Catherine Downes

In this week's cover story, we examine the demise of Irving-based Hostess, purveyor of Wonder Bread, Ho Hos, Twinkies and Ding Dongs -- basically all the stuff you should never put in your body. These days, pretty much everything is political, even the fate of snack food.

Can blame for the company's ongoing liquidation following nearly a year in Chapter 11 proceedings be placed at the feet of the unions, which some say are grand, burdensome anachronisms in a contemporary marketplace? Others pin it on Wall Street. Like all the other companies that have been Bain Capital-ed by private equity barons, they say, Hostess got ransacked, and no wonder it went under. Look at all that debt. The company was completely upside-down!

Over the course of my reporting, however, I reached a different conclusion. There's nuance (shocker!) in the tale of the Twinkie's last, rattling gasps. Rest easy, everybody. There's plenty of blame to go around! Oh, and you probably won't be without you cream-filled sponge cake for long, if you actually eat that stuff. Like Jesus, Twinkie will almost assuredly rise from death.

In the meantime, take a look at this brief history of its storied life:

More »

Hunt County Sheriff's Office

Sam Lone Wolf, aka a bunch of other names

Earlier this month, I wrote a cover story so bizarre, I had to periodically check official documents just to be sure I had not wandered into the realm of magical realism. Yes, in fact, a sacred white buffalo was born to a Greenville rancher named Arby Little Soldier during a lightning storm in 2011. Indeed, Little Soldier, as far as I know, still maintains said white buffalo was slain as a result of a Cheyenne conspiracy.

See also:
- A White Buffalo's Death Breeds Suspicion and Lies

I'm not spoiling much by saying we may never know the whole truth, but the white buffalo was not mutilated by conspiratorial Native Americans wielding skinning knives, perhaps at the behest of Ted Nugent.

There was another character, though, who I found even more fascinating, but I couldn't plumb his strange background as much as I would have liked, primarily for the sake of column inches.

More »

Tristan Elwell

In this week's edition, the cover story chronicles the short life and ambiguous death of Lightning Medicine Cloud, the rare white buffalo born to Hunt County rancher Arby Little Soldier. To the Lakota Oyate, the animal was prophecy, heralding the return of the prophet White Buffalo Calf Woman, and a crossroads for mankind.

The white buffalo died in April before its first birthday, and what followed can't be good for any of us if you believe in the prophecy. I won't spoil the story here, but suffice to say the means by which the white buffalo met its untimely end are ... murky. Little Soldier, of the Lakota Oyate and the Sahnish people, claims the calf was murdered in a Cheyenne conspiracy. Investigators from the Hunt County Sheriff's Office and Texas Rangers think it probably died of natural causes.

So it will be interesting to see what brothers/filmmakers Richard and Ethan Marten do with this unsettled, acrimonious tale. Broadly, their film, "White Buffalo: An American Prophecy," is about galactic alignment, the cataclysm predicted by the Mayan calendar in 2012 and the white buffalo, herald of a transformative era. The film is slated for release sometime during the first quarter of 2013, funded segment by segment via Kickstarter.

More »

Tarrant County Sheriff's Office

Steven Lawayne Nelson, photographed in a Tarrant County jail, following a fistfight with deputies.

Steven Lawayne Nelson was found guilty Monday morning in the slaying of Clint Dobson, a 28-year-old pastor who was discovered in Arlington's NorthPointe Baptist with a plastic bag clinging to his face. Investigators say Nelson wielded a Daisy air pistol during the March 2011 robbery that ended in Dobson's murder. The pastor was severely beaten with some blunt object, but he died of suffocation.

His assistant, Judy Elliott, 67, was bludgeoned half to death; her husband was unable to recognize her at first. Nelson, 25, stole a laptop from the office, along with credit cards and Elliott's Mitsubishi Galant. He later sent a text message to a friend that read, "I did some shit the other day, cuz. I fucked up, cuz. Real bad," according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Whether he was expressing guilt or fear of arrest, it didn't stop him from hitting The Parks at Arlington mall with the stolen cards. Cashiers later identified him.

Nelson swore on the stand that two accomplices did all the killing, but the blood spatters found on his counterfeit Air Jordan's, the print the sole left behind, and the testimony of the man who bought the stolen laptop said otherwise. It took the jury just over an hour to reach a guilty verdict, according to Star-Telegram reporter Dianne Hunt's tweets. Now comes the penalty phase, where prosecutors will seek death.

