True Crime
December 1, 2012
The Innocent Man, Part Two
Michael Morton spent 25 years wrongfully imprisoned for the brutal murder of his wife. How did it happen? And who is to blame?
True Crime
Only in Texas could crime stories contain such characters as a murderous cheer mom, a fraudulent fruitcake accountant, and a polo shirt–wearing bandit. Over the years, we’ve shone a light on these true tales to look deeper than the headlines and tell the stories of the victims.
True Crime
November 1, 2012
The Innocent Man, Part One
The National Magazine Award–winning story about Michael Morton, a man who came home from work one day in 1986 to find that his wife had been brutally murdered. What happened next was one of the most profound miscarriages of justice in Texas history.
True Crime
January 1, 2012
Hannah and Andrew
On October 3, 2006, a four-year-old boy named Andrew Burd died in a Corpus Christi hospital. The cause of death was determined to be salt poisoning, an extremely unusual occurrence. Even more shocking was what happened next: his foster mother, Hannah Overton, was found guilty of killing him. But could
True Crime
January 1, 2011
Rich Man, Poor Man
The tragic culture clash that led to the murder of a governor’s son.
True Crime
September 27, 2010
Innocence Lost
Anthony Graves has spent the past eighteen years behind bars—twelve of them on death row—for a grisly 1992 murder. There was no plausible motive nor any physical evidence to connect him to the crime, and the only witness against him repeatedly recanted his testimony. Yet he remains locked up. Did
True Crime
March 31, 2010
The Lost Girls
Every year thousands of women are smuggled into the United States and forced to work as prostitutes. Many of them end up in Houston, in massage parlors and spas. Most of them will have a hard time ever getting out.
True Crime
February 1, 2010
193
That’s the number of times Harris County housewife Susan Wright stabbed her husband in a brutal 2003 murder that riveted the nation and landed her in prison for 25 years. But should the butcher of the burbs be freed?
True Crime
December 1, 2009
Perversion of Justice
Cathy McBroom loved working as a case manager for Samuel Kent, Galveston’s brilliant, charismatic, all-powerful federal district judge. Then he started attacking her.
True Crime
August 1, 2009
Bringing Down the Dogmen
The bust that nabbed Houston’s top dogfighters was the work of two gutsy undercover cops who knew that the only way to infiltrate this secret world was to become dogfighters themselves.
True Crime
April 1, 2009
Across the Line
Was the quaint East Texas town of Mineola home to a horrific child sex ring? Were the three people sent to prison last year for running it guilty? Was justice served? Depends on which district attorney you ask.
True Crime
December 1, 2008
The Fugitive
Friends and family knew Deborah Murphey as a mild-mannered nurse and a loving wife and mother. Then a U.S. marshal knocked on her door.
True Crime
March 31, 2008
The Night in Question
Thirty years later, we still don’t know who murdered Border Patrol agent Jose Gamez. Or maybe we do.
True Crime
March 1, 2008
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Did Kari Baker, despondent over her daughter’s passing, commit suicide? Or was she killed by her husband, Matt, a Baptist preacher in Waco and an alleged sexual predator? He says he didn’t do it, but her family insists otherwise—and they say they’ll keep after him until justice is done.
True Crime
December 1, 2006
“You Don’t Want to Know What We Do After Dark”
The young, tattooed men who are members of the Southwest Cholos, La Primera, La Tercera Crips, Somos Pocos Pero Locos, Mara Salvatrucha, and other Houston gangs are vicious career criminals who regularly rob innocent people in some of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. They steal cars and break into businesses.
True Crime
August 1, 2006
96 Minutes
At 11:48 a.m. on August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman began firing his rifle from the top of the University of Texas Tower at anyone and everyone in his sights. At 1:24 p.m., he was gunned down himself. The lives of the people who witnessed the sniper’s spree firsthand would never
True Crime
July 31, 2006
The Bad Guy With the Badge
How Conrado Cantu, the sheriff of Cameron County, lived down to people’s expectations of South Texas law enforcement.
True Crime
June 1, 2006
The Gangstas of Godwin Park
Whatever else you can say about it, the life and death of Bellaire High School junior Jonathan Finkelman is a tragic tale of drugs, money, race, and MySpace.
True Crime
April 30, 2006
The Last Rustler
If he was asked what he did for a living, Roddy Dean Pippin would smile and say something about the cattle business. But he didn’t exactly buy and sell cows. He stole them. And right up until he was caught, he was as good as any such thief had ever
True Crime
February 1, 2006
A Kiss Before Dying
Forty-five years after Betty Williams was shot to death by the handsome football player she had been secretly seeing, her murder haunts her Odessa high school—literally.
True Crime
November 1, 2005
The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob
The feds knew him as a prolific bank robber. But the bearded man who eluded them for so long was not who they imagined him to be. And absolutely no one expected the story to end the way it did.
True Crime
August 31, 2005
Girls Gone Wild
Bobbi Jo and Jennifer were young, in love, and on the road, with the wind at their backs and a happy future ahead of them. All that stood in their way was a dead body back in Mineral Wells.
Texas History
April 1, 2005
Unholy Act
No one in McAllen saw Irene Garza leave Sacred Heart that night in 1960. The next morning, her car was still parked down the street from the church. She never came home.
True Crime
February 1, 2004
Family Man
To his suburban Dallas neighbors, Todd Becker was a doting husband and devoted father. They had no clue that he led a secret, lucrative life as a safecracker.
