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.
Bonnie Haldeman, the mother of David Koresh, dies at 64.
A criminal justice reform activist in Texas on overcrowded prisons, Tulia, the Texas Youth Commission, and the criminalization of mental illness.
Sharon Keller must go!
Nearly two centuries after their forebears protected colonists from Indian raids, the Texas Rangers are alive and well and wrestling with the realities of the twenty-first century. In their own words, the iconic crime fighters explain how their world has changed—and what it takes to battle the latest generation of
At the Giddings State School, violent teenagers come to terms with their horrific crimes—and learn how to avoid committing them again—through role-playing exercises in a jailhouse version of group therapy. This is what your tax dollars are paying for? Well, it works. For a while, at least.
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.
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.
Greg Ott, the philosophy graduate student who was convicted of killing a Texas Ranger in 1978, has finally been released and is getting on with his life.
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.
Andrew Lichtenstein spent six years taking pictures inside Texas’ vast prison system. The result is an anthropological study of a brutal culture.
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
Twenty-two years ago a Texas Ranger was shot and killed during a drug raid on the home of Greg Ott, a philosophy graduate student. Even today, no one really knows what happened on that tragic night.
Although they hate to let anyone get away with murder, Harris County detectives Harry Fikaris and Roger Wedgeworth are finding that cracking unsolved cases is no easy task.
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.
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.
There’s something romantic about a jailbreak, even when the escapee is a cold-blooded killer on death row. That’s why our feelings about Martin Gurule were more than a little complicated.
A widower’s search for justice
The East Texas native was the most prolific drug dealer of his generation. Now he’s in jail for life, but he says he’s freer than ever.
The poor quality of health care in the state’s penal system is enough to make you sick. Plus: Inside Tex Moncrief’s IRS mess; a River Oaks bookie is tried for murder; UT’s writing program achieves Texas-size success; and things get woolly for thestate’s mohair producers.
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.
George W. Bush pardoned convicted rapist Kevin Byrd after DNA evidence proved he was the wrong man. How did he get sent to prison in the first place?
He hasn’t been able to find his father’s killer, but Austinite David Wheeler’s computer programs are catching lots of other crooks.
By now we know about Brazoria County— but is there violence in other Texas prisons and jails?
She subdues bail jumpers with a modem and her strong right arm: Meet Janis McCollom, one of Houston’s best bounty hunters.
Why is it so hard for cities like Austin to hire a police chief?
What does McAllen’s Guillermo González Calderoni know about Mexican political corruption—and when will he start talking?
Private prisons lock out the press.
An idyllic small town confronts a controversial rape case involving four high school boys and a thirteen-year-old girl and discovers that nothing is certain—except that its children can’t escape the big-city culture of teenage sex.
Nothing can stop Sheriff Frances Kaiser: not cancer, not grisly murder cases, and certainly not the good old boys of Kerr County.
How tough should our response to juvenile crime be? No less tough than it is now—but no tougher either.
Something stinks in the Department of Criminal Justice, and it’s a lot more than VitaPro. A special report on the worst state scandal in decades.
Texas’ top drug lawyer helps dope dealers and cocaine kingpins beat their raps—and he’s proud of it.
A young black man with a spotless record is facing a controversial death sentence for the murder of four whites. An East Texas town remains divided.
Two grim incidents involving guns, three dead teenagers: Reflections on self-defense.
Policing Texas’ DWI cops
Kim Wozencraft meant to spend her life putting drug pushers behind bars—until she became an addict. Now, more than a decade later, she’s fighting against the justice system she once embraced.
The verdict is in, but a complete account of what went on in the Selena murder trial hasn’t come out—until now.
Eleven years after the death of her youngest daughter, Tanya Reid sits in an Amarillo prison. Is she a murderess, or has she been railroaded by overzealous prosecutors?
When burglars targeted my Dallas business for repreated break-ins, I felt violated—and I fought back.
Led by an owner of a roofing company, a group of novice sleuths solves gruesome crimes in San Antonio. It sounds like a TV show—and it may soon be one.
On a sleepy day last September, two women came barreling down Route 66 with five police cars in hot pursuit. A tiny Panhandle town will never be the same.
Brig Marmolejo may have been convicted of bribery, but he is more than just another crooked cop in South Texas. His is the story of borders easily crossed—the ageless parable of the Rio Grande Valley.
Tired of constantly feeling threatened, these Houstonians won’t be caught with their guard down.
Are the legendary lawmen necessary? Yes, but their inability to grapple with the modern world threatens to make them irrelevant.
Who cares if they dress differently, act differently, and spell their names differently? Brother Dick DeGuerin and Mike DeGeurin are two of the best attorneys in Texas, and for that they can thank their mentor, legal legend Percy Foreman.
The death of a thief in the Big Thicket has federal officials probing the conduct of local lawmen—and local lawmen complaining about a federal vendetta against the Texas prison system.
Police officers Randy Harris and Swany Davenport were called heroes for busting Dallas drug dealers. But when they broke the laws they had pledged to uphold, the dealers cried foul—and the heroes got busted.
What’s behind the Bureau’s bashing of its director, former San Antonio judge William Sessions? Go ask Alice.
George Paouris was accused of molesting his child. A civil court disagreed, but damage had been done–to all involved.
