In January the Observer noted with a certain amusement that a bunch of JFK stuff was being hawked by New Jersey’s Goldin Auctions. These included a bullet fired from the gun that fired the bullet that killed the guy (Jack Ruby) who killed the guy who killed Kennedy (Lee Harvey…
In the worst sign yet for his NFL prospect, former Texas A&M quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel has been dumped as a client by his agent, Drew Rosenhaus. Tuesday afternoon’s announcement came after the Dallas County District Attorney announced that accusations that Manziel beat his ex-girlfriend, Colleen Crowley,…
Evening descends on Tent City. Overhead, the incessant whir of traffic on Interstate 45 has become a muffled groan with the onset of rush hour. The sun hasn’t yet sunk low enough to squeeze between the underside of the freeway and the roofs of the low-slung warehouses that surround it,…
A couple of days a week, Missy Bevers taught a boot camp exercise group called Camp Gladiator outside Creekside Church of Christ on East U.S. Highway 287 in Midlothian. Monday, the 45-year-old arrived at the church just after 4 a.m. for her 5 o’clock class. Because of the rain Sunday, she…
As drug reforms go, the cite-and-release marijuana policy Dallas recently considered was pretty tepid stuff. Getting caught with weed would have still been a class B misdemeanor, still carried a potential penalty of a $2,000 fine and six months in jail and still left a permanent mark on a convicted…
Ethan Couch, the affluenza-suffering teen who killed four in a 2013 Tarrant County drunk driving incident, had his first day in adult court Wednesday. Couch, originally sentenced to 10 years probation, will remain in Tarrant County Jail for two years as a condition of that probation, Tarrant County District Judge…
After conversations with some of the city’s top criminal attorneys and having invested a decent amount of time in reading stuff on the Internet, I have rendered myself qualified, in my own opinion, to offer the following non-legal and inexpert advice: Persons accused of capital crimes in Texas who may…
Listening to the Dallas City Council talk to the chief of police yesterday about smoke shops and convenience stores, thinking about Bill Clinton getting protested by Black Lives Matters, remembering a visit to our offices here last week by a group of Serbian prosecutors, I believe that I have discovered…
Three years ago this month, Dallas police officers Bryan Burgess and Michael Puckett were on a late-night patrol in South Dallas when they noticed a man behind Kwick Stop Liquor, later identified as 51-year-old Fred Bradford, riding his bicycle without a helmet and generally looking furtive. Burgess pulled behind Bradford…
Thursday, the Dallas Police Department announced that they were looking for a man who “stripped completely naked, began to masturbate, exposed his anus to the victim and then fled on foot,” from a Dallas construction site on Tuesday, April 5. The next day, the man returned to the construction site:…
Before dying at the hospital from self-inflicted stab wounds, McCann Utu Jr. told police he was murderer. The 19-year-old told a police dispatcher that he’d “committed murder” and “killed them,” Plano police said Friday, after he is believed to have stabbed his mother, Stacy Fawcett, and his 17-year-old brother Josiah Utu to death…
The water Brenda Delgado is swimming in just got a lot hotter. Following the murder of Dallas dentist Kendra Hatcher, Delgado, 33, was quickly identified as the alleged mastermind behind the killing. Hatcher’s boyfriend at the time of her death was Delgado’s ex. Police say that Delgado, steaming with jealousy,…
Maybe it’s just verbal jujitsu. Maybe, when Greg Hardy, as he did Monday, says that he’s never laid a hand on a woman, he means just that — that he’s never laid a hand on a woman in the way that your uncle’s congregation lays hands on members who’ve gone…
Just after midnight on March 2, Alvin Jerome Joseph Jr. was walking his dog through the sea of apartments in Northeast Dallas where Skillman Street and Audelia Road briefly join when, for no reason police have been able to discern, a gunman shot him in the face. He died the…
A bad wig, sometimes black and other times gray, and dark sunglasses seems like a weak disguise for a bank robber to wear. It’s not the most interesting disguise compared with the New York bank robber who dressed up as Darth Vader, the Illinois bank robber who wore a nun…
Chase Stone and his friends were out Sunday, he says, to enjoy to beautiful weather and the start of riding season with a group motorcycle ride. As the riders traveled through Fort Worth, one of the group’s support vehicles, traveling with the caravan of motorcycles to help out in case…
The Cleveland Browns, who selected Johnny Manziel with the 22nd pick of the 2014 NFL Draft, have released the former Texas A&M quarterback. Hopefully, the wheels have not started turning in Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ head. Jones coveted Manziel in 2014. His son Stephen Jones reportedly talked Jones out making…
Two men accused of orchestrating the killing of Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa, the one-time attorney for Mexico’s Gulf Cartel who was gunned down in 2013 in Southlake, have been connected by federal law enforcement to as many as a dozen additional murders. Jesus Gerardo Ledezma-Cepeda, 59, and his son Jesus…
Rape: another important topic falls off the map of sanity. Now people are demonizing a North Texas lawmaker because she said rape and booze might have something to do with each other. So does that mean somebody actually thinks there’s a planet out there somewhere in the rant-o-verse where rape…
On February 5, Dallas Police Chief David Brown delivered some bad news to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee. Through the first month of 2016, violent crime was up by 26 percent over the previous year. There’d been one fewer murders, but the number of rapes (13 percent) robberies (21…
Denton County Sheriff William B. Travis is losing endorsements faster than blood pouring from a bullet wound. A state representative, Denton county officials, mayors and mayors pro tem from several cities and a couple of Denton County constables have withdrawn their support, and the future of the sheriff’s campaign is…
Denton County Sheriff William B. Travis sits in his office, surrounded partially by confiscated weapons, clinging to a folder of old court documents. Inside are details of a case that has haunted him since the late ’90s and may well ruin his chances for re-election this March. He’s spent weeks…
