Unidentified albumen print. One morning before dawn in the summer of 1883, a strange persistent cry echoed through a west Austin neighborhood and caught the attention of two women, Sophia Phillips and Sallie Mack, both of whom lived nearby. They went to investigate and much to their surprise they soon came upon an abandoned infant lying in the grass. There was no sign of the mother. Inquiries were made but no one could find where the… Read more.

One-time Austinite Steven Saylor tells the story of the Servant Girl Murders through the eyes of one-time Austinite O. Henry in the novel A Twist At The End. You think you know people, but you don’t.  A Twist at The End is an old-fashioned mystery novel of people not being who they seem, thwarted expectations and unexpected resolutions. The novel begins in 1906 in New York, with O. Henry spending his last remaining years writing, drinking too much, struggling with… Read more.

Once there was a killer in nearby Austin who was still at large.  He had chloroformed his victim (rather humanely, I thought) before chopping her head off with an axe.  Fear that ‘dat debblish axe-man’ might strike again, in only the Lord knew whose house, resulted in some extraordinary precautions.  From the morning Pinkie heard about the axe-man’s method of operation until the day that he was finally trapped -- a period of three weeks -- she and Annie (her… Read more.