Skip HollandsworthBesprekingen

A thorough review of an interesting group of murders. Even the somewhat gratuitous introduction of the ripper murders is done in a fairly interesting way. Would have been interested in seeing an expert opinion on the killings . Other books I've read mention that serial killers usually kill within their own race, which made me wonder if there was more than one killer. Looks like we'll never know

Update:
I gave the hardcover copy to my Dad for his birthday. The bound copy is full of goodies, like maps and photos, and contains a reference index. My dad, a native Austinite, is a history buff who particularly loves the late 1800s, and was so delighted with this book that he also sent a copy to his brother.

Original Review:
It seems amazing that I’ve never heard of this string of attacks and murders in Austin, although I seem to recall hearing of the legend of the mysterious woman in white (apparently the ghost of the murdered Eula) when I was a student at UT. Or maybe from my visits to my grandparents in Austin as a kid?

The author does an excellent job of presenting the events and his research findings objectively. The narrative is not at all dry – it’s engaging while paying the reader the compliment of avoiding sensationalism and emotional manipulation. I was as fascinated by the story of historical Austin, its people and growth and politics and race relations, as I was by the mystery of the attacks. The insight into the process (and limits) of 19th century forensics, law enforcement, and justice, was compelling as well.

Audiobook, borrowed from my public library via Overdrive. Clint Jordan provides an excellent performance with an authentic regional voice, although his mispronunciation of a few place names was a little distracting. For example, Seguin is “suh-GEEN”, not “SEG-win”. The author reads the afterword in his own voice, which is even more authentically, delightfully, regional.

stopped on page 18

Like many readers of history and historical fiction, I've encountered serial killers (only in books and movies, thankfully) like Jack the Ripper before, but the connections between the infamous London killer and a murderer who hunted the city of Austin, Texas, are intriguing. As this book points out, the two killers are almost certainly different people, but close time span when they were active led contemporaries to suppose that they might be the same person. Many mysteries remain about this illusive murderer and many of the scenes recounted made me wish modern forensics could have been used. The discussion of how law enforcement rounded up suspects, often black men, and even arrested them with no evidence, made for frustrating reading. Overall, a good read about a serial killer I previously knew nothing about.

If you are a fan of Texas History and want a new story you don't know then here you go.

I don't know why you would want to read it if you are not interested in True Crime or Austin.

A historical tale of a little-known serial killer who tormented the city of Austin, Texas near the end of the 19th century, Hollandsworth’s book will appeal to fans of true crime, especially those who are interested in its “evolution.” Without the benefit of modern tools and technology such as DNA testing, surveillance cameras, or even psychological profiling, law enforcement was practically powerless to track down the person or persons responsible for the brutal attacks and murders of multiple women.

One aspect of this crime spree that differs minimally from current instances of serial murder, however, is its reflection of cultural attitudes towards women, minorities, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged. The first victims of the Midnight Assassin were black serving women, domestic help employed by white families in the city—and suspicion for these murders immediately fell upon poor “shiftless” black men, a number of whom were arrested with little if any evidence against them. When two white women eventually fell victim to the serial killer…well, you can probably imagine the consequences. Hollandsworth doesn’t provide much commentary or analysis on the relationship between law enforcement and the prevailing attitudes towards race and class—perhaps because it’s so glaringly obvious to any reader sensitive to these issues.

In all, an engaging and interesting read.

There aren't many facts about the serial killer(s?) in this book. Although a few different men were tried for the crimes, the perpetrator(s?) was never caught, so, obviously, not much is known. There's a healthy dose of conjecture towards the end, but honestly, I don't think the author presented a strong case for ANY of the men he named as possible suspects. So if you like to read true crime with a known perpetrator being caught at the end, I definitely wouldn't recommend this book.

Honestly, most of the book is sheer padding. He writes a ton about Austin Texas, but I found myself not really caring about the political machinations or the name of the street lamp lighters. It really didn't add anything to the story for me, and I found myself wanting to skim these chapters.

