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.)

***

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.)

***

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.

Review: Short, sweet, and spooky -- The True Crime File

Just in time for Halloween, pop culture writer Kim Daly's "The True Crime File: Serial Killings, Famous Kidnappings, Great Cons, Survivors and Their Stories, Forensics, and More,"

a pocketbook-sized compilation of criminals and their survivors is the perfect bedtime reading as autumn darkness set in -- or for any time of year. 

 Daly includes some of the best-known names of her genre -- the likes of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and John Hinckley, Jr. -- but sprinkles in historic killers and lesser-knowns from around the world, mixes in legislation sparked by outrage over crimes such as hate killings, adds law enforcement goofs and foibles, and leavens the whole with tales of the plucky -- and sometimes lucky -- survivors of violent crimes.

 Daly also touches on the science that can catch criminals -- or backfire on prosecutors. For those who think science is faultless, consider the troubled record of such clues as hair structure, blood spatter, even fingerprinting. Check out the number of exonerations, sometimes even with supposedly scientific evidence, and often even of those who have pled guilty to the crimes for which they were charged. Then ponder how many actual criminals may still be lurking while the innocent are imprisoned. 

 Most of the more than 200 entries in "The True Crime File" are bite-sized -- not more than two pages in length, leading readers to say, "just one more," before lights out. 

 Readers who long for a break from records of human villainy can turn to the "Antics and Accidents" section for the likes of "Assault with a Deadly Gator" (in which no reptiles were harmed). Or my favorite, "The Bizarre Body Snatching of Gram Parsons, involving an already-dead rock star, a pair of inebriated friends, and a wrecked hearse. "(B)ecause there was no law in California at that time against stealing a dead body," Daly deadpans, the criminals were only charged with stealing the corpse's coffin. Someday I may visit the national park where the friends attempted to follow what they believed was his wish to be cremated, with its unofficial monument to him -- and them.

Review: How not to rob banks in Missouri

Bank Notes: The True Story of the Boonie Hat Bandit

Author: Caroline Giammanco

Publisher: W & B Publishers, Inc.

Source: PDF from author in return for review

Grade: C+

There are a lot of good stories buried in Caroline Giammanco's narrative, Bank Notes: The True Story of the Boonie Hat Bandit, but readers will have to dig for them. This account of the brief criminal career of a Missouri bank robber and his much longer career as an inmate of the state’s prison system can’t quite decide whether it’s a memoir of how to (or not to) plan a life of crime or whether to be a call for reform of one state’s overcrowded, bumbling criminal justice system.

Although Caroline Giammanco is listed as the author, most of the book is written as a first-person memoir by Donald Keith Giammanco (who prefers to be known as Keith). Caroline explains in the book’s preface that she and Keith met in 2012 when she was interviewing inmate tutors for the classes she taught at Missouri’s South Central Correctional Center. Although Caroline has taken Keith’s last name, they were not married as of the time the book was published.

“Four teachers were looking for new tutors and I was the third to interview Keith that afternoon. The instant we saw each other, and immediately in the next hour, talking during the interview, we knew there was a connection between the two of us. We were like two old friends catching up after a long separation,” she writes.

“By the end of our time, I was certain Keith was the person I wanted to hire. He was bright, thoughtful, genuine and completely honest with me about why he was in prison without me asking. Most inmates do not want to talk about why they are there. Keith believed I had a right to know who was working in my classroom should I hire him. So impressed, I only half-jokingly asked him to do poorly in his remaining interview so I could hire him. He looked at me and said, ‘I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be ethical.’ I could respect that. What I didn’t know until later was he left my classroom thinking, I’m throwing my next interview. There’s only one classroom I want to work in. Keith proceeded to intentionally fail the math quiz portion of his next interview.”

After realizing that he is the “Boonie Hat Bandit” who robbed 12 banks in the St. Louis area in 2008, and confessing that she fell in love with him, Caroline turns most of the book over to Keith (as he prefers to be known). The person who emerges from this confessional narrative is so different from the charmer Caroline writes about in her preface, and later, near the end of the book, that I could only wonder, which (if any) is the real Keith Giammanco.

A middle-aged, apparently middle-class divorced father of twin daughters, Giammanco writes that he changed his occupation from failing stockbroker to bank robber to pay off the debts he incurred through his divorce, subsequent love affair, and free-wheeling lifestyle. But hey, he says, all he wanted to do was give his daughters the good life, including tuition at private high schools. As soon as he stole enough to pay off his debts, he intended to hang up the floppy-brimmed military-style “boonie hat” he used to conceal his features from security cameras and become a law-abiding citizen again.

(New reports indicate he stole more than $100,000 in the course of his 12 robberies. Near the end of the book, he states that all he needed was an additional $35,000 in order to end his crime spree.)

Giammanco’s internet research on how to rob banks unfortunately didn’t include what would happen if he got caught. Most of Bank Notes, in fact, deals with his battles with the legal system. He willingly confessed in federal court to his crimes, not realizing that the state of Missouri would then prosecute him for those same crimes, and sentence him to far lengthier terms than he received from the federal court system. This portion of the book has some fascinating elements, but those are dulled by Giammanco’s opaque style, and sometimes chapter-long rants against friends and family members he considers to have failed him.

Caroline Giammanco takes up the narrative again late in the book, and the story turns from Keith’s personal situation to the general state of criminal justice in Missouri. Its bloated prison system unfortunately mirrors that of too many other states, where fear of crime has led to exaggeratedly-long prison terms, grotesquely overcrowded prisons, and internal corruption – again, a potentially fascinating subject that I could only wish had been interwoven throughout the book to leaven Keith’s narrative.

Wordcraft – The serial killer Texans wrote out of history

The Midnight Assassin

by Skip Hollandsworth

***

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.”