Skip Hollandsworth is a staff writer at Texas Monthly specializing in longform narratives. He grew up in Wichita Falls, attended TCU in Fort Worth, and after graduation worked as a reporter and columnist for newspapers in Dallas. He also worked as a television producer and documentary filmmaker.
In 1989, Hollandsworth joined Texas Monthly, where he has received several journalism awards, including a National Headliner Award, the national John Hancock Award for excellence in business and financial journalism, the City and Regional Magazine Association gold award for feature writing, and the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry Award for magazine writing. He has been a finalist four times for a National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and in 2010 he won the National Magazine Award in feature writing for “Still Life,” his story about a young man who, after suffering a crippling football injury in high school, spent the next 33 years in his bedroom, unable to move. The comic crime movie Bernie, which Hollandsworth cowrote with director Richard Linklater, was released in May 2012. It’s based on Hollandsworth’s 1998 story “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas.” His book, The Midnight Assassin, a true-crime historical thriller, was published in April 2016 and became a New York Times best-seller.
How an East Texas attorney spawned the most massive products-liability case ever—one that has cost millions of dollars and involved thousands of plaintiffs and might never end.
In sleepy Carthage a rich, haughty widow disappears, and nobody seems to notice. When she turns up dead, everybody seems to feel sympathy for the nice young man who killed her.
When you’re underpaid, inexperienced, and overloaded with files detailing allegations of child abuse, there is a limit to how well you can do your job. Eight months in the life of an investigative team in the Travis County office of Child Protective Services.
Psst! Looking to have somebody murdered? You might want to call Gary Johnson, the number one hired killer in Houston. Then again you might not. You see he works for the cops.
Why would a devoted wife deliberately run over her beloved husband three times? It’s quite simple, really. He was having an affair with a woman accused by her allegedly pill-popping ex-husband of carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, whose ex-husband has been indicted for an illegal wiretapping
With his spectacles and bushy mustache, he looks like everybody’s favorite uncle, and appropriately, his niche in the Legislature is to take care of the kids: juvenile justice, safe schools, and adoption laws. In the age of family-values politics, Goodman brings a quiet rationality to issues that have been known
The feds knew him as a prolific bank robber. But the bearded man who eluded them for so long was not who they imagined him to be. And absolutely no one expected the story to end the way it did.
In “the trial of the century,” a Houston socialite was accused of plotting her husband's murder—and of having an affair with her nephew. But Candace Mossler was only getting started.
Dallas police say Charles Albright is the coldest, most depraved killer of women in the city’s history. To me, he seems like a perfect gentleman. Maybe too perfect.
Mary Kay Ash and Jinger Heath have made fortunes getting women to buy and sell their beauty products. But no lipstick or powder can conceal the ugliness between these Dallas cosmetics queens.
One year ago, before the school shooting in Uvalde, Kimberly Mata-Rubio had never been on a plane or given a public speech or scolded a U.S. senator right there in his office. A year in the life of a grieving mother.
McCurley was living a quiet life in Fort Worth when new DNA evidence linked him to the notorious crime. Police suspect it wasn’t his first murder—or his last.
“I’ll never lose that hope. It could be five years from today. The door is always open at our office for anything that will bring resolution to this case.”
In “the trial of the century,” a Houston socialite was accused of plotting her husband's murder—and of having an affair with her nephew. But Candace Mossler was only getting started.
I caught my first glimpse of the 'Lonesome Dove' author on the streets of Archer City when I was a teenager. It was an encounter that shaped the rest of my life.
In 2016 a popular teenager disappeared in the tiny Panhandle community of Canadian. Two years later, his remains were discovered beneath a tree outside of town. But to this day, no arrests have been made, and it seems that nearly everyone involved in the case has fallen under suspicion.
When her former student was found wandering the streets a decade after she’d last seen him, Michell Girard immediately agreed to take him in. Then she decided to do far more, including give him the Christmas he’d never had.
Brenda thought she and Ricky would be together forever, until he left her. Kendra thought she and Ricky would be together forever. Then Brenda took matters into her own hands. Inside the case of jealousy, spying, and murder that shook Uptown Dallas.
Last September, law enforcement officers were confounded by a murderer targeting prostitutes along the border. As the investigation intensified, they discovered that the killer had been hiding in plain sight.
Sabika Sheikh, a Muslim exchange student from Pakistan with dreams of changing the world, struck up an unlikely friendship with an evangelical Christian girl. The two became inseparable—until the day a fellow student opened fire.
Jeff Henry often said that his goal in life was to make customers of his family’s legendary water parks happy—“to put a smile on their faces, to give them a thrill or two.” It was a beautiful vision. Until it went horribly wrong.
Earlier this spring, Jeff Pike, the head of the infamous Texas-based Bandidos motorcycle club, went on trial in federal court for racketeering. Prosecutors called him a ruthless killer, the man behind one of the deadliest biker shootouts in American history at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco. Pike, however, said
Beginning in 2015, Houston was plagued by a series of brutal armored car robberies that bewildered FBI agents for nearly two years. To finally bring down the unassuming mastermind behind it all, the agents had to stage an elaborate trap—and catch him in the act.
