Author: Skip Hollandsworth
Narrator: Clint Jordan
Some time around the turn of the century, I was an avid reader of Texas Monthly, a periodical covering a wide range of topics which I considered to have some of the finest writing one could come by in that era. And in one issue appeared the odd story of a serial killer, pre-dating Jack the Ripper, who had lurked in my own backyard - killing women and girls in Austin the mid-1880's, when Austin was the capital, but still just sprouting up as a municipality.
I was stunned.
Like a lot of young folks with too much time on their hands, I was aware of details around particularly famous serial killers, having read up on Jack the Ripper as far back as middle school. And I recall being aware of Henry Lee Lucas, Ted Bundy, and a handful of other killers by the time I graduated high school, back when all of it was sort of an abstraction. So to find out that Austin had it's own Victorian-era killer, and that we had our famed Moontowers because of the killer? That was mind-boggling.
Since that article, the general knowledge that Austin had a 19th-century serial killer has become more pronounced. And, these days, if you want to go on one of those Ghost Tours of Austin, I believe there's some that cater to hitting up the spots where folks were killed.
But I'd never read Skip Hollandsworth's follow up to the article, his 2017 book The Midnight Assassin: The Hunt for America's First Serial Killer. I'd planned to read it in October as my Hallow-read, but... I get excited and jump the gun sometimes. And here we are. And, yes, I took the book in as an audiobook read by Clint Jordan.
