77: Austin's "Midnight Assassin" Serial Killer w/ Skip Hollandsworth - A True Crime History Podcast

Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

Erik Rivenes

True Crime, History, Education

4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2018

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

From December of 1884 to December of 1885 a serial killer terrorized the city of Austin Texas. He had multiple nicknames: the Midnight Assassin, the Intangible Nemesis and the Servant Girl Annihilator. Journalist Skip Hollandsworth, author of "The Midnight Assassin: The Hunt for America's First Serial Killer", shares the story of this brutal murderer's killing spree, the suspects, the hapless police department who pursued him, and the rumors that the killer was none other than Jack the Ripper.

More about the author here: https://www.texasmonthly.com/contributors/skip-hollandsworth/

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Transcript

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0:30.0	1. Welcom everyone to the most notorious podcast, I'm Eric Rivenes. Please listen
0:50.8	to our discussion about today's episode. There is some graphic material ahead. Serial
0:57.0	Killer stuff, you know. Alright, so let's get to the interview. I'm thrilled to have
1:01.9	Skip Holland's Worth as my guest today. He's an award-winning journalist, screenwriter,
1:07.3	and executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine. He's also the author of the critically
1:13.1	acclaimed book, The Midnight Assassin, Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's first serial killer.
1:21.6	Thanks for taking some time to chat with me. Absolutely, Eric. I've got to ask you,
1:27.2	where did you come across this story and why hasn't it been written about in a book before?
1:33.9	Well, there's so many historical stories that slip through the cracks. And in Texas, especially
1:41.9	which has a lot of big history, the Alamo, the cattle drives, spindle top, oil, NASA, the Dallas
1:50.0	cowboys, on and on and on and on. And one day I was reading this book about Jack the Ripper because
1:57.6	I'm a depraved human being and I love blood and gore. And I'm reading this, it's an old historical
2:05.6	pamphlet that came out around the time of the killings in Whitechap in the end of London in 1888.
2:13.2	And there's this line in this pamphlet that said, Scotland Yard investigators suspect that the
2:20.1	killer came from a quote, small city in Texas, quote, where a series of similar murders had
2:24.8	occurred three years earlier. Well, for Texas Monthly magazine, crime is sort of my willhouse and I
2:31.2	like to write crime stories. And I thought, what's small city in Texas? What series of similar murders?
2:39.7	And it never, I had never heard of it in such a thing. And this was like in 1980, 1998, and you
2:46.9	know, there was nothing to really Google. And there was no index for old newspapers. And I just
2:55.7	sort of blindly called the often newspaper, the Austin Library. And I said, do you have any
3:02.2	files on old serial killers? And they mentioned the series of killings that occurred in 1885 or 1886.
3:11.6	And they said, we have a small file on it, but it's just one or two clippings about some women
	...

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