In the sweltering summer of 1911, a wave of terror gripped the Black community of Atlanta, Georgia. A predator, who would become known as the Atlanta Ripper or the Black Butcher, was stalking the city's streets, preying on young women. For months, a series of brutal, unsolved murders had been met with a chilling indifference from the press and police.
But the death of Addie Watts, a 22-year-old female laundress, would become a turning point, forcing the city to confront the reality of a serial killer in its midst.
Addie Watts lived at 30 Selman Street and, like many of her peers, worked hard to make a life for herself in a deeply segregated city. Her life was cut tragically short in the early morning hours of Thursday, June 15, 1911. Her body was discovered in a patch of shrubbery near the Southern Railway tracks at the intersection of Krogg and DeKalb Streets. The scene was one of horrific violence. Authorities believed the killer had first struck her in the head with a brick before using a heavy railroad coupling pin to inflict further, devastating trauma. After bludgeoning her, the attacker slit her throat and dragged her body into the bushes to conceal it.
Addie was the second woman to be found with her throat slashed in just four weeks, following the murder of a cook named Belle Walker on May 28. While the Black community was already gripped by fear, Addie’s murder marked the moment the local press began to speculate that a single, vicious killer was responsible for the escalating violence. On June 16, the day after her body was found, *The Atlanta Journal* ran a headline questioning if a "black butcher" was at work, finally linking the crime to the infamous Jack the Ripper of London.
The investigation into the Ripper's crimes was fraught with the racial biases of the era. Early on, the murders of Black women were often relegated to the back pages of newspapers and dismissed by law enforcement. However, as the body count rose, the sheer brutality and pattern of the killings became impossible to ignore. The victims were consistently young, Black or dark-skinned women, often in their early twenties, who were attacked while walking alone at night. The killer’s method was savage and consistent: strangulation, throat slashing, stabbing, and bludgeoning. He often mutilated his victims' bodies after they were dead.
The terror intensified just two weeks after Addie’s death when the killer struck her own neighbors, the Sharpe family. Lena Sharpe was murdered, and her daughter, Emma Lou, was stabbed but survived, providing the only eyewitness description of a potential suspect: a tall Black man in a wide-brimmed hat. The proximity of this attack to Addie's home on Hanover Street plunged the neighborhood into a state of profound fear. Community leaders and churches pleaded for action and offered rewards for the killer's capture, as service workers began refusing to travel after dark.
Despite arresting at least six different suspects over the course of the murder spree, which may have claimed more than 20 lives between 1911 and 1912, police were never able to secure a conviction. Some theories suggested the possibility of copycat killers, while a grand jury in 1912 controversially concluded the acts were committed by different men, a reasoning that was never publicly explained. The Atlanta Ripper was never identified, and the murders were never officially solved.
Today, the intersection of Krog Street and DeKalb Avenue is home to expensive townhouses and shops, with little to indicate the tragedy that occurred there over a century ago. Addie Watts is not just a name on a list of victims; she was a young woman whose brutal murder helped expose a reign of terror. Her case, and those of the many other women killed by the Atlanta Ripper, remains a haunting reminder of a city's forgotten history and a quest for justice that has spanned generations, unanswered.
