Shortly before Thanksgiving, parents at Dallas Independent School District’s Preston Hollow Elementary School got some alarming news. Their children, who had suffered through a six-month paint job at the Walnut Hill Lane school–a job that was supposed to be completed during the summer break–may have been breathing dust from lead-based…

The man on the phone speaks in conspiratorial tones. His name is Martin Barkley, a 40-something divorced father of two who has devoted so much of his life to a single purpose–proving that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book…

Gene Reitnauer devoted her life and Wise County home to caring for abused and abandoned exotic felines. Now, after a protracted legal battle brought by two wealthy donors, Reitnauer has lost it all–the sanctuary she built, access to the cats she loved, and possibly even the rights to her home…

Explosive” and “heartbreaking” are what former Dallas City Council member Jerry Bartos calls a secret meeting Fort Worth power brokers held several years ago to discuss strategies in combating Dallas on issues regarding the Wright Amendment. The meeting’s five-page transcript, a copy of which was obtained by the Dallas Observer,…

Robert Groden, JFK assassination researcher, has had way more than his 15 minutes of fame. In the mid-1970s, he painstakingly created an enhancement of the Abraham Zapruder film that landed him a high-profile appearance on Geraldo Rivera’s Goodnight America television show. The film showed in gruesome detail President Kennedy’s head…

Councilman Don Hicks is between a dump and a hard place. Pleasant Grove homeowners are furious with Hicks because for the last several months he has been meeting with T.E. Frossard Jr., a Highland Park developer whose family owns 40 acres of arid, hole-filled land in Pleasant Grove next to…

It takes a lot to shock Jerry Bartos, but what the former city council member and foe of government waste, special interests, and dirty politics heard this day was alarming even by Dallas standards. A cranky fiscal conservative who had become the city’s most vocal opponent of the Wright Amendment,…

It has to be one of the oddest moments in the annals of modern medical diplomacy. Standing over platters of cheese cubes and bowls of guacamole in the refined quarters of the faculty club at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Kern Wildenthal, the center’s distinguished but…

Susan Allen came home recently to find city procedures for recalling a city councilman stuffed in her mailbox. As president of the Moss Farm Alliance and Concerned Homeowners Association, Allen saw this as a sign that her neighbors in this northeast Dallas community were very close to declaring war on…

Last week my husband had an important business meeting. I wanted to make sure it went well, so before leaving for work, I walked through our house and closed the lids to all the toilets. This wasn’t some family tradition handed down through the generations. Nor was I indulging some…

Rahim Minkah is finally on a roll. Six months ago, the Southern Dallas Development Corporation sandbagged the former Black Panther’s plan to build a roller skating rink in a once drug-ravaged area of South Oak Cliff [“A Dream Deferred,” May 29]. But last week, the Dallas City Council voted to…

On a ferociously hot day in July, Harold Cox carefully affixes aluminum siding to his modest home on a hilly, tree-shrouded street in Pleasant Grove. His two young grandchildren look on as Cox, with rivulets of sweat running down his face, patiently explains to the boys how to post the…

Misty Murphy was terrified. It was her very first trial in her short career as a defense attorney, and she was facing a jury in the courtroom of municipal Judge Faith Hill. To say that the strawberry blonde Murphy was inexperienced is an understatement. After all, she’s only 15 years…

Born with severe cerebral palsy, Evaristo “Pee Wee” Vela walks with a halting gait. He communicates with jerky hand movements, or shakes of the head, or by grunting yes and no. Earlier this year, when Vela came to live in a Dallas home for people with AIDS, supervisors worried about…

The weed-choked, two-acre vacant lot on East Ledbetter Drive was once ground zero in South Oak Cliff’s crack cocaine epidemic. In the late 1980s, drug dealers peddled their cheap, potent rocks in the shadows of towering live oak trees. The Johnson grass grew so tall and thick it was a…

On April 1, Chewy, a rare Asian leopard, bled to death after being bitten in the neck by Sikio, a cougar with whom Chewy had shared a cage for 13 years. Chewy’s violent and untimely death makes him the latest casualty in the bloody, protracted war being waged for control…

In the fall of 1994, independent oilman Sanford Dvorin cracked open a Dallas County Yellow Pages and sent a letter to every person connected with the oil and gas industry. Sounding like every piece of over-the-top, too-good-to-be-true, direct-mail investment scheme literature ever written, Dvorin’s letter boasted: “History is about to…

Yvonne Gonzalez’s eyes were brimming with tears. To the small group assembled at her office conference table, it was clear that she was moved; it was clear she was sharing a lot of pain. Which, considering Gonzalez’s typically tough-as-nails reputation as the newly appointed superintendent of the eighth largest school…

On Wednesday, April 16, shortly after the Dallas City Council begins its weekly meeting, Mayor Ron Kirk will smile for the cameras and accept a Tree City, USA award honoring Dallas’ efforts on behalf of tree preservation. Sponsored by the National Arbor Day Foundation, the award consists of a plaque,…

Around 6 p.m. each day, the neighborhood kids begin to gather at Russell Fish’s tiny North Dallas apartment, which is decorated with educational posters and inspirational sayings such as: “We don’t look for people who never fail. We look for people who never give up.” Primarily black and Latino elementary…

In the early 1980s, when oil was king, Bill Brosseau was the industry’s crown prince. Just 35 years old and worth $10 million by his own accounting, Brosseau had an athlete’s muscular build, movie star good looks, and a millionaire’s accoutrements–a personal chef, an ostentatiously appointed condominium overlooking Turtle Creek,…