"Homicide in Texas has a lively history. From the slaying of La Salle to the killing of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, we present a crash course in murder and mayhem. And if you find it gross or ghastly -- well, shoot.

1687: French explorer Rene Robert Cavalier Siaur de La Salle is murdered on March 19 in central East Texas by Pierre Duhaut, who, along with other mutinous members of La Salla's expedition had killed the explorer's nephew with an ax two days earlier and wanted to prevent retaliation.

1752: On May 11 a soldier and one of the priests of Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria Mission near present-day Rockdale, are found dead, the former with a gunshot wound, the latter with an arrow through his heart. The chief suspect is the commander of a nearby presidio with whom the mission priests have long feuded. The accused, who blames local Indians for the double killing, will be confined at another fort for eight years.

1836: Comanche raiders attack Font Parker in what is now Limestone County on May 19, murder founders Silas, Benjamin, and John Parker, and kidnap two women and three children. One of the children is nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, who becomes the most famous Indian captive in Texas history.

1838: The Killough Massacre, the October 5 murder of eighteen white settlers in what is now Cherokee County, sparks the Cherokee War. Mirabeau B. Lamar, the president of the Republic of Texas, orders five hundred soldiers to the area to drive out the tribe for slaughtering the Isaac Killough family and their neighbors. The soldiers shoot more than one hundred Indians, and the defeated Cherokees leave Texas.

1842: Texas Ranger Mabry "Mustang" Gray, accompanied by a gang of fellow hell-raisers, attacks a party of Mexicans near Goliad. The victims are respectable traders returning from a business trip to Victoria, but Gray and his cohorts rob the men, strip them, bind them together, and then shoot repeatedly into the terrified group. One, Manuel Escobeco plays dead and survives, but the authorities never charge Gray, who will command a contingent of Texas Rangers in the Mexican War.

1853: Jane Elkins, a slave convicted of murder, becomes the first woman legally executed in the state of Texas. She is hanged on May 27 in Dallas.

1858: A group of Texans led by Juan Nepomuceno Cortina annihilates the state's last remaining encampment of Karankawa Indians, rendering the tribe essentially extinct. Cortina, an early activist for Hispanics' rights, will later become a folk hero.

1860: Fearing a slave insurrection, vigilante groups in North and East Texas hang as many as one hundred people, both slaves and abolitionists, between July and September.

1862: In what is euphemistically termed the Battle of the Nueces, on August 10 in present-day Kinney County, Confederate soldiers chase down and kill 28 German settlers who are attempting to escape into Mexico because their sympathies lie with the Union.

1863: Josefa "Chipita" Rodriguez is hanged in San Patricio on November 13 for the ax murder of an Anglo man who stayed at her inn. She may be the inspiration for La Llorona, the crying ghost of Tejano legend. In 1985 state senator Carlos Truan will persuade the Texas Legislature to pass a resolution absolving her of the murder.

1866: The Jesse James and Cole Younger gangs receive temporary shelter in the Scyene home of the teenage Belle Starr, who will go onto earn the nickname the Bandit Queen. Suspected of multiple murders and robberies, she will have liaisons with numerous fellow outlaws and will herself be shot dead in 1889. Her murder will remain unsolved.

1868: In March deputy sheriff William Sutton kills horse thief Charley Taylor in downtown Bastrop, launching an eight-year feud, the longest and bloodiest in Texas history. At least 21 men in the Sutton and Taylor factions will lose their lives.

1875: Bass Reeves becomes the first black U.S. deputy marshal in Texas, patrolling a large area south of the Red River from Paris to Sherman. He tracks and arrests scores of suspected murderers, including, at one point, his own son.

1878: Outlaws Sam Bass and Bill Longley meet their maker. Bass is shot by Texas Rangers and Vigilantes in Round Rock on July 19 and dies two days later; Longley is hanged before a crowd of thousands in Giddings on October 11.