True Crime
November 1, 2002
Suburban Madness
Why would a devoted wife deliberately run over her beloved husband three times? It’s quite simple, really. He was having an affair with a woman accused by her allegedly pill-popping ex-husband of carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, whose ex-husband has been indicted for an illegal wiretapping
True Crime
June 30, 2002
Two Barmaids, Five Alligators, and the Butcher of Elmendorf
He was a ladies’ man who owned a tavern. He kept gators in a pool behind the place, into which he liked to toss small animals. He hired women to wait tables, and some of them disappeared. What happened? With Joe Ball, it was easy to believe the worst.
True Crime
June 30, 2002
Maybe Darlie Didn’t Do It
Darlie Routier has been on death row for five years now, always insisting that she didn't kill her sons Devon and Damon. And as her lawyers prepare to head into court yet again, new information about her case raises the possibility that she may have been telling the truth all
True Crime
June 30, 2002
A Bend in the River
In 1996 the body of a cheerleader from a small town in Oklahoma was found on the Texas side of the Red River. She had been raped and shot. The brutal crime destroyed several families and the illusions of an isolated slice of the world.
True Crime
April 1, 2002
The Traitor Next Door
His name was Wadih el-Hage. He had an American wife and American kids, a home in Arlington, a job at a tire store in Fort Worth, and a secret past that led straight to Osama bin Laden.
True Crime
April 1, 2002
Does Napoleon Beazley Deserve to Die?
In 1994 the president of Grapeland High's senior class committed a brutal, senseless murder. Now he's on death row, waiting for the courts to decide his fate.
True Crime
March 1, 2002
The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared
The North Texas teenager went missing in the late eighties. For years, no one knew where she was, or even if she was still alive-no one, that is, except a mysterious young woman two thousand miles away.
True Crime
February 1, 2002
Durst Case Scenarios
Last September a human torso was found floating in Galveston Bay—a gruesome discovery that opened a window into the bizarre life of the accused murderer, New York multimillionaire Robert Durst.
True Crime
September 30, 2001
Hit Man
Psst! Looking to have somebody murdered? You might want to call Gary Johnson, the number one hired killer in Houston. Then again you might not. You see he works for the cops.
True Crime
May 31, 2001
The Killing of Alydar
In 1990 the legendary Thoroughbred was put to sleep after his leg was broken—an accident, it seemed, until a tenacious prosecutor linked his death to a Houston bank scandal.
True Crime
January 1, 2001
Under the Gun
Nine years after the brutal murder of four teenage girls in a yogurt shop rocked the city of Austin, the police say they have finally caught the killers. But they have no evidence and no witnesses—only two confessions that the defendants say were coerced. Which is why, when the case
True Crime
January 1, 2001
Outlaw Country
Rick Sikes and the Rhythm Rebels could have been bigger than Willie Nelson—if only bank robbery hadn't been on the playlist.
True Crime
December 1, 2000
Child of a Lesser God
It was a modern-day horror story: a little girl hidden away in rat-infested squalor for most of her life. When the authorities took her away from her mother and grandmother, the nine-year-old had never been to school or played outside.
True Crime
June 30, 2000
Capital Murder
In a year-long spree that began in late 1884, Texas’ first serial killer butchered seven women and one man in Austin. More than a century later questions about his identity and his motive remain unanswered.
True Crime
February 1, 2000
The Man Who Loved Cat Burgling
For years Dallas’ most prolific jewel thief robbed the mansions of socialites like Nancy Brinker and Annette Simmons. If not for his girlfriend’s crack use, he might have gotten away with it forever.
True Crime
November 1, 1999
The Outsiders
Amarillo is a city where conformity counts, so the death of a punk at the hands of a football player had more than a little symbolic significance there. So did the jury’s decision to keep the killer from going to jail.
True Crime
September 30, 1999
Is Robert Abel Getting Away With Murder?
Investigators in the coastal plain think so, and they’re doing what they can to tie the retired NASA engineer to the deaths of at least four young women there. But thus far the tangible evidence has eluded them. And, consequently, so has he.
True Crime
July 31, 1999
Evil
How serial killer Rafael Resendez-Ramirez struck fear in the hearts of the men and women of Weimar, a tiny Texas town that will never be the same.
True Crime
April 1, 1999
“No One Knows What Could Be Happening to Those Kids”
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.
True Crime
January 1, 1999
Teenage Wasteland
With its optimistically broad streets and oversized cantilevered homes, Plano is the suburban ideal taken to its extreme, and its exaggerated scale often gives rise to exaggerated problems. Heroin addiction is only the latest.
True Crime
June 1, 1998
Honor Thy Father
In suburban Fort Worth the frail psyche of a football prodigy collided with the crazed ambition of his dad, who himself had been a high school football star way back when. The consequences were deadly.
True Crime
May 31, 1998
Oh, Brother
A River Oaks bookie is tried for murder.
True Crime
April 30, 1998
Whodunit?
The mysterious murder of a small-town mayor.
Being Texan
April 30, 1998
The Newton Boys
UNTIL A STAR-STUDDED FILM SHOT THEM BACK into the spotlight, the Newton Boys had faded from public memory. Famous during the twenties, the four brothers—Jess, Willis (below left), Doc, and Joe (right)—were part Western desperadoes, part newfangled gangsters. They pulled off dozens of bank and train robberies but, unlike more-notorious
True Crime
April 30, 1998
The Hero Had Two Faces
For fifteen years Galveston knew Tim Kingsbury as a civic leader and do-gooder. Then the wife—and life—he deserted back in Ohio caught up with him in Texas.
True Crime
March 1, 1998
The Last Posse
After thieves stole his daughter’s horse, deputy U.S. marshal Parnell McNamara didn’t make a federal case out of it. Instead, he rounded up a group of old-style lawmen and lit out after them.
True Crime
January 1, 1998
Anatomy of a Drug Cartel
The cocaine goes north. The money goes south. And Mexican kingpins like Juan García Abrego laugh all the way to the bank—a Texas bank, that is.