Gone Cold Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.

By 1988, Houston was still riding the waves of the oil boom. But underneath it all, the city had wounds that hadn't yet healed.

A few years earlier, the city had been one of America's fastest growing.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, money poured in with oil. Construction cranes filled the skyline,

and neighborhoods pushed farther in every direction into what had once been nothing more than prairie and pine.

Master-planned suburbs spread like wildfire, and people were coming from everywhere to fill up those

houses, from engineers and roughnecks to executives and bankers. Then oil collapsed. It hit Houston hard. Office vacancies were everywhere.

Half-finished developments sat quiet. Savings and loan failures rippled through Texas.

Families that had come for opportunity were now trying to hold on to houses, jobs, and dignity.

And when cities go through economic pain, crime almost always follows.

Houston in 1988 had a population hovering around 1.6 million, making it one of the largest

cities in the United States. But size wasn't the only

thing that set it apart. The city's sprawl made policing difficult, hundreds of square miles of

subdivisions, apartment corridors, industrial zones, motels, dead-end roads, ship-channel neighborhoods, and empty

stretches of developing land. At night, parts of Houston felt limitless and often dangerous.

Violent crime was steadily climbing toward what would become its peak in the early 1990s.

Crime data shows Houston reporting thousands of violent crimes a year during this era,

including hundreds of murders annually.

In 1985, the city recorded 472 murders and more than 16,000 total violent crimes. By 1990, murders had climbed

to 577, with violent crime topping 22,000 incidents. 1988 was in the middle of that surge.

The violence wasn't evenly spread.

Certain areas of town had become synonymous with crack cocaine, robberies, and gun violence.

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