Check out all 10 Crimes of the Year mugshots in our slideshow.
In ordering the past year's multitude of mayhem, madness and overall malarkey here in the Lone Star State, we struggled to come up with a theme, a spine to link all the various stories we encountered. Should we connect them by type of crime? Or maybe we could construct some sort of narrative out of a chronological recounting of the year's weirdest crimes.
In the end, those frameworks seemed either falsely pat or overly complicated. And even though I have spent the last three years here at the Houston Press pondering all manner of sin, in comparison to the hellfire-and-damnation theologians of the Middle Ages Roman Catholic Church, I was but an ignorant child. Those dudes took themselves off to caves with a little bread and wine and fixated on sin, sin and more sin for years on end.
So it was best to defer to their concept of the Seven Deadly Sins in constructing this article, and I found that the Holy Fathers were on the money often as not. You really can trace back virtually all of the year's most spectacular weird crimes to one or more of the Seven Deadlies.
And away we go to the parade of the lustful, wrathful, greedy, envious, prideful, slothful and gluttonous...
LUST
The ancients broke Lust down into categories, and no less an authority than St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that one sinful subset was "copulation with a thing of undue species, and this is called 'bestiality.'" The year began and closed with two notable cases, both in the Rio Grande Valley.
In January, 41-year-old Cirilo Castillo Jr. of rural Hidalgo County was arraigned on two counts of trespassing and two counts of animal cruelty after a local rancher secretly videotaped Castillo having sex with one of her mares. The tape she gave cops allegedly shows Castillo entering her barn without permission, securing the mare to a fence and then lashing its legs together, presumably to prevent a swift kick in the nuts. (We can but hope that was a lesson Castillo had to learn by painful experience.) And then Castillo is reportedly seen dropping his pants and having sex with the mare. Both horses were asked if the sex had been consensual, and each replied with a "Neigh."
In November, news broke of another Hidalgo County case of copulation with a thing of undue species. This time a dog was the victim. A man in San Juan woke one morning, looked out his window and allegedly saw 54-year-old Jose Angel Hernandez molesting his pooch.
"It's something that you really can't imagine. I see my neighbor out there with his pants down — molesting my dog. I wasn't prepared to see that that morning," the man said.
Is that something anyone is ever truly prepared to see, morning, noon or night?
Hernandez was arrested and charged with public lewdness, his second sex-related crime that year after an indecent exposure charge in February. Neighbors want him put away for a long stretch, but local police say there's not a whole lot they can do until he whips it out again or treats another dog as man's best friend with benefits. "He's already been accused of two sexual acts," said San Juan policeman Rudy Luna . "One was where he exposed himself and now this...with the neighbor's dog. It will come to the point where the offenses will be upgraded."
Moving on to more species-normative forms of lust, 2012 had the über-salacious criminal trial of now-former Kennedale High School English teacher and sports coach Brittni Colleps. Among other sexcapades, the married mother of three was videotaped taking on not one, not two, not three but four of her students while her husband was away serving in the military.
Colleps was convicted of 16 counts of having improper relationships with students, all of whom were 18 years old. (Under Texas law, a school employee cannot have sex with any student, no matter their age.) Despite pleas for leniency from three of the students she had sex with, and from her husband, who admitted to participating in orgies with his wife every now and then, Colleps was sent to prison for five years.
But Angela Buchanan, a 30-year-old Lufkin woman smitten with "Shelley," a 51-year-old lady, absolutely took the cake.
Buchanan and Shelley had been messaging each other for the past seven years via Yahoo!, during which time Buchanan claimed to have survived breast cancer in 2008 and to have had twins via in vitro fertilization while living with a former girlfriend.
According to an Angelina County arrest affidavit, in March, Buchanan started contacting Shelley through a second Yahoo! account. On that account, Buchanan posed as "Doc," a Lufkin gynecologist with whom Buchanan claimed to have a mother-daughter friendship.(So, Doc and Buchanan were the same person messaging Shelley with two different Yahoo! accounts. Got it?)
