Quotation

The Midnight Assassin

Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer
What most intrigued the World’s man was that the motive for the murders remained a complete mystery. Almost always in history, he wrote, violent murders of women “have love, passion, ambition or the supernatural for a background, as a somewhat relieving motive. But here in the city of Austin in the Nineteenth Century, these crimes seem to have nothing to palliate their naked brutality and gaping wounds. As yet, the ablest detectives can advance no satisfactory theory to account for their commission.” The reporter made it clear that he did not believe an “organized gang of vile Negroes” did the killings. Nor did he buy into the theories that the killers were hardened criminals with prison records or saloon drunks with violent streaks. He pointed out that “all the worst characters in town” had been “kept under watch” by the police since the murder of little Mary Ramey back in late August. If such men were guilty of the murders, he wrote, “they would have betrayed themselves long ago.”