1883: In the Fence-Cutting War, which rages across Central Texas, confrontations between proponents of the open range and ranchers who favor barbed wire cause at least three deaths.

1884: Two murderous lawmen, deputy sheriff John King Fisher and former U.S. marshal Ben Thompson die in a March 11 ambush by gunman Joe Foster at a vaudeville theater in San Antonio.

1885: In Austin a serial killer dubbed the Servant Girl Annihilator hacks eight people to death with an ax. The case is never solved.

1887: Outlaw Luke Short kills former Fort Worth town marshal Longhair Jim Courtwright in a duel on February 8. The killing impels the city to undertake a major cleanup of its red-light district, Hell's Half-Acre.

1895: Pardoned by Governor James Hogg after serving sixteen years for murder, gunslinger John Wesley Hardin is shot in the back of the head on August 19 while rolling dice in El Paso's Acme Saloon. The killer is John Selman, a notoriously corrupt constable who will be shot dead the following year by U.S. deputy marshal George Scarborough.

1898: Rancher and businessman Dick Bivins, a member of a prominent Amarillo family, is shot and killed by Skid Ellis, a saloonkeeper who is enraged that the cattleman is dallying with Ellis' niece.

1898: Waco's William Cowper Brann an opinionated journalist who publishes an inflammatory rag called The Iconoclast, is shot in the back on April Fool's Day by Tom E. Davis, who is fed up with Brann's unrelenting ridicule of Baptists. Brann manages to kill his assailant before he dies.

1899: George Morrison, a Methodist preacher in the town of Panhandle, is hanged for the fatal poisoning of his wife, whom he had wanted out of the way because he was in love with another woman.

1900: Wealthy businessman William Marsh Rice, formerly of Houston, is poisoned with chloroform and mercury on September 23 in New York City by his valet, Charles F. Jones. Jones had plotted with Rice's lawyer Albert T. Patrick, who committed forgery in an attempt to inherit Rice's $5.6 million estate. Jones will testify at Patrick's trial and be set free; Patrick will be sentenced to death but later pardoned. Their victim's money will go instead to found Houston's Rice Institute, now Rice University.

1901: Offended by what they misinterpret as insults, the Anglo sheriff of Karnes County and two deputies try to arrest an innocent Spanish speaker, Gregorio Cortez, for horse theft on June 12. The sheriff, W. T. "Brack" Morris, shoots, and Cortez, returning fire, kills him. Cortez becomes the subject of a huge manhunt and the hero of some of the most famous border corridos, or ballads, chronicling the mistreatment of Hispanics by whites.

1916: In what becomes known as the Waco Horror an illiterate black farmhand named Jesse Washington is convicted of the rape and murder of a white woman on May 15. Before he can be led from the courtroom, however, dozens of spectators drag him outside, hang him, douse him with coal oil, and burn him alive while four hundred townspeople watch.

1918: Singer-guitarist Huddle Ledbetter is sentenced to thirty years at a Bowie County prison farm for murdering a relative with whom he had argued. During his time in prison, where he will be nicknamed Leadbelly, he will continue to write songs; after dedicating one to Governor Pat Neff, Neff will pardon him. He will go on to become one of Texas' greatest bluesmen.

1923: The Texas Legislature votes to change the state's official method of execution from hanging to death by electrocution, ending the era of public executions. The following year, Charles Reynolds, a convicted killer from Red River County, will become the first inmate to die in the electric chair, a.k.a. Old Sparky. The chair will be retired in 1964.

1927: Four men, including one dressed as Santa Claus, hold up the First National Bank in Cisco two days before Christmas. In the ensuing shoot-out, one of the robbers and the chief of police and a deputy are all mortally wounded. After an extensive manhunt, the three surviving perpetrators are caught in the town of Graham. Two are sentenced to death; one gets 99 years in prison.

