At 5 o’clock in the morning, a van pulls into the deserted parking lot outside the Richardson public library. Ordinarily at this time, a group of Falun Gong practitioners would be gathering for their morning exercises, but today they have a more urgent mission. They will spend the next week…
Channel 4 investigative reporter Becky Oliver makes it look easy. The ambush, that is. But ambushing somebody is harder than it looks, especially for a first-timer like myself and especially if the target is Becky Oliver. On paper, Oliver is the winner of countless awards for investigative reporting. On TV,…
A song has been written as part of the massive marketing effort under way to lure the 2012 summer Olympics to Dallas. It’s called “Our Time to Shine,” and the title suggests that the city, along with North Texas, is ready to bask in the international glow the games bring…
After 17 years of unrelenting global expansion that has hooked caffeine fiends from Seattle to Seoul, Starbucks Corp. has, at last, penetrated one of the most remote corners of the retail world: Oak Cliff. In what is certain to go down in Oak Cliff retailing history as the espresso shot…
“It all begins here,” says Pam Schaefer, the founder and executive director of Trinity Works, a nonprofit agency also known as Trinity Ministry to the Poor. “Here” is the lobby of Trinity’s year-old, custom-built headquarters, located on Bryan Street in Old East Dallas. The headquarters are a spotless testament to…
When the state of Texas in July 1999 unveiled NorthSTAR, an experimental project in which two managed-care companies were hired to deliver health care to indigent mentally ill and chemically dependent people living in Dallas and six surrounding counties, its critics feared the worst: Because of a historical lack of…
Restaurateur-turned-journalist Joanna Windham, a stringer for National Enquirer and its sister tabloids, makes a living by unearthing sensational stories. But Windham fears that this mess, the one spreading in her Dallas apartment, is turning into the kind of story that alien-touting competitor the Weekly World News could publish. “Killer Molds…
With the exception of the city limits sign, which sells Glenn Heights as the “Gateway to Southern Country,” there is little to alert drivers bouncing down Hampton Road leaving DeSoto that they’ve entered a city of more than 6,000 residents confined to nine square miles of generally neglected territory. With…
On this Thursday afternoon, Ronnie Wilson holds up the latest clue–the most recent footprint, really, left by the person or persons who got their mitts on her identity eight months ago and have been on an illegal $10,000 shopping spree ever since. It is a letter, arrived today, from Dillard’s…
There is one simple reason why a jury was able to convict Clint Shelton of murdering Michael Hierro and wounding his wife, Marisa, with a shotgun in the driveway of their Rowlett home on December 20, 1999. The reason is, Rowlett police officer J.B. Rutherford had to take a pee…
When real estate developer Anthony Natale announced plans last year to rehabilitate 15 decrepit 1960s apartment buildings along Gaston and Live Oak avenues, he vowed that the ambitious, $22 million publicly backed project would cement old East Dallas’ reputation as a residential destination spot for young professionals. Six months ago,…
Amy Ralston took ecstasy for the first time in the spring of 1985. It was Saturday night, and Ralston, a striking 25-year-old blonde, had a blind date. At a girlfriend’s urging, Ralston says she dosed up before heading out to the now-defunct nightclub Papagayo, a laser-lit meat market that was…
David Dean, a former Texas secretary of state and now a professional lobbyist, knows how to get what he wants. Unfortunately, what Dean wants and the tactics he’s employing to get it have stirred up a donnybrook among residents of the Swiss Avenue Historic District. Dean and his wife, Jean,…
Some six months ago, the inmates confined inside the Carswell federal prison in south Fort Worth got a rare glimmer of hope when they were presented with a unique proposition: If an artist could come to the prison and teach them, they were asked, what type of artist-teacher would they…
“I don’t want my money back,” Alejandra says, closing her front door and locking it. The lock makes a metallic clank that echoes through this spare Dallas apartment adorned with framed prayers and family portraits. “I just want these people to stay away from me.” Alejandra has lived peaceably, but…
The first hint Michael and Marisa Hierro had that something was amiss when they pulled into the driveway of their Rowlett home on the night of December 20 was their Christmas lights. They had been on when the couple left earlier that day, but now they were off. The Hierros…
On November 29, Linda Dennis sent Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk a letter containing what may well be the last and weirdest claim made against the city this century. Dennis, a Dallas native whose family has deep roots in the city, announced she was formally claiming an eighth of an acre…
Arlington taxi driver Eric Owusu always said he felt safe driving his cab, provided he steered clear of Dallas and Fort Worth, two cities the London-raised cabbie deemed hazardous. Unfortunately, he could do little to save himself when danger found him on a suburban street on St. Patrick’s Day 1996…
In the second homework-related arrest in as many weeks, a Denton County juvenile court judge jailed a Ponder student for suspicion of making a terroristic threat after the first-grader wrote a book report on the children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are. Cindy Bradley, a diminutive 6-year-old, was arrested without…
If there is still such a thing as a war on drugs in Texas, then one of its last skirmishes is unfolding in the trenches at New Place, a drug treatment center that operates amid a pocket of vacant lots in Old East Dallas. On this Thursday evening, the addicts…
The news that Mayor Ron Kirk ignored Councilwoman Laura Miller when he doled out committee leadership assignments last month was hardly a surprise: Who could blame Kirk for shutting the door on his loudest critic? No one except Donna Blumer, Miller’s closest ally on the council and the only returning…
In the destitute world of animal rescue work in Dallas, the SPCA of Texas’ plan to build the Russell H. Perry Animal Care & Education Campus truly is revolutionary. Located in Collin County between Plano and McKinney, the 29-acre campus promises to be a “pastoral oasis,” as one report put…
