During his four years as an undergrad at UT-Dallas, Ross Ulbricht earned a handful of mentions on the school’s website. His name appeared on a list of students at the NanoTech Institute, on a 2004 press release about students competing in an academic tournament, on a handful of research papers…
Turns out, Michael John Yowell had nothing to worry about. A week after filing a federal lawsuit to delay his execution on the grounds that the state’s custom-made supply of pentobarbital, ordered hastily from a Houston-area compounding pharmacy last month, might cause an unconstitutional amount of suffering, the 43-year-old convicted…
Douglas Campbell has not been convicted of any crime. The allegations of sexual assault by a public servant, official oppression and theft, reported today by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Deanna Boyd, are exactly that — allegations. That said, we’re going to go out on a limb here and say that,…
The Delta Plaza apartment complex in South Dallas recently gave its tenants a little midweek surprise: On Thursday, they found out that they all had to move. Tenants say they got the news via a note on the door, apparently taped there by the property manager. “You have violated your…
From the start, something about Michelle Williams’ story just didn’t add up. She told police that a man, dressed in black and carrying a wrench, had broken into her Keller home one October morning and shot her husband, 40-year-old Gregory Williams, in the temple. But there was no sign of…
Death row inmate Michael Yowell’s last-minute, Hail Mary lawsuit, based on the claim that the state was going to experiment on him with untested execution drugs, failed to sway U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes. In an order handed down Saturday, he dismissed that as “a guess piled on an assumption”…
It’s always a thankless task, manning the counter at a convenience store, but it was particularly unpleasant for those who happened to be working the graveyard shift at southern Dallas 7-Elevens last night. In the span of just over an hour and a half, four of the stores were robbed…
Richard Slatkin must have appreciated the irony in his predicament. Here he was, a 66-year-old private investigator who caught cheating spouses for a living — whose stock and trade was sorting through lies to find something near the truth — and he was being divorced by a wife who had…
Earlier in the week, 59-year-old Robert Prichard learned he would be staying in jail for the time being. A Dallas County judge upped his bail to $50,000 on a felony animal cruelty charge and sent him back to Lew Sterrett. The upside for Prichard is that he now has more…
John Boehr, a 31-year-old opera singer from Carrollton, says he was violently mugged Thursday afternoon as he walked to choir practice in South Dallas. The attack happened at 3:10 p.m., as Boehr was en route to the Dallas Opera’s rehearsal facility at 4301 S. Fitzhugh, on the far eastern edge…
UPDATE: After this item ran, we sent a question to Texas Department of Criminal Justice public information director Jason Clark, asking him — not to put too fine a point on it — why Texas doesn’t just switch to an alternative method of execution altogether, like the electric chair. The…
When it was first announced, all the way back in January, the Frisco Gun Club billed itself as the nation’s largest indoor shooting range. Nine months later, as club prepares to open this month, it has dropped that claim, focusing instead on its luxurious VIP lounge and culinary offerings. There’s…
Now that the war in Iraq is officially over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, the Department of Defense found itself facing a conundrum. It had just spent billions of dollars buying heavily armored personnel carriers designed to stand up to insurgent attacks only to find that it had…
Update at 1:11 p.m.: Police have identified the homeowner as 57-year-old William Hall. According to county property records, he lives at 10316 Sandra Lynn Drive, which shares an alley with Plummer Drive. At a press conference this morning, police provided a more detailed narrative of the shooting, which you can…
It’s a question that stumps even the most erudite of moral philosophers: who beats their own grandmother? What type of vile creature would stoop so low as to willingly injure a blood relative, much less one who’s frail and 85 years old? Here, at last, is the answer: James Dolan…
The Founding Fathers were farsighted men. They were wise enough to write iron-clad protections of individual liberty into the Bill of Rights and wise enough to craft those protections with just enough wiggle room that, three centuries on, they would still be relevant. Take the Second Amendment: A well regulated…
The goal of the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty — of fostering international peace and cooperation and “reducing human suffering” — is laudable. Its methods, which basically consist of asking countries to monitor gun exports so they don’t wind up in the hands of terrorists and other malevolent actors, are commonsense…
There are a handful of possible explanations for what went down on Tuesday night at the McDonald’s at 4800 South Freeway in Fort Worth. It may have been, as Sergeant Joe Loughman suggested to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, an act of divine intervention. Perhaps gun manufacturers developed a mind-reading anti-murder…
Liberty Tax Service doesn’t let just anyone don its trademark Lady Liberty costume and dance for potential tax customers. There are tryouts and specialized training on proper singing, dancing and waving techniques. A lot of dreams are crushed. Channing Gould was one of the lucky ones. A 19-year-old performing arts…
Kiowa Park, a postage stamp of green space tucked behind Prestonwood Elementary in Far North Dallas, is not known as hotbed of Voodoo or Santeria, a fact that makes yesterday’s discovery all the more puzzling. According to police, a neighborhood resident was walking a dog through the park at about…
Van Dralan Dixson, the man accused of raping as many as nine women in South Dallas in recent months, is sorry. He’s sorry that he raped a woman as she walked home from her job at at a fast-food chicken restaurant on September 1, then stole her cell phone, cash,…
Every man has his limit, and Leonard Small reached his late Sunday night, somewhere between the apartment parking lot where he was picked up for public intoxication and the Dallas city jail. When officers ushered the 25-year-old out from the back of the paddy wagon, they noticed that his pants…
