You're listening to The Drag.

Twenty years after a bloody civil war that freed its slaves, the Frontier City of

Austin grew and quickly modernized in the heart of Texas. But unlike the relatively

safe and hip tech center that it would later become, residents of Austin in 1885

faced violence every day. It was a still very much a town of crime and

outlaw behavior people were shot or stabbed in the middle of the street and

they didn't think that that was unusual. And yet Austinites experienced a new

form of evil that gripped the city by its neck for the entire year of 1885.

A few years before Jack the Ripper went on his murder spree in London or H.H.

Holmes stalked visitors during Chicago's World's Fair. An axe murderer struck in

the middle of the night killing Austinites as they slept. The killer mostly

attacked black women working as domestic servants to the city's rich white

population. A fearful midnight murder on West Pecan,

mystery and crime, devilish deeds, war mischief by the night prowlers, the

foul fiends keep up their bloody work. The city's small police force didn't

have the forensic tools to track down the killer. To make matters worse for the

black community, the police assumed the killer must also be black and they

arrested scores of the city's black men on little to no evidence. A bunch of

black men are getting interrogated, they're getting arrested. It's it's

mayhem. I'm Megan Parker, the host of this podcast and a journalism student at

the University of Texas at Austin. I've been studying these murders and when

learning about the victims, I couldn't help but fill a connection to them as a

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