1930: On May 9 more than five thousand people surround the Grayson County courthouse in Sherman, intent on lynching prisoner George Hughes, a black man accused of raping a white woman. The crowd eventually sets fire to the courthouse, which burns to the ground. Hughes, who has been locked up for his own safety, dies of smoke inhalation, but they pull out his corpse and hang it anyway.

1930: Attorney Alfred D. Payne of Amarillo, who is having an affair, is arrested for planting a car bomb that killed his wife and severely wounded his son. He pleads insanity but kills himself in jail before his trial.

1931: Houston NAACP president O.P. DeWalt is assassinated on April 24 after a fiery speech denouncing the Ku Klux Klan.

1934: On Easter Sunday, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, along with Henry Methvin, another member of their outlaw band, are parked on the side of a road near Grapevine when two police officers stop to investigate. Barrow and Methvin open fire and kill both. The following month, on May 23, Bonnie and Clyde are trapped near Gibsland, Louisiana, by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and dozens of other lawmen, who riddle their car with 167 bullets.

1938: After waitresses keep disappearing from his bar in Elmendorf, Joe Ball is suspected of killing the women and feeding them to the alligators he keeps in a backyard pool.

1943: On July 7 Sheriff Jess Sweeten of Henderson County guns down gangster Gerald Johnson, the Dallas Kid, after a dramatic high-speed car chase through the streets of Athens.

1946: During a four-month period, the town of Texarkana is terrified by a nighttime killer who wears a canvas bag over his head and targets couples driving on lonely back roads or parking in lovers' lanes. The investigation is headed by Texas Ranger Manuel "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas. who suspects a local man but lacks the evidence to convict him. After the man is investigated, however, the murders stop. The story of the Texarkana Phantom Killer will inspire the 1977 movie The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

1952: Circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Jacob "Buddy" Floyd, Jr., implicate George Parr, called the Duke of Duval because of his stranglehold on politics in Duval and Jim Wells counties. Though Parr is never charged, the murder prompts Governor Allan Shivers to target the Parr machine. Nevertheless it will continue to operate until Parr commits suicide 23 years later.

1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas on November 22 and Governor John Connally is wounded. The same day, police officers arrest Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas Theatre in the city's Oak Cliff section and charge him with shooting police officer J. D. Tip. pit, who had stopped him for questioning. The next day he will be charged with shooting the president and the governor from a sixth-floor-window of the Texas School Book Depository. On November 23 Oswald himself is shot dead by night-club owner Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas city jail.

1964: Wealthy Houston banker Jacques Mossler is bludgeoned and stabbed to death in a Florida apartment. His wife, Candace Mossier, is tried for his murder along with her nephew, Melvin Lane Powers, who is 22 years her junior; at their trial, the prosecution's evidence includes their love letters. Both are acquitted, and Candy inherits Mossler's $15 million estate. In 1971 Candy, aged 57, will marry electrical contractor Barnet Garrison, aged 33. The next year, while climbing up to her third-story bedroom window, he will fall and be permanently disabled. No charges will be filed, and they will divorce in 1975.

1965: The Icebox Murders rivet Houston. Called by a concerned relative to check on an elderly couple who haven't been answering the phone, the police find the bodies of Fred and Edwina Rogers, eviscerated and dismembered, in their refrigerator. The police determine that the murders occurred three days earlier, on June 20, which was Father's Day; their chief suspect -- the couple's only son, Charles -- disappears and is never found.

1966: On August 1, after fatally stabbing his wife as she slept in their bed and then killing his mother in her apartment, 25-year-old Charles Whitman packs a footlocker with guns, ammunition, and survival rations and climbs to the top of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. Over the next hour and a half he murders 14 people from his sniper perch and wounds 31 more before two police officers get close enough to kill him.

1969: Frank Jones of Clarksville, a convicted rapist and murderer, dies after spending some twenty years in state prisons, where he became a prominent folk artist known for his drawings of devils, or "haints."

