Once sleepy Austin, Texas, was beginning to boom in the late 19th-century when a series of brutal murders rocked the town. The crimes were so vicious that when Jack the Ripper started his notorious murder spree in London, some in Austin wondered whether the Texas killer had moved abroad.

Skip Hollandsworth, executive editor of Texas Monthly and an award-winning crime writer, became fascinated by the still-unsolved Austin case and reveals the details of his research in The Midnight Assassin. We contacted the author at his home in Texas to find out more about this intriguing true-crime narrative.

This story is not widely known. How did you come across it?
Actually, there have been a handful of amateur historians who have been researching the case, hoping to find the killer. Eighteen years ago, one of those researchers, an Austin schoolteacher hoping to write a novel about the killings, generously shared with me a couple of newspaper articles she had come across, and it wasn’t long before I was on the hunt, too.

Austin was in full flower when these killings began. How big a part did the desire to avoid bad publicity play in slowing the investigations?
A lot. Austin’s mayor prided himself on its “booming”—exuberant civic promotion in order to draw in more residents. And Austin at the time was changing, in the words of one newspaper reporter, “as quickly as the turn of a a kaleidoscope.” It was transforming itself from a frontier town into a modern, Gilded-Age city, complete with telephone and electric lights. The last thing Austin civic leaders wanted were headlines about mysterious murders.

What surprised you most in your research?
What didn’t surprise me? Let’s start with the diabolical way the murders were carried out, the ingenuity of the killer in escaping detection time after time, and the fact that for nearly a year, none of the authorities could wrap their arms around the idea that one man was behind it all. The killings also set off a huge political scandal that probably changed the outcome of the governor’s race. There was one criminal trial of a suspect—the prominent husband of one of the white victims—that became the O.J. Simpson trial of its day, complete with a dream team of Austin defense attorneys.

Did writing this book leave you with any impressions about what inspires serial killers?
I think the reason the Midnight Assassin is so fascinating is because we have no idea what inspired him, just as we usually have no idea what inspires serial killers today. Why did the Midnight Assassin want to attack women in a ritualistic way, leaving their mutilated bodies on display like works of art, and then disappearing into the night? It’s a haunting question.

It’s unusual to find humor in a book about a serial killer, but the “detectives” trading on the Pinkerton name were funny. Were you concerned about including levity in the story?
Not at all—and talk about surprises. At the height of the citywide panic, the great Pinkerton detectives arrive from Chicago to solve the murders, and it turns out they are frauds. It was such an unexpected twist in the story that I couldn’t help but laugh.

The press was breathless in its coverage of the crimes but seemed to support the view that a gang of black men (or Frankenstein) were committing the murders. Does the media do any better today in its coverage of sensational crimes?
I’m not sure. I do know that if this happened today, the media would be all over this story after the second murder had taken place. Reporters would be coming into Austin from around the country. And their reports would probably be more breathless, setting off public fear by proclaiming that a serial killer was running amok.

Can you point out some of the differences in how these crimes were investigated versus today’s procedures?
In 1885, there was no such thing as a CSI unit. The science of criminology did not exist. Fingerprinting had not been invented. Neither had blood typing. Of course, there was no such thing as DNA evidence. And cops did not yet understand that hairs found on a victim might provide clues to the identity of the killer. Outside of an eyewitness, the best tool the cops had was bloodhounds. They were brought to a murder scene, where they sniffed around, hoping to find a scent to follow. But in the Austin killings, the bloodhounds found nothing.

Did you ever feel close to a viable suspect while writing? Do you think the book might bring the case to a conclusion?
Throughout the writing of the book, I would wonder, Could it be this man? Or that man? Is the killer a barefoot chicken thief? Or is he a famous politician? Is he a Malaysian cook who disappeared suddenly just after the last set of killings? Or is he well-known young doctor who worked at the state lunatic asylum? The answer has got to be out there somewhere—in an old musty record in a police department filing cabinet, or in a letter hidden away in someone’s attic. Maybe this book will lead to the answer. But then again, maybe not. After all, this killer was unlike anyone ever before seen—a brilliant, cunning monster who set off a citywide panic, and then disappeared forever.

Author photo by Laura Wilson.
 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Midnight Assassin.

Patty Hearst? Jeffrey Toobin was skeptical when his Doubleday editor suggested writing about the sensational 1970s kidnapping saga that Toobin would eventually recount in riveting detail in American Heiress.

