Reporter George Hale’s radio feature about a missing person in Texas was supposed to only last two minutes. Instead, the story plunged him into a 12-episode investigative podcast titled “Buried.”
The NPR-affilated podcast explored the dubious 1991 disappearance of a 23-year-old woman and a nonexistent police investigation 60 miles east of Dallas, TX, which lead Hale through meth dens, foreboding woods and fractured lives.
In 2017, The Texas Associated Press Broadcasters awarded Hale’s podcast first place for “Investigative Report” and “Use of Actuality in Production.”
Hale said, “This remains the craziest story I have ever covered.”
Writer Merritt Tierce’s debut novel, “Love Me Back,” about a self-destructive lover, mother and waitress was widely lauded by literary critics who described the work as “ruthless,” “devastating” and “terribly uncomfortable.”
BookRiot called the novel “a prayer to everything broken, vulnerable and human” while KERA’s Think said, “It's Cormac McCarthy's The Road set in a Dallas steakhouse.”
Tierce later wrote for the acclaimed Netflix show “Orange is the New Black.”
Steve DeWolf pilots his T-6 Texan at Dallas Executive Airport in Dallas, TX.
DeWolf attended the U.S. Naval Academy with hopes of flying carrier-based aircraft, but imperfect eyesight ended his dream.
He instead practiced law, travelled extensively, wrote a novel optioned as a film and pioneered wind energy in Texas. DeWolf also ran marathons, climbed mountains and outran Spanish bulls.
But he never lost his love of flight, earning his pilot’s license and buying two WWII-era aircraft.
Two weeks after this photo shoot, DeWolf took off in his T-6 and crashed, killing him and his passenger.
Dallas, TX author René Guerrero’s paranormal novel, “White Rock,” was partly inspired by an urban legend about the Lady of White Rock Lake:
While driving, a 1940s couple finds a drenched woman roadside and drives her to her home only to find their backseat empty and her parents exclaiming that their daughter had drowned years prior.
![José R. Ralat, a Dallas, TX resident and professional taco connoisseur, took a job as Texas Monthly Magazine’s first taco editor in 2019. Maldonado said, “[Tacos are] essential not only to the Texas diet but also to the Texas identity, and that’s j](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b6b7975cef372fa95fd1d97/1597467898183-6JCRLYPTAQ6QX7JRQRJZ/191010076_DannyFulgencio_JoseRalatMaldonado_OCL.jpg)
José R. Ralat, a Dallas, TX resident and professional taco connoisseur, took a job as Texas Monthly Magazine’s first taco editor in 2019.
Maldonado said, “[Tacos are] essential not only to the Texas diet but also to the Texas identity, and that’s just growing.”
Jenny Grumbles stands in the McCommas Bluff Landfill in Dallas, TX.
Grumbles’ trash-to-treasure entrepreneurship lead to the 11-year tenure of Uptown Country Home, a home furnishings store whose inventory included repaired and repurposed cast-offs from repossessed storage units.
Grumbles starred on the A&E reality TV show “Storage Wars Texas.”
Musician Wanz Dover has been a critic and practitioner in the Dallas, TX music scene for over two decades.
He fronted the rock band the Black Dotz, spun records at local venues and produced his own albums.
“I don’t have the ambition for success,” he said. “Now I make music for much more selfish reasons. It’s really all about expression. I make art because I have to, and I don’t know what else to do because that’s all I’ve ever done.”
Leslie Porterfield cruises near Rowlett, TX.
In 2007, Porterfield found herself at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah hoping to become the fastest woman on Earth on a motorcycle. Instead of breaking the speed record, she broke seven ribs after crashing at 110 mph.
The following year, Porterfield returned to the salt flats and clocked a top speed of 246 mph, shattering previous records and securing her position as the Fastest Woman on Earth on a Motorcycle.
After serving five years in prison for drug trafficking, Brittany White, a resident of Dallas, TX, joined and managed Live Free, a decarceration nonprofit advocating for freed inmates.
