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An exclusive excerpt from Skip Hollandsworth's new book, She Kills. Skip Hollandsworth By Skip Hollandsworth Skip Hollandsworth Skip Hollandsworth specializes in longform narratives. View Articles * Email * RSS October 2025 In the summer of 1974, I was sixteen years old, living with my family in the North Texas city of Wichita Falls. I was a straight arrow of a kid: an Eagle Scout, a member of my high school's debate team, and a cellist in the school orchestra. I volunteered at the state mental hospital with my fellow scouts, cutting lawns and trimming hedges, and every Sunday morning I attended services at Fain Memorial Presbyterian Church, where my father was the pastor. When church members asked me what I planned to do when I grew up, I told them I would most likely become a pastor myself, delivering cheerful sermons about the joys of the Christian life. Then, on the morning of June 22, I walked into the kitchen and glanced at the local newspaper, the Wichita Falls Record News, that my father had brought in from the yard. Spread across the front page, in heavy two-inch-high block type, was the headline "Millionaire Oilman, Wife Found Dead: Couple Fatally Shot in Home Here." I felt my mouth go dry. The oilman was 53-year-old Bobby Burns, a lean wildcatter who drilled wells all over Texas. His wife, Abbie, was a former fashion model in her early fifties who was described in the newspaper's society columns as "charming" and "attractive" and "petite." Everyone in Wichita Falls knew the Burnses--or at least knew about them. They lived in the grandest house in the city, a split-level, five-bedroom mansion, more than nine thousand square feet in size, that they had built at the top of a hill on their twenty-acre estate when their four children were still young. The mansion included both an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool, a trophy room containing the heads of wild animals they had bagged on big game hunting safaris in Africa, and two shooting ranges in the basement. The estate was protected by a high chain-link fence, guard dogs, and a state-of-the-art burglar alarm system. If a prowler tried to force open a window, the grounds would automatically be flooded with outdoor lights, a loud bell would begin to clang, and another alarm would alert the police station. Apparently, all that had not been enough to keep the Burnses safe. When the police got to the mansion, they discovered the couple in their bedroom, where they slept in separate twin beds. Bobby was found in his bed wearing green pajamas. He had been shot three times--twice in the head and once through the right wrist. Abbie, wearing a blue floral gown from Neiman Marcus, was lying on her back in her bed. She had been shot once in the abdomen, just above her navel, the bullet lodging close to her spinal column. A snub-nosed .38 revolver, no doubt the murder weapon, was on the floor beside her. photo of coupleBobby and Abbie Burns, who were found dead in their Wichita Falls mansion in 1974. Courtesy of Wichita County Archives At that point in my life, I had read a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories and an Agatha Christie novel. But I knew nothing about actual crime. I don't think I knew anyone who had been arrested and taken to jail. And I certainly had never imagined that someone would execute two of Wichita Falls' most prominent citizens in their mansion, three miles from my home. I was both terrified and transfixed. Maybe, I told friends who gathered at my father's church for our Sunday night youth fellowship meeting, the killer was a professional thief who had broken into the mansion, stolen Bobby and Abbie's money and jewelry, then shot the couple so he could make a clean getaway. Or maybe, I said, my voice rising, the killer was a professional assassin who had been hired by one of Bobby's business rivals. "He could still be here hiding out!" I nearly shouted. Three days later, the county's chief medical examiner dropped a bombshell: Bobby and Abbie Burns, he announced, had not been killed by an intruder. Forensic tests and autopsies indicated that the couple had died in what the medical examiner described as an "apparent murder-suicide." He believed that Abbie had slipped out of her bed in the middle of the night, grabbed her pistol, shot her husband, climbed back into bed, shot herself, and then bled to death. I simply couldn't believe it. No one could. Abbie was one of those women who seemed to have it all. She wore beautiful clothes and styled her hair in a Doris Day-like bob. She tootled around town in Bobby's Cadillac or Mercedes or in her own Rolls-Royce, and she flew around the country in their eight-seat private jet. In addition to having a reputation as a skilled big game hunter, she was known for her artistic talent: She painted delicate miniature landscapes on antique china. So what could have led Abbie to commit such a gruesome act? Was it because of something Bobby had done? Was it because of something Abbie herself had done? I began my own, amateur investigation, pestering adults at my father's church to see if they had any idea of what happened. When I went swimming that summer at the Wichita Falls Country Club with my wealthier friends, I tried to eavesdrop on the conversations that the moms were having while they lay on their lounge chairs, hoping I could pick up some rumors. One day I decided to get a look at the mansion, which I had never seen. I asked a friend who had his own car--I hadn't yet passed my driver's test--to take me there. We slowly made our way up the hill and approached the estate's front gates, which were flanked by the tusks of a huge bull elephant