Some people saw a connection between the Austin serial killer(s) and Jack the Ripper, but I don't see that, either. The crimes are so different from one another that I'd be shocked if there was any relation at all. I get the author bringing this up ONCE (if to puzzle as to why these crimes aren't remembered but Jack the Ripper's are), but it was mentioned several times. So it kind of felt like the book was trying to piggyback off of a more famous crime.

I think that I would have liked this book more if it was just an in-depth article. I'm not exactly how the author thought that he was going to write a whole book at this without significant padding of the story. Maybe if I was fascinated with Austin Texas I would have enjoyed this more?

This was an interesting book and told of a part of history I had never heard of before. I was truly interested in the outcome and could appreciate the research that went into this. There were some creepy parts, but that comes with the territory.

I did not know about the serial killer in Austin in the 1880's. I found this book very fascinating. Also, since there was a suspected connection with Jack the Ripper, I would have thought these killings would have been more well known. This book goes into why that did not happen. For fiction readers, this book is not written like a novel like some non-fiction books are. It is definitely written like a typical non-fiction which I enjoy.

This is a true crime novel about the first known serial killer in the United States. In the late 19th century someone began killing women in Austin, TX by striking them with an ax in the middle of the night. In the beginning, serving women (most of whom were African American) were targeted while sleeping in their quarters behind the homes of their employers but eventually even well to do white women were victims. Investigators had no concept of serial killers and thought that the murders had to be the work of murderous gangs of African American men. Although many men, African American as well as white, were arrested for the murders, they were all eventually cleared and the true murderer was never found and the murders eventually just stopped. (One theory was that the murderer went to London and became Jack the Ripper.) Despite the interesting subject manner, the book felt a bit tedious to me midway through. The author had a lot of descriptions of Austin and its residents at the time and described every time someone was suspected and/or arrested even though there was no evidence linking them. There was very little evidence in the cases, especially since they had not yet developed most forensic methods of gathering evidence. Arrests were made because someone might possibly have a motive in hopes that they would confess once arrested. There is a lot of potential here for an interesting story, this fell a little short for me. I do know that it gave me a deeper appreciation for modern forensic science.

This is a narrative nonfiction story about America's first serial killer. He appeared in 1885 Austin, terrorized the town, which was pretty much just a frontier town at the time, for a year, and then was never heard from again, or caught. It has been speculated in some quarters, now mostly disproven, that Jack the Ripper, whose murders began terrorizing London a few years later, was one and the same as the Austin killer.

Sources for the book are primarily the newspaper reports of the time, and one thing that clearly comes through is what a racist time and place Austin was. The first murders were of servants, who were black, and lived in separate quarters behind their employers' houses. At first, authorities assumed that the culprit was the husband or boyfriend of the murdered woman, and those men were frequently arrested, although they all had to be soon let go. It got so that black men began to be afraid to go out on the streets for fear of arrest.

Things reached a high pitch when white women, matriarchs and pillars of society began to be murdered. The murders of all the women were brutal and vicious--the murderer used an axe and knife and frequently skewered the victims' brains with a long steel pole. Forensic methods at the time were extremely primitive, relying on bloodhounds to track the scent of the murderer fleeing the scent, so the police usually had not clues to go on.

This book was okay, but not compelling, Just an interesting look at a time and place.

3 stars

This is the story of America's first serial killer. The murders occur in Austin Texas the last 1800's and the possibility that the same killer moved to England to become Jack the Ripper. The serial killer side of the story was gory (as expected) and interesting in how they murders happened the way they happened. But the story or a young Austin was wonderfully written.

This brand new thriller by a veteran writer from Texas Monthly details the series of brutal murders in Austin, Texas of 1885. Anyone who liked Larson's The Devil in the White City will love this!

America's first serial killer stalked Austin, Texas, in the late 1800's, striking terror and panic in the city. Some even wondered if Jack the Ripper had crossed the ocean!