“We have a caricature of who criminals are in this country,” she said. “and we use that to deny the formerly incarcerated of very basic human rights like housing, a job with a livable wage and healthcare.”
Woodrow Wilson High School senior Rogelio Martinez of Dallas, TX said he was humiliated by family for his love of dancing. So, while his family slept, he would slip out of bed and quietly dance in the dark.
Guided by high school dance teacher Lisa King, Martinez flourished and said that dance was the sole reason he didn’t drop out of high school.
Pineapple Tangaroa came up homeless in Brooklyn, NY when the borough had fewer lattes and Weimaraners and more drug dealers and gunfire. He still has shotgun pellets in his elbow.
Tangaroa legally changed his name to “Pineapple” after taking ownership of an annoying childhood nickname given for his Pacific Islander heritage.
Once Tangaroa escaped Brooklyn’s criminal orbit, he combined his business acumen, affinity for tattoos and body modifications to establish Shaman Modifications, body piercing studios in Dallas and Austin, TX.
Singer Judy Chamberlain moved to North Texas in 2011 and thereafter entertained thousands in Dallas, TX with her velveteen renditions of jazz standards.
Dallas’ Balcony Club owner, Tommy Stanco, credited Chamberlain with keeping his ailing club alive for years.
Chamberlain, a fourth-generation entertainer, sang professionally at 13 and, since 1957, enchanted listeners in New York City, Los Angeles and Dallas jazz clubs.
She claimed to know over 4,000 songs.
Trigger Mortis, aka Buck Wylde, sits between Carmel Sutra and Taylor Anne Ramsey at Texas Theatre in Dallas, TX.
Mortis worked as a corporate marketing professional by day before moonlighting as Buck Wylde, a suave, hyper-masculine drag king emcee.
Mortis said her alter-ego drew from Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Ritchie Valens, among others, and that her transformation regularly took two hours, with hair alone taking 30-45 minutes to style.
Rachael Williams, aka Frankie Stiletto, poses for a portrait while wearing a straight jacket in Dallas, TX.
In April 2016, Williams earned a Guinness World Records certificate for her “fastest escape from a straight jacket while sword swallowing in 47.94 seconds.”
Professional soccer player Dane Brekken “Brek” Shea stands on the FC Dallas pitch in Frisco, TX.
In Texas—let alone the United States, where soccer’s near-global fandom isn’t as well appreciated, Shea, a native Texan, stood to shift the sport’s domestic appeal.
Shea signed with FC Dallas in 2008, having proven himself a skilled footballer with tremendous promise and marketable rock ’n roll flare.
Fatima Hirsi types a poem on Lower Greenville Avenue in Dallas, TX.
After meeting a street poet in Austin, TX, Hirsi began spontaneously typing poems for passersby in Dallas.
Her donation-based service asked only that a patron offer a single personal truth, after which Hirsi composed a personalized poem.
“People are so open and welcoming,” she said. “It creates this space, and they pour their hearts out to me.”
John Freeman said he worked construction while his wife waited tables and that, for 20 years, the couple had lived as “gypsies,” but settled in Dallas, TX to be closer to family.
They said they loved living in West Dallas Trailer Park, which was nestled in a lush grove of old oak trees. Plus, rent was cheap.
But then the Freemans and 41 other families were told to leave. A developer wanted luxury apartments.
“We could’ve stayed here for years,” Freeman said. Then the rain picked up and the couple hustled to leave by nightfall.
Musician Joshua Ray Walker belts out a tune in Dallas, TX.
As a 2020 Rolling Stone Magazine deck put it, “Country’s most fascinating young songwriter is a baby-faced, 6XL guitar hero with a Dwight Yoakam voice and songs about suicide and boat-show models.”
Captain Dean Smith sails his homemade steamboat, Linda Lue, in the backwaters of White Rock Lake in Dallas, TX.
Smith, an architect, said he and his father had built a steamboat in the 70s, which sank, but that in 2011 he again tried his hand as a shipwright of leisure.
