America's first serial killer stalked Texas in the 1880s

Pop culture’s fascination with serial killers is waning. By now, in the raw light of 21st-century terrorism and mass murder, the stylish savagery of Hannibal Lecter seems somehow quaint. But as Skip Hollandsworth reminds us in his new book, The Midnight Assassin (Henry Holt, 270 pp., **½ out of four stars), there was a time when the very concept of a motiveless murderous maniac was unheard of, impossible to grasp, and could spur a population to panic.

In this case, it was the people of Austin, Texas, who suffered through the end of 1884 and the beginning of 1885 with a fiend on the loose, one who bludgeoned women to death in their homes for no apparent reason, and was never caught. A few years later, when Jack the Ripper began cutting the throats of prostitutes in London’s Whitechapel, it was theorized that the Austin killer had crossed the Atlantic.

We may never know whether America’s first known serial killer was also the world’s most legendary, but Hollandsworth,  executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, digs into the yellowing evidence. The result is a lucid, lurid, often windy page-turner that evokes a simpler time, when Texas was young and its cities were on the rise, competing then as now for tourism, population and business growth.

It was also an era of abject Jim Crow segregation, and the initial victims of the The Midnight Assassin (as one purple-prosed newspaper dubbed him) were black servant women — Mollie Smith, Eliza Shelley, Irene Cross, Mary Ramey, and Gracie Vance. Austin’s more enfranchised residents, its police and civic leaders were quick to accuse jealous boyfriends or vicious husbands — all black — until the killer began to prey on white women.

Indeed, the ax murders of the affluent Susan Hancock and the comely young Eula Phillips sent Austin reeling in a way that the servant slayings did not. But neither imported Pinkerton detectives nor local sleuths could find a credible suspect or entrap the killer. In the meantime, scandal enveloped politicians linked to the frisky Ms. Phillips, but that was the least of the horror.

Ultimately, the killer’s ease of access and escape can be chalked up to a lack of forensic science and the ineptitude of Austin authorities, but Hollandsworth’s book is more a tale of class and race than its marketing materials trumpet. In 19th-century Texas, the murders of poor black women — however gruesome and mysterious — weren’t quick to rise to the level of civic crisis.

Hollandsworth doesn’t evade that truth in his reporting, but he dwells on colorful period details to an almost suffocating degree, quoting newspaper accounts at length as they swill their provincial brew. Reminding us how the Austin Daily Statesman rhapsodized that the moon and stars were “at their most effulgent and shot their mellow light all over the earth” adds only tedium. While this book has its tragic charm, it reads like an overwrought magazine article.