrie Brown, IMO.
But that tenuous link to the Whitechapel Murders made it more well known than the Austin murders. The location of the crime ( New York as opposed to Austin) and that a man was charged for the murders( Ali ) also played a factor in the amount of coverage. Although the Brown Murder coverage lasted only 10 weeks in 1891, people grew up on the East Coast without ever hearing of the Austin murders.
I went to high school in Texas ( 1969-1972), 60 miles away from Austin, and had to wait until I moved back to Philadelphia before I heard about them in the late 1980's.
New York
WorldJanuary 1, 1886
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