Longtime Texas Monthly contributor Robert Draper has written about prison gangs, Mexican drug cartels, the Iraq War, and, most recently, a family of January 6 insurrectionists. But his favorite TM story, “Manhunt at Menard Creek” (1993), tells an apparently more prosaic tale. In January 1991, a 48-year-old career criminal named Tommy Earl Haynes was found dead in a creek after being chased by police dogs for two days through the Big Thicket of East Texas. The death was ruled an accidental drowning, but a number of lacerations on Haynes’s skull led investigators from the Department of Justice to believe that Haynes had been beaten to death by law enforcement officers as punishment for evading arrest. To report the story, Draper spent months interviewing the folks who…The post Three Decades Later, It’s Still Unclear What Killed Tommy Earl Haynes appeared first on Texas Monthly.