Shock Treatment
Three new books deliver sordid stories of drugged-up cops, kinky murderers, and a real-life drug kingpin.
Three new books deliver sordid stories of drugged-up cops, kinky murderers, and a real-life drug kingpin.
When his luck ran out, A.W. Gray ended up behind bars. Now he’s on a winning streak as a crime novelist.
She was a hooker. He was a race car driver. They fell in love. She moved in. He put on his three-piece suit and went to work. She was always on call. They fought. She moved out. Then she found out that his real job was bank jobs.
The disappearance of a University of Texas student in Matamoros led police to the discovery of a drug-dealing cult whose rituals were not only unholy but unthinkable.
They were elderly people, flattered by the attention of a nice young man. But sometimes it’s a mistake to depend on the kindness of strangers.
Houston’s city controller prided himself on being the most scrupulously honest politician in town. So why did he sign his name to someone else credit card?
He had a wife and a girlfriend. His ambition was unchecked. He tried to commit suicide. But when I came face to face with the minister of my boyhood church, the sin we talked about was murder.
In 1980 a white girl was raped and murdered at Conroe High School, and the police quickly arrested a black janitorial supervisor. Now it looks as if the case wasn’t so open and shut after all.
In a ninety-minute reign of terror, gunshots rang out that still echo in the history of Texas.
When Jimmy Lee, an unrepentant troublemaker, felt he had taken one insult too many from the powerful Fredeman family, he called in the law. The results of that action have exposed decades of larceny and corruption in Port Arthur and threaten a Gulf Coast empire.
In a small East Texas town a black principal and a white coach loved the same woman. First came the gossip. Next came the strange letters. And then there was a murder.
Selling crime self-help devices has become a booming business. But do any of these gadgets really make us safer?
The story of Lenell Geter’s release from prison is unfinished without the tale of the conservative engineers who stuck their necks out to help a friend in trouble.
Candy Montgomery thought her affair with Allan Gore was over, until she found herself fighting for her life against Allan’s wife.
Urban refugees fleeing high-tech Dallas have created ersatz rural communities in the nearby countryside. This isolated, pastoral life sometimes erupts into adultery and murder.
Everything is bigger in Texas, including the scams.
From his early days in Big Spring, Eugene Anderson wasn’t what he seemed; neither was the mysterious element he later claimed turned water into fuel.
Sometimes women fall in love with men behind bars, but once the bars disappear, the love itself may become the prison.
The three-to-eleven evening shift, Bexar County Hospital, San Antonio: nurse Genene Jones was on duty in the pediatric intensive care unit, and for months babies kept having mysterious—sometimes fatal—emergencies. Why?
Sometimes prison is harder for the people on the other side of the bars.
Soon there won’t be anyone left who wants to be a cop.
Probation gives criminals a chance to show society that they can stay straight. Probation officers like Jan Purdom believe the system works.
Anybody can get a job as a security guard. Anybody.
Used correctly, the polygraph can tell whether or not an accused criminal’s claim that he didn’t do it is true. Too bad the police can’t take that to court.
Hugh Roy Cullen found the oil and made one of Houston’s great fortunes; now his grandson is spending his inheritance like there is no tomorrow, and suing for more.
The life—promising beginning, overripe middle, bloody end—of Lee Chagra, the biggest drug lawyer in El Paso.
To unjam its prisons, Texas is moving convicted felons out of the big house and into a house on your block.
Trial by jury is a right most people charged with a crime never get to exercise. Instead, they accept a quicker, less risky alternative: the plea bargain.
Every year thousands of men and women assault, molest, or murder innocent victims - their own children.
John Catchings can sole crimes without witnesses, confessions, or clues. How? He’s a psychic.
Mandatory sentencing means every felon gets the same sentence for the same crime - and for the rest of us it means a lot of crimes that won’t happen.
A tale of passion in the double-knit aristocracy.
Is your family safer with a gun in the house?
Violence within the family tends not to be taken too seriously by the courts. But eventually that violence will burst loose to threaten us all.
Lock your doors. The police have given up trying to catch burglars.
Who turned off the melting pot? Vietnamese and Texans fight on the coast.
Houston police said they shot Randy Webster because he pointed a gun at them. Randy’s father set out to prove they were lying.
He knows the secrets behind closed doors.
There’s more at stake than money when two hustlers cue up.
If you ever go to Houston, you’d better walk right. You’d better not gamble, and you’d better not fight.
The secret life of the man who tells the Man.
Spring cleaning in the house that Zale built.
You won’t find Greta Garbo at these classic establishments, but some things that happen there are straight out of a movie.
What’s good for marijuana is good for Starr County.
Profile of a society murder and the woman who lived to tell about it.
The life and times of Candy Barr—the woman who made headlines by always being in the wrong place at the right time.
Two self-styled Texas soldiers of fortune engineered one of the more bizarre jailbreaks in history. Here’s how it happened.
Whodunit?
Dope sellers obey the law—of supply and demand.
Sometimes the history books leave out the best part.