Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South with Lauren Nicole Henley (LSU Press, 2026)

New Books in African American Studies · Oct 13, 2026 · 1h 3m

For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the technology nor the vocabulary to identify the serial killer in their midst. Instead, regional authorities worked the cases as individual homicides.This approach led to seemingly contradictory realities: the unknown killer was dubbed “the axman,” and a young…