1969: After being stopped by a state trooper, husband and wife Robert and Ila Fae Dent overpower him, commandeer his car, throw him in the back seat, and hit the road. Eventually some 150 cars as well as news helicopters follow the Dents all the way from Port Arthur to Wheelock, north of Bryan, where an FBI agent, assisted by the local sheriff, shoots Robert dead. The incident will become the basis for Steven Spielberg's first feature film, The Sugarland Express.

1969: Joan Robinson Hill, a blond Houston socialite and equestrienne, develops a mysterious bacterial infection. After she dies, on March 19, the police and the victim's father, the wealthy Ash Robinson, suspect her husband, Dr. John Hill, of poisoning her with a tainted pastry. Three years later Hill will be shot dead in the foyer of his Houston mansion, and shocked Houstonians will learn that Robinson is suspected of masterminding the hit. The case will be the subject of Texas' best-ever true-crime book, Thomas Thompson's Blood and Money.

1970: More than a year after the stabbing and shooting murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles, Manson gang member Charles "Tex" Watson is extradited from McKinney, where family members with political clout have delayed his return to California. Watson will be tried separately from gang leader Charles Manson and three female cohorts but will also receive a death sentence, later commuted to life in prison.

1973: On August 8 Elmer Wayne Henley calls the police in Pasadena and reports that he has shot and killed 33-year-old Dean Corll in self-defense. Subsequently Henley, age seventeen, and David Owen Brooks, eighteen, reveal that they introduced two dozen or so young men to Corll -- a former Houston Heights resident known as the Candy Man -- and helped him torture, kill, and bury them. Both young men will be sentenced to life in prison.

1974: Fred Gomez Carrasco and two other condemned murderers use smuggled guns to hold eleven civilians and seventy inmates hostage in the prison library at the Walls Unit, in Huntsville. On August 2, after a ten-day standoff, the three men attempt to break out of the prison using a homemade shield. Surrounded, Carrasco shoots himself; troopers and FBI agents kill one accomplice and capture the other. Two hostages also die.

1974: Robert Kleasen of Austin is convicted of killing two young Mormon missionaries, whom police believe he dismembered with a band saw in the taxidermy shop where he worked. Three years later he will be released from prison after a judge rules that some trial evidence was illegally seized from his trailer. The freed ex-con eventually moves to England, where in 2002 the press will play up "the Texas bandsaw massacre" because state authorities want Kleasen extradited so they can retry him using modern DNA testing.

1974: An eight-year-old Pasadena boy dies on Halloween night after being poisoned with cyanide hidden inside a Pixy Stix candy straw. His father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, is convicted of having committed the crime to collect on a $20,000 insurance policy. O'Bryan, who will later be executed, becomes known as the man who killed Halloween.

1976: Millionaire Cullen Davis is charged with murder and attempted murder after a late-night shooting spree at the Fort Worth mansion where his estranged wife, Priscilla Davis, lives with her children. Priscilla will recover from her injuries but her boyfriend, Stan Farr, and her twelve-year-old daughter, Andrea Wilborn, die at the scene. Cullen Davis will be tried and acquitted.

1979: Federal judge John Wood is assassinated outside his town house in San Antonio. Police determine the murder was arranged by El Paso drug lord Jimmy Chagra, who was scheduled to be tried in the courtroom of the notoriously tough Maximum John on a variety of felony charges. The killer is identified as Charles Harrelson, a professional hit man. After evading lawmen for a year and a half, Harrelson will be caught on a desolate stretch of highway outside Van Horn. Wasted on cocaine, he will surrender after a six-hour standoff. He will be sentenced to life in prison.

1980: One day before he is scheduled to appear in court in Daingerfield on charges of molesting his daughter, Alvin King III opens fire on the congregation of the First Baptist Church, killing five people and wounding eleven others.

1981: Price Daniel. Jr., former Speaker of the Texas House and a son of Governor Price Daniel, is shot to death in his Liberty home by his second wife, a former Dairy Queen waitress who claims he abused her. After she waives a jury trial, a district judge will find that Vickie Daniel acted in self-defense and acquit her of murder.

