Fort Worth

Fort Worth, 1900-1910: a decade the city would rather have forgotten.
Before the skyline, before the stockyards became a tourist stop, Fort Worth was a rough young city still learning what justice meant to the people who lived in it. In one decade, its streets and farmhouses saw murder in a wine room, a lawman shot down by a man he'd just arrested, a father killed at his own gate by his own son, and a teenage messenger boy gunned down in a case that was never solved.
Here are twenty-two of Fort Worth's true crime cases - selected from a decade that saw far more violence than any one book could hold - the ones that didn't make the history books, pulled from original newspaper accounts, trial records, and prison and pardon files. Here are the grand juries that refused to indict, the trials that lasted days instead of weeks, the men pardoned within a few years of their crimes, and the ones who never saw the inside of a courtroom at all.
Meticulously researched and told with unflinching detail, Fort Worth - Murder in the New Century is a portrait of a city figuring out - case by case, verdict by verdict - what it would tolerate, what it would forgive, and what it would simply let go unanswered.
A decade of murders and a city learning what it meant to call something justice in the twentieth century.