Behind the Scenes Skip, a Beat
JUST AS HE WAS FINISHING up “Poisoning Daddy”, his tale of a Fort Worth teenager who killed her father, senior editor Skip Hollandsworth set out to interview the sibling models featured on this month’s Face page. As it happened, one of the sisters, Wende Parks, had been the teen murderess’s classmate at Mansfield High School and had lived in the same dormitory at the University of Texas at Austin. For any other reporter, this discovery would have come as a stunning coincidence, but it was par for the course for 38-year-old Hollandsworth, who always seems to be in the right place at the right time. In seven years at Texas Monthly, he has happened on to some of the great narratives of our day—from the romancing of a Taylor teen by her high school’s football coach (“The Seduction of Jane Doe,” November 1994) to the story of a serial killer who carved out his victims’ eyeballs (“See No Evil,” May 1993), for which he earned a National Magazine Award nomination. Crime stories, in fact, are Hollandsworth’s specialty. “I have a weakness for them, as do all reporters,” he says. “As determined as I am not to do another one, I end up sitting in a courtroom watching another murder trial. It’s a pure addiction.”
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