As part of the San Antonio Book Festival, this episode of "Texas Matters" was recorded in front of a live audience at Texas Public Radio with Skip Hollandsworth from "Texas Monthly." He's the author of “She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales.”
True crime has exploded from the spinning metal rack of the drug store into one of the dominant genres in modern media. Streaming platforms and podcast charts are crowded with titles dissecting cold cases, serial killers, and domestic murders; recent research suggests that roughly half of Americans enjoy true crime content, and that a large share of regular podcast listeners seek it out specifically.
Long before this boom, Skip Hollandsworth was helping define high-quality true crime storytelling from his perch at "Texas Monthly," where since 1989 he has produced meticulously reported, novelistic accounts of Texas murders, cons, and scandals.
His work on cases like the Carthage murder that inspired the film "Bernie" showed how true crime could be both deeply reported and literary. While also grounded in place, psychology, and social context rather than pure police blotter shock value.
In that sense, Hollandsworth didn’t just ride the wave of true crime’s popularity; he helped shape the genre’s modern standards, demonstrating that stories about real violence carry the most impact when they are told with restraint, empathy, and an eye for the human consequences.
A new collection of stories from Hollandsworth puts a distinctly Texan spin on America’s enduring obsession with true crime. “She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales” gathers some of Hollandsworth’s most memorable stories about women who committed – or were accused of –
extraordinary crimes across Texas.
Hollandsworth has long been regarded as one of the state’s premier narrative journalists. In “She Kills,” he revisits cases that range from a teenager who poisoned her father’s dinner to a quiet small-town nurse who began killing her patients, to a dental hygienist who arranged a hit on a romantic rival.
Hollandsworth also writes about the Goree Girls, a 1940’s all-women western swing band made up of inmates at the Goree prison unit in Huntsville, Texas. They became unlikely stars of Texas radio. Performing on the prison-produced program “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls” and at the Texas Prison Rodeo, the band’s fiddles, guitars and close harmony vocals reached listeners across the country, who sent fan mail, gifts and even marriage proposals to the convicted women behind the microphones.
Hollandsworth tells their story in his "Texas Monthly" feature “O Sister, Where Art Thou?” excavating a largely forgotten cultural phenomenon and the women at its center. He mixes archival research with intimate character detail, tracing how the band’s fame grew precisely because they were locked up — and how it faded as members won parole and tried to disappear back into ordinary life.
