How does a man wrongly convicted of murder get released twenty years later? It helps to have a wife who loves you, a podcaster who believes in you, and an army of amateur sleuths who won’t stop digging for the truth.
Murder
He called himself the Tiger King and plastered his face on highway billboards in Texas and Oklahoma. He bred big cats, bears, baboons, and more. He lived, with a parade of partners, on the grounds of his private zoo. He threatened a rival with murder—repeatedly, on YouTube—and tried to hire a hit man to do the deed.
Bob Ruff is working on his fifth Texas case in fewer than four years, this time hoping to prove the innocence of Sandra Melgar in the killing of her husband, Jaime Melgar.
Ronald Burgos-Aviles, a nine-year Border Patrol veteran, was arrested Monday in Laredo.
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.
We’re not even a quarter of the way through 2015 yet, and mosques have been burned, loyalty oaths have been demanded, and—in Dallas last week—a Muslim man was shot in the back while watching the snow fall.
Nearly seventy years later, the infamous Phantom Killer attacks may finally be solved. But Texarkana remains as puzzling as ever.
The video proving that Brelyn Sorrells acted in self-defense the night he fatally stabbed another man had been sitting in the prosecution's office for fifteen months.
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.
A Texas district attorney and his wife were found dead at their home, gunned down by unknown assailants, less than two months after an Assistant DA in the same office was shot outside the courthouse. There are no conclusive suspects, but the signs are pointing towards gang violence.
Andre Thomas is deeply mentally ill. He is also a vicious murderer. How should he be punished?
Mario Swain, convicted of the murder of a Longview woman, had a history of stalking and assault.
If Verna McClain is found guilty, she will join the ranks of three other killer nurses from Texas.
Trey Sesler, an online anime critic from Waller, is said to have been planning a Columbine-style attack on a local high school.
The film 8 Murders a Day focuses on El Paso's sister city, which has seen 10,000 drug war-related murders since 2007.
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 to be done.
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.
The senior editor on writing about Mary Eula Sears, talking to relatives of the deceased, and dealing with sensitive issues.
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.
When Randall Adams was sentenced to death ten years ago, the Dallas community thought a cop killing had been put to rest. But it hasn’t.
Once, the State of Texas was going to put Kenneth McDuff to death as payment for his crimes. Instead, it set him free to murder again.
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?
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?
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 the system fail?
The most shocking thing about the murder of the Caffey family in East Texas last year was not how gruesome or inexplicable the crime was. It was that it was masterminded by sixteen-year-old Erin Caffey, a pretty girl who worked at the Sonic, sang in her church, and loved her parents.
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.
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.
27-year-old was suffocated after months of allegedly being raped, at her husband's urging, by members of the prayer group he founded in Georgetown.
The Columbia University Human Rights Law Review published a 400-page investigative article that alleges that in 1989, Texas executed the wrong man for a 1983 murder.
A study conducted by Texas State University researchers involving vultures and human remains could have big implications for homicide investigators.
A former NASA contractor allegedly killed her Air Force Colonel husband's mistress after learning of the affair.
The El Paso Times reported that as Juárez’s murder rate drops, funeral homes suffer, a story that elicited horrified reactions from the community.
Someone killed Melissa Trotter and dumped her body in the Sam Houston National Forest. But according to six forensic experts, that someone was not Larry Swearingen.
Thirty years later, we still don’t know who murdered Border Patrol agent Jose Gamez. Or maybe we do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly three years after attorney Steve Davis’ body was found, his family still doesn’t know how he died. Thanks to an out-of-court settlement with Comanche County, they probably never will.
Now that Joe Chagra is dead, it’s time to clear his name in the 1979 assassination of San Antonio federal judge John Wood.
David Graham and Diane Zamora were intelligent, young, and in love. And they shared a secret: They had brutally murdered Adreianne Jones.
Now that the crack epidemic has leveled off and gang violence is down, urban Texas is being terrorized by a new type of criminal: the superpredator. He murders without motive, feels no remorse, and worst of all, seldom gets caught.