1982: On December 7 convicted murderer Charlie Brooks, housed on death row at the Ellis Unit, near Huntsville, becomes the first inmate in the United States to die by lethal injection.

1984: Drifter Henry Lee Lucas is convicted of the 1979 killing of a woman whose body was found north of Georgetown clad only in orange socks. Lucas goes on to claim credit for hundreds of murders nationwide in an attention-getting confess-a-thon that will prove largely bogus. He will die in prison in 2001.

1984: Pediatric nurse Genene Jones is convicted of murder and child endangerment in the death of a fifteen-month-old girl in Kerrville, and the police suspect her of the murder or attempted murder of dozens more. She is sentenced to 159 years in prison.

1988: A man enjoying a rafting trip down the Rio Grande in Big Bend Ranch State Park is killed and his wife and their river guide are wounded when snipers shoot them from the Mexican side of the river. Four teens are arrested by Mexican authorities and charged with murder.

1988: The Thin Blue Line, a documentary directed by Errol Morris and scored by Philip Glass, examines the conviction of construction worker Randall Dale Adams for the 1976 murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood despite considerable evidence pointing to his innocence. Morris' film includes the unexpected confession of the real killer and ultimately helps exonerate Adams, who will be freed after serving twelve years for a crime he didn't commit.

1989: Accompanied by college friends, 21-year-old Mark Kilroy, a junior at the University of Texas in Austin, takes a spring break trip to Brownsville. During a night of barhopping in Matamoros, across the border. Kilroy vanishes. Mexican and U.S. police learn he has been abducted by a cult that practices voodoo-like rituals. On April 11 his body is found, along with those of other victims, in a decrepit shed on an isolated rancho outside Matamoros; an autopsy shows he was tortured before being killed.

1990: Dallas heiress Joy Aylor, who is wanted for arranging the strangulation and shooting of her estranged husband's girlfriend seven years earlier, flees first to Canada, then to Mexico and France. Arrested on the Cote d'Azur, she is referred to by the French press as la femme diabolique de Dallas -- "the devil woman of Dallas" -- and is extradited to Texas only after prosecutors promise French authorities they will not seek the death penalty.

1991: Dallas is terrified and fascinated by the Eyeball Murderer, who strangles prostitutes and then surgically removes their eyes. Charles Albright will later be convicted of the killings and sentenced to life imprisonment.

1991: Armed with two handguns, an unemployed loner named George Hennard drives his pickup through the plate-glass window of a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen on October 16 and opens fire, killing 23 patrons and wounding more than 20 others. As police officers close in, Hennard commits suicide. At the time, it is the worst mass murder in U.S. history.

1991: On December 6, responding to a 911 call about a blaze at a yogurt shop, Austin firefighters discover the bodies of four teenage girls. The police soon learn that the victims, two of whom are sisters, were bound, gagged, and shot before being burned. After nine years of investigation, the police will name four suspects, one of whom, Robert Springsteen, will be convicted of capital murder in May 2001.

1991-1992: Released from prison after serving 23 years for killing three teenagers in Tarrant County by crushing their throats with a broomstick, Kenneth McDuff abducts and murders at least three young women in Central Texas, including Colleen Reed, who is grabbed at night from a car wash near downtown Austin.

1992: In a Fort Worth courtroom on July 1, George Lott, angered because his ex-wife has been granted custody of their son, pulls out a gun and starts shooting, killing two lawyers and wounding three other people. After declining to appeal his conviction, Lott will be executed in 1994.

1993: In a compound outside Waco, members of the Branch Davidians, a religious group headed by David Koresh, shoot at law enforcement officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, who suspect that the cult is illegally stockpiling weapons. The siege lasts 51 days, from February 28 till April 19, and ends only when the main building goes up in flames, killing 82 men, women, and children.

