Skip Hollandsworth

In the early nineties Mickey Guyton was a young girl living in the small town of Crawford, a short walk from George W. and Laura Bush’s ranch. One summer evening, she attended a Texas Rangers game, where LeAnn Rimes, who was about the same age, performed the National Anthem. Guyton was so inspired that she declared that she, too, wanted to sing country music. Today the forty-year-old Guyton is a genuine country star. Over the past five years, she has released a Top 50 album, received four Gra…

On May 6, 2021, Jena Ehlinger was at a friend’s wedding in Mexico when she received a phone call from an Austin police officer. He told her that her twenty-year-old son, Jake, a student at the University of Texas, had been found “unresponsive” in a house in West Austin that he was renting with three friends. Jena quickly flew home to be with her two other children: her daughter, Morgen, who was a senior in high school, and her eldest, Sam, who had spent the past four years as the Longhorns’…

Before they clubbed two deer to death in their tiny West Texas town, the four high school football stars were treated like royalty. Afterward, when news of their exploits hit the Internet, they were celebrities of a very different sort.

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.

“Can we talk UFOs?” I asked Nicholas Suntzeff, the regents professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University. “I’d be happy to,” he replied, letting out a chuckle. “But just so you know, the government now wants us to call them unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP.” The wiry, good-natured Suntzeff, who’s 71, is one of the most respected astronomers in the world, a specialist in cosmology and supernovas. He majored in mathematics at Stanford University, earned his doctorate in ast…

One should never attempt to guess what kind of film Richard Linklater is going to make next. Since 1985, the indie maverick has written and directed movies about everyone from eccentric Austin misfits (Slacker) to Texas high schoolers on the last day of classes (Dazed and Confused) to a young couple who meet on a train in Europe (Before Sunrise). He has tackled genres as varied as the western (The Newton Boys), political satire (Fast Food Nation), and science fiction (A Scanner Darkly). He relea…

How a mother and daughter hired a hit man to kill their husband and father, and why they might just get away with it.

On screen and off, his affect is that of someone who should not be disturbed: a crotchety, contentious, impatient, and thoroughly genuine West Texan. That’s what makes his characters—including his latest, the lead in ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’— so believable.

For decades, Stanley Marsh 3 was one of the most celebrated eccentrics in Texas. Then one Houston attorney set out to prove that he had a dark and terrible secret.

The legendary Skip Hollandsworth revisits the case that launched his lifelong obsession. An exclusive excerpt from his new book, ‘She Kills.’