Human memory is an amazing thing.

The great influenza that occurred during WWI is common knowledge now. But one of the things that historians and disease-hunters found surprising when looking back in retrospect, was how thoroughly people had blotted the memory out of their minds. This was no flash in the pan, like the Legionnaires Disease flare-ups in the 1970s and early 1980s – affecting a few people in a few locations around the country and, once the cause was pinpointed, eradicated. This was a pandemic at the scale of Covid. People were dropping dead on subways and public buses, hospitals were overrun (remember: there were no antibiotics in those days). You can easily find photographs of people wearing surgical masks on the street. Children were orphaned. It was historic.

And yet, when it was over, humans blotted it out of their memory. It was too traumatic to talk about. So they made it go away. And it stopped being historic.

A similar thing happened in Austin, Texas, following the aftermath of The Midnight Assassin in late 1884 and for most of the year of 1885. This was a killer who “tore open” women with “axes, knives and long steel rods,” in their yards and in their homes, sometimes injuring the men they lived with, sometimes killing the woman and leaving other family members alone. The killer attacked young and old, poor and rich, Black and white – much to the chagrin of the white community, who was sure the killer was African American. People lived in terror, families sitting up together in a single room of their house, guns drawn. Sometimes they banded together in groups, for safety in numbers. Law enforcement was out in force, patrolling on horseback – and never quite turned up in the right place at the right time.

Rumors abounded. Reporters and private detectives flocked to Austin. The story became a national sensation. People were arrested (often just because they were Black). Trials happened but all defendants were found to be not guilty. And, meanwhile, the killings continued. Then, almost a year to the day after the first murder, the serial killer stopped. No one knew why. There was no announcement: the murders have stopped. The next one just didn’t happen yet. And kept not happening yet until people slowly let down their guards again, the way we have started letting our guard down about Covid.

People wondered where the killer had gone. Had he been checked into the lunatic asylum outside town for some other reason? Had he moved on to London and become the Whitechapel killer? Or to Chicago, where he became infamous as H.H. Holmes? Or did he continue to live on in Austin, concealing his motives beneath a deceptive demeanor, at least for the moment.

The fear continued even a decade after the murders ended as mysteriously as they had begun. Much like the mayor in Jaws who plays down the shark attacks to boost his town, the politicians and civic leaders of Austin set about proving that Austin was safe by banishing the dark. First, they built a dam to provide electricity. Then, in 1895, they installed huge arc lamps – 165 feet tall – across the city. The light was so bright that it blocked out the moon. And then everyone stopped talking about it: the investigators; the mayor; the head of the State Lunatic Asylum outside town; contemporary Texas historians; even newspapermen, who had made their name with articles recounting the terror of the town and speculating on possible perpetrators, stopped writing about it.

There were still whispers. Children made up nursery rhymes and scary stories about it, like later children did about the Influenza. There were rumors that the victims wandered the streets as ghosts.

But eventually the murders were forgotten so thoroughly that, when the author began researching them for the book, descendants of the victims were surprised to hear they had been murdered.

Hollandsworth paints a vivid picture of Austin at the time – the streets and houses, the individual people, the Texas politics, the racism, all come alive, making it easy to picture being there among them as events unfolded. He also captures the terror of the situation, starting with the callous dismissal of the husband of the first murder victim – Black – who staggers to the sheriff’s home in the middle of the night to beg for help; and then the next morning’s bewilderment upon discovering the wanton violence visited upon that woman. The casual “round up the usual suspects” amongst the Black community for what they assumed was a “Black on Black” crime; and then the alarm when white women started – and continued again and again – to be attacked. And the escalation, from there, to sheer terror amongst the town folk. Hollandsworth makes it all come alive.

I also liked the epilogue, where the author switches from telling the story as it happens, to describing how he stumbled across the story and moved from disbelief to obsession, until finally friends and colleagues take him aside and whisper that he’s getting to sound like he’s researching JFK conspiracy theories. It’s an amusing insight into how an author can get caught up into the story, trying to solve the unsolvable. It reminds me of the community of amateurs who research crimes online now, so certain that they can crack the case, because it needs to be cracked, and the truth is out there: it must be.

I have to admit that there’s a part of me that says, I could solve this. I should be doing this. It just takes a logical mind and persistence to figure these things out. JFK, Zodiac, The Midnight Assassin, Jack the Ripper. The truth must be revealed.

But then I come to my senses and recognize: some things aren’t problems meant to be solved. Some things just are. And we can still learn from them, even if we never know the truth.

That is the beauty and importance of history.