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Guaranteed Human.

Please check out my weekly podcast, crossing the line with M. William Phelps,

where I delve into a new missing person and cold case murder each week,

wherever you get, your favorite shows.

He called Texas a place of unpeopled horizons, a land of American bleakness,

brazenly adding that culturally, socially, and intellectually, Texas is empty.

He also won an Oscar for his script, Brokeback Mountain, and is

considered the most well-known best-selling author to come out of the Lone Star State, the late,

great Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Larry McMurtry, who gave us lonesome dove, The Last Picture Show, and HUD, to name only a few of his 30-plus

best-selling books. McMurtry had a love-hate relationship with his home state and often focused on

that bleakness, depicting his characters as corrupt, broken, and easily swayed by the devil's

offerings. As I traveled throughout Parker County, developing sources, building trusting relationships,

I began to understand McMurtry's passive, aggressive brashness for the place he called home.

Many of those good, honest, caring people I met, and even those I had reported on, felt as if

they'd walked straight off the pages of a McMurtry novel.

If I was to find any answers in these cases, I would need to appreciate that the testimony

from those I spoke to, and even those I hadn't, was inherently their own, and that a deeper

truth can often emerge from what is a fractured, scorned, and broken space inside of people. And truth, as I have said before,

is akin to a mountain, standing tall, all on its own, unmovable, and even unshakable. Yet the

issue I kept running into was getting to the summit of the mountain without falling.

I can't even tell you.

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