Before Jack the Ripper attacked London, there was The Midnight Assassin, who terrorized Austin for nearly a year. Texas Monthly journalist Hollsandsworth makes the crime come alive.

In the genre and style of Erik Larson.

What happens when a serial killer strikes a city with such ferociousness and cunning that no one can be trusted and everyone's a suspect? Out of seemingly nowhere someone is brutally killing with no rhyme or reason. In "The Midnight Assassin" by Skip Hollandsworth we learn that such a thing happened to Austin, Texas, in 1885. Although there was a history of multiple murders across the nation the concept of a serial killer was yet to be described. Young and old, black and white, this killer was bent on nothing more that brutal murdering as many people as possible. Law enforcement, vigilante groups, posers, and imposters were searching day and night and there were a dozen or so men arrested for the crimes, Unfortunately, the killing continued while they were in custody leaving a town deeply mistrusting and frightened.

The author does an excellent job of portraying this western town in the midst of the terror and confusion experienced during this time. No one felt safe and everyone was eager to point a finger of blame and catch the killer. At first the victims were thought to be limited to black females and the suspects were black males. Soon enough it was found that neither supposition was true. Through photos, newspaper and magazine articles, and police records the story is rolled out in all its gory details.

The ending may not be what every reader is looking for but when the story is non-fictional, that can't be helped. This is an engaging tale with an interesting cast of characters in a time that is fascinating. You'll be drawn in by the mystery and the timelessness of the account of the killer and his/her victims.

Recommended for fans of Texas history, unsolved murder aficionados, and historical non-fiction devotees.

Well-written and researched. I picked up some interesting insight into turn of the century Austin and Texas history. I wanted to love this book, but it fell a little bit short for me. I love crime and reporting of early criminal justice. However, this book starts with a bang and ends on a whimper.

There's no smoking gun and after all the research, the author doesn't put forth a hypothesis. Utimately, there's neither a satisfying nor tantalizing ending. IMO, this would have been better suited to a long form article series.½

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/same-as-it-never-was/content?oid=21399965

For our next depressing read, The Debbie Downer Book Club selected The Midnight Assassin by Skip Hollandsworth (2015) a rare (for us) brand new hardcover selection. But how could we resist? This well-researched look into the series of brutal murders of Austin women in the 1880s was both sad, local, and involved historical research -- as a group of archivists / librarians / information professionals in the Austin area, we were in! The author gives us a nicely researched and journalistic look into the time of the murders, pulling out details from the history of Austin that give depth and context to the reactions of the town at the time. His descriptions of the murders themselves, supported by his research in newspapers and police files, are brutal and effective, and bring the terror the town must have felt back then to life for the reader. While there is a general consensus on who the murderer was (hint: not Jack the Ripper), Hollandsworth doesn't come to any conclusions on that front, and just presents the theories and evidence as they were collected and presented to the public. I really enjoyed this book, and if you have lived in Austin, like true crime, are interested in history, or just enjoy a good read, I think you will like it too.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-midnight-assassin-panic-scandal-and.ht... ]

Well-written and thoroughly researched account of the first serial killer in America. In addition to learning about the murders and the unsuccessful search for the killer, there is a wealth of information about Austin in the 1880's which is fascinating. I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but am glad I chose this from the Early Reviewer program. Would recommend to anyone who has an interest in true crime, history, or Texas. (I do agree with another reviewer that I was expecting some sort of theory to be put forth by the author, but there really wasn't one. That was a tad disappointing - surely he had some thoughts after all his research.)

Skip Hollandsworth, a regular columnist for Texas Monthly magazine, became so intrigued by a true crime story from Austin’s past that he turned it into his first book, The Midnight Assassin. The book recounts a series of murders that happened there in 1884 and 1885, murders that were so horrendously bloody that they rivaled those committed three years later by London’s Jack the Ripper. The murders in the two cities were in fact similar enough that some newspapers of the day speculated that London’s Ripper may have tested and developed his skills in Austin before bringing them with him to Europe.