that Abbie had shot on one of the couple's safaris. Suddenly I spied a security guard striding toward us. "We've got to get out of here! I think he's got a gun!" I cried. My friend slammed his foot on the gas pedal and raced back down the hill, his car banging over potholes. archival photoSkip Hollandsworth during his high school years, in the early seventies.Courtesy of Skip Hollandsworth As the summer wore on, I kept waiting for the police to release more information about the shootings. But they shut down their investigation. ("Nothing to indicate Burns was not murdered by his wife who then killed herself," a detective noted in a handwritten report in July.) Nor did members of the Burns family or their close friends reveal anything publicly about what might have led to a murder-suicide. ("I never knew two nicer people," the caretaker at the Burns estate told one Dallas newspaper reporter. "They were thoughtful and considerate and easy to work for.") A reporter for the New York Daily News, then one of the most popular tabloids in America, even came to Wichita Falls to see if he could turn up some answers. But under the headline "One Gun Too Many," he admitted that he, too, had come up empty. "The house on the hill," he wrote, "was a good house for secrets." I went back to high school to finish my senior year, and in the fall of 1975, I headed off to Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, to major in English literature. I was a dutiful student: I read Shakespeare and all the great American novelists, and to improve my writing skills, I worked as a sports reporter for the student newspaper. After graduation, I decided to give journalism a try. I landed jobs with The Dallas Morning News and, later, with the Dallas Times Herald, where I was mostly assigned to short, fluffy feature stories, which often included interviewing celebrities who came through town. I spoke to the pop singer Connie Francis, the famed novelist John Cheever, the young actor LeVar Burton, and an 88-year-old restaurant manager named Plennie L. Wingo, who was attempting to walk backward across the entire United States, dressed in a beautiful pinstriped suit. "Backward came he, backward like a crab," I wrote in my opening paragraph. "Come on back, Plennie L. Wingo. Way back." Trying to be kind, my coworkers said I had a future writing fluff. To their credit, they didn't laugh when I told them that what I really wanted to do was write novelistic true stories about those who had committed crimes. I obsessed over Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry's Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, and, of course, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. When the newspapers' veteran police reporters went on vacation, I occasionally got the chance to cover for them, spending evenings in the police department's press room, leafing through stacks of incident reports about car thieves, con artists, purse snatchers, pimps, forgers, and other lowlifes. I wrote a story about three teenagers who stole a pig. I chronicled the life and times of two brothers who married two sisters and then persuaded them to join their home-burglary ring. And every now and then, I'd get to sit on a front-row bench in a courtroom and cover a murder trial, furiously taking notes as hard-boiled police detectives, the sleeves of their suit coats stretched taut around their biceps, testified in monotone voices about Dallas citizens who had shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, mutilated, poisoned, drowned, or electrocuted their victims. Eventually I landed a coveted job at Texas Monthly, working alongside a roster of writers and editors who were renowned for producing exactly the kind of deeply reported narratives I aspired to publish. I got the chance to write more true crime: tales about love and betrayal, recrimination and revenge, malice and madness. I profiled a murderous Baptist preacher, a murderous U.S. Air Force cadet, a murderous armored car robber, and a murderous small-town mortician. I spent days interviewing a highly skilled portrait painter in Dallas who late at night picked up sex workers and cut out their eyeballs; I drank beer in West Texas with a man widely regarded as a satanic cult leader; and I followed a gang of motorcycle outlaws who were involved in a deadly highway feud with another notorious crew. "Are you a yuppie asshole?" the leader of one of the gangs asked me. "No sir, not me," I replied, sweat rolling down my back. The Wichita Falls Record News' coverage of the deaths of the Burnses. Courtesy of Wichita County Archives The elephant tusks that adorned the front gate of the couple's home. Courtesy of Wichita County Archives But the lawbreakers who most intrigued me were women. Although some of them were as hardened as Texas's greatest female felon, Bonnie Parker, the Depression-era, gunslinging partner of Clyde Barrow, almost all the others seemed to be decent, law-abiding citizens living mostly normal lives. I met a devoted wife and mother from the Houston suburbs who overnight had turned into a desperate, knife-wielding killer. I spent time with a kindly nurse from the town of Nocona who every day would eat lunch by herself at the local Dairy Queen before heading back to the hospital to murder her patients. I sat through a murder trial in Fort Worth of a popular teenager who had decided that the only way her life would get better was if she poisoned her father. I hunted down close friends of a middle-aged Dallas woman who lived in a small apartment with her mother and who periodically dressed up as a cowboy and robbed banks. Read Next Previous Next Angel of Death By Skip Hollandsworth Poisoning Daddy By Skip