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.

Wordcraft – The serial killer Texans wrote out of history

The Midnight Assassin

by Skip Hollandsworth

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True crime is one of Skip Hollandsworth’s passions. He’s written about it numerous times – as a reporter, a screenwriter, and editor for Texas Monthly magazine. But a serial killer in Texas, before the term “serial killer” was even coined? A serial killer who terrorized the state’s capital of Austin for a single year in the 1880’s? A serial killer some considered to have been Jack the Ripper doing an apprenticeship in Texas before moving to London?

Skip Hollandsworth

Never heard of him, Hollandsworth told his audience during a recent reading of his volume, The Midnight Assassin, at Half Price Books’ flagship store on Dallas’ Northwest Highway. But fascinated both by the killer and the way in which Texans deliberately expunged from the history books, Hollandsworth began haunting libraries, police archives, and cemeteries, searching for clues to the identify of a murderer who specialized in staging macabre tableaus with the mutilated bodies of his victims.

Beginning on New Year’s Eve 1884 through Christmas Eve 1885, the killer known variously as the Midnight Assassin and Intangible Nemesis (when not being simply described as a devil) struck on moonlit nights in Austin, leaving a trail of dead, maimed and terrified victims – almost all of them women. Then he vanished, as mysteriously and completely as he had come.

More than a year passed, with a few scattered killings afterward in other Texas cities. But nothing else seemed to match the murder’s MO until a similarly gruesome string of slayings of women half a world away from Texas, beginning in September 1888 in London. This time, the killer, or someone purporting to be the killer, sent a taunting letter in which he named himself Jack the Ripper.

Maybe he thought the epithet had more cachet than the Texas monikers. Neither the Midnight Assassin nor Jack the Ripper – if indeed they were separate killers, as Hollandsworth believes -- has ever been identified.

The killer first announced himself in Texas in the early morning of December 31, 1884. One of the notorious blue norther storms had roared through the state and most of the citizens of Austin were huddled in their beds when a black laborer stumbled into the house of his girlfriend’s employer begging for help.

“Somebody has nearly killed me!” he said, through the blood from gashes in his head that poured into his mouth, nearly strangling him.

He was more worried, however, by the disappearance of his girlfriend, a young woman named Mollie Smith. However, only two of Austin’s main streets had streetlights at the time, and it was not until dawn the next morning that Mollie’s grotesquely mutilated body was found. Her discoverer at first thought the “strange-looking object” lying on the ground was a dead animal. Then he noticed the scrap of a nightgown, and legs under the gown. And then he started screaming.

It was a ghastly thing, of course. But in a few days, the furor died down. The white citizens of Austin told themselves Mollie had been killed by a jealous lover, and thought no more about it.

Then the bodies piled up. The story of the murders became front page news as far away as New York and San Francisco. And Austin’s leaders, its police, even private detective agencies, became first frustrated, then terrified.The killings finally culminated in the deaths of two white society women, and a murder trial destroyed the careers of several prominent politicians.

And then it was over. The Midnight Assassin stepped back into the shadows from which he had briefly appeared, and Texans only wanted to put the memory behind them. “At least a half-dozen histories of Texas were published in the decade between 1885 and 1895,” Hollandsworth writes, “and not one of the made any reference to the story. . . Needless to say, Mrs. Anna Pennybacker, the very proper schoolteacher who wrote a textbook in 1888 for the state’s public schools, A New History of Texas, did not think it was appropriate for the children of Texas to be reading about women being chopped to pieces. . . It was as if (the Midnight Assassin) had walked out of history altogether. It was as if he had never existed.”