Midnight Assassin

The New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters's Carr P. Collins Award
One of Book Riot's Best Books of the Year

In nineteenth-century Austin, Texas, a ruthless murderer terrorized the city in what would soon become a story more shocking than any fiction.

In the late 1800s, just as Austin was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis, a series of brutal murders rocked the burgeoning city and shook it to its core. At the time, the concept of a serial killer was unknown and unimaginable, but the murders continued, the killer became more brazen, and the citizens' panic reached a fever pitch.

For more than a decade, Texas Monthly journalist Skip Hollandsworth has researched this gripping tale of murder and madness that plays out like a well-crafted whodunit. With vivid historical detail and novelistic flair, Hollandsworth's The Midnight Assassin: The Hunt for America's First Serial Killer brings this terrifying saga to life.

Prologue 1
"A killer who gives to history a new story of crime."

PART ONE 7
December 1884-April 1885
"Doctor Steiner reports a woman lying near Ravy's."

PART TWO 67
April 1885-August 1885
"Who was it? Who did this to you?"

PART THREE 107
September 1885-Christmas Day 1885
"A woman has been chopped to pieces! It's Mrs. Hancock! On Water Street!"

PART FOUR 153
December 26, 1885-January 1886
"The whole city is arming. If this thing is not stopped soon, several corpses will be swinging from the tree limbs."

PART FIVE 195
February 1886-May 1888
"A prominent State officer and an active candidate for the Governorship of Texas . . . knows something about Eula Phillips' murder."

PART SIX 229
September 1888-August 1996
"I would suggest that the same hand that committed the Whitechapel murders committed the Texas murders."

EPILOGUE 259
"If no one could catch the killer back when he was alive, what makes you think you can catch him now?"

Notes and Sources 271
Bibliography 297
Acknowledgments 309
Illustration Credits 311
Index 313