Skip Hollandsworth

“Last September, law enforcement officers were confounded by a murderer targeting prostitutes along the border. As the investigation intensified, they discovered that the killer had been hiding in plain sight.”

Sabika Sheikh came from Karachi to experience the best of being an American high school student and instead got our very worst, leaving two crushed families behind — one Pakistani, one Texan.

Can a man be convicted of second-degree murder for building a water slide? Where’s the line between thrill-seeking and willful negligence? After indictments following the death of 10-year old Caleb Schwab on the “Verrückt” slide at Schlitterbahn water park, we’re going to find out.

Federal authorities struggled to identify the team of violent criminals who were robbing armored cars in Houston, Texas. When they finally got their break, the news shocked some local people, and not everyone believes it.

In 1991, twelve-year-old Edwin Debrow killed a cab driver. Twenty-five years later, he remains in prison, continuing to be denied parole since 1999. Is the public better served by putting youngsters in adult prisons and keeping them off the streets for years and years?

A detective accuses a woman of murder; the woman says the detective is the one who should be in prison.

Whom did Farrah Fawcett really love? A court battle over an expensive Warhol turns on matters of the heart:

It was a Monday morning in mid-December at the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the day of closing arguments in the matter of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System v. Ryan O’Neal, and the show was just minutes from getting under way. Outside the courtroom, the players milled about. O’Neal was strolling down the courthouse hallway in a navy blazer, an open-collared light-blue shirt, and dark pants. Seventy-two years old and still impossibly youthful, with only a touch of graying hair, he wore gold-rimmed sunglasses and held a plastic water bottle, which he wiggled before him as if he were going for a birdie putt on the eighteenth green at Riviera. “God, I’m nervous,” he said.

In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston. Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his victims would haunt the city to this day.

I had a perfectly normal childhood in Wichita Falls, a place Advertising Age once called the most average city in America. But I didn’t truly understand where I was from until I stepped inside the gates of the local state hospital and realized that every town has another side.

How a pair of undercover cops infiltrated the secret world of Houston dogfighting.