Fatal Choices: Women, Murder and the Courtroom
Skip Hollandsworth chronicles the trials of women society never expected to kill. True crime may be about murder, but the writing is what lives.
Susan Wright, whom the media called the “blue-eyed butcher” of the Houston suburbs, is still a lovely young woman, still as polite as she was seven years ago, when she grabbed a knife, stabbed her husband at least 193 times, and buried him face down in their backyard.
Okay. You got me. I am completely hooked. 193 times? And buried face-down? Nice detail. What happened? Why did this polite young woman butcher and bury her husband? Was it triggered by domestic violence? And did she get convicted of the crime? What happened to her?
That opening paragraph is precise, compressed, seemingly stark, yet tells a complete story. Or at least enough of a story that the reader craves more. And this is the kind of lede only true crime writer Skip Hollandsworth could write: You can feel the low-key precision at work. Every comma is pulling weight; every clause builds suspense.
The Rarity and Fascination of Female Killers
Susan Wright is one of nine women profiled in She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, The Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, And Other True Crime Tales (HarperCollins, 245 pages). The stories, all originally published in Texas Monthly, where Hollandsworth has worked since 1989, include very welcome present-day updates. The book itself is a consummate object: featuring rich photography and stunning illustrations by Matt Rota.
Women who kill are exceedingly rare, Hollandsworth notes. Only one in six homicides is carried out by a woman, and of the nation’s serial killers, fewer than one in ten are female. Their scarcity disrupts cultural expectations, making their cases irresistible to storytellers and readers alike, because they turn the idea of womanhood inside out.
The motives are varied: financial gain, deep delusion (the “missionary killing” phenomenon), or, curiously, a pattern among nurses and healthcare workers who may have a history of abuse. As New Yorker writer Rachel Monroe cites in the introduction, ACLU findings show the vast majority of women in prison have been victims of physical and/or sexual violence, and women who kill their husbands receive significantly longer sentences than men who kill their wives.
The Art of the Texas Acquittal
I came for the courtroom drama and Hollandsworth definitely delivers. And there’s nothing I love more than a larger-than-life Texas defense lawyer like Percy Eugene Foreman — Houston’s “King of the Courtroom.” He was born in a log cabin, which is the perfect origin story for a flamboyant lawyer who ends up defending the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr. (James Earl Ray) and the man who killed the man who killed JFK (Jack Ruby).
Foreman represented more than 1,500 death penalty cases and only lost 53. Of those 53, only one man was ever executed. Foreman understood the importance of law in the courtroom, but showmanship was a close second.
He was retained, wisely, by Candace Mossler, the flamboyant Houston socialite accused of conspiring to murder her millionaire husband (and allegedly having an incestuous relationship with her nephew). Mossler arrived at court in designer suits and perfect makeup, playing to the all-male jury with tears and charm.
Mossler understood the courtroom as theater. So did her lawyer. A large man with slicked-back hair and a ruby ring on his left hand, the sixty-three-year-old Foreman commanded the courtroom.
[He] was a magnificent orator, renowned for his opening and closing arguments, his gravelly voice lowering dramatically, then rising as he quoted Greek poets, Roman philosophers, Shakespeare, the Bible, and cracker-barrel proverbs.
Foreman’s strategy: put the victim on trial. Foreman committed to the bit. He told the jury that “thousands” of people hated the banker Jacques Mossler because he was “as ruthless in business as any pirate who ever sailed the seven seas.” The trial became a spectacle of wealth, sex, and Texas swagger, and Candace Mossler walked free. Naturally, Mossler and Percy later fell out over legal fees. I love that for them.
From Houston to Nowhere: Singular Stories Across Texas
Hollandsworth prowls Texas small towns and cities to find homicide stories that are both somehow singular and emblematic. Violent deaths illuminate complex lives and desperate circumstances in this book. Examining the social backdrop — poverty, battered wives, the small suffocations of daily life — Hollandsworth reveals the forces that nudge individuals toward violence.
