A black saloon in Austin in the eighteen-eighties.  Police regularly raided such venues to find murder suspects, as Skip Hollandsworth, of Texas Monthly, writes in his new true-crime book, “The Midnight Assassin.”  PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER, AUSTIN PUBLIC LIBRARY

For the writer Skip Hollandsworth, there was life before Charlie and there was life after.  In 1993, early on in a journalism career he describes as, to that point, “fairly blasé,” Hollandsworth read about Charles Albright, a middle-aged former science teacher and football star who was known in the media as the Texas Eyeball Killer.  Albright, Hollandsworth said, was well groomed and eloquent, a “Renaissance man” who spoke several languages.  He had also murdered three Dallas women, all of whom were working as prostitutes.  He removed their eyeballs with such precision that, when the eyelids were shut, it was impossible to tell they were gone. 

“It was almost a religious experience, talking to him,” Hollandsworth told me recently, over the phone. “ Here was a man who had crossed a line into the pit of depravity and had done something to send Dallas into a panic.  And so I began to search for more stories like that.”  In the decades since, Hollandsworth has recounted, in the pages of Texas Monthly, where he is an executive editor, many more tales of what he calls “our glorious Texas criminals.”  This spring, he published his first book, “The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer.”  The book’s titular assassin, who committed his crimes in Austin in the late nineteenth century, had “a rich need to ritualistically kill,” Hollandsworth said. “ Slip out of his house, stalk a woman, slaughter her, leave her out to be seen like a work of art.”  Other nicknames for the murderer included the Servant Girl Annihilator (coined by a young O. Henry), the Texas Jekyll, the Intangible Nemesis, and, remarkably, the Talented Sensationalist.  Seven women were murdered on moonlit nights between 1884 and 1885. 

The socialite Eula Phillips, one of the women who was murdered in Austin on Christmas Eve, 1885.  COURTESY SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH COURTESY SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

Hollandsworth immerses the reader in the time and place with meticulously researched detail. “ A thin breeze swept through the city, carrying with it the aroma of evergreen and cinnamon and wood smoke,” he writes of Christmas Eve, 1885.  That night, two women were brutally murdered in different parts of the city.  When police discovered the corpse of one of those women, Eula Phillips, splayed in her backyard, they also found her son inside the home, still alive, “the baby sitting up, holding an apple, unharmed even though his nightclothes were crimson with blood.” 

The F.B.I. places the incidence of serial murder at less than one per cent of all murders committed in any given year.  But from Jack the Ripper to “The Jinx,” readers and other spectators have long been enthralled by the phenomenon. “ Everybody knows the feeling of wanting to kill a spouse, kill your parents,” Hollandsworth said, offhandedly. “ But only a chosen few are sick enough to want to go murder strangers.  And that’s the scariest kind of crime, and that’s why people are drawn to it, because it’s the most alien.” 

I’ve spent plenty of late-night hours venturing down the blood-spattered rabbit hole of murder stories—peering through the dead-eyed mug shots on Murderpedia, for instance, a sprawling online trove of information about nearly seven thousand murderers.  I find that my id is vicariously gratified by the grisly details.  My own troubles start to feel lighter during these macabre reading sessions, as my relatively small-bore moral failings lose their sometimes crushing weight. 

But Hollandsworth believes that serial murder has a special appeal to writers, for simpler reasons. “ Serial killers create better chronological narrative,” he explained. “ You have a killing; you have a break.  You have a second killing; you have a break.  It gives you a chance to watch the panic begin to build, watch the fear rise, slowly and slowly.”  The structure lends itself to drama, he said.  The building of suspense leads to a spectacular dénouement, in which the killer is either caught or commits a final atrocity before evading justice. 

Serial killers who rely on especially perverse or eccentric techniques tend to fascinate the public the most.  But as Hollandsworth himself has noted, including in a haunting Texas Monthly feature called “ ‘If the Serial Killer Gets Us, He Gets Us,’ ” from 2011, the identities of the victims play an outsize role in determining how much media coverage, and what kind, a killer may receive.  In 2006, when a fifty-four-year-old woman named Pamela Goss was viciously stabbed to death in the poor black neighborhood of Acres Homes, in Houston, the murder garnered only four paragraphs in the Houston _Chronicle—_even though she was one of six women to have been murdered in the neighborhood in as many months.  The silence of the news media meant that “no one outside the neighborhood had any idea what was happening,” Hollandsworth wrote.  He describes that story as one of the best he has ever written, and also one of the least read. “ It had no impact,” he told me. “ I wonder if it was because I was writing about black life for a mostly white audience.” 

An Austin Daily Statesman report, from Christmas Day, 1885, on the murder of two white women.  COURTESY SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH COURTESY SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

In that respect, Hollandsworth said, America has changed “only glacially” since 1885, when the Midnight Assassin preyed on Austin’s black servant women.  Much of Hollandsworth’s account of the killings is stitched together from breathless nineteenth-century newspaper reportage.  Because the initial victims were uniformly black, he writes, coverage was sparser than it might have been, and suspects were rounded up from the city’s black neighborhoods with the tacit approval of the city’s white community. “ When the killings started in Austin, the first thing was to find a black criminal to arrest,” Hollandsworth told me. 

Then the killer began targeting prominent white women, and the story went national, reaching the New York Times.  When Jack the Ripper began killing women in London, three years later, people speculated that he was Austin’s killer gone abroad.  The Midnight Assassin, after all, had never been caught. 

Hollandsworth, to his considerable chagrin, was not able to identify him, either.  But it seems almost fitting that his first book would examine a case in which the killer’s identity remains unknown.  Looking back on his crime writing, Hollandsworth finds his gaze drawn to the victims, whose sufferings are often compounded by a lack of attention from the same media that immortalizes their killers.  When Hollandsworth wrote the story of Dean Corll, a vicious serial killer of young boys in Houston, in the nineteen-seventies, it was the families of the victims who haunted him. “ What was most powerful,” he said, “was the mothers who still wait for their sons to come home after all these years.”