Discretion is advice.

This is a minute murder.

More than seven decades before the term serial killer was first used by investigators,

the people of Austin, Texas were terrorized by a string of murders.

It was the mid-1880s when the first victim was found.

She was 25-year-old Molly Smith, who worked as a cook,

and she was murdered on the 30th of December, 1884. Her body was discovered lying in the snow

next to an outhouse. The murder weapon was an axe, which had been used to inflict deep wounds

to Molly's entire body, leaving her in a pool

of blood. The wounds to her abdomen and torso would have caused her death quickly. It was clear that

her killer had been determined to end her life. Five months later, the body of a second woman was found

with very similar injuries.

Eliza Shelley's axe wounds were so severe that her skull had been almost split in two.

Both Molly and Eliza had been attacked while sleeping in bed and then overpowered,

dragged outside, where their bodies were left.

When it became clear that the killings were likely connected with the same murder weapon used,

the locals initially began to refer to the crimes as the Austin Axe murders.

Then a letter from a well-known writer was published where the killer was nicknamed the servant girl annihilator.

And from that moment on, that nickname stuck.

Only days after Eliza Shelley's murder, another servant girl was killed.

Irene Cross was also attacked with an axe, and one reporter who saw her body remarked that the axe

wounds to her head gave the appearance that she had been scalped. Throughout June and July,

...