The muddied evidence, the gruesome details, and the hair-raising headlines are unique to each case, but the underlying question beneath all true crime stories is the same: Why?
For decades, Skip Hollandsworth has been puzzling over two motives. First, of course, there’s the thorny emotions and vengeful impulses behind each bizarre crime he’s chronicled during his tenure at Texas Monthly. Then there’s the question of his own drive, the ever-lurking human puzzle of what draws reporters and readers alike to revisit these harrowing acts again and again.
In She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales, Hollandsworth’s second book, the illustrious journalist collects the women-perpetrated Texan crimes of his long-form catalog. It’s a niche which, it just so happens, contains the murder that started it all for the North Texas-raised writer: the case of Bobby and Abbie Burns.
“Here’s a woman, this glamorous beauty, who pulls off this murder and then kills herself,” Hollandsworth says, calling to mind the petite oilman’s wife who orchestrated a murder-suicide in her Wichita Falls hilltop mansion, miles from the writer-to-be’s childhood home. He was a junior in high school at the time. “I could have started a little private detective agency called the Hollandsworth Investigations just to try to find out what happened,” he muses on the phone with the Chronicle, remembering his juvenile efforts to investigate the case revisited in a chapter from She Kills called “My First Murder.”
“Why did I have this turn in my life right then?” he wonders aloud. There’s a long pause on the phone line. “If you’re waiting for me to give you an answer, I just don’t know.”
Whatever the reason, the fascination was there to stay. The unshakable storyteller regales me with tales of prison visits, facing down portrait-painting serial killer Charles Albright for his very first Texas Monthly crime story, and of conversations with the friends and families of killers that still haunt Hollandsworth’s imagination, like the story of “Cowboy Bob,” aka Peggy Jo Tallas.
“Why would a middle-class woman who lives in an old apartment with her mother, takes care of her mother – who’s very ill – makes sure she gets the right medications, suddenly, out of nowhere, put on a cowboy uniform, a 10-gallon hat, sunglasses, big buckled belt, cowboy boots, padding around the waist to make her look fatter? Why would she suddenly do this and go rob a suburban bank and get $1,200?” Hollandsworth asks himself. “I just can’t escape that kind of story.”
Like the emblematic bloodhound, Hollandsworth keeps trotting along, nosing around for the next puzzling crime to capture his, and his readers’, attention – whether it be a centuries-ago tale like that of Austin’s own “Servant Girl Annihilator,” who terrorized the pre-moontower-lit streets of the capital city, in his New York Times bestseller The Midnight Assassin, or the ready-for-comedy true tale of Bernie Tiede, which Hollandsworth adapted to the silver screen for Richard Linklater’s Bernie. Puzzling over the nurse poisoner and socialite stabber that adorn the pages of She Kills, Hollandsworth puts forth another theory.
“I love writing about tragedy and I think it’s to help me understand little questions like ‘Why are we here? What are we supposed to do with our lives?’ You know, all those kinds of questions you’re supposed to have answered and got out of your brain by college,” he says, playfully belittling the quintessential human quest. “I’m still obsessed.”
Skip Hollandsworth in Conversation About She Kills
Saturday, Nov. 8, 3:15pm
Texas Tent Presented by Texas Monthly
This article appears in November 7 • 2025.