1993: Sixteen-year-old Marie Robards steals barium acetate from the chemistry lab at Mansfield High School and puts a lethal dose in her father's refried beans. She will receive a sentence of 28 years.

1995: On March 31 tejano singing star Selena is shot dead at the age of 23 by Yolanda Saldivar, the former manager of her fan club. Tens of thousands of fans will visit the Corpus Christi motel where she died, leaving impromptu shrines of flowers, candles, and poems.

1998: Having spent nine years in prison for the shooting death of her husband, a Brownsville car dealer, Susie Mowbray is freed on January 23 after questions arise about the scientific validity of blood tests performed on her nightgown and the suppression of evidence by prosecutors. The district attorney retries her for murder, but after a dramatic outburst in which Mowbray cries, "I didn't do it!" the jury acquits her.

1998: Karla Faye Tucker is executed on February 3 for the pickax murders of a man and a woman in Houston fourteen years earlier. She is the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War, and her death reignites the debate about the death penalty.

1998: Military cadets David Graham and Diane Zamora are convicted of the murder of Adrianne Jones, a high school junior whose body had been found in a field near Grand Prairie three years before. Zamora's comments to fellow cadets at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland, resulted in her arrest as well as that of Graham, at the time a freshman at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. Both are sentenced to life in prison.

1998: Three white supremacists chain a black man, James Byrd, Jr., to the back of their pickup and drag him for two miles, decapitating him and ripping his body apart. The smirking ringleader, John William King, will receive the death penalty, as will his accomplice Lawrence Brewer; Shawn Berry will get life in prison.

1999: "Railroad Killer" Angel Maturino Resendiz surrenders to Texas Rangers on July 13 on a bridge connecting El Paso and Juarez. Resendiz is suspected of killing nine people in three states, including two who lived near Weimar's railroad tracks. The following year he will be convicted of capital murder in Houston and sentenced to death.

1999: During a September 15 youth gathering at Fort Worth's Wedgwood Baptist Church, Larry Ashbrook, an unemployed 47-year-old man, rolls a pipe bomb down the aisle and then opens fire with a handgun, killing seven. He then steps into a back pew and fatally shoots himself.

2000: After overpowering eleven prison employees and donning guards' uniforms, the Texas Seven escape from the John Connally Maximum Security Unit, in Karnes City, on December 13, driving off in a prison van. Eleven days later, they break into a sporting goods store in Irving to steal guns and ammunition, and kill a police officer who intervenes. The group is on the lam for more than a month before the owner of a Colorado RV park recognizes several of the men from news reports and alerts the authorities. One of the seven kills himself to avoid recapture; the others are returned to Texas to face charges of capital murder.

2001: Five years after they disappeared, along with $500,000 in gold coins, from their Austin home, the decomposed bodies of national atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son Jon, and her adopted daughter, Robin, are found on March 15 on an isolated ranch in Real County. The authorities locate the remains after striking a plea bargain with the suspected killer, former O'Hair employee David Waters, who is already serving time in prison for a previous conviction.

2001: On June 20 Andrea Yates, a house wife in suburban Houston who has been repeatedly treated for severe psychosis, drowns her five children in the bathtub, one by one, then calls the police. Despite her history of mental illness, jurors will reject her plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and sentence her to life in prison.

2002: After a long search for a Lewisville six-year-old, Jackson Carr, who disappeared April 15, two neighborhood kids lead cops to his body and confess that they held him down, stabbed him in the neck, and suffocated him. The police identify the two killers as the child's fifteen-year-old sister and ten-year-old brother.

2002: A grand jury indicts Chante Mallard of Fort Worth for murder on April 25. Mallard confessed to the police that she struck Gregory Biggs, a homeless man, while driving and continued home with him stuck headfirst in her windshield. Despite his pleas for help, she then left him in her closed garage until he died." (Anne Dingus, Texas Monthly, July 2002).