Skip Hollandsworth (Publicity photo)
Being a crime-show junkie, I have on more than one occasion spotted Preston Hollow resident Skip Hollandsworth on my TV, speaking as the expert on, say, The Killer Cadets case, one of the dozens upon dozens of murder cases on which he has reported and elaborated.
He doesn’t just write about murder, but his crime stories, like the fantastic Bernie, are particularly captivating, as a New York Times book reviewer notes.
“Skip Hollandsworth knows his way around a crime scene. Since 1989, he has written about a wide range of subjects for Texas Monthly, but his most memorable pieces — featuring bank robbers, disappearing teenagers, murdered prostitutes — are about the grim events that get cordoned off behind yellow tape,” wrote John Williams last week.
Williams went on to review Hollandsworth’s first full-length book, “The Midnight Assassin,” and did so with ample flattery.
Assassin is about a very old, unsolved serial murder case spanning 1884 and 1885 in Austin, TX.
“It’s peppered with eerie set pieces: A wedding held on the grounds of the Texas State Lunatic Asylum. A baby found at one murder scene, ‘sitting up, holding an apple, unharmed even though his nightclothes were crimson with blood.’ An injured woman fleeing an attacker and screaming, ‘We are all dead!’
“Mr. Hollandsworth handles gruesome details with a smart, restrained touch … The book vividly recreates a time when open spaces like Texas were becoming more tightly bunched and slightly more claustrophobic, and when news was traveling faster from one corner of the country to another.”
Texas Monthly recently shared an excerpt from the book — it’s here.
