1828
The first settlers came in about 1828, and a man named Joseph Dunman built a ferry across the river, which turned the spot into a centre of commercial activity.
about 0:07:36The story
In September 1964 Marianne Allen was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up there in a stable family. At nineteen she got a job doing office work for the Texas Department of Public Safety, where she stayed for decades. The family moved from Houston to a neat one-storey home in the suburbs of Humble, Texas. Marianne kept the household steady and pushed both children academically.
The two began a relationship. Her father took it calmly. Her mother did not.
Marianne's objection was mostly the age gap. After that the rules tightened.
He was to come to the house after Marianne was asleep and bang on the outside wall of her bedroom, so that her mother would hear the noise she had claimed to hear and believe her. Instead, shortly after one in the morning on 16 July 2012, Marianne was stabbed 73 times in her bed. The wounds were concentrated on her throat. A loaded, unfired .22 pistol was found under her pillow. Nothing was taken from the house. The glass in the back door was broken and a brick was lying in the yard, but the brick and the glass were both on the outside of the door.
Police arrived within three minutes and found Marianne dead in the master bedroom, the room covered in blood. Don and Scott were called from their night shifts. Sergeant Craig Clopton thought Don's flat demeanour was strange, but Don's workplace confirmed he had never left, and Scott had also been at work.
Phone records then turned up Marianne's long-running affair with a fellow DPS employee. He was the last person she had spoken to that night. He seemed genuinely devastated, answered every question, said he had never been to the house, passed a polygraph and had phone records placing him 45 minutes away. The autopsy made things worse: the blood in the wounds was already coagulated, which did not fit a killing minutes before the 911 call.
She began to backtrack, then agreed to a polygraph and failed it badly. She then said Zane Ahmed had done it, that she had heard him arguing with her mother and recognised his voice. Zane was brought in. After more than 12 hours of interrogation he was given a polygraph, and partway through he began saying it was an accident and he was sorry. The house was one storey. The knife he said he still had was the knife found at the scene. His parents said he had been home all night playing video games, and they had a time-stamped photograph of him there at 11.30. His mother had sold gold jewellery handed down through generations in Pakistan to raise his $100,000 bail.
Her father bailed her out.
By then Sergeant Clopton had been fired.