“The first thought that came to me was that there must be a million books about Patty Hearst,” Toobin says during a call that reaches him in Washington, D.C. Toobin, whose bestsellers include The Oath and The Nine, is a staff writer for The New Yorker and senior legal analyst at CNN. His wife is an assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration. Their two children are recently out of college and on their own, so as an empty-nester, Toobin says his work is portable. Although he has offices at both The New Yorker and CNN, his real desk, he says, is the dining room table in their apartment in New York City—or his laptop just about anywhere.

To his surprise, when he looked into the Patty Hearst case, he found that “nothing had been written about it for decades. For decades! I was a young teenager when it happened, so I was vaguely aware of it but not really following it. Just a bit of preliminary research suggested that it was an amazing story that had not been told in any detail.”

For those who don’t remember, on February 4, 1974, Patricia (or “Patty,” as she disliked being called) Hearst, a 19-year-old U.C. Berkeley student and the granddaughter of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a shadowy group of revolutionaries known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Two months later, Hearst publicly declared she had joined the SLA and taken the nom de guerre “Tania.” She appeared heavily armed on a videotape taken during a bank robbery in San Francisco. Months later, she and fellow SLA members Bill and Emily Harris were out buying supplies when police surrounded the SLA’s Los Angeles hideout. A fiery shootout, the first such news event to be broadcast live nationwide, left all the SLA members at the house dead.

Over the next year, Hearst and the Harrises joined with others, including Kathleen Soliah and her brother, Steve, and continued their revolutionary crime wave with bank robberies and bombings. Hearst was finally captured in September 1975, but the drama continued during her trial on bank robbery charges, where she was defended by the blustery F. Lee Bailey.

With great clarity, Toobin takes readers through all the perplexing twists and turns of the SLA’s misadventures. The SLA, for example, was led by a plum-wine-drinking escaped convict named Donald DeFreeze. His leadership was tactically proficient but strategically hapless, almost comically so.

“There was an element of theater to what they did,” Toobin says. “Guerilla theater can be effective. But every time you think of the work of the SLA, it’s imperative to remember Marcus Foster and -Myrna Opsahl [two victims of the SLA’s murderous rampage]. That quickly takes their behavior out of the realm of funny. . . . DeFreeze attracted a small cross section of an extreme of the counterculture.”

Toobin excels in giving readers a sense of 1970s-era counterculture, the petri dish in which the SLA  was spawned. “One of the things that I found so fascinating researching this book was how insane the ’70s were. I mean, there were dozens of bombings in Northern California alone. Can you imagine what cable news would be doing with dozens of bombings?”

Two big research scores allowed Toobin to add texture, detail and a sense of the complex interpersonal dramas that play out in his narrative. After Bill Harris was released from prison, Harris collected all the material about the case he could get his hands on—court documents, FBI files, private investigators’ notes. Toobin found out about the materials while interviewing Harris and arranged to purchase what turned out to be 150 boxes of documents. “For a journalist/historian looking at the era, this was a gold mine,” he says. Even more interesting was the acquisition of the jailhouse love letters exchanged by Hearst and Steve Soliah. Passed through their lawyers so they remained protected by attorney-client privilege, the letters speak loudly about Hearst’s state of mind after her arrest. 

And Hearst’s state of mind is a central question of the book and was the question at her trial. Toobin offers a balanced portrait that is surprisingly complimentary of her courage and strength. And in some ways he believes her behavior was entirely rational given the circumstances.

“One of my goals in portraying anyone is complexity,” Toobin explains. “People are not one-dimensional. Their behavior is not accurately defined in black and white. I think that is especially true for Patricia. She was kidnapped, and it was a horrible experience. But she also was a willing participant in a lengthy and extensive crime wave, long after she had the opportunity to walk away. I certainly understood why the jury in her trial convicted her. And frankly, she was fortunate that she was not prosecuted for the other two bank robberies that she participated in, or shooting up Mel’s Sporting Goods and setting off bombs in Northern California. That is very serious stuff. If you want to evaluate her conduct, you have to take all that into account.”

Toobin’s portrait of Hearst is nuanced enough that readers are likely to hold different opinions about the extent of her culpability when they reach the end of the book (just as people in the 1970s differed, often vigorously).

“I always thought this was bigger than just a legal story,” Toobin says at the end of our conversation. “It is really about this era and these people. It would have been a mistake to see Patricia Hearst’s experience as simply that was she guilty of a bank robbery. This is really about the question of who this woman was, why she got involved with this craziness, and how did this all happen.”

American Heiress offers compelling answers to these questions.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.