The stakes were high for Saturday night’s fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. Mayweather was out to defend his crown as this generation’s most dominant fighter. Canelo, hugely popular in his native Mexico, was out to prove his skill by dethroning a world champ. Then, of course,…
The Texas Worm Ranch, a fixture at local farmer’s markets and producer of the Observer’s reigning Best Worm Doo-Doo Pee-Pee, is in crisis. Yesterday, they declared a “worm emergency” after its five commercial air conditioning units were stripped of their copper wiring, rendering them inoperable. When The Dallas Morning News…
When he drove through the Shadow Brook Apartments on Ferguson Road at 10:30 Thursday night, he dismissed Edward Jackson as just another bumbling rent-a-cop hiding behind a faux badge and uniform. That was his second mistake. His first was playing his music too loud on Jackson’s turf. His third, according…
A beer delivery truck idles in a convenience store parking lot, a couple of cases stacked on the pavement while the driver momentarily disappears inside. The cool, refrigerated air wafting from the open beckons you closer. A fleeting voice tugging at the edge of your mind whispers about how easy…
The first attack began as a robbery, turned into a carjacking, and ended in sexual assault and arson. Police say that Van Dralan Dixson approached a man as he stepped behind a South Dallas building to take a leak at about 4:45 on the morning of June 22. After the…
Last January, an FBI agent based in Maryland was cruising through a peer-to-peer file-sharing network in search of child porn. There, he stumbled upon a user named “Classybitch,” who offered him access to several hundred videos and images with file names like “Taboo Incest – Grampa Fucks Sleeping Girl Pedo…
Van Dralan Dixson, the neighborhood watch volunteer accused of a string of rapes in South Dallas, was arrested in Baton Rouge on Tuesday, several local news outlets are reporting. Police announced Dixson as a suspect over the weekend after DNA evidence linked him to one of the assaults. Subsequent DNA…
It’s 3 a.m. You’re driving around Pleasant Grove, hot-boxing your car, when the cops pull you over for a minor traffic violation. Smoke billows from the window as the officer approaches. The smell of marijuana is unmistakable. What do you do? NORML, the national pot-advocacy group, has a handy primer…
Van Dralan Dixson, the neighborhood watch volunteer now tied by DNA to four South Dallas rapes, is out of jail and on the run. Alan Mason, the silver Honda-driving, oval glasses-wearing man whom police publicly identified as a “person of interest” before the results of the DNA test came in,…
Two years ago, David Mangum left Dallas, where he’d lived for a decade or more, and moved to Dexter, Missouri, population 8,000, where he got a job in a grocery store. He kept the reasons for the move mostly to himself. Small-town life would seem ill-suited to his favorite pastime…
Dallas police haven’t officially cleared Alan Mason, the man they identified as a “person of interest” in the recent string of nine rapes in the area around Fair Park, of wrongdoing. He’s still in jail for violating his probation for driving while intoxicated. But any evidence suggesting his involvement –…
The Dallas and Arlington Police Departments have found Alan Mason, who they’re calling a “person of interest” in the serial rapist case that’s been haunting the Fair Park area this summer. Mason’s arrest comes after two more victims of sexual assault came forward this week. The most recent victim to…
Despite what its name implies, Exel Transportation Services does not actually transport anything. It’s what’s called an intermodal marketing company; basically, it helps other companies ship things. Not the sexiest business to be in, but lucrative enough to convince Exel CEO Michael Musacchio to jump ship in 2004 after a…
Not long after police announced that a ninth women had come forward as a victim of a serial rapist prowling South Dallas, and a few hours before they would identify 29-year-old Alan Mason as a person of interest in the assaults, residents packed into a community meeting hosted by Dallas…
When Danny Secker died unexpectedly last January at the age of 41, he left behind a widow, three sons — one 3 years old, the others 5-month-old twins — along with a $1 million life insurance policy through Transamerica to help see his family through. The timing of the life…
Larry Poulos wasn’t very close with his roommate. They had only been sharing their Arlington apartment for a few days, and they had never been formally introduced. The roommate knew him only as “Chino.” So, when Poulos announced on Saturday that he planned to rob a bank, the roommate took…
Back in March, on the same day that a third Lake Highlands woman was raped in her home in as many weeks, Dallas Police Chief David Brown addressed the media and pledged a swift and comprehensive response. When a serial rapist began targeting South Dallas three months later, it took…
It may have been that Johnny Charles Butler and James Robert Cleveland Butler hoped to etch their names in bank-robbing history by going out in a Bonnie and Clyde-style shower of bullets in August 2012. Perhaps the two brothers simply overestimated their chances against a professionally trained FBI SWAT team…
It was 1:30 a.m. when Cornellias Simon, aka “Bean,” burst through the door of the apartment. The tenant watched as Simon staggered for a moment, then collapsed onto the kitchen floor, dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. That was the first surprise. The second was the man who…
Safe to say that most of us at Unfair Park celebrated Labor Day in the traditional way: by guzzling beer poolside while drunkenly scorching animal flesh. Many in Dallas chose to mark the occasion by more unconventional means, at least judging by the weekend’s police reports. Here is a sampling…
He’s held up five North Texas banks in six months. Each time, he wears a plain ball cap and glasses or sunglasses and calmly hands over a note and demands cash. His preference is for bank branches tucked inside grocery stores and Walmarts, always in the suburbs. He’s shown a…
A couple of years ago, Dallas police officers parked one of their bait cars outside an apartment complex in West Oak Cliff, complete with a set of keys and unlocked doors. But the man who took the car, 31-year-old Louis Torres, didn’t bother with the keys; he used a tow…