Chef Bekavac stands in his kitchen with his 5-month-old son, Bowen.
After culinary adventures from San Francisco to New Orleans, Bekavac settled in Dallas where he and Chef Nick Badovinus forged Neighborhood Services, a restaurant whose programs promoted pragmatic fare over fashionable high-end technique.
No children were harmed in the making of this portrait.
In 2007, Jennifer Griffin was hospitalized in Dallas, TX for flu-like symptoms. She woke from a three-month coma without hands or feet.
An ovarian abscess had ruptured. Infection set in. Amputation followed.
The experience inspired Griffin to launch the P.L.A.Y. Foundation (Positive Living for Active Youth), a nonprofit that provided $2500 grants to child amputees to pursue arts, academics and sports.
Within three years, the foundation delivered $60,000 in grants.
“Of course I get the looks,” Griffin said. “But I’ve found that most people are just curious and not trying to be rude. I’m way beyond that now. A lot of people have benefited from my foundation. That’s more important to me than having a foot.”
Dr. William Roberts, Executive Director of the Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute, created the hospital’s Heart to Heart program in Dallas, TX.
The program reunited heart transplant recipients with their original hearts, both as an educational tool and for emotional closure.
Jackie Lane poses for a portrait at her ranch, Scrapiron Stables, in Archer City, TX.
Larry McMurtry, Archer City native and Pulitzer-winning author, called Lane “the last real cowgirl.”
Bold and brash, Lane was a local misfit known for taking in broken horses and broken people.
Gmo Tristan savors fatherhood with his 6-year-old son, Luca, at their Oak Cliff home in Dallas, TX.
While studying visual arts at Eastfield College, Tristan worked three jobs, one of which being a catering gig that pushed him toward cooking professionally.
Tristan then enrolled in El Centro College’s pastry program before relocating to New York to practice his craft. He later found work as a sous chef at celebrated Dallas restaurant FT33.
Journalist Tim Cowlishaw watches sports during a portrait session at Lakewood Landing in Dallas, TX.
Cowlishaw, an award-winning Dallas Morning News sports columnist and a regular ESPN commentator, wrote “Drunk on Sports,” a memoir about his penchant for drinking with sports celebrities to land stories other writers couldn’t… but not without consequences.
Beppy Gietema was friends with Zoe Hastings, a promising 18-year-old Dallas, TX resident who, while returning a movie, was abducted, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in 2015.
When Gietema learned of her friend’s death, she cut off her ponytail.
“She was the first person that I lost that I really loved,” she said. “I lost half of myself.”
Angel and Marie Reyes pose for a portrait in her bathroom in Dallas, TX.
Marie Reyes starred in the reality TV show “Real Housewives of Dallas.”
She and her husband co-chaired Dallas’ No Tie Dinner and Dessert Party for AIDS Services.
“We didn’t come from any family money,” Angel Reyes said. “We’ve been very fortunate and we recognize that fact. As a result, when we get asked to help we tend to say, ‘yes.’”
Retired Dallas Police Officer G.M. Tippit plays the harmonica at Whiterock Court retirement community in Dallas, TX.
When Lee Harvey Oswald killed Officer J.D. Tippit shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, many believed Officer G.M. Tippit died, including Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, as evidenced on page 262 of the Warren Commission Report:
“… Ruby remarked how he knew Tippit, the officer who had been shot by Oswald. Later Ruby stated that he did not know J.D. Tippit but that his reference was to G.M. Tippit…”
Still, G.M. Tippit’s WWII buddies never invited him to U.S. Navy reunions until 2000, believing him dead.
Tippit said, “When they found out I was alive, when they saw me, they just bawled.”
While a bandmate ambles into frame, Colton Crews poses for a portrait after band practice.
In 2014, Crews, a vegan drummer in a Dallas, TX ska band, needed fast cash to pay off the $600 payday loan he’d used to finance a trip to Mexico with his girlfriend.
