This Saturday, a 33-year-old man was found dead in Lady Bird Lake after going missing early Friday morning. His is the third body to be found there in the last six weeks.
Lady Bird Lake, for those not from Central Texas, is a brief section of the Colorado River (not that Colorado River, the other one) which runs through downtown Austin. It’s surrounded by a ten-mile park and trail, it’s crossed by a few scenic bridges, it’s home to a giant floating party of kayaks and paddleboards in the summer months. It also runs alongside the end of Rainey Street, the peninsula on the southeast corner of downtown which has transformed from residential street to quiet/quirky bar district to unhinged college/yuppie playground over the last twenty years, as the houses which were once converted into laid-back bars have been largely knocked down and replaced by clubbier bars and soaring high-rises (the tallest building in Texas is going up in the neighborhood as we speak).
To hear the police tell it, the recent surge in river corpses (I can hear our Philadelphian readers now: What’s the problem here?) traces back to things like Rainey Street. The basic idea is that there are a lot of drunk people near a river and the predictable thing happens. According to the police, the bodies—at least 16 of them since 2018—have never shown signs of trauma. It’s terribly sad, but there’s not, I don’t know, a serial killer running around the woods by the Hike & Bike Trail.
To hear sensationalist locals on The Internet tell it, there’s a serial killer running around the woods by the Hike & Bike Trail.
I don’t know if there’s a serial killer or not. I’m not out in the mornings reeling in bodies. It seems pretty believable that someone could get too drunk and fall into the river, but what do I know? I’ve never serially killed. I don’t know what to look for. The important thing is that people think there’s a serial killer out there. There’s speculating to be done, and local online citizens are doing it. So, to do my share:
How do we know Jack the Ripper isn’t still alive and back in Austin?
I doubt I’m the first to posit this theory, but for those unfamiliar with Jack the Ripper’s history: There was a serial killer in Austin the century before last known as the Servant Girl Annihilator. He was killing people back when O. Henry lived in town. His last murder was done in 1885. Jack the Ripper’s first murder was done in 1888. There’s a theory out there—first publicly suggested by an Atlanta Constitution editor at the time the latter’s murders were occurring—that the Servant Girl Annihilator and Jack the Ripper were one and the same.
Nobody has proven or disproven the possibility that the two are one, and some have gone to the trouble of finding specific travel documents tracing specific people between Austin and London between 1885 and 1888. Is it true? We have no idea. At the very least, it’s a useful bit of folklore if you find yourself driving rideshare in Austin.
The theory then, applied here—and this is comparably likely to Jack the Ripper and the Servant Girl Annihilator being one and the same, just as it’s comparably likely to there being a serial killer working on a biweekly basis on the south end of Rainey Street—is that the Servant Girl Annihilator/Jack the Ripper/the Bachelor Party Butcher is an immortal force which has traversed the globe these last 135 years and is now pushing drunk folks into the Colorado River. Which, honestly, is an inconvenience. As though people didn’t have enough to worry about on Rainey Street, in the age of roofies and in the age before functioning Rainey Street cell phone reception. Now they have to make sure an evil quasi-deity doesn’t drown them in a river with hardly any current and a depth of only two or three feet in some spots.
Ideally, nobody else dies in the river for a long time. Unfortunately, that would probably still be accompanied by people in Facebook groups building their brand around alleging a government coverup of the Austin Assassin’s work.
P.S. If you’re new in town, please know you shouldn’t let your dog swim in Lady Bird Lake: The last time this many deaths happened in quick succession in the river was when a blue-green algae bloom took out three pups in 2019.
