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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|
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.

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hit man
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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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True Crime|
March 1, 2000

Blood Will Sell

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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True Crime|
January 1, 1998

A Few Bad Boys

The slashing of a cadet’s throat at the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen is only the latest incident of violence at a venerable institution under not-so-friendly fire.

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True Crime|
January 1, 1998

Ku Klux Klowns

There was something comical about the plot by four Klan members to blow up a chemical plant in Wise County— and that was before their own Imperial Grand Wizard turned them into the feds.

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True Crime|
November 1, 1997

The Bookmaker’s Wife

She had a secret life, and so did her husband. For a while they seemed to have a pleasant existence in the affluent Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. But then she turned up dead.

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True Crime|
February 1, 1997

Good Fella

Now that Joe Chagra is dead, it’s time to clear his name in the 1979 assassination of San Antonio federal judge John Wood.

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True Crime|
February 1, 1997

Brenham’s Paradise Lost

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.

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True Crime|
November 1, 1996

Thrill Killers

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.

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True Crime|
September 30, 1996

Death and the Matrons

What could drive a suburban housewife to murder? The bizarre cases of Rowlett’s Darlie Routier and Fairview’s Candy Montgomery hint at the answer, and it may be closer to home than we’d like to think.

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Headshot of Marie Robards, teenage murderer.
True Crime|
June 30, 1996

Poisoning Daddy

No one ever suspected a thing until she asked her best friend if she could keep a terrible secret: the bizarre story of teenager Marie Robards, the devoted daughter who murdered her father.

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True Crime|
December 1, 1995

Carrillo’s Crossing

In the billion-dollar business of drug trafficking, Amado Carrillo Fuentes is king. He's the elusive ringleader of a smuggling operation that police are powerless to stop.

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josh levine breaking the bank
True Crime|
January 1, 1995

Breaking the Bank

Gambling became a way of life for young Josh Levine. When he got in too deep, he came to believe that only a holdup could get him out.

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True Crime|
June 1, 1993

One Last Shot

Decades after his family controlled Galveston’s liquor and gambling, 89-year-old Vic Maceo is clinging to his gangster past—and to his pistol.

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Charles Albright in prison.
True Crime|
April 30, 1993

See No Evil

Dallas police say Charles Albright is the coldest, most depraved killer of women in the city’s history. To me, he seems like a perfect gentleman. Maybe too perfect.

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