Indianapolis Monthly

Don Huckstep thought he’d found love. But when his fiancee Teri Deneka vanished after a mysterious text, her disappearance led him, police, and another family down a strange path of discoveries.

Mark Nicholson was convicted of manslaughter, served his time, and became a lawyer. He’s now one of Indianapolis’s top public defenders, defending the city’s poorest citizens.

The author reflects on his experiences attending an all-male college in the early ’90s.

On paper, Joannah Bierzychudek’s new boyfriend—a successful surgeon and world-traveling mountain climber—seemed like Mr. Right. But then he started describing his detailed plans to kill his ex-wife.

How basketball great Larry Bird almost walked away from the game.

A parent’s lessons on living with grief, 10 years after her daughter died.

Jeff and Tiernae Buttars made a difficult decision to have a portion of their son’s brain surgically removed to eliminate his seizures. The decision changed all of their lives.

A group of volunteers helps make sure people are not alone when they are dying:

I sat in the room with the volunteers. Every three hours one of them would leave, and someone else would appear in the doorway. Amanda, Denise, Martha, and others. Noon, midnight, 2 a.m., 6 p.m., a rhythm.

They had found NODA in various ways. Amanda Egler read about it in a news app on her phone. Her grandmother had died the previous year, and it was fresh in Amanda’s mind that the death had been something of beauty, that her grandmother had been conscious until the very end, thankful that a constant flow of people were in her presence, sitting with her, the room never empty. Amanda read about NODA and considered what it might be like to die alone. “This is something very simple, but so important,” she said. “Because everyone is going to die, and to give three hours of your life, at the end of someone else’s, seems like the right thing to do.” She went to the first NODA volunteer meeting, just to listen.

Phil Ferguson conned hundreds of investors out of millions of dollars and then disappeared. The story of one of the Indiana’s biggest fraudsters:

“The FBI knew Ferguson had money. They knew he had been in Colorado, where he landed for a time after fleeing Indiana and did business with a man named Roy Vernon Cox while using the name “Al Russell.” They narrowly missed apprehending him. Later, they received a tip that Ferguson had brazenly returned to Marion, from someone who claimed to have seen him in a drugstore.

“The rest was just guesswork. How much did Ferguson have? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?”

An excerpt from The Spark, a memoir about a mother who nurtures her autistic son’s genius:

“The ‘math people’ in our lives found Jake fascinating. One day I was having a cup of coffee with my aunt, a high school geometry teacher, while Jake sat at our feet, playing with a cereal box and a bunch of Styrofoam balls I’d gotten from a craft store so that the daycare kids could make snowmen. He was putting the balls into the box, taking them out, and then doing it again, and it sounded as if he was counting. My aunt wondered aloud what he was doing.

“Jake didn’t look up. ‘Nineteen spheres make a parallelepiped,’ he said.

“I had no idea what a parallelepiped was; it sounded like a made-up word to me. In fact, it’s a three-dimensional figure made up of six parallelograms. Jake had learned the word from a visual dictionary we had in the house. And yes, you can make one out of a cereal box. My aunt was shocked, less by the fancy word than by the sophisticated mathematical concept behind it.”