In the summer of 1911, a palpable fear gripped the Black communities of Atlanta, Georgia. A brutal killer, dubbed the "Atlanta Ripper" and the "Black Butcher" by the press, was preying on women, leaving a trail of terror and grief. For months, on a near-weekly basis, victims were found bludgeoned, stabbed, and with their throats cut. The city’s Black residents were on edge, and women hesitated to walk the streets alone, especially after dark.
It was in this climate of dread that Lena Sharpe, a 40-year-old female seamstress, left her home on Hanover Street on the evening of Saturday, July 1, 1911.
Lena had told her 20-year-old daughter, Emma Lou, that she was walking to the market. When an hour passed and she had not come back, a frantic Emma Lou went out to find her. The recent murder of a neighbor, Addie Watts, whose body was found near the railroad tracks, weighed heavily on her mind. Emma Lou’s search of the market revealed her mother had never arrived. As she made her way back home through the area separating the Inman Park and Reynoldstown neighborhoods, a man stepped into her path. He was described as a tall, broad-shouldered Black man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat.
He spoke to her, asking, "How do you feel this evening?" Wary, Emma Lou tried to walk past him, but he blocked her way. "Don't be 'fraid," the stranger said. "I never hurt girls like you." In the next moment, he plunged a knife into her back. As Emma Lou screamed and ran for her life, she heard the man laugh before he disappeared into an alley. Her cries drew neighbors, who quickly came to her aid. Though badly wounded, Emma Lou would survive the vicious assault. She was the only person to see the attacker's face and live to tell the tale.
The search party that formed after the attack on Emma Lou soon made a devastating discovery. Just meters from where she was stabbed, along the Seaboard railroad tracks, they found her mother’s body. Lena Sharpe had been brutally murdered, her throat slashed so severely that she was nearly decapitated. Her head lay in a pool of blood, another victim in a string of slayings that targeted Black women and seemed to baffle a dismissive police force.
Lena’s murder was one of at least 15, and possibly more than 20, attributed to the Atlanta Ripper between 1911 and 1912. The victims were almost all Black or mixed-race women, often in their twenties, who were attacked while walking alone. The killer’s method was consistent and savage: strangulation or bludgeoning followed by throat slashing and sometimes further mutilation. The attacks spread terror, with Black service workers refusing to go out after dark and women staying home.
Despite the clear pattern and the eyewitness description provided by Emma Lou, the investigation faltered. The police and city officials were criticized for their inaction and for downplaying the idea of a serial killer. At one point, a man named Todd Henderson was considered a suspect after Emma Lou partially identified him, and other evidence connected him to a different victim, but a grand jury ultimately dropped the case. In a stunning conclusion in March 1912, a Fulton County grand jury declared the murders were unrelated, each committed by a different man out of "jealousy following immoral conduct." This official verdict contradicted the fears of the community and the headlines in the papers, which continued to report on the "Ripper." No one was ever convicted for the series of killings. The case of Lena Sharpe, like that of the Ripper's other victims, remains unsolved, a chilling chapter in Atlanta's history.
