El Gallito: Framed Nephew and a Texas Ranger's Missing Evidence

01 • 18 Minute Read

Texas Observer

Lise Olsen

The Troubling Disappearance of 'El Gallito'

Ernesto Gonzales, a cantankerous Rio Grande Valley attorney with many enemies, walked out of his law office in 2017 and vanished. His coat hung neatly, his Bible lay open, his pistol was gone. Lise Olsen reconstructs how Ranger Roy Garza zeroed in on the victim's nephew, Sonny Campos, a former cop with no record and no motive, while waving off relatives who had threatened the dead man. A skeleton surfaced on Campos's ranch after earlier searches found nothing. Then came the missing evidence, the informant Garza swore did not exist, and a verdict in under three hours.

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02 • 21 Minute Read

Victory Journal

Tim Struby

Name of the Father

Jarrod Tillinghast walked into a basement apartment to rob a kid of thirty pounds of weed. He took a butcher knife to the skull and answered with two left hooks that shattered the kid's face. That was the double life Tim Struby traces. Jarrod was the son of Jerry Tillinghast, a New England mob enforcer doing life for murder, and a Golden Gloves boxer trying to make his first name mean more than his last. He robbed drug dealers between fights. Twice he quit the ring. At 43, nursing a Tito's and soda, he floats another comeback.

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03 • 20 Minute Read

The State

Chiara Eisner

They Executed People for the State of South Carolina

Craig Baxley pushed the drugs into a stranger's veins, watched the light leave the man's face, then knelt on a bathroom floor and begged God's forgiveness. He never slept the same again. Chiara Eisner tracked down 10 people who carried out South Carolina executions and found a clear pattern. The men who pressed the buttons live with PTSD, heart problems, and thoughts of suicide. The leaders who gave the orders sleep fine. Now the state wants to start killing again, with a firing squad ready. The question is who pays for what the law demands.

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04 • 37 Minute Read

Atavist Magazine

Nile Cappello

The Girl in the Picture

In 1989, Dennis Bowman told police his 14-year-old daughter, Aundria, had run away from their Holland, Michigan home with $150. For 31 years that was the story. Nile Cappello follows Cathy Terkanian, Aundria's birth mother, and Carl Koppelman, an accountant who taught himself forensic sketching, as they worked the case from across the country. Bowman had a long record of attacking women. DNA tied him to a 1980 Virginia murder. Then investigators dug beneath a concrete slab in his backyard. What lay under it, and how many other cold cases lead back to Dennis Bowman, is still being counted.

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A lawyer vanished. The Rangers arrested the one man with no motive.

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