Alayna Urquhart

Like there's always those that pop up.

During the second decade of the 20th century, an unidentified serial killer was believed to have operated in Atlanta, Georgia, over here in the U.S., brutally killing at least 20 black women.

Now, due to the similarities between the Whitechapel victims and the victims in Atlanta, the Georgia press dubbed their killer the Atlanta Ripper.

An anonymous monster whose presence literally held the city's black population in a grip of fear.

For a period of roughly five years, the Atlanta Ripper killed with regularity on the city streets, slashing, mutilating, and otherwise brutalizing the bodies of the women that they killed.

Despite having at least six viable suspects, investigators were never able to conclusively identify who the Atlanta Ripper was.

And the murders were unsolved.

That's maddening.

And the city at this point was boiling over with racial tensions and Civil War resentment even, because that's the time period we're in.

Oh, yeah.

The Atlanta Ripper became also kind of a convenient scapegoat for domestic violence and racially motivated murders.

Yeah.

Which may have undermined investigators' abilities to solve the crimes at the time.

There was just so much shit going on.

Yeah.

And so much racism.

Now, in the wake of the American Civil War, the reconstruction effort across the American South was focused largely on the cities, which had been completely devastated to near completion by the Union Army nearing the war's end.

In Georgia, a lot of the state's reconstruction was focusing on rebuilding Atlanta in particular.

It was the largest city in the state.

It had been kind of the economic and social hub.