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Since 1973, one magazine has covered crime in Texas like no one else, delving deep into stories that may turn your stomach—but won't let you turn away. Texas Monthly On... Texas True Crime is a high-speed read around Texas, chasing criminals from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods, through gated mansions and trailer parks, from 1938 to the twenty-first century. The stories, which originally appeared as articles in the magazine, come from some of its most notable writers: Cecilia Ballí investigates the drug-fueled violence of the border; Pamela Colloff reports on Amarillo's lethal feud between jocks and punks; Michael Hall re-visits the legend of Joe Ball, a saloon owner who allegedly fed his waitresses to pet alligators; Skip Hollandsworth uncovers the computer nerd who became Dallas' most notorious jewel thief; and Katy Vine tracks a pair of teenage lesbians inspired by Thelma and Louise.

Texas Monthly On... Texas True Crime is the second in a series of books in which the editors of Texas Monthly offer the magazine's inimitable perspective on various aspects of Texas culture, including food, politics, travel, and music, among other topics. Texas Monthly On... Texas Women was released in 2006.

The term Cold War has long been associated with the “red menace” of communism at home and abroad. Yet as Lee Bernstein shows in this illuminating study, during the 1950s the threat posed by organized crime preoccupied Americans at least as much as the fear of communist subversion. At the beginning of the decade, the televised hearings of Senator Estes Kefauver's crime committee, focusing on colorful mob figures such as Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, attracted far more attention than the spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the years that followed, public concern about gangsters and racketeering continued unabated, even after the anticommunist fever of McCarthyism had begun to subside. 

Drawing on a broad range of evidence, from government records to films, television shows, and pulp novels, Bernstein explains how the campaign against organized crime, like the crusade against communism, reflected deep social and political anxieties. Just as the inquisitions of Senator McCarthy fed on popular fears of international conspiracy and alien infiltration, the anticrime investigations of the 1950s raised the specter of a foreign-based criminal cartel—the Sicilian Mafia— preying on a vulnerable American public. In both cases, the association of the foreign-born with criminal or un-American activity led to the creation of state and local citizens committees and to calls for new restrictions on immigration. Labor unions also came under attack, particularly after the McClellan Committee and its chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, claimed to have found a link between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, led by Jimmy Hoffa, and the Mafia. 

As Bernstein points out, despite significant changes in the way organized crime actually operated, and despite repeated protests from Italian Americans, the popular image of the sinister gangster persisted, because it served a more profound need. In an era marked by widespread uncertainty and rapid social change, the fight against a common enemy, real or imagined, helped forge a Cold War consensus across shifting lines of race, class, and ethnicity by redefining what it meant to be an American.

The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice president and a famed physiologist dubbed “the conscience of U.S. science,” wholeheartedly embraced Krebiozen. Ivy’s impeccable credentials and reputation made the treatment seem like another midcentury medical miracle. But after years of controversy, the improbable saga ended with Krebiozen proved a sham, its inventor fleeing the country, and Ivy’s reputation and legacy in ruins.

Matthew C. Ehrlich’s history of Krebiozen tells a quintessential story of quackery. Though most experts dismissed the treatment, it found passionate public support not only among cancer patients but also people in good health. The treatment’s rise and fall took place against the backdrop of America’s never-ending suspicion of educational, scientific, and medical expertise. In addition, Ehrlich examines why people readily believe misinformation and struggle to maintain hope in the face of grave threats to well-being.

A dramatic account of fraud and misplaced trust, The Krebiozen Hoax shines a light on a forgotten medical scandal and its all-too-familiar relevance in the twenty-first century.

In Corsicana, Texas, Shelley Watkins, the charismatic young wife of Jerry Mack Watkins, disappeared on Labor Day, 1993; her body, tied and taped in plastic and chained to concrete blocks, was found in the Trinity River eight days later. Although a wealth of circumstantial evidence pointed toward Jerry Mack, corruption and its legacy have kept the investigation and legal proceedings in limbo for decades. Now, as DNA evidence offers hope for a long-overdue resolution, author Carol Dawson chronicles both one woman’s tragic story and the history of violence in small-town Texas.

Beginning with Shelley’s life before she arrived in Corsicana, Dawson reveals how her death perpetuates a Gothic history of crime within the town—including a devastating number of murdered women. She also delves into the closed culture of financial control and how the Watkins family became one of the town’s wealthiest, and pulls new details from the witnesses, cops, and prosecutors connected with a case that has haunted her for thirty years. Rooted in the complex history of author Carol Dawson’s hometown, and framed by her family connections to the case, The Labor Day Ghost delivers an arresting narrative that traces the way this tragedy has continued to split Corsicana’s citizenry during the long deferral of justice.

Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department—a beat cop whose first assignment as a rookie policeman was working on the wagon that picks up the dead. Inspired by Preib’s daily life on the job, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City chronicles the outer and inner lives of both a Chicago cop and the city itself.

