Stagnant Voter Rolls - despite rapid growth in H-town

As our country grows, voter registration in some counties - like Harris County, the nation's third largest - has been surprisingly stagnant. I reported in this  Jan 29 story (later posted on chron.com) how population boomed from 2006-2012 yet registered voters numbers stayed about the same. This is a trend I'm continuing to explore.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Voters-rolls-stay-stagnant-as-population-surges-2830304.php --    “

That story prompted two interesting guest editorials  –

http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Let-s-simplify-voter-registration-3255466.php

http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Election-day-registration-would-be-an-invitation-3323666.php

There's also a lawsuit that was recently filed regarding voter registration issues across Texas and in Galveston County.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Voting-rights-group-files-suit-over-state-3313076.php

 

Sad epilogue to 1970s serial killings

After 40 years, we still don't know exactly how many boys  serial killer Dean Corll, dubbed the Candy Man, and his teen henchmen caught and killed in Houston the 1970s though it was at least 29.

This week I wrote about another ID of a victim - a boy who went missing after leaving home to go to work at a shoe store in the Northwest Mall in about 1972.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/After-decades-another-serial-killer-victim-2336666.php?utm_source=twi

Murdered couple remains unidentified after 30 years

Of the 400 unidentified bodies in Harris County's cold case files, some of the most confounding involve two people killed together whose identities remain lost in time. One of the most compelling is a pair of teens whose corpses were found, freshly murdered, in early January 1981.
This is their story -
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Investigators-hope-DNA-provides-answers-in-2296253.php

It's part of an occasional series we've done this year on the 400 unknown dead here - and efforts to use a new grant to try to identify some of them through DNA. Previous stories led to the identification of two people.

An estimated 50,000 Texans are in guardianships.Meet one of them:

An estimated 50,000 Texans are in guardianships. Helen Hale is one of them...
A family dispute resulted in her being placed under the care of a court-appointed guardian.
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Guardians-for-the-elderly-and-disabled-paid-2251312.php

Four years later...I'm still waiting for a state department response to an FOIA

Tracey Eaton, a former HChron metro editor and ex-foreign correspondent, has an initiative to try to get records out of the State Department regarding spending in Cuba (as well as other fed agencies) See: .http://cubamoneyproject.org/
His efforts remind me that the State Department never responded to my own request for copies of the database of Americans killed worldwide - a record it keeps and distributes, in part, online.