Crews subsequently found himself in a Target store parking lot with an AK-47 in his trunk and a buyer en route.
The buyer was a 22-year-old U.S. Army veteran who had recently been discharged after serving in Afghanistan.
The sale was perfectly legal in Texas.
Two years later, at a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas, that gun buyer, Micah Johnson, shot 12 police officers with an assault-style rifle, killing five, before being killed by an explosive detonated by a Dallas police robot.
Puppeteer Will Schutze stands near an old bank vault with the world’s most miserly merchant: Ebenezer Scrooge.
For 38 years, puppeteer John Hardman pulled Scrooge’s strings, entertaining and deriding Christmas shoppers at NorthPark Center in Dallas, TX.
When Hardman died of cancer in 2014, his apprentice, Will Schutze, reluctantly assumed control of the show, flying in from South Carolina each year to fill the role of a disagreeable bah-humbuger for 10 shows a day.
Schutze said, “I get through the shows and they’re a lot of fun—a whole lot of fun actually—and I finish and I turn off the microphone, and I just kind of sit down and wish that John was there.”
Carmen Flores made the varsity soccer squad during her freshman year at Sunset High School in Dallas, TX.
Her athletic ambition was sidelined during her sophomore year when, at 15, she learned she was pregnant with her daughter, Amber Ruiz.
By her senior year, Flores hoped to become a forensic accountant, having received scholarship offers from Southern Methodist University, the University of North Texas at Dallas and the University of Texas at Arlington.
“Every day when I wake up, I feel unmotivated,” she said. “But then I think about my future, and I think about how I am going to provide for my daughter.”
After Hurricane Harvey, a self-proclaimed member of Antifa stands in the gutted bathroom of a home in the Forest Lake neighborhood of Houston, TX, where floodwaters had reversed the flow of area sewer lines.
While relief organizations like FEMA were absent weeks after the hurricane devastated the low-income neighborhood, a small group of leftists, including Antifa and Redneck Revolt, helped residents strip their homes of sewage-soaked drywall.
Retired homeowner Delia Arcerc said, “We’re very thankful for these people. They’re angels that God sent to us.”
Performance artist George Quartz, aka Bryan Campbell, gets yanked by artists Danielle Georgiou and Hilly Holsonback at Texas Theatre in Dallas, TX.
Campbell grew up countryside with metropolitan dreams near Gainesville, TX. In the 90s, he found his creative outlet in the explosive art scene in Denton, TX.
He said, “You imagine what the city kids are doing, so you try to emulate that, but you end up being crazier than they are.”
Animal advocate Norah Meier directs her dogs at her home in Dallas, TX.
Fresh out of college, Meier’s first job was in South Dallas, where she said she saw stray dogs everywhere, including entire litters of run-over puppies.
Meier then began fostering dogs, established a Facebook group for strays and worked alongside the Education and Animal Rescue Society.
When a tornado struck Rowlett, TX in 2015, Meier organized a search-and-rescue party to unearth pets from the rubble and reunite them with their families.
Lucha libre wrestler Aski Palomino poses for a portrait at his home in Dallas, TX.
Spectators notoriously booed and berated luchadores for their thematic roles. Palomino said, “We’re like a cheap psychologist.”
Boxer Jesús Chávez poses with his dog, Rocky (also a Boxer), at the Maple Avenue Boxing Gym in Dallas, TX.
Chávez’s early adulthood was besmirched by a four-year prison stint and deportation to Mexico, a country he didn’t know.
But his turbulent trajectory shifted when he showed promise as a fighter, launching Chávez into a 44-8 boxing career, all while mentoring at-risk youth in Texas.
Tragedy struck in 2015 when Chávez beat Leavander Johnson for the lightweight world title. After the fight, Johnson collapsed in the locker room and died of brain trauma.
Chávez said the accidental death devastated him, but that he found peace through the support of Johnson’s family.
David Grover, owner of Spinster Records, poses for a portrait in Dallas, TX à la Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass’ 1965 album “Whipped Cream and Other Delights.”