Maybe it’s not so surprising, when you stop and think about it, that Houston, the oil town that has long drawn the ambitious and the clever—the ones willing to do whatever it takes to strike the right deals and make their fortunes—has proven to be fertile ground, too, for those with less honorable intentions. Bizarre murders, political bribery, revenge plots, corporate bankruptcies that have sent ripples through the entire financial world—Bayou City has seen it all.

In this issue, we take a look at 12 of the most notorious crimes that have come out of this particular stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast, the stories that changed our city’s history forever, that people have been telling and retelling for years: of the forged will that almost allowed a butler and a lawyer to steal a fortune, of the doctor’s wife who died so suddenly, of the stiletto that became a murder weapon.

Crime is terribly revealing, as Agatha Christie once noted, and not of only the criminal. It can also strip away the poses and pretensions of even the best of cities, and give us a glimpse, for better or worse, of some of the darker things that a town is made of…