More »

Forget about worker's comp if you slip in those heels.

Strip clubs are the brave new frontier in employment lawsuits. Women who were for years treated as "independent contractors" are filing suit in droves against their current or former employers. All of them want basically the same thing: the minimum wage and overtime money they feel they should have gotten while lap-dancing and pole-swinging for tips alone. Many also want compensation for years of unfair "house fees" and the tips they say they were forced to share with D.J.s, "house moms," valets, waitresses and sometimes even their bosses.

Esther Sue Eliazo is the latest dancer filing a Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) claim against her former employer, local topless joint Baby Dolls. In her suit, filed this morning in federal district court, the Tarrant County woman claims the saloon let her work over 40 hours a week without paying her minimum wage or overtime.

More »

Photo by Brandon Thibodeaux

The Nasher Sculpture Center has been feuding with Museum Tower, its shiny new neighbor in the Arts District, over light, heat and reflectivity for going on six months now. At the end of July, we published a story showing that the tower isn't the only risky real estate project the pension fund has chosen to invest in. That's part of a broader investment philosophy in which higher-risk alternative investments make up half their portfolio. It is, as financial analyst Ed Easterling told us, "a very risky strategy for a taxpayer-backed entity."

In the fund's newsletter this month, George Tomasovic, chairman of DPFP's trustee board, responds to some of those criticisms. Sort of. In a lengthy editorial, he suggests that the onus is on the Nasher to change the orientation of its skylights, suggests that the media is attacking the pension fund "as a part of the general attack on public employee defined benefit plans like ours," and points out that all the other big cities have shiny glass buildings.

More »

Brandon Thibodeaux

Our cover story this week deals with the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, the owners of the much-argued-about Museum Tower project in the Arts District. In researching the story, we obtained a draft of the fund's 2011 annual report, which hasn't been released yet. It shows that although the pension fund had an exceptionally rocky year in 2011, its investment managers made $32 million in "asset management" fees. And those same advisers can expect to do even better in 2012, internal documents show.

Our story focused in on a few of the pension fund's other high-dollar real estate transactions. Real estate is, at this point, the pension fund's single largest asset, making up some 24 percent of its total portfolio.

More »

On Friday, Dallas police reported that they were investigating the apparent overdose deaths of two students from Thomas Jefferson High School in March and April: 14-year-old Jaime Morales, who was found dead at his home in Northwest Dallas, and an unnamed 17-year-old, found dead in an apartment on Ferguson Road.

Although police are still awaiting toxicology reports, it's been reported that the deaths are the result of cheese heroin, a mixture of black tar and over-the-counter cold medicine that's dogged North Texas for years.

The deaths are tragic, no matter the cause. But if cheese is to blame, we have to ask: Why is everyone caught off-guard yet again? Does Dallas have a persistent case of cheese amnesia?

More »

Photo courtesy of newscom

Thomas McGowan celebrates his exoneration at the Crowley Courthouse.

This week's feature tells the story of Debbie Jones, a Richardson woman who was raped and robbed at knifepoint in 1985, when she was 19.

Soon after the crime, Jones picked Thomas McGowan out of a photo lineup. He was convicted of burglary and sexual assault and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. Jones tried her best to move on with her life. But when DNA evidence exonerated McGowan in 2008, she suddenly had to live with the knowledge that her mistaken identification had put an innocent man in prison. At the time, her real rapist hadn't yet been found -- and when he finally was, the statute of limitations to prosecute him had passed.

Jones agreed to speak with the Observer about her experiences, the first time she's been interviewed at length. But one of her main concerns was McGowan: She wanted to make sure nothing in the article hurt or upset him. Although she never could have imagined it, the two have tentatively formed a friendship; today, they occasionally speak at events together about wrongful conviction and exoneration, sometimes accompanied by Mike Corley, who was a detective on Jones' case.

"We'll always always be forever bound by this," Jones says.

More »

When President Obama appointed SMU prof Al Armendariz to the EPA regional post in Dallas back in 2009, it was to the sound of collective groaning from the energy industry and Republican politicos. Only months before, he'd authored a study citing oil and gas production as a major source of air pollution in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And now he was supposed to regulate them?

Ever since, everyone from the industry right on down to the chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Railroad Commission of Texas and Gov. Rick Perry has looked for an excuse to call for his head.

Then came the video above, which should be set to a soundtrack of knives sharpening.

More »