'Mayhem' Annotated Contents

Following is an annotated table of contents for the "Mayhem" section of Texas Confidential! "Sex," "Scandal," and "Murder" tables of contents with chapter descriptions appear as separate posts.

MAYHEM

1) The Texas Indian Wars: Bad faith on the part of the whites as they explored and settled Texas and an almost incomprehensible savagery on the part of the native Indians brought the two cultures into violent, continuous, and irreconcilable conflict.

2) Crime and Punishment: Texas is, by all accounts, more violent and crime-ridden than the average state, and it has a commensurate number of places to keep its convicted criminals. According to recent statistics, the annual crime rate in Texas is about 18 percent higher than the national average rate and is ranked 10th worse in the country.

3) The Texas State Police: From its start in 1870, the short-lived Texas State Police was highly unpopular, something that was probably inevitable no matter what it did, and memories of the organization are bitter to this day. (Shown here is Republican Governor Edmund J. Davis, quite possibly the most reviled of Texas politicians and the man to whom the state police answered directly.)

4) The Marfa Lights: For as long as anyone around the west Texas town of Marfa can remember, they have seen strange lights burning at night on the Mitchell Flat, an otherwise unexceptional stretch of desert that runs along Highway 90.

5) The Aurora UFO Incident: The Lone Star State’s oldest documented UFO incident goes back more than a century, to April 17, 1897, when a mysterious airship purportedly crashed in the north Texas town of Aurora. This chapter also looks Texas connections to the even more famous Roswell UFO Incident. (Shown here is a marker, possibly over the grave of a reputed "spaceman," in the Aurora cemetery.)

6) Howard the Barbarian: Up until a few years ago, visitors to the central Texas prairie community of Cross Plains could still meet a handful of very old residents who remembered seeing author Robert E. Howard running around town with a cloak and sword. (Note: The research for this chapter involved a pilgrimage to the home and grave of the author and was one of the most personally significant to me in the book.)

7) The Paperclip Swastika: In the years following World War II, one of the best places in the world to find Nazi war criminals was the Texas border town of El Paso — where they worked for the U.S. government at the highest levels of security.

8) The Texas City Disaster: On April 16, 1947, the French cargo vessel SS Grandcamp, heavily laden with highly-explosive ammonium nitrate fertilizer, caught fire at its berth in the Galveston Bay port of Texas City and sparked the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history.

9) Mistreating the Treaty Tree: In March of 1989, a 45-year-old heroin addict and farm equipment salesman named Paul Stedman Cullen dumped two containers of a powerful herbicide on the 500-year-old Treaty Oak in downtown Austin, Texas, as part of a black magic ritual.

10) Legend of the Chupacabra: For the past several years, the boogeyman that has haunted the Texas darkness has been the chupacabra, a creature that many dismiss as a legend but which an increasing number of people hold accountable whenever something goes bump in the night or happens that they cannot readily explain.

11) Zombies Ahead!: Early on the morning of Monday, January 19, 2009, commuters in the state capital of Austin were surprised the see the dire warnings “ZOMBIES AHEAD” and “Zombies ahead! Run for your lives!” on two large electronic signs.

12) Let the Bad Times Roll: You can’t spell “abusive” without “bus,” something VIA Metropolitan Transit riders were well aware of by the summer of 2010, when the system had become so plagued by violence that it received national attention.

13) Gangland Texas: Numerous gangs reign over the criminal underworld of Texas, prowling its urban streets and rural highways, and wreaking violence on anyone that would challenge their control of lucrative concessions like the drug trade and prostitution. (See also "Breaking News: Los Zetas Gang Leader Caught" for new information about one of the gangs covered in Texas Confidential.)