Consider the Fort Worth teenager who poisoned her father’s refried beans in a desperate bid for control. Or the Dallas woman who donned a cowboy disguise to rob banks, becoming a folk hero before her capture. Hollandsworth captures these women in their paradoxical humanity: not as monsters or archetypes, but as individuals constrained, compelled, and often warped by circumstance. Their criminal acts expose both the limits of human empathy and the ambiguities of justice.
The Power of Precise Detail
The narrative texture of Hollandsworth’s writing is meticulously calibrated. Consider his description of Vickie Dawn Jackson, a nurse in Nocona, Texas, who poisoned patients with lethal injections:
“She owned twenty-five nurse’s uniforms, all of which she kept pressed on hangers in her bedroom closet at her house on the poor side of town. When she went to the local Dairy Queen…she would almost always be dressed in one of her uniforms. Her hair, which she dyed herself at her kitchen sink with Lady Clairol Pale Blonde, would be neatly brushed and pulled back in a little knot on the top of her head…she would be wearing a dab of Charlie on her neck, which she’d buy on sale at Walmart.”
It is the specificity of these details — the pressed uniforms, inexpensive perfume, self-styled hair — that grants the narrative its arresting power. Hollandsworth does not merely report crimes; he reveals the ordinary rhythms in which extraordinary evil manifests.
How True Crime Becomes Hollywood Storytelling
Hollandsworth’s talent isn’t just in how he crafts a sentence, but in the stories he chooses — tales that sometimes blend small-town strangeness with gripping crime, often tinged with dark comedy.
This sensibility makes his work the perfect fit for director Richard Linklater, a master of wry humor and deep character empathy who specializes in finding the profound within the regional and unexpected.
Their first collaboration, Bernie (2011), co-written by Hollandsworth and Linklater, tells the unbelievable true story of Bernie Tiede, a beloved, overly helpful assistant funeral director in a small East Texas town who murders his wealthy, cantankerous companion, Marjorie Nugent. The movie is a masterful blend of documentary style and fiction, with Jack Black delivering a career-defining performance as Bernie and Shirley MacLaine playing the difficult Marjorie. It’s a film that perfectly captures Hollandsworth’s eye for the absurdity.
More recently, Hit Man (2023), based on Hollandsworth’s article about a college professor who moonlights for the police posing as a hitman, translates the source material into a sharp, romantic action comedy. Starring Glen Powell (who also co-wrote the script with Linklater), the movie is a brilliant, funny examination of identity, performance, and the seductive nature of changing your persona.
True Crime as Storytelling Craft
Calvin Trillin, writing for The New Yorker beginning in the 1960s, explained his interest in murder by noting, “A killing often seemed to present the best opportunity to write about people one at a time.”
It’s an observation that could describe Hollandsworth’s work, too — not in imitation, but in spirit. Both writers understand that crime is never just about the act itself; it is a way of entering the complicated lives that surround it.
Hollandsworth writes with that same fidelity to the individual and also widens the frame. Like the best crime writers, he shows that true crime, rendered with empathy and precision, can illuminate not only the particulars of a case but the broader human condition. At its strongest, the genre grapples with social justice, mental health, poverty, domestic violence, and the cultural scripts that shape how we view women — and how we understand evil itself.
True crime is often accused of exploiting suffering, but Hollandsworth’s approach does the opposite: it restores complexity. His stories resist the cheap thrill of the “shocking woman killer,” instead revealing the quiet, cumulative forces that make violence possible and illuminating the human condition.
We are all hooked, yes, partly because of the voyeurism, but also because these stories offer a portal into what feels incomprehensible: how ordinary lives tip into darkness.
As a female spectator once observed at a murder trial, quoted in Hollandsworth’s collection: “Where else could you find so much human nature?”
Thank you to HarperCollins for providing a book to review. This post was originally published by Books are our Superpower on Medium.