![]() ![]() Interestingly, the daughter of one of his early Night in secluded or out-of-the-way areas, such as open fields between their The next three years, until 1913, the Ripper would strike again and again,Īlmost always targeting young African-American women who were walking late at Local newspapers claimed a ‘Black Butcher,’ or in the name that stuck, an ‘Atlanta Ripper.’ That February, another victim (never named) was found murdered in exactly the same way, and then in June, one Addie Watts fell prey as well. Rosa Trice, a thirty-five year-old housewife, was found dead just a short distance from her home, her head bashed in, her throat slashed open. By early 1911, the perpetrator had begun adding a similar grisly signature to his victims. The moniker will sound familiar to crime enthusiasts for a reason: just a few years earlier, Jack the Ripper had terrorized London, murdering women and prostitutes in the goriest of fashions. As Wells notes, theĪccumulation of bodies-almost one per month during that time-stokedĬonsiderable fear in the area, especially once the next series of slayings Beginning in April 1909, the bodies ofĪfrican-American women began to show up in the historic Old Fourth Ward, some killedīy gunshot, some killed by blunt force trauma to the head. Della Reid was found in a trash pile near this area on April 5, 1909.”Ĭlose-knit nature of these neighborhoods made the murders that began to take Though segregation plagued the Jim Crow South-and had engendered race-based violence, such as riots in 1906-the African-American neighborhoods in Atlanta banded together as a tightly-knit community, home to many small businesses, working families, and cultural and religious institutions. Though the process was lengthy and difficult, beset by many of the racial and economic inequities of the Reconstruction period, by the turn of the century Atlanta’s role as a railroad terminus had cemented its importance in the state. But thanks to the work of intrepid historians such as Jeffery Wells ( The Atlanta Ripper: The Unsolved Case of the Gate City’s Most Infamous Murders) and Corinna Underwood ( Murder and Mystery in Atlanta), these grisly crimes can finally be documented in full.įollowing the Civil War, when General Sherman’s notorious march razed it nearly to the ground, Atlanta faced a protracted period of rebuilding. Agreed: though in the early 1900s the case made news worldwide, over a century later it had been eclipsed not just by the passage of time, but by other, cases featuring more sensational mass murderers-Jeffrey Dahmer, James Jones, and Charles Manson, to name a few. Talking, of course, about the Atlanta Ripper. Presaged by another spate of slayings seventy years earlier. Series may not have realized is that the nearly thirty murders committed at theĮnd of that decade-twenty-three children and six adults, all of them Black-were Went either unnoticed or in large part forgotten. ![]() Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children have become newly aware of the horrificĬrimes the Gate City suffered in the late 1970s, crimes that until recently ![]()
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