The book follows Preib as he transports body bags, forges an unlikely connection with his female partner, trains a younger officer, and finds himself among people long forgotten—or rendered invisible—by the rest of society. Preib recounts how he navigates the tenuous labyrinths of race and class in the urban metropolis, such as a domestic disturbance call involving a gang member and his abused girlfriend or a run-in with a group of drunk yuppies. As he encounters the real and imagined geographies of Chicago, the city reveals itself to be not just a backdrop, but a central force in his narrative of life and death. Preib’s accounts, all told in his breathtaking prose, come alive in ways that readers will long remember.

On May 13, 1988, Stephen Roy Carr, a so-called mountain man living in Michaux State Forest in south central Pennsylvania, shot two female hikers while they were making love at a campsite near the Appalachian Trail. Rebecca Wight died at the scene. Claudia Brenner, despite five bullet wounds, survived to testify against her attacker.

In this book, H. L. Pohlman reconstructs the dramatic story of this murder case and traces its disposition through the criminal justice system. Drawing on interviews with participants as well as court records, he closely examines competing interpretations of the evidence. Was the attack a hate crime? A sex crime? A class crime? At the same time, he shows how a broad range of substantive and procedural issues—from the rights of the accused to evaluation of potential mitigating circumstances—can influence the assessment of culpability in homicide cases.

Honorable Mention, 2025 Society of Midland Authors Award in History!

Examining the case that inspired a pop culture phenomenon

In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested and incarcerated for killing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, Maurine Watkins, a reporter at the time, wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of the story of Annan and of Watkins’s play, Charles H. Cosgrove provides the first critical examination of the criminal case, and an initial exploration of the era’s social assumptions that made the message of the play so plausible in its own time. His careful historical research challenges the received portrait of Annan as a killer who got away with murder, and of Watkins as a savvy cub reporter and precocious playwright.

In They Both Reached for the Gun, Charles H. Cosgrove expertly combines inquest and police records, and interviews with Annan’s relatives, to analyze the participants, the trial, and the subsequent play. Although no one will ever know what really happened in the Kenwood apartment on Chicago’s south side one hundred years ago, Cosgrove’s interrogation shows how sensationalized Watkins’s writing was. Her reporting on the Annan case perpetuated falsehoods about Annan’s so-called “confession,” and her play gave an inaccurate portrayal of Chicago’s criminal justice system. Despite Watkins’s insistence that her drama revealed the truth about its subjects without any exaggeration, her play depicted police, prosecutors, and judges as the only “good guys” in the story, ignoring those who lied, misled, and used brutal methods to obtain forced confessions.

The murder of thirteen women and girls in 1979 and the social movement they launched.

In four terrifying months in 1979, thirteen women and girls—twelve Black, one white—were murdered in Boston. All were found in or near Roxbury, a predominantly Black neighborhood in a city famously beset by racial strife and division. Fears of a serial killer spread within Black communities. But the authorities wouldn’t hear of it: these were just ordinary, everyday murders of unimportant people, killed by men they knew. The police said Black residents had nothing to fear—and the media implied that white people could safely ignore the carnage.

Yet Black feminists refused to accept the murders of Black women and girls. The real serial killers, they argued, were chronic racism, sexism, poverty, and domestic violence, including violence committed by Black men. Something had to be done.

Thirteen Sisters tells the gripping stories of the women who died—their lives, their brutal deaths, the attempts to solve them—and the renowned Combahee River Collective, whose activism in the wake of the murders brought national attention to the overlapping oppressions that made Black women and girls so vulnerable to violence. Historian Andrew S. Baer interviews family members and activists to introduce readers to the victims as complete people and investigate the events surrounding their deaths, unspooling a fast-paced and urgent narrative about crime, race, and marginalization. Baer also pays tribute to the Black feminists who saw the social roots of this violence and called for radical change, demands that remain all too relevant today.

Riveting, enraging, and humane, Thirteen Sisters is an indictment of the neglectful institutions that have failed Black women and a testament to the activists who transformed how we understand systemic oppression.

Interweaves the stories of a revolutionary and a bombing victim to explore the roots and unintended consequences of political violence.

1976. The Vietnam War had ended, but radical political groups still operated clandestinely throughout the United States. Nowhere was the threat of civil unrest greater than in Boston. Racial tensions had been building since a federal judge ordered the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools, and civic leaders were counting on the pageantry of the nation’s Bicentennial to boost both tourism and investment. In April, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, prison reformers schooled in Marxism and angered by US interventions abroad, bombed the Suffolk County Courthouse, injuring twenty-two people. The site of the blast marked the spot where the lives of two men intersected: a mill town kid who’d been radicalized in Vietnam and prison, and an immigrant waiting in line because he needed to renew a cab license.

Fifty years after the bombing shook the city, Troubled Times tells the story of lives changed by political violence at a time when the American experiment is again in crisis.