Hollandsworth The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob By Skip Hollandsworth 193 By Skip Hollandsworth And that's just a short list. There were so many others who fascinated me. I studied the life of a glamorous Houston socialite who seemed to have a deep-rooted need to get rid of her husbands, visited with an elderly East Texas seamstress who 33 years earlier had made five escape attempts from prison before finally getting away for good, and went looking for a remarkable group of brazen criminals--murderers, robbers, thieves, and grifters--who were incarcerated in the 1940s at the Goree State Farm, then Texas's sole penitentiary for women. I also dug into the murder-suicide of Bobby and Abbie Burns, examining autopsy records and death certificates and poring over the medical examiner's written findings as well as the police department's 27-page investigative report about the shootings, the faded ink barely visible on the pages. I called at least a dozen Wichita Falls residents who had known Abbie and Bobby, asking if they had ever been told why Abbie did what she did. They said they were sorry, but they had no idea. I reached out to members of the Burns family, but they weren't interested in speaking to me. A few people did pass on one rumor--that Bobby, who was said to have had an eye for other women, had been carrying on a torrid love affair. According to the rumor, Bobby wanted to marry his mistress, but Abbie was having none of it. ("The old saying of 'if I can't have him nobody can,' might have been running through her head that night," Julie Williams Coley, a local author, wrote in her history How Did They Die?: Murders in Northern Texas 1926-1975. "Why else would Abbie kill her husband and then herself unless it was because her husband was leaving her?") photograph of skip sitting at deskHollandsworth at his Dallas home this spring.Justin Clemons Over the years, I picked up another new piece of gossip--that Abbie might've had a secret life of her own. So why, after shooting Bobby, would she decide to turn the gun on herself? According to the people I spoke to, she didn't want to deal with the public shame of an arrest, a murder trial, and a prison sentence. As one moneyed Wichita Falls woman told me, "Abbie obviously had decided she was going to go out her way." But I found no evidence that any of the gossip was true. When I interviewed 88-year-old Tim Eyssen, who was Wichita County's district attorney in 1974, he told me that police detectives had never informed him of any alleged love affairs. Nor, he said, had they ever mentioned any motive Abbie might've had for wanting to kill her husband. "So the mystery of the Burnses' killings seems destined to remain just that--a mystery?" I asked. "I hate to say this, but I'm not sure this case will ever be resolved," Eyssen replied. I recently returned to Wichita Falls to poke around once more and see who might agree to be interviewed. But I had no luck. At the end of the day, I decided to make my way up Memorial Drive to take one final look at the mansion at the top of the hill. There were new owners, of course. The elephant tusks by the front gate had been taken down long ago, and there were no more guard dogs wandering the grounds. I put my car in park. For a moment, I imagined that I could hear the gunfire coming from Abbie's .38 revolver that night--four shots that would forever haunt a community. I couldn't help but wonder: What was Abbie feeling right then? Was she consumed with rage? Was she overwhelmed with heartache as she reached for her gun? I sat there for a few minutes more. It was a warm afternoon. Insects buzzed around my open front window. A light breeze began to rattle the leaves of nearby trees. Finally, I sighed, put the car into drive, and made my way back down the hill. The story that had launched my lifelong obsession, I realized, was one I might never be able to tell. She Kills By Skip Hollandsworth Buy Now When you buy a book using this link, a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores and Texas Monthly receives a commission. Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article originally appeared in the October 2025 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline "My First Murder." Subscribe today. When you buy a book using a link on this page, a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores and Texas Monthly receives a commission. Thank you for supporting our journalism. * More About: * Books * Writer * Skip Hollandsworth * Wichita Falls Read Next * The Work of the Devil * Poisoning Daddy * The Girl Who Saw Too Much * A Kiss Before Dying * It Was Already One of Texas's Strangest Cold Cases. Then a Secretive Figure Appeared. * Maybe Darlie Didn't Do It From the October 2025 Issue Subscribe * Home * * Share on Facebook * Share via email * Comment 0 * Share on X * Share on Pinterest * Print this article * Copy article link * Gift this article * Click to expand Recommended Books Announcing the Texas Book Club's October Pick By Amanda O'Donnell Books Iconic Texas Heiress Lynn Wyatt Really Is That Girl By Amanda O'Donnell Books I Went Into the Woods to Read Matthew McConaughey's Poetry, and This Is What Happened By Dina Gachman Books A 'Lonesome Dove' Lover's Reading Guide By Amanda O'Donnell TM Out Loud Our Editor In Chief on His Texas Reading Habit By Texas Monthly Style & Design Meet the Texas-Born Mastermind Behind Some of the World's Wildest Soirees By Sallie Lewis Subscriber-only content Join the Conversation Subscribe today to view and add comments. Already have a subscription? Log In. Read Comments (0) Trending 1. Their Daughter Is Still Missing. 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