The voice on the phone to the 911 operator sounds urgent, slightly breathless: "Hello, my name is Harold Henthorn, I’m in the Rocky Mountain National Park, and I need an Alpine Mountain Rescue Team immediately." The operator transfers him to the National Park Service. "My wife has fallen from a rock on the north summit of Deer Mountain," he says.
How could 100 jars of human brains—taken from deceased patients of an Austin mental hospital—just disappear from their home at the University of Texas? Somewhere in a little-used room in the bowels of the Animal Resources Center on the University of Texas’s campus in Austin sit around 100 or so large glass jars.
Texas is the execution capital of the US, where hundreds await their fate in solitary confinement. For more than a decade, one former supermarket checkout worker from Northampton in England has been offering friendship and solace to the condemned. Alex Hannaford meets her.
Last year, 322 deaths were recorded along the US border with Mexico. The real number could be a lot higher. Alex Hannaford joins volunteers searching for the lost
Down near Austin’s Lady Bird Lake, there is little room to move. People are spilling into the road near stalls selling flags, T-shirts and lapel badges that read: ‘Science is not a Liberal Conspiracy’ and ‘Protect Kids Not Guns’. As 8pm approaches on this Saturday night in autumn, there are 50,000 people here; some reckon 60,000.
Ruaridh Connellan, 26, survived hours in the water by clinging to a branch Credit: James Breeden / Telegraph. London-born freelance photographer Ruaridh Connellan, 26, who now lives in Brooklyn and was brought to a Houston hospital by police on Tuesday morning, recounted the story of his incredible ordeal.
Two years after Colin Kaepernick, then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, knelt down during the national anthem in order to protest racial injustice in America, a middle-aged man stood before a crowd of people gathered in Houston, Texas, and defended Kaepernick’s right to do so. ‘Isn’t it disrespectful?’.
Last year, a man was caught trying to sell a stolen Tyrannosaurus skeleton for $1m. But how many more illicit fossils are on the market? And where does Nicolas Cage fit in?
Duncan Williams, 32, an amateur climber from Southampton, was killed by a massive avalanche on a frozen Himalayan mountainside. Here, his friend Alex Hannaford retraces his final steps and asks, why are so many young men dying on the roof of the world?
It didn’t take long for Richard Kaul’s spine surgery practice in the middle-class New Jersey suburb of Pompton Lakes to turn a profit. The Indian-born, British-raised doctor had been performing procedures in small surgeries for a number of years before he opened his own place in 2011. By 2012, he owned a $2m home in New Jersey, a Manhattan penthouse and an $8.3m brownstone on New York’s Upper West Side, which boasted a soundproof media room, three terraces and nine fireplaces.
This solitary 17-year-old girl was at the centre of a sexual molestation case involving the leader of a dangerous cult, who is 68. But she can’t wait to turn 18 so that she can go back to him and his ‘ministry’. Alex Hannaford on the church of The Lord Our Righteousness.
A volunteer heads out into neighborhood to look for people in need of help in Houston Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images. As Steve Paul stood on Gaywood Drive in a leafy suburb of Houston late last week, looking toward the sunken intersection of Boheme Drive, he could only shake his head as the water level slowly rose on an already drowned street.
Almost 20 years after the brutal and very public death of her son, Matt, who had been the victim of one of the most notorious anti-gay hate crimes in US history, Judy Shepard had managed to change history. After years of fighting and lobbying, she’d seen hate crimes laws expanded to include attacks on LGBT people; her work was instrumental in establishing the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.
