Dear Reader,

Before Skip Hollandsworth, legendary true crime writer, began his path down the darker corridors of human behavior, he envisioned he would become a pastor, following in the footsteps of his father and adhering to the wholesome Christian life he’d grown up in.

But then a millionaire oilman and his beautiful wife were fatally shot in their Wichita Falls mansion and Hollandsworth, who was familiar with the couple from around town, was “both terrified and transfixed.” He began asking questions, concocting theories, and casing the palatial home where the crime had occurred. Still too young for a driver’s license, he had to ask a friend to take him on that last mission. 

As Hollandsworth recounts in a new essay, excerpted from his book She Kills, out October 14, his adolescent obsession with the Burnses’ murders led him to pursue a career in journalism, through jobs at the The Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Times Herald, and eventually, Texas Monthly. It was at this magazine that he would finally become known for his dogged, detailed, and damn-good chronicling of Texas’s bloodiest, biggest, and most absurd true crime cases. 

Read Skip’s full essay on his “first murder” below. For more stories like it, preorder his forthcoming book, then catch him at one of three book-signing events happening across the state. Learn more here.

My First Murder

BY SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

A legendary true crime writer revisits the case that launched his lifelong obsession. An exclusive excerpt from Skip Hollandsworth’s new book, She Kills.

Suburban Madness 

Why would a devoted wife deliberately run over her beloved husband three times? It’s quite simple, really. He was having an affair with a woman accused by her allegedly pill-popping ex-husband of carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, whose ex-husband has been indicted for an illegal wiretapping scheme designed to catch the two in the act and cover up his own infidelities with her former Lamaze-class buddy. Any questions? 

Midnight in the Garden of East Texas 

In sleepy Carthage a rich, haughty widow disappears, and nobody seems to notice. When she turns up dead, everybody seems to feel sympathy for the nice young man who killed her. 

Poisoning Daddy 

No one ever suspected a thing until she asked her best friend if she could keep a terrible secret: the bizarre story of teenager Marie Robards, the devoted daughter who murdered her father. 

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