Texas writer smackdowns -- dial femme for murder

 Ready for another round of Texas writer smackdowns? How about the genre of true crime? In one corner we have Thomas Thompson’s Blood and Money tale of greed, lust, revenge – and, of course, money, vs. Skip Hollandsworth’s She Kills, in which the supposedly fair sex gets down and dirty for all of the above reasons and some you have to read to believe.

Thompson was born in Fort Worth, like previously spotlighted smackdown writer Patricia Highsmith. Like Highsmith, he moved left Texas but unlike her, could never quite shake off the state’s dust. He covered the JKF assassination in Dallas and went on to write about the rivalry of Houston surgeons at the dawn of the heart transplant era and later with the also Houston-based murders of socialite Joan Robinson Hill and her husband in Blood and Money.

(I have a special fondness for Blood and Money, having lived in Houston during part of the time covered in Thompson’s book.)

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Blood and Money

If ever a woman had it all, it was Joan Robinson. She was rich, beautiful and charismatic, sought after by myriad eligible men and the adored only child of her father, wealthy oilman Ash Robinson. Maybe too much adored.

Joan went through men like a Texas tornado, notching up a couple of divorces before she fell hard for John Hill, a struggling young doctor. At first, Hill seemed equally smitten, but the marriage soon turned ugly. Aside from a quickly fading physical attraction, the pair had nothing in common.

Joan was a world-class equestrian atop her beloved gaited mare. John hoped to parlay his wife’s (i.e. her father’s) money into a home recital hall that would be the envy of any music lover. Show horses were as foreign to him as classical music was to her.

  And although daddy Robinson and Hill loathed each other, Joan was too horrified by the prospect of losing at marriage a third time to consider divorce.

Dr. Hill sought other female companionship, but he and his wife floundered along until Joan was stricken by a mysterious illness.

And the old saw  of doctors’ wives dying young came all too true. But was Joan’s death simply an illness ignored too long by her husband. Or was it murder? If so, by the doctor or his woman companion?

The next death was John Hill’s, this time unmistakably murder. He was shot at close range in his own home by a complete stranger, who was later killed while resisting arrest.

Who was ultimately behind the string of deaths? Suspicion pointed to Joan’s father. But with enough money, anything can happen. . .And although multiple parties, including Ash Robinson filed suit over the book, none ultimately prevailed.

(Thompson would later die also somewhat mysteriously – from a liver disease his family believed he contracted during a South Asian research trip for still another book.)

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She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales

 Skip Hollandsworth has a long-time interest in true crime, an interest given full scope by his years of as a journalist with Texas Monthly magazine. Besides lengthier stories such as the historical Midnight Assassin, he has adapted his magazine articles for the big screen in Bernie and Hit Man.

Despite the subtitles of She Kills, a couple of its stories are of women who are simply quirky, quite possibly wronged, but nonviolent. Still, there’s a strange fascination on the subject of women who kill, sometimes by their own hands, sometimes through intermediaries.

Women such as the terribly nice nurse whose patients loved her. (Pray she’s not on the night shift during your hospital stay.)

Or the deadly dentist, the homicidal high schooler, the shady socialite, and others.

In each case, Hollandsworth provides a “where are they now” follow-up. Does it confirm their guilt or give us reasons to believe them innocent?

 The prize of the stories is “Oh, Sister, Where Art Thou?”, the tale of eight women imprisoned in the early 1940’s at the Goree State Farm in Texas, then the state’s only prison for women.

Calling themselves the Goree All Girl String Band, “. . . they were once a national sensation,” Hollandsworth writes, drawing millions of radio listeners to the musical variety show titled Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls that featured them.

These women, most of whom had no musical experience, were indeed killers – no matter how justifiable their actions may seem in hindsight.

Some received early release because of their popularity. None ever returned to show business or, apparently, discussed this aspect of their lives after leaving prison. A movie about their experiences is believed to be in development.

True crime devotees will want to make their own decision about each book’s worthiness. Hollandsworth’s is the more readily available, but with a little searching I found copies of both in my local HalfPrice Books. And, of course, there’s always the internet.

Adventure classics -- Murder most Texan

Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

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Houston plastic surgeon John Hill’s beautiful equestrian-socialite wife Joan was as good for his rising practice as a full page newspaper ad, Texas journalist Thomas “Tommy” Thompson wrote in his 1976 true crime narrative, Blood and Money. Unfortunately for himself, Dr. Hill had a taste for adultery. And a wealthy oilman father-in-law, Ash Robinson, who had a history of not letting legalities stand in the way of what he wanted. When his doted-on only child Joan died, what Robinson wanted was John Hill, dead.

The Hill marriage, many who knew the couple would say, was doomed from the start. “Joan seemed a creature of daylight, open, unsuspicious, now shadow cluttering her world,” Thompson wrote. “John seemed a resident of the night, a man who relished the concealing cloak of darkness.”

When Hill returned to their home in Houston’s wealthy River Oaks neighborhood after still another all-night absence, Joan threatened him with divorce -- and the loss of daddy‘s money. The next day, she fell ill. After Joan’s death from a mysterious infection, Hill married -- and divorced -- his lover; married again; and was tried for the “murder by omission” of Joan. The murder case ended in a mistrial, but before another could take place, small-time criminal Bobby Vandiver shot Hill point blank in his home in the presence of his son and third wife.

Arrested for Hill’s murder, Vandiver implicated Joan’s father, Ash Robinson. But before his own trial, Vandiver also died in a bizarre shootout. Never tried, Robinson died in 1985, three years after author Thompson.

Thompson’s Blood and Money had special significance for me, because I was living in Houston at the time of many of case’s events. So when I saw the name Larry D. Thompson, the “good friend and a good lawyer” Tommy Thompson dedicated the book to, during last spring’s Houston Writers Guild conference, I had to hear him.

“It’s probably still one of the great crime stories about Houston,” Larry Thompson said of his brother’s book.

Texas criminal defense lawyer Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, he said, “told Tommy, ‘I didn’t think anyone could write that story and make it make sense.’”

The best selling book spawned three libel suits, all of which Thompson won, defended by his brother Larry. For more about Tommy Thompson and his work, see the Texas State Historical Association’s site,
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fth53/.

Larry Thompson, after years of legal work, has recently started writing thrillers. For more about his writing, see my May 14, 2012, post, “Thrills and spills of thriller writing.”

More than forty years after her 1969 death, Joan Robinson Hill still commands such a wide following that I couldn’t find a copyright-free picture of her. Perhaps it’s fitting that the picture illustrating this post is of the late Texas actress Farrah Fawcett, in her portrayal of Joan for the made for TV movie based on the book, Murder in Texas.

(Next Wednesday -- Adventure classics begins a February of animal adventures with two of the oddest heroes in literature, in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.)