It all started when someone began slaughtering Austin’s black servant women. Most of the victims lived in detached quarters adjacent to the homes of their white employers, and in each case, the killer escaped the area without leaving behind any clues that could identify him. Early witnesses, some of them children of the murdered women, could not even agree on whether the killer was a white man or a black man.

Austin’s 17,000 citizens were concerned about the murders, but because the victims were all African-American women, it was easy enough for them to write the crime spree off as being the work of a gang of “bad blacks.” For a year, the rest of the city had little fear that the murders might spread into their own community and homes. That all changed on Christmas Eve, 1885, when within the space of a few minutes two prominent white women were butchered in their homes. From that moment, Austin’s politicians and policemen pulled out all the stops in their attempt to catch the murderer before he could kill again - even hiring two sets of Pinkerton detectives from Chicago (one set being real, the other fake).

The Midnight Assassin is as much a social history of the city of Austin as it is a true crime story. Barely twenty years after the close of the American Civil War, the relationship between the state’s white and black populations was still eerily similar to what it was before the war was fought. Slavery might have been a thing of the past, but most African-Americans still struggled to live on what little wages their white employers were willing to pay them. It was no coincidence that from beginning to end almost single person considered to be a potential suspect was black.

Austin was a city on the make it the 1880s. As state capital, the city had an image to live up to – even if it was one largely in the minds of politicians who saw the unsolved murders of white women as a personal threat to their own careers. Upcoming elections, personal feuds, and business considerations made it imperative that the murderer be caught, but it never happened. The first serial killer in American history was never identified - and he probably never will be – but The Midnight Assassin is still one heck of a ride.

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book or my review itself.

The true story of "The Midnight Assassin", as he was nicknamed by members of the press, is the tale of America's first serial killer.

This is not a killer who has been written about like Jack the Ripper or H.H. Holmes (though he has been suspected of being both those infamous murderers as well), but is one who carved his own trail of terror through Austin, Texas, and was never caught. This is an unsolved crime, one even many descendants of the victims themselves had never heard of.

Hollandsworth expertly brings this untold true crime tale to today's readers, with impeccable research and an excellent writing style. I highly recommend this book for readers of true crime. It's the kind of book where I read an ereader ARC of it, and have added the hardback to my wishlist. I want it as an addition to my true crime book collection.

TEXAS HISTORY/TRUE CRIME
Skip Hollandsworth
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer
Henry Holt, 978-0-8050-9762-2, hardback (also available as an ebook and on Audible), 336 pgs., $30.00
April 5, 2016


Austin, Texas, in December 1884 was a rapidly growing modern city with 230 students enrolled at a brand-new university, a new pink granite state capitol under construction, an opera house, and a roller coaster. Prosperous gentlemen wore frock coats and ladies wore bustles. Reporters wore their hats “at jaunty angles” and hung out at the Horseshoe Saloon which sold a new beer called Budweiser. The Austin Police Department had twelve policemen. As the mayor liked to say, “No city has the promise of a more healthful prosperity!” And then for the next year and change someone “crisscrossed the entire city … using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class.”

In a ridiculously entertaining, page-turning history, Skip Hollandsworth, award-winning journalist and executive editor of Texas Monthly, tells the story of these slayings in The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer. Almost as mysterious as the still-unsolved crimes is how such a sensational story could be so little known, especially in Texas. Hollandsworth’s prodigious, dogged research provides an engaging history of Austin’s development. Details of life in Austin in the late nineteenth century add context and provide a particularly effective contrast with the extraordinary murders.

No one had any experience with this type of crime, and the science of criminology didn’t exist yet. Speculation ran wild and included Comanche Indian attack, escapees from the nearby Texas State Lunatic Asylum, and, eventually, leading politicians, and even Satan himself, before settling, inevitably, on the nearest available black man. As long as the victims were poor and black, the respectable white citizens of Austin assigned the assaults and mutilations “all the significance of a hangnail.” Then white women were targeted and lynch mobs gathered in the streets. The matter-of-fact racism is truly stunning to twenty-first-century sensibilities.

