Life on the ranch was hard enough already, and full of uncertainty. Then a string of dead calves turned up, and everything pointed to murder. But why? And how? A Longview mystery.
He worked 80-hour weeks to send money home to his family. The driver who ran him over had been in and out of trouble for years.
In our premier Texas Monthly Trove film, Skip Hollandsworth takes a look back at one of the strangest stories in his writing career, involving a beloved funeral director, a wealthy widow, and a tragedy in the small Texas town of Carthage.
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.
When Given Kachepa first arrived from Zambia as a young boy, he expected to sing in a choir and gain an education. Instead he was forced into servitude.
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.
A quarter century after 82 Branch Davidians and 4 federal officers died outside Waco, retired FBI agent Byron Sage still can't stop thinking—and arguing—about what happened.
The Midnight Assassin, who terrorized Austin 138 years ago, also targeted minorities first.
A decade ago, Gabby Sones accused her parents and five others of running the most depraved child sex ring in Texas history. Now she’s ready to clear their names.
Priscilla Villarreal doesn’t work for the local news in Laredo—but for her 80,000 Facebook followers, that doesn’t matter.
When Alberto Mendiola returned to El Paso from the war in Afghanistan, he was suffering from severe, untreated PTSD. But is that a viable defense for murder?
Two years after a deadly Waco shoot-out, the local district attorney is trying to take down the Bandidos and Cossacks biker clubs. It won’t be easy.
Kerry Max Cook did everything to clear his name of a horrifying murder. So when he was finally exonerated, why did he ask for his conviction back?
Edwin Debrow committed murder at age 12. Now 37, he remains behind bars. When should a child criminal be given a second chance?
They were some of the toughest narcs on the border, known for busting smugglers, staging raids, seizing cartel cocaine—and being dirty.
He was just a regular kid in South Texas, until a brush with the law propelled Gabriel Cardona into petty crime—and the service of a drug lord rising to power across the Rio Grande. In this exclusive excerpt from Wolf Boys: Two American Teenagers and Mexico’s Most Dangerous Drug Cartel, Dan
In 1982 three teenagers were killed near the shores of Lake Waco in a seemingly inexplicable crime. More than three decades later, the tragic and disturbing case still casts a long, dark shadow.
An exclusive excerpt from The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer reveals a forgotten time in Austin history, when a series of brutal, unsolved slayings terrified officials and left them wondering if a madman was on the loose.
Sandy Jenkins was a quiet accountant at the Collin Street Bakery who felt overlooked and dreamed of living the good life. He found it (for a while) by embezzling nearly $17 million from the famed fruitcake maker.
How the once troubled Texas Forensic Science Commission put the state at the forefront of the criminal justice reform movement.
A dark incident almost twenty years ago put Greg Torti on the sex offender registry for life. But the real story, he insists, is much more complicated.
In 2011 Callie Quinn moved from Austin to Chile to experience a new way of life. Then she met a charming fellow foreigner—and almost lost everything.
When the 85-year-old matriarch of a prominent pecan-farming clan in San Saba was murdered, her death shook the town—and exposed how obsession and greed can fell a family from within.
The Reverend Charles Moore ardently dedicated his life to the service of God and his fellow man. But when he couldn’t shake the thought that he hadn’t done enough, he drove to a desolate parking lot in his hometown of Grand Saline for one final act of faith.
Olivia Lord told Dallas police officers that her boyfriend put a gun to his head after a drunken argument. Detective Dwayne Thompson couldn’t see how the evidence—or motive—made any sense. How did Michael Burnside die on May 9, 2010?
Scott Catt was a single dad who held up banks to make ends meet. As his greed intensified, he knew just whom to enlist as accomplices: his kids.
Robin Doan was ten years old when a stranger killed her entire family. Nearly ten years later, she refuses to let the past haunt her.
In 1998 famously tough Montague County district attorney Tim Cole sent a teenager to prison for life for his part in a brutal murder. The punishment haunts him to this day.
They say he ran over Eddie Peltier with his El Camino on a North Dakota Indian reservation in 1983. He says he didn’t do it, and the evidence is overwhelmingly on his side—yet the Plainview native has languished in federal prison for twenty years. It’s long past time for justice
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.
Yvonne Stern knows that her husband, the wealthy Houston attorney Jeffrey Stern, had a steamy affair with a woman named Michelle Gaiser. And she knows full well that two years ago Gaiser hired a series of men to kill her. But she refuses to believe that Jeffrey was in on
Police had all but given up looking into a pair of assaults against two prostitutes in the Houston neighborhood of Acres Homes. But when a third turned up dead, investigator Darcus Shorten embarked on a search that revealed a brutal reality.
In 1982 a man named Wayne East was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of one of Abilene’s most prominent citizens. To this day, he maintains his innocence. And one member of the victim’s family believes him.
Dorothy Hilligiest's son David disappeared one day in 1971. She spent her days and nights searching for him, following leads, and eagerly awaiting his return. And then she found out about Dean Corll, one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history.
Researchers have discovered a mistaken identity and another possible victim.
It was the most shocking crime of its day, 27 boys from the same part of town kidnapped, tortured, and killed by an affable neighbor named Dean Corll. Forty years later, it remains one of the least understood—or talked about—chapters in Houston's history.
A Q&A with Skip Hollandsworth, author of “The Lost Boys.”
A blundered raid and a botched finale don’t change an essential fact about the Mount Carmel standoff: David Koresh is to blame.
The richest man ever tried for murder has found the Lord, along with a new career peddling hand cream. Are you buying the latest incarnation of Cullen Davis?
How else to describe the murder and mayhem and fear that have gripped Nuevo Laredo for months—and are now spilling over into Texas?
Ten years. More than three hundred women murdered. What is going on in Juárez? And why aren't the Mexican authorities doing something about it?
Anthony Graves had been behind bars for eighteen years when the prosecutors in his case abruptly dropped all charges and set him free. How did it happen? What happens next?
As the peculiar case of a Fort Bend sheriff’s deputy and his bloodhounds makes clear, the techniques of crime-scene investigation are not as infallible as the TV shows would have us believe. How a misplaced faith in some forensic experts is putting innocent people behind bars.
Gangland-style executions are par for the course these days in Juárez, where drugs— and despair—flow freely.
The lovesick antics of diapered astronaut Lisa Nowak are some combination of funny and sad but seemingly not revealing of anything larger, until you realize that her tragic, tabloidy breakdown says everything you need to know about NASA’s many troubles.
Clyde Wilson is more than a private investigator. He’s the historian of Houston’s dark side—and that makes him the most dangerous man in town.
What was it, exactly, that caused Vickie Dawn Jackson, a sweet, soft-spoken nurse at Nocona General Hospital, to become one of the most prolific serial killers in Texas history?
The short, slight, mentally disabled black man was found on the side of a road in Linden, huddled in a fetal position. He was bloody and unconscious—the victim of a violent crime. But another tragedy was how residents of the East Texas town reacted.
When a rare white buffalo was born in North Texas, thousands came to celebrate the new age he heralded. A year later the animal was dead.
