It took more than a year and two special sessions to do it, but last July, the Texas legislature finally provided a constitutional option for punishing teen murderers. In Texas, 17-year-olds are treated as adults for purposes of criminal law, which previously meant that those convicted of capital murder were…
The underground sex economy in Dallas, you probably won’t be surprised to know, is thriving. Not thriving quite like the local trade in drugs ($191 million per year) or guns ($171 million), but it’s substantial, pulling in an estimated $98.9 million per year. That’s at least the figure reached in…
That moment when you spot the red-and-blue flashers in your rear-view mirror, emerging from behind a conveniently large shrub, is not a pretty one. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could avoid it, and do so without the bother of having to obey all traffic laws all the time? The…
The undeveloped stretch of woods north of Garland’s Firewheel Mall is exactly the type of spot where a Hollywood screenwriter would have the two panicked 16-year-old suburban kids, suddenly in way over their heads, dump their classmate’s body. It’s also, according to police, the type of spot where two panicked…
In October, the Duncanville Police Department responded to what they vaguely described as a “major disturbance.” After they arrived, a 28-year-old man named Clinton Peterson somehow ended up getting shot to death. The police department admitted this much in a press release published shortly after the shooting. But cops provided…
The last time Emily Lambert was seen alive was around 11:30 Saturday night, and she was leaving the motel bar at the Best Western in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Lambert, a third-grade teacher at Richardson ISD’s O’Henry Elementary, had traveled to New Mexico to spend the weekend her boyfriend. According to…
On the evening of July 13, 2010, a 36-year-old woman checked into the emergency room of Lake Pointe Medical Center in Rowlett. She was suffering from a painful infection on her left leg, the result of untreated poison ivy, but that was relatively low on her list of concerns. As…
It’s impossible to overstate the heinousness of the crimes Eric Lyle Williams is accused of. Prosecutors say the 45-year-old carried out a cold-blooded hit on Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse as he walked through a courthouse parking lot one morning last January. Two months later, on the day…
There’s a reason it’s illegal to fire a gun in city limits (Class A misdemeanor, punishable by a year in jail and a $4,000 fine). There’s no telling whose head those celebratory New Year’s rounds might fall upon, or which kitchen window might be breached during backyard target practice. On…
At midday on Wednesday, Dallas police and firefighters broke down the front door of a small townhome in the 1800 block of Browder Street in the Cedars to perform a welfare check. Inside, they found the bodies of Nick and Vanessa Pitofsky, both dead of gunshot wounds. Police are describing…
If The Dallas Morning News’ brief account of the Monday morning robbery of Hometown Day Spa left you a bit confused, you’re forgiven. Two armed men walk in and credibly pass themselves off as customers for several minutes as they plot their heist? The answer, as always, can be found…
It’s not easy to call the cops on your boyfriend when he’s a powerful judge, but in the beginning, it seemed that the law was on Maggie Strother’s side. Dallas Police Department officers visited the Uptown condo of state District Judge Carlos Cortez on December 28. There, Strother showed them…
Rewind for a moment to the morning of April 15, 2013. Tyrone Allen, 26, allegedly murders his pregnant girlfriend in Hamilton Park, then leads police on a wild 40-minute chase that ends about a block from where it began. He’s finally pulled from beneath a house and arrested after a…
William Ian Brown did not have a prescription for the single alprazolam (Xanax) pill he was allegedly carrying in his pocket when he was arrested on Sunday. A crime, to be sure, but a minor one. If prosecutors decided to pursue the case — given that it was a single…
It’s a curious phenomenon, the “death row groupies” who become enamored with men who committed some of the most vile crimes you can imagine. When Scott Peterson arrived at California’s San Quentin State Prison fresh off a conviction of murdering his wife and unborn child, he received a marriage proposal…
The days when you had to actually smoke marijuana to get dosed with THC ended long ago with the discovery that the chemical can be melted into butter and baked into brownies. Ganjapreneurs in Colorado are taking things to a completely different level. In Denver, you can get high via…
Longhorn Wrecker has a very long list of of enemies. That’s only natural in an industry predicated on holding people’s vehicles hostage for exorbitant fees, especially when you do business the way that Longhorn does business. Put another way, it will be no easy task to identify the man who…
There’s not a lot of what Michael Pollan would call “food” at South Dallas’ KSO Dollar Mart. Plenty of beer, wine and hair care products, according to the signs out front, but not much by way of whole grains or fresh produce. The store nevertheless did a thriving business in…
Robert Hamilton, 72, was walking down the 2900 block of Jeffries Street in South Dallas at 4 p.m. on Thursday when he was approached by a group of five boys. ‘Hey old man,” they called to him, according to a police report. “You got some money?” Hamilton did have money,…
When he gets out of federal lockup, Michael Allen Watson may want to consider finding a new line of work. His current vocation — counterfeiting money using computer printers — isn’t working out so well. Six years ago, the U.S. Secret Service raided Watson’s Dallas home after a pit bull…
Ronnie’s Catfish & More is delicious. How delicious? This delicious: According to Dallas police, a man walked into the Ronnie’s location on Red Bird Lane at 7:45 p.m. Tuesday. “What can I get for six bucks?” he asked. He ordered a two-piece catfish basket ($4.69 plus tax, includes fries, pickles,…
Generally speaking, the Dallas Police Department does Twitter pretty well. Helmed by a chief who uses it to live-tweet disciplinary hearings and set up lunch dates with reporters at Chili’s, and who isn’t afraid to drop a “cocksucker” every now and then, DPD’s output is timely and detailed enough to…