This story seems custom-ordered for Hollandsworth. In the unmistakable style he’s perfected at Texas Monthly, he has great fun, in a sort of disbelieving and sometimes righteously incensed manner, with this “story worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, a rip-roaring, multilayered gothic saga of madness and intrigue, panic and paranoia, beautiful women and baying bloodhounds, and flabbergasting plot twists and sensational courtroom drama.” He will make you listen more closely to strange sounds in the night.

The Midnight Assassin is filled with improbable facts, such as London Metropolitan Police speculating that the Austin madman had shown up in Whitechapel, calling himself Jack the Ripper. The bobbies even questioned Black Elk, the Lakota tribesman, who was left behind in London by Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Truth is stranger than.
Even though there were arrests, trials and mistrials, reward offerings and vigilante committees, additional police and Pinkerton detectives hired, and Austin’s famous “moonlight towers” (fifteen of which remain) were installed, the murders remain unsolved. But Hollandsworth, a tad obsessed, is still on the case. He asks that anyone with information potentially leading to the identification of the perpetrator please give him a call.

Originally published by Lone Star Literary Life.

I had never heard of the "Midnight Assassin", and had no idea that a serial killer terrorized Texas before Jack the Ripper terrorized London. I'm intrigued by historical crime, so I was immediately drawn to this book. It's a fascinating read that kept me fully engaged.

Clearly, the author put an immense amount of time and effort into research. While we are immersed in detail, I never felt overwhelmed by it all. And, most importantly, the detail never outweighed the story. This is an easy book to read.

While the focus is, of course, the murders, Hollandsworth gives us far more. I felt what it was like to live in this emerging Texas city that was still remote and removed from much of the country. We see how racism influenced opinions, inciting fear, hatred, and further division. We also see the politics of the time, and how politicians then, as now, made decisions based more on retaining their position than on what was needed.

The Midnight Assassin is a complex story told with ease, offering us a vivid look at a frightening time and place in American history.

*I was provided with an advance copy by the publisher, via LibraryThing.*

Most people have heard of the horrific murders in Victorian London carried out by Jack the Ripper. Few, however, have heard of the Midnight Assassin until now. Almost three years before the Ripper murders, the American city of Austin, Texas was terrorized by a series of brutal killings. The Midnight Assassin began his reign of terror by killing servants, most of whom were African American. This lead authorities to assume that the culprit must be African American as well. Nevertheless, eyewitness accounts varied. Some described a white attacker, while others described a black attacker. Meanwhile, servant women took to barricading themselves in at night. Before the killing spree would end, around a dozen suspects had been arrested.

As the holidays approached, an uneasy calm descended upon the city. That's when the Midnight Assassin attacked once again...on Christmas Eve. This time two white women were attacked. During this era law enforcement did not fully understand the ramifications of these events as the concept of a serial killer was unknown. Then just as abruptly as the killings started, they stopped. As life got back to normal in Austin, London began experiencing a series of gruesome murders. Investigators on both sides of the Atlantic would wonder if Jack the Ripper and the Midnight Assassin were the same person.

The Bottom Line: After a slow, detailed start with lots of background information, the pace quickly picked up speed. The mystery of the Midnight Assassin remains unsolved to this very day; yet, few outside the Austin, Texas area have ever heard of these brutal crimes. Written in a journalistic style, Hollandsworth takes the reader on a terrifying journey. Fans of true crime and American history will want to pick up a copy. Also, recommended for readers who enjoyed "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson. This is a fascinating look at a little known event outside the Austin area, and visitors to the city can still see some of the changes the city made in the wake of these events (for example, the giant moonlight towers). Note: This book includes vivid descriptions of the murders; thus, it is not suitable for sensitive readers.½

I enjoyed reading this book, and learning about a part of history that I didn't know about. Ignoring the possible connection to Jack the Ripper, the rest of the story is well told. If you enjoy history or unsolved mysteries, pick this book up - you won't be disappointed.