Make nice It sounded like a right honorable thing to do: District Attorney Bill Hill, still in his rookie year, told The Dallas Morning News he was dustin’ off his trial boots this week and gettin’ back into the courtroom. He claimed he was just living up to the campaign…
It lasted, at most, two or three seconds. Enough time to send and receive a million impulses that ripped through her mind like neural buckshot. They are stuck there today, two years later, as memories, and Elise Thompson can feel them viscerally; she recalls the sounds, sights, and sensations as…
They began noticing the symptoms only days after the explosion. Bronchitis. Asthma. Sleeplessness. Nausea. Trouble breathing. Surely, they thought, it must be the gas. Bill Smith has no doubt he can prove that the butane gas leak and pipeline explosion near his home in rural Kaufman County three years ago…
In a small, nondescript room in Charter Hospital in Plano, a disheveled, glassy-eyed woman rocks in a chair as she speaks in a little girl’s voice to her therapist. At this moment, 33-year-old Martha Hurt believes she is a 12-year-old girl named Mawsa, whose parents made her do unspeakable things…
L.M. Kit Carson founded the USA Film Festival in 1970 for one reason: He needed a place to show his movie. Two years earlier, Carson and director Jim McBride had made David Holzman’s Diary, a dazzling mockumentary starring Carson as a moviemaker determined to discover The Big Truth by capturing…
The lunch served at the daylong meeting last August was nothing to brag about. “It was just your standard chicken lunch,” recalls Rosemarie Allen, who was, at the time, one of three associate superintendents in the Dallas school district. Yet the meal was part of a pricey gathering arranged by…
The truth shall set you free Seems Dallas Independent School District superintendent and chief hatchet man Bill Rojas is quick to learn how we do things in Dallas. Taking his cues right out of Mayor Ron Kirk’s playbook, Rojas has figured out how to quiet his critics: by making them…
Community activist Sharon Boyd, who led an unsuccessful campaign against giving tax dollars to the city’s new sports arena, has filed suit to have the arena group’s special tax exemptions declared illegal. Her suit argues the arena project does not match up with state law on who should get tax…
When some people stress out, they take a bubble bath among dimly lit candles. Or strum a familiar tune on a guitar, or shoot some hoop. Then there’s Colby Watkins, who lives in Austin. When the 24-year-old and his former girlfriend ended their relationship, he went to Robert-Michael and asked…
Porn may be going mainstream on the coasts, but a couple of recent obscenity busts in Dallas make it clear that isn’t about to happen here. Dallas, true to its Saturday night-Sunday morning moral compass, is as schizophrenic as ever in its approach to skin. It consumes porn in vast…
Untitled Executive assistant police chief Willard Rollins, one of the most unloved leaders in the department, finally did something to win affection from at least two of his fellow commanders — even if he didn’t mean to. When Rollins persuaded a state judge last week to give him back the…
When the time comes for historians to reflect on the decade of the ’90s, one of the troubling issues they will face is the headline-grabbing litany of violence that all too regularly has visited unlikely places. Misguided outcasts sprayed lethal gunfire into schools in Pearl, Mississippi; Littleton, Colorado; and West…
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had taken every precaution to guarantee that escape artist Steven Russell stayed where he belonged: behind bars. State prison authorities had placed him in administrative segregation; they denied him trusty status; they even refused all media requests to allow him to be interviewed. But…
Sarge says he spends most days at his “duty station.” The tall, gentle-sounding man appears to be talking about a single metal folding chair parked under a scraggly hackberry tree a block south of Dallas City Hall, just out of reach of the withering sun. But he is also clearly…
There he stands, in grainy, jerky images resembling an old home movie. Captured on rough film is George W. Bush in a line of Cub Scout troops, then posing for snapshots with boys clad in Little League baseball uniforms. More footage follows him out of an airport building marked “Davenport,…
Former Assistant District Attorneys Linda Guadarrama and Terry Moore don’t know why they didn’t have successful careers in former Dallas County District Attorney John Vance’s office, except for one thing: Neither of them has a penis. Nearly a year after Vance left office, the two women are awaiting trial, scheduled…
Cash on delivery So Republicans want to put the Ten Commandments in public schools? Dallas Independent School District is already one-tenth of the way there, at least among its administrative staff. Earlier this month, DISD Chief Financial Officer Janice D. Davis sent a memo to principals, department heads, and vendors…
In a few days or weeks, a very hot potato will land with a thunk on the desk of the Dallas city manager, and everyone in the city’s architectural community will be watching carefully to see what he does with it. The city auditor, who works directly for the city…
People keep coming in here to say good-bye,” says Cheryl Craigie, the president and CEO of KERA public television and radio stations who announced her resignation earlier this month. “But for me, it’s business as usual.” Although Craigie has told her staff that she is quitting, the 43-year-old public television…
How can we miss you… …if you won’t go away, Paul Coggins? It seems that every three months a new rumor crops up that the Dallas-based U.S. attorney is heading off to greener pastures somewhere — a judgeship, a promotion, something. “He’s going to one of those intensive Spanish-language seminars,”…
Swill if you will, cuss if you must, but there are certain time-honored social covenants that shouldn’t be broken for Dallas’ (and even less-sophisticated Fort Worth’s) annual homage to the artist — Gallery Walk. Or is that Gallery Night? More an unspoken code of conduct, the guidelines listed herein appear…
Highland Park police chief Darrell L. Fant is the first to admit that morale on his 65-man force isn’t what it could be. “There’s been a lot of misinformation and a lot of misunderstandings, and it’s led to a lot of unhappy employees,” says the 46-year-old chief, sitting in the…
