After Cameron Wright confessed to assaulting Aliah Hernandez in 2014 in a New Braunfels, Texas hotel room, both the officer assigned to Aliah’s case and Aliah’s friends and family thought it was an open-and-shut case. But two grand juries declined...
In December 2014, Aliah Hernandez, a trans woman, told police she was assaulted after revealing her gender identity to a man whom she met up with at a hotel in New Braunfels, Texas. In the first episode of Queer Texas, a four-part “Forsaken” series...
Everyone’s familiar with AMBER Alert — the notifications sent out when a child is missing or kidnapped and in danger. But what many don’t know is that the system was created because of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was abducted while riding her...
This spring, protests and encampments materialized on college campuses across the United States. On campuses like Columbia University, the University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin, law enforcement has arrived to...
In the second episode of this two-part series, Cristela Jones shares the stories of Brenda Moore and Pinkie Mae Davis-Herron, two of four Black women who went missing in Austin in 1976, and discusses “Missing White Woman Syndrome.”
In 1976, four Black women went missing in Austin, Texas. Their stories went largely untold. In this two-part series, Cristela Jones interrogates why these women’s stories haven’t been told — why we’ve heard the names Gabby Petito and Natalee...
The mostly conservative state of Texas is not necessarily known for its promotion of sex education in schools — it’s actually not even required to be taught at all. In this episode, Mackenzie Matwick talks to the Austin Independent School District’s...
Anthony Graves was only 26 years old when he was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. Accused of murdering a family of six in Somerville, Texas, Graves was sentenced to death, solely on the testimony of a man who later confessed to acting alone...
I grew up in Smithville, Texas, a small town about 45 miles southwest of Austin. When I was a kid, in the mid-1990s, the population was around 4,000 people. Smithville is one of those towns where everyone knows everyone, for better or for worse...
In 1998, Rodney Reed was the defendant in Bastrop, Texas’, first capital murder trial in nearly 50 years. In this episode, Aisling Ayers speaks to a juror who has never spoken to the media before. The juror shares what happened in the courtroom...
