Terminus: Dekalb Avenue

[jack_babalon]

Thee Invocation ov Jack the Ripper
November 18th, 2006
~Rob M.

Here's one for this dark and rainy day that's waiting outside like a wolf at the door. A quick history lesson, pulled straight from the True-Crime Files of Terminus, Ga.

May 20th, 1911. Saturday night in what is now the Innman Park-Reynolds Town area (this is just a few blocks shy of Little Five Points for any of you tourists out there) and 'The Atlanta Jack the Ripper' has claimed his first victim.

The Vic was an African American in her early twenties. She was found in the bushes off Pryor Street. Throat slit, ear to ear. Local law here in the 'city too busy to hate' treats African American crimes with a bureaucratic shrug and a the thinnest of pretenses. Crimes, that is, without a white Vic involved. A half assed investigation follows. It should come as no surprise that they come up with Jack... as in 'Shit'. No clues. No suspects. No witnesses. 'The Negro Ripper', as the Atlanta Constitution would come to call him, has gotten away with murder.

And he wouldn't stop there.

"On that and the next six Satuday nights the knife-wielding madman took a victim, all attractive black women. The victims were apparently choked into submission or unconsciousness (none were raped) and then had their throats slit before their murderer mutilated them sexually in a fashion similar to his London counterpart."
~From The Encylopedia of Serial Killers, Unsolved Murders

So far as we know there was only one eyewitness to the identity of the killer, one Emma Lou Sharpe, who was also the only known survivor of a direct encounter with the 'Ripper'.

Another Saturday night. July 11th, 1911 and Emma Lou is sitting at home worried about her mother. Turns out Mom went out to do a little grocery shopping, but she's been gone for over an hour now. Something don't sit right with Emma Lou. There's nothing left for her to do but go out and look for her mother. She hits the market where her mother was doing her grocery shopping. She learns that Mom never made it.

That's when she meets Jack:

"Emma Lou started back for home. In the area that now separates Inman Park from Reynoldstown, she was approached by a stranger, who she described later, according to The Atlanta Constitution, as "tall, black, broad-shouldered and wearing a broad-brimmed black hat."

"How do you feel this evening?" the man asked Emma Lou.

"I'm very well," she told the man, and began to walk past him. But he blocked her path.

"Don't be 'fraid," he told Emma Lou. "I never hurt girls like you." Then he stabbed her in the back. Bleeding, she ran away, screaming for help.

- "Atlanta's Jack the Ripper: Did a serial killer murder 20 women a century ago?"
Steve Fennessy, Creative Loafing.

As for her mother, she was found dead the next day with a slit throat.

Year after year, like his Whitehapel blood brother, he remained free. Dead ends. Bad clues. False arrests. Beaten confessions and still the murders occured, though more seldomly, until they finally petered out around 1916. Life went on and 'The Atlanta Ripper' became just one more unsolved crime in the history of our city.

I checked. I did my homework. The photo you see at the top of this post was taken in the neighborhood where the bulk of these crimes were supposed to have occured. 'The Stabs'. White letters dripping off a bridge. Three Masonic Square & Compuses tagged in blood red. It still fucks with me everytime I see it. I mean what am I looking at: Bad Magick? A creepy coincidence? A psychogeographic echo? A ghost memory lurking on the precipice of some vandals subconscious? Neitzche's eternal recurrence having itself a bad laugh at our expense?

When I bike around Dekalb at night, sometimes I imagine him out there, crouched in the bushes or pressed flat behind one of the crumbled walls of some abandoned home. Supernaturally still alive, I can almost feel him eyeballing me. I can see the white razor row of his smile. A golem sized shadow, crowned in a black rimmed hat ready to cut across my path like a knife.

A Hate Demon, perched on the shoulder of our fears, waiting patiently to wake again.

Comments

[daucus-carota.livejournal.com]

*shivers*
xxx

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

That's mad creepy. Doesn't it make you want to go banish it?

[scottopic.livejournal.com]

So yeah, I'm thinking - hoping that we see an echo, as shown through perhaps some artistic-musical wanderings of some misspent youths howling songs of random violence and the vandalism that they so willingly commit in the name of their neo-gutter-punk band, THE STABS. In there, they have a song about CONspiracies, or what not.

As the bumper stickers say:

2 B 1 ASK 1.

[petzilla.livejournal.com]

It's crazy I now but when I read this I hear it voiced by Darren McGavin from the old Night Stalker series or think of the movie Time After Time. There were many conjecture that the original Jack was a mason, that the way that the murders were committed pointed to their manner. I was just recently following a similar case in the UK that targeted women of the night.

[efire360.livejournal.com]

I remember reading that article. Thanks for the pict. I had no idea where it was in Atlanta, being that I'm a transplant and all. As for the rest, who knows. It was quite a different time back then. Go ask the ghosts – they always remember if you can find them.

[gaeasdaughter.livejournal.com]

New Jersey very recently joined the tabloid-jack-and-the-lady-of-the-evening creepshow. Three "working women" hacked Ripper-style, possibly still counting (as of November), and nary a clue. Followed a small aside in the NY Times to a few local papers to catch this story. Not a raised eyebrow nationally.

I often wonder how many more are out there, their acts of infamy slipping by in the corners of local papers with only odd connections made on offbeat websites.

There were hearsay warnings back when I worked in the clubs on the strip in Chicago in the late 60s. Something like six women shredded in eight weeks. Not sure if it was in Chi proper or somewhere in the vicinity.

Someone should do a compilation. Except the results would be too freaky.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

It never rains but it gets much odder all at once.

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

One day i'm going to kidnap you and find the secret of why you're so damn cool!

Thanks. I think I know what i'm blowing my next paycheck on!!!
:)

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Hey, I live to serve. Or at least, to shuffle data to appropriate places. It might be the same thing.