Outrageous acts of villainy have slowly drifted out of the national
limelight and into the dustbin of Texas history. Consider the uproar
over the 1879 shooting of actor Maurice Barrymore in Marshall and the
1949 murder of oil field legend Tex Thornton in Amarillo. The 1909
Coryell County Courthouse massacre committed by a sixteen-year-old girl
remains just as shocking today. For the long-suffering associates of
repeat offenders like Fort Worth's Flapper Bandit or Temple's
International Man of Mystery, notoriety couldn't fade quickly enough.
From the lawless days of the frontier to the rise of organized crime,
Clay Coppedge sifts through eighteen obscure case files to chart the
evolution of crime and punishment in the state.